FLDS vs LDS: What the FLDS Is and How It Split From the Latter-day Saints

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The FLDS is a small polygamist church that broke away from the Latter-day Saints. Its full name is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It shares roots and scriptures with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church most people mean by “LDS,” but the two split over plural marriage and are not connected.

The Church of Jesus Christ ended plural marriage between 1890 and 1904 and now removes from membership anyone who practices it. The FLDS kept plural marriage and made it central, and the people who paid most for that choice were its own families, above all its girls. Its prophet, Warren Jeffs, has been in custody since 2006 and is serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting girls he claimed as spiritual wives. Former members say he still controls the church from prison. Yet in Short Creek, where nearly every home once stood on the church’s trust land, many of the people the FLDS cast out have come back.

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	FLDS	The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Full name	Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints	The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Began	Fundamentalists who refused to give up plural marriage after 1904; the Short Creek settlement from the 1930s	Organized by Joseph Smith in New York in April 1830
Home base	Short Creek: Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona	Salt Lake City, Utah
Size	About 10,000 followers in 2011; far fewer now, and no published count	17,887,212 members (end of 2025)
Marriage	Plural marriage, taught as necessary for exaltation	One husband and one wife; plural marriage ended by 1904 and now costs a person’s membership
Scripture	The Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price	The same four books
Leadership	One prophet, who alone performs marriages and can “reassign” wives and children	A church president regarded as prophet, with counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
Relationship	Descended from the same movement	States it has no affiliation with any polygamous group

FLDS stands for Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “Fundamentalist” is the name given to the groups that broke from the Church of Jesus Christ in the early 20th century because they believed it had given up something God required.

The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, published with Brigham Young University in 1992, describes these groups as claiming “to follow all the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.” They call themselves believers in the “fulness of the gospel,” which they say “must include plural marriage and sometimes the United Order,” a system of shared property. They claim to believe in the four books of Latter-day Saint scripture and in the church’s prophets “up to, and including, John Taylor.” They hold that the Church of Jesus Christ went wrong when it stopped plural marriage, and that it lost the keys of priesthood authority by doing so.

The FLDS became the largest polygamous group in the United States. Reporting from Warren Jeffs’s 2011 trial summed up its central belief: “The FLDS Church believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.” Exaltation is the highest glory that section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants promises the faithful in the life to come. The FLDS leader is regarded as a prophet of God, and he is the only person who can perform marriages. He can also punish a man by “reassigning” his wives and children to other men.

It depends on what “Mormon” means. Historians call the FLDS and groups like it Mormon fundamentalists, and the FLDS sees itself as the faithful continuation of Joseph Smith’s church. But it is not part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church the nickname usually refers to. That church says polygamous groups in the western United States and Canada “have no affiliation whatsoever” with it. Its style guide asks reporters to say so whenever they write about “people or organizations that practice polygamy.”

The confusion is common. After the 2008 raid on the FLDS ranch in Texas, a survey the church commissioned found that 36 percent of Americans thought the ranch belonged to it. Elder Quentin L. Cook, one of its apostles, answered that Latter-day Saints “have nothing whatsoever to do with this polygamous sect in Texas,” and added: “People have the right to worship as they choose, and we aren’t interested in attacking someone else’s beliefs.”

Part of the confusion comes from names. “Mormon” is a nickname taken from the Book of Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ asks people not to use it, or “LDS,” as a name for the church or its members, and it notes that the term is sometimes “incorrectly applied” to polygamist groups. The FLDS does come from the same 19th-century movement and reads the same books, but it is a separate church with its own leaders, and each rejects the other’s authority.

Both churches look back to the same revelation. In 1843 Joseph Smith recorded the revelation now printed as section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which speaks of “a new and an everlasting covenant” and sets out laws for plural marriage. It answers Joseph Smith’s question about why God had justified biblical figures such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses in having more than one wife. For about 50 years, the church says, “20 to 30 percent of Latter-day Saint men, women, and children lived in families that practiced plural marriage.”

From 1862 the United States passed laws to stop the practice. In Reynolds v. United States (1879) the Supreme Court ruled that the law protected religious belief but not this religious practice, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church’s corporation and ordered most of its property forfeited to the government. In September 1890 President Wilford Woodruff issued what Latter-day Saints call the Manifesto, after what they believe was a revelation. “We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice,” it said, and Woodruff declared his “intention to submit to those laws.” The church accepted it as binding on October 6, 1890.

The Manifesto did not end every new plural marriage at once. Some were quietly performed in Mexico and Canada, and a few in the United States, until 1904. That April, President Joseph F. Smith issued the Second Manifesto: anyone who entered or performed a plural marriage “will be deemed in transgression against the Church” and could be “excommunicated therefrom.” The church calls this “a watershed event.”

Some members would not accept it. In the church’s own account, those who kept up the practice were brought before disciplinary councils, and “some who were excommunicated coalesced into independent movements and are sometimes called fundamentalists.” In the 1920s Lorin C. Woolley of Centerville, Utah, said that in 1886 he had been commissioned through “the ministration of Jesus Christ, John Taylor, and Joseph Smith” to keep plural marriage alive. Fundamentalists hold that Taylor received a revelation in 1886 to continue it; the Church of Jesus Christ says that contention is wrong. Woolley named a governing “Council of Friends,” and one of its members, John Y. Barlow, started the United Order of Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona line in 1940.

Short Creek families had pooled their land in a trust since 1936, and in 1942 it became the United Effort Plan. On July 26, 1953, Arizona police and National Guardsmen raided the town, arrested the men and took the women and children into custody. Twenty-six men received suspended sentences, and the Arizona Supreme Court ordered the children released. The group grew afterward. LeRoy Johnson led it from 1954 until his death in 1986, followed by Rulon Jeffs until 2002. Under Rulon Jeffs, the council gave way to rule by one man.

The Church of Jesus Christ still prints section 132 in its scriptures, and it honors the 19th-century members who lived in plural families. But it teaches that monogamy is God’s standard unless he commands otherwise, and it quotes the Book of Mormon: “For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none.” On the afterlife it says: “No scripture or revelation teaches that plural marriage is a requirement for exaltation nor has this been an established doctrine of the Church.” Its leaders teach that “only monogamous temple marriage is necessary for exaltation.” Today, it says, “no person can practice plural marriage and remain a member.”

The FLDS reads the same revelation the other way. Section 132 warns that “if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned,” and fundamentalists count plural marriage as part of that covenant: in the words of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, they hold “that God requires all ‘true’ believers to abide by the principle of polygamy.” In the FLDS a marriage needs the leaders’ approval, and only the prophet performs it.

Warren Jeffs, Rulon’s son, became prophet on September 8, 2002. Former members say the community changed under him. In January 2004 he expelled 21 of its leading men and gave their wives and children to other men. Nearly every home in Short Creek stood on land held by the United Effort Plan trust, so a man cast out of the church could also lose his house. In 2005 a Utah court took control of the trust, and in 2006 a judge stripped it of its religious terms so that former members could benefit too.

Jeffs was charged in Arizona in 2005 with arranging the marriage of a 16-year-old girl to a married man; Arizona dismissed its charges against him in June 2010 because he faced more serious charges in Texas. The FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list on May 6, 2006, and he was arrested near Las Vegas that August. A Utah jury convicted him in 2007 as an accomplice to rape for performing the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to an adult man, his cousin; the Utah Supreme Court reversed the verdict in 2010 over flawed jury instructions.

In April 2008 Texas authorities raided the FLDS’s Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, and removed more than 400 children. The call that prompted the raid turned out to be a hoax. On May 29, 2008, the Texas Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that “on the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted.” The ruling came in the case of 38 mothers, and hundreds of children were returned to their families. The state’s child-protection agency later found that 12 teenage girls on the ranch had been married to adult men. Eleven of the 12 people charged after the raid were later convicted of child sexual assault, bigamy or performing an unlawful marriage. Texas began seizing the ranch in 2014.

Jeffs himself was convicted on evidence seized at the ranch. On August 9, 2011, a jury in San Angelo, Texas, sentenced him to life in prison for aggravated sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl and a further 20 years, to be served after it, for sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. He claimed both girls as “spiritual wives.” Prosecutors said he had 24 underage wives. Jeffs contended that he was being persecuted for his religious beliefs. The prosecutor told the jury that “this isn’t a prosecution of a people” but “a prosecution to protect people.” The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists his parole eligibility date as July 22, 2038.

Other cases followed. In March 2016 a federal jury found that the town governments of Hildale and Colorado City had discriminated against people who were not FLDS members, denying them police service and water hookups. In 2017 Warren’s brother Lyle Jeffs, who ran the church’s daily affairs, was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison for food-stamp fraud and for escaping house arrest.

To report child abuse or get help, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.

Samuel Bateman, a Colorado City man who had been one of Warren Jeffs’s trusted followers, declared himself a prophet and gathered a small splinter group. Jeffs denounced him in a written “revelation” sent from prison. From 2019 Bateman claimed more than 20 “wives,” including 10 underage girls, taking women and girls from his own followers. He was arrested in August 2022 after state police in Flagstaff found three girls, 11 to 14 years old, in a trailer he was pulling.

Bateman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport minors for criminal sexual activity and conspiracy to commit kidnapping, and in December 2024 a federal judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison. Seven of his adult “wives” were also convicted.

If you know of a child who is being abused, or you were abused yourself, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.

Yes, though it is much smaller and more scattered than it was. As of August 2026, Warren Jeffs remains in a Texas prison and is still regarded by his followers as “prophet, seer and revelator.” He has issued prophecies and edicts from his cell, and former members say he still controls the faithful. CNN’s profile of the group, updated in August 2026, lists followers in Colorado City and Hildale and in Texas, South Dakota, Colorado, Nevada, British Columbia and Mexico.

Short Creek itself has changed. Since 2019 a community board, not the church, has decided who can buy the homes held in the old trust, and many people the FLDS once expelled have come back. The Hildale mayor, Donia Jessop, who left the FLDS in 2012, said in 2025 that the towns “used to be like 95% FLDS” and that those who might follow Warren Jeffs now make up “about 5%” of the population. There is no current membership count. In 2011 the Associated Press put the church’s following at roughly 10,000.

The neck-to-ankle pastel dresses and long sleeves are rules handed down by successive FLDS prophets, most recently Warren Jeffs. Former members told KSL News in 2008 that the long sleeves and skirts cover the white religious undergarments FLDS members wear, and that Jeffs had told the children, “Every bit of your body is to be covered.” The same former members said the hair swept high over the forehead is tied to spirituality in the community, and that red is forbidden because it is kept for Christ’s return. Few women in Short Creek dress this way now. In 2025 the Hildale mayor estimated that only one woman in 200 or 300 there wears it, and that about 50 homes appear to be FLDS, judging by dress.

It depends on whom you ask. The FLDS calls itself a church and sees itself as the faithful continuation of Joseph Smith’s, and its members have said the prosecutions were persecution of their religion. Many former members and reporters call it a cult. They point to one man’s power over marriages, homes and children, and to the punishment of anyone who questioned him. One former member who testified in 2016 said he had come to see it as “the cult of Warren Jeffs.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for its part, has said it wants to define itself “rather than be defined by events and incidents that have nothing to do with us.”

Short Creek is a different town now. Its homes are no longer the church’s to give and take away, and many of those who were expelled live there again. For the wives and children who were once handed from one man to another, there is an older promise: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation” (Psalm 68:5, KJV).

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