The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints split from the Mormon Church on the issue of polygamy, believing it was divinely ordained that men should have multiple wives. By the early 2000s, FLDS leader Warren Jeffs was using this to justify marrying more than 80 wives and sexually assaulting girls as young as 12.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or the FLDS, sounds at first like it might be nothing more than a different sect of the larger Mormon Church, but what started as a schism in doctrine soon evolved into a full-blown cult rife with controversy, exploitation, and abuse.
After the LDS Church officially renounced polygamy in 1890 and doubled down in 1904, the FLDS emerged as a separate community in the Short Creek area of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona. Their hierarchy is centralized around a single “prophet,” who claims ongoing divine revelation, the most infamous of whom is a man named Warren Jeffs.
Jeffs became the FLDS leader in 2002 after his father, Rulon Jeffs, passed, and enforced a system of “placement marriage,” in which the prophet auto-arranged marriages — including underage brides. Many of these underage girls were forced to marry Jeffs himself, eventually earning him a position on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Yet even today, despite his incarceration, Jeffs maintains his role as the FLDS prophet, while the church still contends with legal battles over missing children, abuse allegations, and property rights.
The FLDS’ history is littered with controversy and crimes which have only just begun to be brought to light. Some have managed to escape the cult’s influence and speak out about the abuse, but for many others, the church’s teachings — and Jeffs’ influence — remain a part of everyday life.
The Twisted History Of The FLDS
In 1890, the president of the Mormon Church, Wilford Woodruff, issued what became known as the "Manifesto," formally advising members to cease entering new plural marriages in compliance with anti-polygamy laws in the United States. Congress had recently passed and enforced laws like the Edmunds-Tucker Act, seized Church assets, and stripped polygamists of civil rights, steadily applying pressure to the LDS Church.
In response, Woodruff publicly stated the Church's intention to obey the law and secure Utah's transition to statehood. The Manifesto was accepted in general conference on Oct. 6, 1890, declaring it "authoritative and binding" — though it notably only halted future plural marriages. Existing polygamist families were unaffected.
Despite this, various church leaders and members continued to practice polygamy, especially in Mexico, Canada, and at sea. So, in April 1904, new Church President Josph F. Smith issued a more stringent declaration, threatening excommunication for anyone entering or solemnizing polygamy. Still, not everyone in the church abided — and this led to a schism within the Mormon Church.
To those who believed polygamy was divinely mandated, the Manifesto — and the Second Manifesto 14 years later — were seen as societal compromise. Out of this emerged the FLDS, the original followers of which claimed spiritual legitimacy over the 1890 Manifesto because of a purported divine revelation to then-LDS Church President John Taylor in 1886.
This supposed revelation was outlined in a 1912 statement by Lorin Woolley, who claimed that in issuing the Manifesto, Woodruff had given up his right to the Priesthood. Therefore, Woolley claimed, his father John W. Woolley was the true successor to the Mormon Priesthood. Following their excommunication from the church, Lorin Woolley and other prominent Mormon men in Short Creek formed the Council of Friends, a predecessor of sorts to the eventual FLDS.
By the mid-20th century, though, the church's internal conflicts would make their way onto the national stage when Arizona state police and the National Guard raided the fundamentalist Mormon community of Short Creek.
The 1953 Short Creek Raid Set The Stage For Warren Jeffs' Rise
On July 26, 1953, Arizona law enforcement and the National Guard raided Short Creek in what would be the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history. Even at the time, though, the move garnered criticism, with many of the opinion that this "show of force," as LIFE magazine aptly described it, was an overreaction, likening it to "hunting rabbits with an elephant gun."
At the time, the community of Short Creek was composed of around 400 people. The Attorney General's office had prepared 122 indictments — 36 men and 86 women — for insurrection, additionally equipping officers with extra John and Jane Doe warrants to cover any people that hadn't been accounted for. Those men were arrested and jailed in Kingman, while the women were forcibly sent off to Phoenix.
But that wasn't all. 164 dependent children were also taken into custody, and though a superior court order two years later in March 1955 demanded they be returned to their families, many of the children wound up in foster care or remained otherwise separated from their families.
Law enforcement officials had also — foolishly, some might say with hindsight — made the decision to make the raid a media spectacle. They invited reporters and photographers to accompany them and document the event, not realizing that the public, upon seeing the photos of crying children being taken away from their parents, would not view the raid favorably.
"I just have such a strong emotional response [to these photos]," author Dorothy Allred Solomon, who has written about the pros and cons of polygamy and grew up in a polygamist community, told LIFE in the 2014 interview. "I was a little girl when these things happened, but I was conscious of them, and I was fully aware of the implications that families could be broken up."
Speaking to Deseret after a similar raid in Texas in 2008, University of Utah professor Martha Sonntag Bradley explained that it was the concern of Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle that the men of Short Creek had been marrying young women, thus prompting the raid. Speaking to the press shortly after, Pyle called the raid "a momentous police action against insurrection."
Pyle compared the treatment of Short Creek's women to white slavery, saying it was "the foulest conspiracy you could possibly imagine." He was not the only official to make such a comparison.
"This is a white-slave factory," one assistant attorney general involved with the raid said. "No woman has escaped this community for at least 10 years. They are forced to submit to men old enough to be their grandfathers."
Despite Pyle and others' attempts to spin the narrative favorably, though, most couldn't help but see the raid as too extreme. A move that was meant to expose Short Creek's residents as misogynistic, pedophilic monsters instead had garnered sympathy as parents were separated from their children — children who likely had no idea what they had done wrong.
Media outlets questioned how children could be accused of insurrection by simply existing, some called the move "un-American." Pyle tried to justify it. He had meant to send a message that polygamy would not be tolerated. The message was received, but the result was even more secrecy, as polygamists "went way underground," according to Solomon.
"And when people go underground like that, it creates shadows and darkness for people like Warren Jeffs to exploit other people's paranoia," she added. "The reason someone like Jeffs could come to power was because of this raid in 1953 — he totally used people's fears."
Life In Warren Jeff's FLDS Cult Is Everything Pyle Feared
Polygamist groups spent a few years in quiet anticipation after the raid, but rather than feeling demoralized, they were more resolved than ever before. The raid had proven that the public was less tolerant of the government's meddling in their lives than they were of polygamy, and various splinter groups started to come together.
Eventually, a man named Rulon Jeffs managed to incorporate many of these groups — around 10,000 by the turn of the century, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. When the elder Jeffs died in 2002, his son Warren took over as prophet and immediately began enacting a dictatorial regime.
Among Warren Jeffs' first moves was outlawing things like swimming, watching television and movies, music, celebrating certain holidays, and children's play. All of this was in a move to make the faith stricter and gain more control over the lives of his followers.
Jeffs' most infamous decision was assuming control over "spiritual marriage," a foundational point of the FLDS' polygamy which says men must have at least three wives in order to reach the highest level of salvation. Jeffs, however, also claimed it was his divine right to assign wives to the men of his church — or reassign them, if a husband had deviated from the path of righteousness. He also reportedly excommunicated younger men who he felt presented a threat to their elders in terms of accumulating wives.
Warren Jeffs used his position to his advantage most often, though. According to The Guardian, Jeffs had married around 80 women during his time as FLDS prophet. He had also spent a good deal of time reaffirming FLDS teachings about minorities and the queer community, saying things like, "The Black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth."
For all his moral posturing about homosexuals and African Americans, though, Warren Jeffs' attitude toward pedophilia was glaringly liberal — so much so, in fact, that he engaged in it himself.
In 2005, Jeffs went on the run after the FBI placed him at the top of their "Ten Most Wanted" list. Shortly after, during a routine traffic stop in 2006, Jeffs was arrested, and while awaiting trial in prison in 2007, he attempted suicide (generally viewed to be a sin in FLDS doctrine). During his trial, the full extent of Jeffs' crimes was laid bare.
He was initially wanted for forcing a 16-year-old girl to marry an already wed 28-year-old man, then hit with a subsequent charge of unlawful flight when he went on the run. His arrest prompted a raid on one of his compounds, where investigators found evidence that he had also taken child brides — and engaged in sexual acts with girls as young as 12. Teaching these young girls to please him sexually was referred to in the church as "heavenly trainings."
In the end, he was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years, but even from behind bars he reportedly continued to dictate orders to his followers. Some reports surfaced of a memo in which Jeffs renounced his position as prophet, but it seems that many within the church still look to Jeffs for guidance.
Back in 1953, Pyle had feared that fundamentalist Mormon sects were abusing children and forcing young girls into marriage, but all the public saw was children being ripped from their parents while Pyle moralized about insurrection. Half a century later, his fears about the FLDS were proven to be true. The tragic irony is that Jeffs' rise was only made possible because of the Short Creek raid in the first place.
After this deep dive into the FLDS, read about the murder of Brenda Lafferty at the hands of her fundamentalist Mormon brothers-in-law. Then, read about how Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, met his death at the hands of an angry mob.
