Offbeat Church Stirs Fear in Montana : Religion: Church members have skirted land laws and hoarded arms. Neighbors say they’re dangerous, but leaders say they’re just misunderstood.

Almost from the moment the Church Universal and Triumphant loaded its belongings onto 100 tractor-trailers and moved its headquarters here from its enclave in Malibu, the valley has been rife with rumors about the unorthodox organization.

Some residents said that the church--whose leader claims to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette and Queen Guinevere, as well as the true leader of Catholicism--was planning to take over the valley, just as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had taken over the town of Antelope in Oregon.

Others predicted that the influx of newcomers would ruin this unspoiled area just north of Yellowstone National Park and threaten the ecology of Yellowstone itself. There were even stories that the church was stockpiling weapons.

The fears got a boost one day last summer when a local pilot flew over part of the church’s 33,000-acre holdings and was stunned to see earthmoving equipment carving a gigantic hole in what had been a meadow in the Gallatin Mountains. The church, residents discovered, was constructing an underground bomb shelter the size of two football fields. It had begun to build the structure just one month after winning final approval for other construction plans under an environmental impact study that had taken three years to complete. The Church Universal and Triumphant, known locally as CUT, had never mentioned the huge shelter in those plans.

State officials, environmentalists and other community members were outraged.

Days later, the other shoe dropped.

In Spokane, Wash., a high-ranking church member was arrested for illegally buying more than $100,000 in weapons and ammunition, including semiautomatics and nine .50-caliber military anti-vehicle guns. At first, the church denied any knowledge of his activity, but just a little over a month ago, Ed Francis, CUT vice president and husband of spiritual leader Elizabeth Prophet, admitted to authorities that he had actually directed the acquisitions.

On Dec. 15, Francis was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush to a month in prison and three months’ home detention after pleading guilty to a conspiracy charge.

The twin disclosures of the shelter project and the weapons cache were not the only unsettling developments, however.

Prophet--who claims to communicate directly with “ascended masters” in heaven, including Jesus, Merlin, Buddha, King Arthur, 17th-Century alchemist St. Germain and her deceased husband, Mark Prophet--has cautioned church members not to make any plans past Dec. 31. By that date, she said, everyone should have a completed bomb shelter and should have stored enough food to last seven months.

She said that, while she is not predicting the end of the world, it is clear from the “dictations” she has received from the ascended masters that either a nuclear attack or economic collapse looms for the nation.

Some longtime residents have made light of previous CUT prophesies. After one was issued, patrons of the Two Bit Saloon in nearby Gardiner held an “End of the World” party. But with the revelation of arms stockpiles and the massive fallout shelter, others here are nervous.

“People just don’t know what to think,” said Robert Aronsen of West Yellowstone. “Everybody has a right to own a gun, but what do you need a .50-caliber gun for?”

In rural Montana, residents seldom take quickly to strangers. So townspeople in Gardiner and Livingston were cautious when the church first bought 12,000 acres from magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes in 1981. The church said then that the land would be used only as a summer retreat. But three years ago it decided to move here, and by that time CUT had purchased 21,000 more acres around the area to become the largest private landholder and third-largest taxpayer in Park County.

About 600 church staff members moved into quarters at Corwin Springs, transforming it from a little community of 50 to the county’s third-largest town and the precinct with the largest number of registered voters.

Twenty-one miles north, on 4,200 acres near the town of Emigrant, the church began to carve out Glastonbury North and South, a members-only community of about 300 where, in keeping with the organization’s religious teachings, bomb shelters are mandatory.

None of these changes boded well for relations with longtime residents in an area where a popular bumper sticker reads “Save the land. Shoot a subdivider.”

Since its expansion here, the church has been accused of everything from outbreaks of the measles and whooping cough to tapping into hot springs that threaten Old Faithful. There have been environmental arguments and lawsuits over the impact of the church’s expanding operations, which border 5 1/2 miles of Yellowstone, the oldest national park in the United States.

And there has also been plain old religious bigotry.

“You hate not to like somebody because of their religion,” said Cane Harris as she slid another beer down the rail at a Gardiner bar, “but you find a lot of prejudice coming out when you’re face to face with it.”

Officials of the church say they regularly receive threatening telephone calls, and that flyers have been circulated for the last two years for the “Annual CUT Shoot,” a fictitious contest with points awarded for church members shot.

Church members, many of whom appear to be well-educated and of middle- to upper-economic status, say they wish they could be just left alone to establish the “archetypal community of the Aquarian Age,” a self-sufficient, almost monastic environment where they can practice their religious beliefs, which have elements of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and astrology.

Instead, they say, their religion and intent are being distorted.

“When you are in a group that’s outside the mainstream, you can expect that not everybody is going to be madly in love with you,” said Kathlene Boyle, a longtime member who oversaw the move to Montana and currently manages the Glastonbury development. “What really concerns me is I think a lot of the issues are raised against us when maybe they wouldn’t be raised against somebody else.”

“It’s almost like a trial of our beliefs,” added Louis DiFoe, an investment banker and former vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, who moved to Glastonbury six months ago with his wife and three children. “People are telling you what to believe. That’s why the pilgrims came here in the first place.”

Church officials said they have been accused of being less than honest because most of their property purchases were made through third parties. They found that tactic necessary, they said, after owners twice reneged on real estate deals when it became known the buyers were church members.

“We were the ones who were treated dishonestly,” Francis said.

Church officials contend that the demands for public scrutiny of their development projects are unprecedented, and often mask religious bias.

Steve Pilcher, in charge of the state agency that oversaw the environmental impact study of church construction, agrees. “A lot of the people who were demanding an environmental impact study in the beginning did that only because they knew that would delay the church’s activities,” he said.

Church leaders also note that, when the park service was demanding that the church move its root crop operation because it attracted grizzly bears, park officials were growing root crops inside the park itself.

Some valley residents side with the newcomers, who do not drink, smoke or tolerate drugs, and who require chastity of single members.

“They’ve been good neighbors,” said Jack McDonald, a rancher who has lived in Paradise Valley for 75 years. “That ranch is in better shape than it has ever been. People should leave them alone. The land is theirs. Let them do what they want with it.”

But controversies have always surrounded the church.

At the center of the storm is Elizabeth Prophet, 50, an attractive, charismatic woman and prolific author whose 50 books make up most of the church’s teachings and supply much of its income. Although revered by church members, Prophet has come under attack from some former followers, including a daughter who left the church last summer, claiming her mother was duplicitous and dishonest.

Moira Lewis, 21, accused her mother of using her sway over members to live a lavish life style while many close followers turned over their personal belongings to her, and said she had not been honest with local residents about the church’s plans.

Prophet and her other children countered that the accusations are the vindictive lies of a rebellious daughter with a long history of sexual promiscuity and drug and alcohol abuse.

Prophet has largely withdrawn from the fray. She spends most of her time writing and no longer grants interviews, a chore she leaves to her husband, Francis, and to her daughter Erin, 23, a USC graduate.

Born Elizabeth Clair Wulf in Red Bank, N.J., Prophet was the only child of a German father and Swiss mother. In 1960 she married a Norwegian law student. Then, while studying political science at Boston University, she met Mark Prophet, a former vacuum cleaner salesman and railroad worker who had started Summitt Lighthouse, a storefront church in Washington. The two of them divorced their spouses and set up housekeeping in 1963.

In the late 1960s, the Prophets relocated to Colorado Springs, where Francis, then a student at Colorado College, joined the church. So did Randall King, a third-year student in hotel management at the University of Denver. According to King, Francis and Prophet began an affair before her second husband’s death and were married nine months after Mark Prophet “ascended” in 1973.

The church later moved to California and eventually came to rest in Malibu, where it took its present name. King said in 1986 court testimony that he and Prophet developed a plan to become millionaires, invested in stocks, silver and other commodities, but took heavy financial losses and dipped into $100,000 of church funds to shore up their investments. With Prophet’s children, they lived well in their beachfront home, he said. He also testified that he and Prophet had required church members to make frequent high-speed chants called “decrees” as a means of controlling them. One former church member won a $1.5-million judgment against the church in that trial.

Prophet denies the allegations. She and King were divorced in 1980. A year later she married Francis.

The son of a well-to-do Dallas entrepreneur, Francis, 39, now handles the financial end of the operation, and according to outsiders, does it well. “His last name should be ‘Profit,’ ” said one Montana real estate agent admiringly. “He’s a good businessman.” But it was Francis’ misstep that has brought the church under tighter scrutiny.

Last summer, Spokane, Wash., police stopped Vernon Hamilton, a ranking church member, after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms got a tip that he had been using mail drops to make weapons purchases.

Through the window of his pickup, a flustered Hamilton handed police conflicting identification, including one with the name of a Nevada attorney who had died of AIDS. Hamilton then led authorities to a local warehouse where he had stored weapons, ammunition and $27,000 in cash and South African gold krugerrands.

Possession of the weapons was legal--but to hide church involvement, Hamilton for months had illegally used phony addresses and identification, including birth certificates and college transcripts, to purchase them. Hamilton was sentenced Dec. 1 to three years probation and was fined $100 by a judge who described him as a “good and moral person.”

When Hamilton first agreed to plead guilty and threatened to testify against other church members, Francis admitted directing the weapons acquisitions and pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy. The same day, another church member was arrested in Moscow, Ida., for giving a phony address while purchasing two more .50-caliber weapons.

Prophet and church officials have maintained that they knew nothing of Francis’ efforts. Francis said he acted on his own and that no church funds were used.

But concerned as some residents are about the weapons cache, for many Montanans the more enduring issue is the growth that has accompanied the church’s move and its possible impact on the environment.

Yellowstone Park officials said the church’s improvements threaten to upset the delicate ecological balance in the nearby park. Park ranger Stuart Gardner said that development has changed the land pattern, that church fences impede the winter grazing of bighorn sheep, elk and bison, and that the newcomers place additional burden on the water table in an area that gets only 13 inches of rain a year.

And, while there is no data to support his charges, Gardner said the church’s plans to use a hot spring on its property could threaten Yellowstone Park’s thermal system. That church plan has been put on hold pending a study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The church has acquiesced to many park concerns by changing its farming and livestock operations. Still, Gardner claims, “They’ve decided to do what they want to do, and everything else be damned. But in today’s world, you can no longer build anything you want on the property you own. That’s why you have zoning.”

However, in a state where property rights rank right up there with Old Glory and the right to hunt, zoning restrictions are few and weak, and Park County residents recently voted down an attempt to initiate more.

John O. Sullivan, editor of the Livingston Enterprise, says that vote “set the stage for a disaster.”

The church has sometimes been able to sidestep the few restrictions there are. For example, at Glastonbury, where nearly 200 homes are going up against a beautiful mountainous backdrop, it has avoided state subdivision restrictions on most of the land by selling it to members in 20-acre lots, the size just large enough to fall outside state jurisdiction. In many cases, members then build three or more houses on the property without dividing the land, thus circumventing the state subdivision rules. However, the church has imposed a series of its own restrictions which, ironically, are much more stringent than Park County limits.

But the most glaring example of the church’s efforts to avoid restrictions involves the construction of the bomb shelter to house 756 members. In 1986, the state ordered an environmental impact study of the church’s proposed development plans. The state gave the go-ahead, with a few changes, but a coalition of local environmental groups sued the state, holding up any development until the courts gave final approval last May.

One month later, the church began to build. However, it had never mentioned plans to build a bomb shelter, and when the big earthmoving project was seen from the air officials were stunned.

“We took a lot of heat for them,” said Pilcher, whose agency approved the study and testified on the church’s behalf. “We attempted to be fair and honest and treat the church the same way we treat any other individual proposing construction. In doing so, we sort of stood up for them. It would have been a courtesy to at least tell me about it since we were the ones catching most of the hell from the people, but we didn’t have the benefit of that.”

At this point, Pilcher said, his hands are tied. The state has no further jurisdiction in the matter.

“That’s one of the frustrating features of the whole situation,” he said. “Even if I did have a legal reason to go back in, much of the impact . . . is already there. What they are doing is legal, but that doesn’t make it OK.”

Those are the sentiments of many residents. Even people the church initially counted among its friends are beginning to view the organization differently.

“I have a lot more reservations about them now than I did before,” said Methodist minister Bill Kilber, who put together a special luncheon meeting to welcome CUT members to the community when the church first arrived. “When we started, the basic feeling was religious tolerance.

“They haven’t been totally honest with the community. They’ve been hedging on their development, and then there’s the whole thing of gathering of automatic weapons. There’s just no reason for it. I’ve got acquaintances in the church that I deeply respect, but I don’t understand what’s going on over there.

“If we were doing what they are doing, they’d be very paranoid.”