Old document confirms Missouri faction’s position.

When the founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, Jr., was assassinated in Illinois in 1844, a squabble erupted over who would succeed him. Brigham Young convinced a majority that the leadership should pass to the body known as the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. As head of that group, Young accepted the mantle of succession and led the party westward to Utah.

Dissenters, including Smith’s mother, widow, and brother, believed that Smith wanted his son, Joseph Smith III, to be the heir. The younger Smith’s followers remained behind, eventually settling in Independence, Missouri, under the name Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (only the church based in Utah uses the name “Mormon”).

A problem in the Missouri faction was that no one could prove the founder wanted his lineal descendents to succeed him. There were only reports of conversations about his wishes. It was an important discovery, therefore, when a young collector of Mormon artifacts recently came across the transcript of the blessing Joseph Smith pronounced upon his son five months before his death. The blessing contained this crucial wording: “… the anointing of the progenitor shall be upon the head of my son, and his seed after him, from generation to generation. For he shall be my successor to the presidency of the high priesthood, a seer and a revelator, and a prophet unto the church, which appointment belongeth to him by blessing and also by right.”

The document was dated January 17, 1844, and for the first time it pinpointed what the reorganized church in Missouri always believed: that their wing was in the line of succession ordained by Joseph Smith.

Although the document was an important historical find, neither branch of the church is making a big deal out of it. “We have no interest in pursuing old nineteenth-century battles,” said Richard Howard, historian of the reorganized church in Independence. “The Mormon church has settled the issue of descent to their satisfaction and we have settled it to ours.”

The Missouri church has been led by Smith’s descendents ever since his death (currently, the prophet is Wallace Smith, the great-grandson of the founder), but the church does not believe it is locked into the Smith family forever. More important considerations when a prophet chooses his successor are a sense of divine will and acceptance by the church members.

Besides that, there is some doubt that when Joseph Smith, Jr., blessed his son, he really intended the blessing to mark him as successor since the boy was only 11 years old at the time and did not understand the blessing to be a sign of succession. Although he led the Missouri church for 54 years (1860–1914), the son acknowledged that “It is not a birthright to be president of the church. [It is] by virtue of fitness and qualification, I may say, and good behavior and the choice of the people.”

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What is most likely to happen is that the Missouri church, numbering 224,000, will continue to live in harmony with, and be out-numbered by, the Utah Mormons, who have some 2.6 million members (4.7 million worldwide). For one thing, the reorganized church in Missouri does not employ temple worship as do the Utah Mormons with their highly secretive and exclusive liturgy. And the two branches are far apart theologically. The Missouri church is far closer to orthodox Christianity in its views of Scripture and the Trinity than the decidedly unchristian brethren in Utah.

The IRS Alerts Its Agents
Courts Check Spread Of Phony Mail-Order Ministers

People have become mail-order ministers to evade the draft, avoid taxes, and even to keep a disco open after 2:00 A.M. as a “religious establishment.” All of this has the Internal Revenue Service agitated enough to issue instructions to tax agents that tell them how to spot phony ministers.

The mail-order ministers are so called because they are ordained through the mail, paying a small fee to companies willing to give them credentials. But the IRS suspects as many as 10,000 persons are now mail-order ministers so they can illegitimately enjoy the tax benefits of religious organizations.

Judges, sensitive about church-state separation, have upheld the right of mail-order churches to exist. But blatant abusers of tax exemptions for religious organizations are consistently losing in tax court.

The biggest problem, said a spokesman for the IRS, is the person who gets ordained and starts a church merely to funnel his normal living expenses through it. Then the typical offender claims deductions because he supposedly has given his income to a nonprofit entity. Early this year, the IRS took 10 Braniff International airline pilots to court, alleging the pilots’ Basic Bible Church was bogus as a church, but the real thing as a tax fraud.

Mail-order churches claim they fulfill many traditional church functions. California’s Mother Earth American Fellowship Church, for example, claims its ministers will conduct weddings and funerals.

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One Mother Earth minister, Mark Hackman, admitted he presides over no regular meetings; neither does he even have a set meeting place. He, said applicants for ordination are not questioned about their motives, although Mother Earth Church does disapprove tax evasion. Some ministers may abuse their mail-order ordination, he said, but any freedom can be abused. “More people are benefitted by this service than are harmed.”

The president of Mother Earth Church, Ted Swenson, defends his operation and others like it in light of the First Amendment: “In this country, anyone can establish a religion, no matter how nuts.”

Americans like credentials, and Swenson’s service offers help for “people who just feel that they are not worthy because they don’t have a credential.” Having such documents may give some applicants a boost in morale, but Swenson said his church leaves spiritual growth and development to the individual.

The IRS stipulates that any agency claiming benefits as a religious organization must “actually be operated for religious purposes.” The organization also “cannot be operated to further the private interests of its founder or other individuals.”

In at least two cases last year, the tax court ruled against organizations it considered to be in violation of that stipulation. In Walker v. Commissioner, the court said it would not allow tax law to be “subverted by those who would twist it to their own private benefit—regardless of the scheme or artifice by which it is attempted.”

The ‘Jupiter Effect’
Scientist Retracts Theory But Believers Won’T Budge

A book published in 1974 has many people believing 1982 will be a year of earthquakes terrible enough to destroy Los Angeles. Some pastors are still preaching about the “Jupiter Effect,” even though one of the authors of the book that started it all has denounced his earlier claims. “If anyone tries to warn you about the Apocalypse coming in 1982, just tell him that the old theory has long since been disproved,” wrote scientist John Gribbin in the June 1980 issue of Omni magazine.

Gribbin and coauthor Stephen Plagemann wrote The Jupiter Effect, they said, to warn Californians that a unique alignment of the planets might result in catastrophic earthquakes in 1982. Gribbin and Plagemann surmised that the San Andreas Fault was due for collapse, and that the slightest nudge would aggravate the fault, shaking major cities to their foundations.

The authors, according to science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in a foreword to the book, went looking for the fatal nudge on a trail that took “them not only over all the earth, but to the Sun and through all the Solar System and even beyond.” The chase was, it turns out, a wild goose chase.

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Astronomers never took The Jupiter Effect seriously. One called it “absurd and inaccurate.” Another, who said his California observatory still gets at least two calls a week on the Jupiter Effect, labeled it “nonsense.”

Finally, Gribbin himself lashed out at The Jupiter Effect in the June issue of Omni. “I have bad news for the doomsayers,” he wrote. “The book has now been proved wrong; the whole basis for the 1982 prediction is gone.”

Rumors, however, die hard. Some Christians are still looking to 1982 as a year of quakes that will echo the words of Christ about his Second Coming: “… and there will be famines and earthquakes.”

The Gospel Tract Society of Independence, Missouri, has printed two million copies of a tract that warns of “Strange Events Forecast for 1982.” The Southwest Radio Church, based in Oklahoma City, continues to expect the Jupiter Effect. Christian college astronomy professors report being consistently questioned about the seven-year-old book.

All this was enough to convince Kansas minister Donald Wells that the Jupiter Effect needed investigation. Spurred by his amateur interest in astronomy, Wells researched scientific journals, queried astronomers, and wrote “What Alignment of the Planets?”—a six-page paper debunking the rumor and chiding Christians for buying it.

Exactly what is the Jupiter Effect? Gribbin and Plagemann’s cosmic chase convinced them a complex chain of events would climax in 1982 with serious earthquakes. Their chain included these links:

• The contention that planets exert tidal forces on the sun (much the same way the moon does on earth) and that all planets would align on the same side of the sun in 1982, maximizing the tidal force.

• The tidal force would provoke an overabundance of sunspots, with more sunspots meaning the higher probability of eruptions on the sun. The eruptions would shoot solar particles into the earth’s upper atmosphere.

• The increased solar particles would cause unusual movements of large air masses in the earth’s upper atmosphere, slowing the rate of the earth’s rotation.

• The change in the rate of the earth’s rotation would shake geological faults (like San Andreas) and cause massive earthquakes.

This chain was called the Jupiter Effect since Jupiter’s size and proximity to the sun makes its gravitational pull the greatest in the solar system. Soon after the publication of the book, Edward Upton of Los Angeles’s Griffith Observatory said, “There is not one solid link in the entire Gribbin-Plagemann chain. The combined chain, as a basis for predicting earthquakes, has the same credibility as a reading of tea leaves.”

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A special weakness of the theory was the idea that all planets aligned on the same side of the sun would maximize the tidal force. Not so, say astronomers. In reality, planets can create equally strong tidal forces when some are on opposite sides of the sun, forming an “anti-alignment.”

Christians who tied the Jupiter Effect into their expectations of the end times also read the alignment as being a “perfect” arrangement of the planets, all in a straight line from the sun. Gribbin and Plagemann did write of an “unusual alignment” where “every planet is in conjunction with every other planet.” They also spoke of a “superconjunction with all nine planets in line on the same side of the Sun.” But astronomers know the alignment, though it will be unusual, will hardly be perfect. The planets will actually be spread out around one-fourth of the solar system, not aligned one behind the other like soldiers on parade.

Still, tracts continue to circulate the warning that “fearful things are shaping up in our solar system!” David Buttram, manager of Gospel Tract Society, said his company will continue to print “Strange Events” until “we are determined it is not accurate.” He said he was trying to reach Gribbin on the subject.

David Webber, president of Southwest Radio Church, was aware of Gribbin’s retraction, but still circulates “Apocalyptic Signs in the Heavens,” with 30,000 copies in print. He is convinced that heavenly signs are accumulating. “They bring evidence to bear on these things which suggest we may be living in the end times,” he said.

“Apocalyptic Signs” says Gribbin’s retraction reflects his concern for scientific respectability: “In reading the [Omni] article carefully, it seems evident that Mr. Gribbin disavows his theory more for the sake of appeasing his fellow scientists than anything else. All he actually does is move the date for increasing earthquakes and other astraterrestial predictions in The Jupiter Effect up a few months,” the booklet reads.

Gribbin does admit in the Omni article that he was probably more rash than good science allows, but it is not accurate to say he merely “moves the date for increasing earthquakes … up a few months.” In fact, Gribbin moves the date up two years, noting that sunspot activity reached its peak in 1979 and 1980, and that Los Angeles would fall before the end of 1980 if at all.

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“But if Los Angeles is still standing by the end of the year, the rest of our forecast will have been invalidated,” he wrote. 1980 has passed. Los Angeles has not.

Christians, such as those Gribbin calls “weirdos” and “cultists,” have been expecting Christ’s Second Coming a long while. But those like Baptist pastor Wells, who says he also looks forward to the Second Coming, lament Christian gullibility. “What I can’t understand is why Christians are flocking to this book. Is it that they don’t care?” Wells writes in his paper. “Or is it that Christians simply never bother to check the facts?” Unfortunately, he believes, “Either answer is a sad commentary on our faith.”

RODNEY CLAPP

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