United Effort Plan

The United Effort Plan is the legal financial trust that owns the assets of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, including virtually all the land in Colorado City–Hildale. In the book, the Plan matters not simply as a holder of property but as part of a larger order in which religious authority and control over the community’s resources are closely linked. The Plan’s legal ownership should be distinguished from the priesthood’s religious authority: the account describes them as interlocking powers, not as identical institutions.

Legal Structure and Community Setting

The town occupies both sides of the Arizona–Utah border: the Arizona portion is officially Colorado City and the Utah portion Hildale. Longtime residents continued to call the community Short Creek, its name before incorporation and renaming in 1962. The United Effort Plan is the legal name of the financial trust holding the church’s assets, and its ownership extends to virtually all land in town. This concentration of property gives the Plan a material presence throughout the community, even when decisions are presented as religious commands rather than transactions by a trust.

The book places this arrangement within a broader history of Mormon theocratic authority. At Nauvoo, Joseph Smith headed a city with unusually extensive sovereign powers; later, under Brigham Young, the Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the jurisdiction of local probate courts controlled by the church leadership. These earlier examples are not described as actions of the United Effort Plan, but they establish a recurring tension in the narrative: church institutions assert their own authority within places where state and federal law also claim jurisdiction.

Religious Authority and Daily Restrictions

Under Rulon Jeffs, the leader known to residents as Uncle Rulon, the community’s religious hierarchy extended into public administration. The mayor, city employees, police force, and superintendent of public schools were described as answerable to him. The book also recounts an edict banning dogs from within city limits after a child was killed by a dog: young men were sent to gather the animals, which were then shot. The episode illustrates the reach attributed to the leadership, while not identifying the United Effort Plan itself as the issuer of the order.

Information and contact with outsiders were also restricted. Members were forbidden to watch television or read magazines and newspapers, and residents were barred from contact with people outside the Plan, including relatives who had left the faith. The prohibition did not eliminate access to media. People secretly bought satellite dishes in nearby St. George or Cedar City and hid them; after Rulon Jeffs preached against television and warned that he knew who owned dishes, many were discarded in the desert. For two or three years televisions would disappear from town, only for concealed dishes to gradually reappear before another crackdown. The cycle shows how enforcement could suppress visible dissent without extinguishing the attraction of forbidden information.

Property, Family, and Leaving the Faith

The priesthood’s claims over family life were described in terms of ownership and reassignment. According to the doctrine presented in the book, wives did not belong to their husbands, nor children to their parents; the priesthood could claim them. When DeLoy Bateman stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting after deciding to leave the Work, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children and decreed that they should be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy, and most of the children also became apostates. The account presents this as an attempted exercise of priesthood power, not as a transfer of family members owned by the United Effort Plan in its legal capacity.

The threat of separation also shaped relationships between people who left and those who remained. DeLoy’s brother lived only yards away, across a six-foot fence, but was forbidden to speak with him. DeLoy said that if his brother’s wife caught them talking, she might take the children, while the leadership could assign her to another man; the brother might then be left in the community without his family, a condition locals called becoming a eunuch. The account connects this pressure to a wider teaching that apostates were more wicked than outsiders or mainstream Latter-day Saints. The Plan’s ownership of land thus sits within a social order where leaving the faith could also mean threatened loss of family ties and home.

Public Resources and Competing Claims of Law

Colorado City received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for street paving, fire-department improvements, and water-system upgrades. The federal government also built a $2.8 million airport immediately south of the city, serving almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. Thirty-three percent of residents received food stamps, compared with a statewide average of 4.7 percent; the town received eight dollars in government services for each dollar paid in taxes, while the rest of Mohave County received just over one dollar in services per tax dollar.

DeLoy Bateman explained that Rulon Jeffs justified government assistance as money ultimately coming from the Lord and as a way for the Lord to provide for a chosen people. Fundamentalists called defrauding the government bleeding the beast and regarded it as virtuous. The book places this reasoning beside a public defense of religious privacy: Sam Roundy, the community’s police chief, argued that what happened inside residents’ homes was not the government’s business. Yet polygamy was illegal in every U.S. state and in Canada, and police officers were sworn to uphold the law. The tension between the community’s religious claims, its reliance on public resources, and state law frames the United Effort Plan as a property institution embedded in a wider contest over who may govern the community and its members.