Theocratic rule in Colorado City

Theocratic rule in Colorado City was a system in which religious authority reached beyond worship to govern civic offices, family relationships, access to information, and control of property. Led by Rulon Jeffs through the United Effort Plan (UEP), the community understood obedience to the prophet as a religious duty and treated resistance or departure as a threat to the religious order. Its authority was sustained both by everyday rules and by a story of divine leadership reaching back to Joseph Smith.

Leadership and Religious Authority

Colorado City straddles the Utah-Arizona border and is home to several Mormon Fundamentalist groups, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The UEP’s members were expected to follow Rulon Jeffs, a former tax accountant who presented himself as prophet and whose followers regarded his leadership as part of an unbroken succession from Joseph Smith. They also believed Jeffs fulfilled the prophecy of a “one mighty and strong” figure. His religious standing thus provided the claimed foundation for authority over the community’s public and private life.

The reach of that authority was institutional as well as devotional. The mayor and city employees, the police force, and the public-school superintendent answered to Jeffs. The account describes a community in which his word functioned as law, not simply as guidance for worship. The distinction between church and municipal authority was consequently difficult to maintain: civic administration operated within a religious hierarchy whose leader claimed divine warrant.

The system also regulated marriage and family. Jeffs had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children; several wives had been married to him as teenagers, when he was in his eighties. In the UEP’s doctrine, wives and children were not understood as belonging exclusively to husbands or parents: the priesthood could claim them and assign them elsewhere. This principle made family security conditional on religious standing and left the prophet with authority over intimate relationships as well as public conduct.

Rules, Surveillance, and Everyday Compliance

Restrictions on information illustrate how authority operated in ordinary life. Members were forbidden to watch television or read magazines and newspapers, and they were also prohibited from contact with people outside the UEP, including relatives who had left. These restrictions limited access to outside accounts of the community while making relationships with departing members subject to religious discipline.

The ban on television did not eliminate the desire to watch it. DeLoy Bateman described members secretly travelling to St. George, Utah, or Cedar City, Utah, to buy satellite dishes and conceal them at home. After Jeffs preached against television and warned that he knew who owned dishes, residents would discard them in the desert. For two or three years, televisions might disappear from town; then dishes would gradually return until the next sermon and renewed crackdown. The recurring cycle shows how prohibition could produce both visible compliance and concealed disobedience, without ending the attraction of what had been forbidden.

Authority extended even to animals. After a dog killed a child, an order prohibited dogs within city limits, and young men were sent to gather the animals; the dogs were then killed. The incident exemplifies the reach of the rules described in the account: decisions about public safety could become sweeping commands issued from the same religious authority that governed schooling, policing, and family life.

Apostasy, Family Separation, and Property

DeLoy Bateman’s departure exposed the consequences for people who rejected that authority. After he stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Jeffs sent someone to his home within a day to take his wives and children. Jeffs decreed that they should be given to another man considered more worthy. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy. They and all but the three oldest children became apostates with him, turning an attempted exercise of priesthood authority into a family’s collective break from the community.

The consequences extended beyond the household. Relatives who remained in the religion were forbidden to speak to DeLoy, his wives, or their apostate children. Although DeLoy had built and paid for his house, the UEP owned the land within the city limits, including his lot. Jeffs and the UEP brought legal action to take possession of the house and sought to evict the family from Colorado City. The conflict therefore joined religious exclusion to control of the ground on which former members lived: personal ownership of a home did not secure their place in the community when the organization controlled the land.

Law, Persecution, and Contested Legitimacy

The UEP’s authority existed alongside state and federal law, rather than replacing it in the eyes of government. Polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona, while members described their practices as constitutionally protected religious belief. Colorado City’s police chief, Sam Roundy, defended the privacy of the community and asked whether members had a right to practise their religion. That claim collided with the obligations of public officials to uphold the law, a tension made especially clear when a police officer’s plural wife fled the community and accused him of abuse.

Community leaders interpreted outside legal action through memories of the 1953 raid on Short Creek. Mayor Dan Barlow treated the prosecution of Rodney Holm as government harassment of an unorthodox but honorable minority and said it recalled the earlier raid. That account of persecution gave present-day scrutiny a familiar meaning: outsiders were once again portrayed as attacking the community’s faith. Yet the documented pattern of abuse in Colorado City complicated the claim that the dispute was only about religious freedom. The competing accounts reveal a struggle over which authority should define the problem—religious autonomy, state law, or the experiences of people subject to community rules.

Revelation, Obedience, and the Limits of Authority

This concentration of authority belongs to a broader history of tension over who may speak for God. Joseph Smith first encouraged members to seek personal revelation, but later declared that church commandments and revelations could be received only by him. Followers continued to trust their own experiences of divine communication, and competing claims helped produce numerous schismatic Mormon groups. In Colorado City, Rulon Jeffs’s claimed succession gave his commands institutional force; elsewhere, rival revelation could instead challenge a leader’s authority.

The contrast helps explain why obedience was not simply an individual virtue in the UEP. When one prophet’s revelations determined doctrine and daily conduct, a member’s competing conviction could threaten the structure of authority itself. The community’s prohibitions, family rules, restrictions on contact, and penalties for apostasy formed connected parts of a governing order. Its claim to divine legitimacy stood beside the law of the state, while the lives of members and former members bore the consequences of that unresolved conflict.