bleeding the beast

Bleeding the beast is a term used by Mormon fundamentalists to describe defrauding the government as a virtuous act. In the account of Colorado City, the phrase condenses a striking reversal: assistance from a government regarded as wicked is interpreted not as dependence on that government, but as provision from the Lord for his chosen people.

Meaning and religious logic

DeLoy Bateman explains the reasoning through Rulon Jeffs and his followers: they believed that government money was ultimately coming from the Lord, who was manipulating the system to care for his people. In this framework, taking public funds could be understood as fidelity to divine provision rather than loyalty to the state. The phrase therefore names more than a way of obtaining money; it gives that conduct a moral and religious justification.

That justification sits within a broader conflict over whose authority governs. The book describes an earlier version of the same tension in Nauvoo, where Joseph Smith headed a city with unusually broad sovereign powers, and in Utah, where Brigham Young’s followers maintained that God’s laws took precedence over human laws. In Utah, Mormon-controlled probate courts expanded local jurisdiction at the expense of federal authority. These examples do not establish that the later expression originated in those arrangements, but they show a recurring dispute over whether religious obligation or civil law should prevail.

Public assistance and its uses

Colorado City received substantial public support even as its leaders and residents were described as hostile to the federal government. More than $4 million a year flowed to the public school district. The Phoenix New Times reported that administrators used district funds for personal expenses, vehicles, and travel; in December 2000, the district bought a $220,000 Cessna 210 for staff trips around Arizona. The expression bleeding the beast applies to the community’s stated moral framing of government fraud; the reported spending details concern district administrators and should not be treated as proof that every public dollar was obtained or used fraudulently.

Other public expenditures served the town more broadly. Colorado City received $1.9 million from the 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 just south of the city, which the account says served almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. These figures make the central contradiction concrete: public resources entered a community whose religious leaders could frame the government providing them as an adversary.

The book also gives measures of the town’s economic relationship with government. Thirty-three percent of residents received food stamps, compared with a 4.7 percent state average. Colorado City residents received eight dollars in government services for every tax dollar they paid, while the rest of Mohave County received just over one dollar in services per tax dollar. These figures describe public assistance and services, not by themselves acts of fraud; their significance lies in the contrast between extensive reliance on government resources and the belief that exploiting the government could be righteous.

Government as adversary and provider

The phrase is part of a larger pattern in which government is treated simultaneously as a source of benefits and an illegitimate authority. Dan Lafferty, in a separate context, argued that government had exceeded its constitutional reach and rejected licenses, taxes, and Social Security numbers as forms of control over individual life. That position helps illuminate the broader anti-government currents represented in the book, but the text does not identify Dan as the source or user of the phrase bleeding the beast.

The conflict also appears in public defenses of religious practice. Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s police chief, maintained that what happened inside residents’ homes was not the government’s business and appealed to the right to practice religion. The account sets that claim against the fact that polygamy was illegal across the United States and Canada and that police officers were sworn to uphold the law. Bleeding the beast belongs to this contested landscape: it describes not simply taking assistance, but a way of making that action compatible with a religious community’s rejection of civil authority.

Boundaries and significance

Colorado City’s rejection of outside influence was reinforced by restrictions on television, newspapers, and contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. DeLoy Bateman was one such apostate. The boundary between the community and the outside world thus shaped how government, information, and dissent could be understood: the state could be condemned as wicked while its resources were treated as providential.

The phrase’s force comes from that double standard, presented not as a contradiction by its adherents but as evidence of divine care and strategic advantage. It captures how religious language can turn the violation of a public rule into a virtuous act within a particular community, while leaving the practical consequences—public spending, government services, and competing claims of authority—visible to the wider society.