History & overview · every faith gets one
Keep the covenant the main church let go.
The largest of the Mormon fundamentalist bodies, formed among families at Short Creek — now Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona — who held that the LDS Church's 1890 renunciation of plural marriage abandoned a commandment rather than obeyed a law. Property is consecrated to a communal trust, marriages are assigned by the prophet, and the church has been led since 2002 by Warren Jeffs, who has directed it from a Texas prison since 2011.
Warren Jeffs was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list in May 2006 and arrested that August. A 2007 Utah conviction as an accomplice to rape was overturned by the Utah Supreme Court in 2010. On 4 August 2011 a jury in Tom Green County, Texas convicted him of two counts of sexual assault of a child — one twelve years old, one fifteen — on evidence taken in the April 2008 raid on the YFZ Ranch, including his own audio recording of one assault and DNA establishing paternity in the other. On 9 August 2011 he was sentenced to life imprisonment plus twenty years, the terms to run consecutively. He has continued to direct the church from prison.
Why it is filed this way
Scholarship files the FLDS two ways at once. Mormon studies treats it as a denomination of the Latter-day Saint tradition, holding the same scripture and the same priesthood theology and differing on one commandment; the study of new religious movements treats it as a high-demand movement organised around a living prophet. It is carried as a denomination here because the descent, the canon and the theology are all Latter-day Saint and neither side disputes that.
Reduced and dispersed. Utah took control of the United Effort Plan trust in 2005, the Texas ranch was seized in 2014, and Hildale and Colorado City are no longer run by the church. Members remain, and Warren Jeffs remains the prophet.
The founding
The LDS Church renounced plural marriage in 1890 and began excommunicating those who continued it. Families who refused the loyalty oath put to them at Short Creek in 1935 formed the community that became the FLDS. It was formally incorporated under Rulon Jeffs in the early 1990s; his son Warren succeeded him in September 2002.
No single founder — The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. A covenant world with a living prophet, and priesthood held by one man at a time.
The divine. The theology is Mormon — God the Father with a body of flesh and bone, Jesus Christ as his son — with exaltation held to require the plural marriage covenant, which the LDS Church denies and has denied since 1890..
Death and after. Degrees of glory; the celestial kingdom entered through the new and everlasting covenant of marriage.