Wesley Swift and the Church of Jesus Christ - Christian

Rev. Wesley Swift, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ - Christian

When Joe Jeffers was asked about British Israelism’s implications for non-Anglo-Saxon peoples, the preacher was always at pains to stress that he wasn’t a racist or an anti-Semite. Like most advocates of the doctrine, he maintained that he primarily preached God’s love for all humans, and that if anything, having a bloodline from the ancient Israelites made White Christians more obligated to behave gently and righteously towards people of color and modern-day Jews.

No such disclaimers troubled the career of Reverend Wesley Albert Swift, late of Lancaster, California. The founder of the Church of Jesus Christ – Christian, Swift spent over three decades proudly transforming British Israelism from a largely-harmless Biblical revisionist doctrine, into a racist ideology that portrayed non-Whites as sub-humans and Jews as Satanic schemers, and inspired religious-based terrorism that has claimed lives across the United States.

Like so many other Christian figures that have put their distinctive marks on the Golden State’s spiritual culture, Wesley Swift was an East Coast transplant. Born in 1913, he grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Richard C. Swift. The elder Swift was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, a sect that split from mainstream American Methodism because of the latter’s anti-slavery stance. 

In his teens, young Wesley heard the call to spread the Gospel, and his father’s Church licensed him as a preacher when he was a mere 18 years old. The freshly-ordained young minister then trod off to Los Angeles, where he studied at Philip E.J. Monson’s Kingdom Bible College. Monson was best known a representative of Howard Rand, the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America and an advocate of British Israelism.

"British Israelism" theologian Howard Rand

The form of British Israelism that Rand and Monson taught deviated sharply from the versions preached by Californian Christian leaders like Joe Jeffers, Gene Scott and the Armstrongs. Unlike original British Israelism, which claimed modern-day Jewish people – “the tribe of Judah” – were related to Saxons and Celts via the “Lost Tribes of Israel”, Rand and his followers taught that the Jews of the 20th Century were Canaanites – descendants of Isaac’s son Esau, who had lost his birthright as Patriarch of the Israelites to his brother Jacob, and had married outside the Abrahamic lineage. As a result, so-called “Jews” were actually Semitic impostors, whereas the true Israelites had been dispersed into Northern and Western Europe, and were the White race of today – a Chosen People blessed by God to dominate all His Creation.

Married to this was an even more sinister concept: the so-called “Two-Seed Theory”. In Randian British Israelism, this was the idea that Adam and Eve were the first true humans, created by God in about 7400 BC to have dominion over “the beasts of the field” – the prototype pseudo-humans who preceded them in the six days of creation, and who were identified with the non-White races. The fall from Eden came when Eve, yielding to the temptations of either Satan or a demonic entity in the form of the Serpent, mated with the creature and birthed Cain, the murderer of Adam’s birth son Abel. After killing his half-brother, the demon-child Cain then married into the Hittite beast-tribe, forming the Canaanite line that Esau later joined. 

The "Two-Seed" theory held that Canaanites
were the descendants of Eve and the Serpent

Although versions of the two-seed theory had been taught in ancient Jewish writings, as well as the Gnostic Gospel of Philip and other Christian Apocrypha, the early Church rejected the concept. But 20th Century fringe-Adventists like Rand rediscovered it, and used it to literally demonize Jews, seeing them as serpentine connivers and a pseudo-human pestilence that had lied and tricked the White race into economic and political servitude, and spiritual and racial alienation. Their racist and anti-Semitic variant of British Israelism told White Gentiles: You are the lost children of Israel. Throw off the yoke of false, Judaicized “Christianity” and reclaim your birthright as the Chosen People of God, and as the masters of the planet.

Swift absorbed and embraced this doctrine during the 1930s. For the rest of the decade he worked as an itinerant preacher, mounting the podium at any Southern California church that would host him, and bringing the Gospel of Randian British-Israelism to any audience that would listen. Swift’s best gig of the era was at Aimee Semple MacPherson’s Foursquare Temple, where he served as a warm-up act for the fading Pentecostal superstar.

Somewhere on the pastoral circuit, Swift met San Jacinto Capt, a California-based Baptist minister. Capt later claimed to have set up the young preacher’s first ministry in Temple City – a “Pyramid Study Group” where his flock, like so many other fringe-Adventists, delved into the mysteries of Egyptology and what they foretold for American and Christian destiny.

By the 1940s the racist British-Israelite doctrine promulgated by Swift didn’t exactly have mass-appeal in a nation fighting a total war against advocates of another Jew-bashing, master-race ideology. But the Southern Californian pastor attracted one major convert to his cause: the legendary preacher and rabble-rouser Gerald L.K. Smith.

Populist firebrand Gerald L. K. Smith

Originally a Disciples of Christ minister, Smith was a charismatic speaker and demagogue whom iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken called “the greatest orator of them all, not the greatest by an inch or a foot or a yard or a mile, but the greatest by at least two light years.” Smith first got involved in radical politics as an organizer for Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement.

When Long was assassinated in 1935, Smith took over the movement, and joined with controversial “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin and pension-advocate Francis Townsend to form the Union Party, which ran populist Congressman William Lemke against Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 Presidential election. When Smith’s rhetoric became increasingly racist and anti-Semitic in the late 1930s, his former allies split with him, and during World War II the Federal Government tried (but failed to convict) him for sedition.

Smith met Wesley Swift in 1947, three years after the sedition trial. Impressed by the 34 year-old preacher, who he called an “eloquent and crusading clergyman,” Smith hired Swift initially as a bodyguard and chauffer, but soon made him the West Coast representative of his “Christian Nationalist Crusade,” and shared the pulpit with him on his California lecture tours. 

Poster advertising a talk by Smith and Swift in Hollywood

Still a potent speaker who could easily rally disaffected and angry Americans, Smith and his protégé filled Los Angeles’ Embassy Auditorium in 1949, as well as other venues across Southern California, one of which they claimed was picketed by “nearly 20,000 Reds and their Dupes.” Their talks merged nascent Cold War paranoia with “Biblically-based” anti-Semitic and White-Supremacist rhetoric drawn directly from British-Israelite sources. They asserted that America was under siege from Jewish Communists who were manipulating everything from Hollywood to race-relations in a plot to bring down White Christian civilization. 

But Wesley Swift wasn’t content to merely share a podium with Smith, and act as his California agent. Now a rising star of the postwar American far-Right, Swift was making waves across the state’s political and spiritual landscapes all by himself. In 1946 he attempted to resuscitate California’s dormant Ku Klux Klan when he burned a cross on a hillside near Big Bear Lake, and lectured to American Legion posts about “the new Klan” and its mission to save America from Communism and race-mixing. When the Attorney General’s office investigated Swift’s doings that year, it found that not only had he organized his own KKK faction, the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire, but that he’d built a private rifle range in the backyard of his Lancaster ranch, and was conducting paramilitary training for Klansmen in the Antelope Valley desert. For his part, Swift refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Swift's formation of an Antelope Valley-based KKK chapter alarmed California officials

Around this time, Swift founded his own religious denomination: The Church of Jesus Christ – Christian. Originally known as the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation (in a seeming hat-tip to Howard Rand), the Church was formed specifically as the spiritual arm of his racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Communist crusade,  and dedicated to disseminating Swift’s version of British Israelism.

The denomination grew steadily throughout California in the 1950s, planting branches in San Francisco, Oakland, Lancaster, Riverside, Hollywood and San Diego. There was also a Church center in St. Petersburg, Florida under the Rev. Oren Potito, Swift’s East Coast coordinator and an organizer for the National States’ Rights Party, a Neo-Nazi/Klan fusionist group whose leaders would later serve time for bombing a Black church in Birmingham and a Jewish temple in Atlanta. Swift’s own lieutenant and co-preacher in California, the Rev. Charles “Connie” Lynch, also served as the NSRP’s state leader, as well as a “traveling parson” at Ku Klux Klan rallies across the South.

Swift’s most important associate in California, however, was William Potter Gale. Gale, formerly the youngest Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army during World War II and a close associate of General Douglas MacArthur, retired from the military in 1950 and worked afterwards as a securities trader. 

Col. William Potter Gale, in clerical garb

Introduced to Swift by San Jacinto Capt, Gale, who had organized the guerrilla resistance in the Philippines during the war, lent a distinctly paramilitary tone to Swift’s operations, helping the preacher found the Christian Defense League as an umbrella group to bring together the various religious and political far-Right groups that cross-pollinated in Swift’s world. Gale also started the California Rangers, a secretive guerrilla corps that acted as the Church and League’s armed militant wing.

As the Civil Rights movement gained steam, and the Fifties became the Sixties, the rhetoric of Swift, his associates, and his followers, got louder and more strident. Using British-Israelite exegesis, Swift insisted that God created the races not only separate but unequal in one publication called THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY:

And God spoke out then, against these Hivites that came out of the Hittites. He spoke out against the Amorites, the Canaanites. He spoke out against the Perizzites, the Jebusites. And he told His people not to mix with them, not to have covenants with them, not to intermarry with them, for they would teach His people to serve other gods. They would have no spiritual capacity, and the spirit of God would not cohabit in any of their mixed-blood offspring. Such offspring, He said, would be totally unable to understand the truths of God. So God was calling for segregation!

Jews fared no better in Swift’s doctrines. The preacher was quoted as saying “All Jews must be destroyed,” and in a 1962 sermon, stated "the days are going to come when there's not going to be any of them (the JEWS)  in the United States either, because the Bible says so in the book of  Zechariah .... The destroyers of America (the JEWS) are going to discover that it's not the best place to remain inside of these United States, as America wakes up." Colonel Gale seconded his spiritual leader, ranting, “You got your nigger Jews, you got your Asiatic Jews and you got your white Jews. They’re all Jews, and they’re all the offspring of the Devil.”

Gale, who preached Swift’s teachings at his own Ministry of Christ Church in Glendale, later claimed that he coined a new term to describe this Jew-baiting, White-supremacist form of British-Israelite Adventism: Christian Identity. Like many other heterodox Christian doctrines, Christian Identity maintained that apocalyptic Biblical prophecy was being fulfilled in the modern world, and called on its followers to repent and join its struggle against principalities and powers of evil. Unlike most Christian millenarianism, however, the Identity creed prophesied that its believers would not be raptured into the Kingdom of God in the Last Days, but would have to fight to establish the Kingdom on Earth, in an all-out war against Satan’s worldly minions: the Communists, the “mud races,” and the Jews.

Some of Swift’s followers took his battle cry to heart. In August 1963, California Ranger George Joseph King Jr., the son of a retired Admiral, was busted for attempting to sell a .50 caliber machine gun and a British Sten submachine gun to undercover agents who posed as prospective Rangers. King allegedly assured the agents that he could get almost any type or amount of illegal weapon they desired. 

One year later, agents raided the Cucamonga home of Christian Defense League member William H. Garland, a self-described “patriot” who wanted to fight off “invaders,” and seized nearly 100 arms, including fully-operational machine guns, 105MM rockets, and bomb-making equipment. And in 1965 another Swift follower, Keith Gilbert, was caught with 1,400 pounds of stolen TNT; when asked what the explosives were for, he replied that he planned to blow up the Hollywood Palladium when Rev. Martin Luther King spoke there.

Alarmed, the California Attorney General’s office once again delved into Swift’s doings. In 1965 it issued a 100-page report, California Rangers, where it theorized that the Church of Jesus Christ – Christian was a front for the Rangers and a networking device for extremist organizations, and that both Swift and Gale were working to dominate the spiritual and political worlds of the Californian far Right. 

Not all Golden State ultra-Rightists, however, were impressed with Swift and his approach. Don Sisco, a onetime American Nazi Party member who would later gain notoriety writing survivalist manuals under the pen-name Kurt Saxon, recounted how underwhelmed he was with the pastor during a 1964 visit to his Hollywood church:

One night [Swift] raved, "There are 60,000 niggers training with guns in Arizona". A few months later the Watts riots broke out. Where were the "60,000 niggers"? Another time he said, "There are 60,000 Red Chinese hidden in Baja, California, brought over here by submarines". (He was hung up on the number 60,000).

Those in the audience were all southern Californians and had to know that Baja is a barren desert peninsula which couldn't hide or support 60,000 field mice, much less 60,000 Chinese troops. Besides, at that time, the Chinese had only 30 WW II subs, hardly enough or the type of vehicles to transport 60,000 men.

The thing that impressed me about this was, first, Swift was a liar. Second, his audience believed him, even though such lies were preposterous and could be believed only by an exercise in credulity. That is, training the mind to accept absurdities as a test of faith and loyalty, in a pathetic desire to belong.

No less a hard-Right avatar than John Birch Society leader Robert Welch also condemned Swift. In a paper called “The Neutralizers”, he charged that the preacher’s virulent anti-Semitism and fanatical Christian-Identity preaching were alienating potential allies in the fight against Communism. The Bircher chief felt Swift was an embarrassment to the patriotic American Right, and thought it would be a grievous strategic victory for the Reds if “everybody else should come to believe everything he is teaching.”

Yet Swift’s message was still getting through, far beyond the confines of his Southern California home territory. Lacking the national-radio pulpit of predecessors like Father Coughlin, Swift instead took advantage of a new technology to spread his doctrines: cassette-tape recordings. Although not nearly as gifted or forceful a speaker as Coughlin or Smith, Swift nevertheless had a singular talent for explaining Christian Identity concepts in his sermons, and he regularly recorded them, then duplicated the tapes onto cassettes and sold them to followers across America. 

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the general Zeitgeist of the Sixties drove White racism out of the respectable American mainstream, there still remained a considerable audience for these tapes. “Listening parties” were held across the besieged Southern states, where far-Right radicals terrified by the end of Black segregation and White supremacy found in Swift‘s preaching a righteous spiritual rationale for fighting back against what they saw as a Godless Communist takeover of the country.

In the book The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., authors Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock made the case that Swift’s taped sermons, along with the agitation campaigns of Church preachers like Connie Lynch and Oren Potito, and the crimes of their followers in the KKK and the NSRP, were intended to provoke a race war that would spread from the beleaguered South into all of the United States, and would bring about Federal repression, a full-scale revolution, and the eventual victory of White Christendom over the forces of Communism, Zionism and “race mongrelization.” 

Using previously-unreleased FBI records, the authors also revealed that Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian acted as a front for the Army of White American Kingdom Evangelists (AWAKE), a militant British-Israelite activist organization. AWAKE in turn supplied its most talented agitators to “The Christian Knights”, an elite paramilitary whose inner core members were groomed for terrorism against Black, Jewish and Left-wing leaders and groups. 

Mug shot of Thomas Albert Tarrants III

One of these core members was Thomas Albert Tarrants III, a young Klansman who bought a rifle from Swift with the expressed purpose of using it to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and who was  imprisoned after a bloody 1968 shootout with Mississippi cops.  Wexler and Hancock believe that Tarrants, who later repented of his violent racism and became an Evangelical minister, was part of an underground KKK/NSRP terror network that had taken to heart Swift’s cassette- and pamphlet-driven White-supremacist teachings, and had made the killing of King a primary mission since the early 1960s. This network, they maintain, had provided James Earl Ray, who would later be convicted of the civil rights leader’s assassination, with financial incentive to commit the murder, as well as cover within its ranks. If true, this made Swift the intellectual author of, if not an active co-conspirator in, one of the greatest crimes in American history.

Yet back in Lancaster, Swift’s physical ministry was fading rapidly. Observers of the time noted that while the preacher could still fill meeting halls, he wasn’t able to hold onto a solid cadre of Californian followers, and his string of churches across the state rapidly began to close down. A big blow came when Gerald L.K. Smith dissociated himself from Swift’s organization, and migrated to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where he built a “religious theme park” that featured a 67 foot-tall statue of Jesus (“The Christ of the Ozarks”) and a 4,100-seat amphitheater that hosts an annual Passion Play based on the one in Oberammergau, Germany.

In 1965, further troubles came when Swift quarreled with William Potter Gale about the Christian Defense League and its role in their operations. The Colonel-cum-Reverend split with Swift shortly thereafter, claiming years later that he thought the Lancaster preacher was “a pig,” and that he had defrauded some of his most loyal followers in an investment deal. Gale continued to preach Christian Identity doctrines for the next twenty years at his own Ministry of Christ church, now relocated to a Gold Country ranch near Mariposa, California.

Before his departure, however, Gale introduced Swift to a middle-aged, Los Angeles-based aerospace engineer who would later, help make the Church of Jesus Christ – Christian, under an appended name, synonymous with American White-racist crime and terrorism.

The engineer was Richard Girnt Butler. Born in 1918, Butler had studied at Los Angeles City College in the 1930s, during which he had also been a member of William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion fascist paramilitary. Later, he joined the California Rangers, and it was Commandant Gale who told Butler that the Lancaster preacher had the goods on who and what was really behind the Reds and their assorted ill-doings.

As Butler recalled years later: “I finally agreed to go there [Swift’s church] one time. And I must say, when Dr. Swift spoke, he spoke in Technicolor. The words came out and you could just see in living color what he was talking about. You could – he was a master orator, just a master orator.” Independently wealthy from patents and other sources, Butler moved to Palmdale, just south of Swift’s ranch in Lancaster, and soon became a force in the now-dwindling California ranks of the Church.

Although he still regularly preached sermons and distributed tapes, Wesley Swift was seriously ill by the end of the Sixties. He had long suffered from diabetes, untreated since he distrusted the “Jewish” American medical system. When he finally sought help at a Tijuana clinic, he expired in their waiting room of a heart attack on October 8, 1970, aged 57 years. Swift’s wife Olive Lorraine remained at the helm of his Lancaster operation for the next four decades, continuing to circulate his materials until her own death at 85 in 2005.

With Gale and Smith out of the picture, Butler took over as the heir apparent to not only the Church of Jesus Christ – Christian, but also to the multinational network of White racists and radical-Right militants to whom Swift ministered. As Seventies Los Angeles rapidly became a multiracial and politically liberal city, symbolized by Black Democrat Tom Bradley’s 1973 election as mayor, Butler abandoned Southern California, and moved his family and the Church to a 20-acre ranch near Hayden Lake, Idaho in April 1974. 

In Idaho, Butler renamed Swift’s organization the Church of Jesus Christ Christian – Aryan Nations, although it would become best known as simply “Aryan Nations.” To befit the neo-Nazi implications of the name, Swift adopted a standard for the Church that combined the cross-and-sword and Rebel-flag motifs of the American Christian far-Right, with the Wolfsangel – the “hook rune” associated with Third Reich symbolism. 

Richard Butler, backed by the Aryan Nations symbol

Butler also surrounded himself with paramilitary guards clad in blue shirts, black trousers, and Sam Browne belts, and sporting regalia reminiscent of Hitler’s Stormtroopers and SS men. These guards, many of whom were drawn from the White-racist fringe of the Skinhead subculture, maintained order at Butler’s Church services, as well as at the “Aryan Nations World Congresses” – annual rallies on the property that attracted hundreds of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and ultra-Right radicals from across the Western world. At the Congresses, attendees swapped Nazi salutes, burned crosses, and listened to sermons by Butler, whose rhetoric was becoming even more militant than his mentor’s in the post-Sixties, racially-integrated America he inhabited and feared.

Among other the doctrines he preached, Butler became one of the first advocates of the “White Homeland” concept. He believed that if “race conscious” European-American people moved en masse to Idaho, Oregon and Washington, they could form a new White nation that would eventually secede from the increasingly-multiracial United States, and become a sort of Identity-Christian Israel. Unfortunately, most of Butler’s hardcore followers were Southerners who spurned the call to resettle in the rainy Northwest, and he contented himself with a few dozen adherents living in and around the Idaho Panhandle.

Aryan Nations member and White-supremacist
terrorist Robert Mathews

Although Butler was careful to never openly advocate violence, some of his followers took his militant preaching to its logical extreme. They formed Northwest-based gangs, and terrorized Jews, people of color, government officials, and other Identity enemies throughout the region. The most notorious of these was “The Silent Brotherhood,” or simply, “The Order”: an underground neo-Nazi group led by Hayden Lake regular Robert Mathews. The Order staged armed robberies and murders throughout the Northwest, until Mathews was gunned down on Washington State’s Whidbey Island on December 8, 1984, after a 36-hour police siege. 

Butler and his followers faced an American government and populace far less tolerant of racism, anti-Semitism, and politically-motivated violence than Wesley Swift had back in the Sixties. After the Whidbey Island siege, Federal, state and local law enforcement started a campaign of surveillance and infiltration of the Hayden Lake compound, and the national media became a constant presence just outside Church gates, especially during the World Congresses. 

Butler’s meager empire was an obvious target for anti-racist activists as well, and it eventually crumbled under their attentions. When Aryan Nations security guards assaulted a woman and her son in 1998, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that monitors American “hate groups”, took the Church to court on her behalf, and won a $6.3 million judgment against them in 2001. Bankrupted, the Church turned its Hayden Lake center, along with other assets, over to the plaintiff. Shortly thereafter North Idaho College gained control of the compound, then destroyed its buildings and turned the land into a “peace park”.

Back in California, former Wesley Swift associate William Potter Gale’s Christian-Identity church also collapsed under government and media pressure. Although his Mariposa-based Ministry of Christ had eschewed Butler’s openly-Nazi sympathies, and he hadn’t drawn nearly as many thugs and crazies into his orbit as the Idaho preacher had, Gale was still very much a radical, and in 1984 formed the Committee of the States, a coalition of ultra-Right groups that called for the end of the income tax and the total replacement of the U.S. government. 

In 1986, Federal officials, who had linked the Committee and Ministry to paramilitary training and other illegal doings in California, raided Gale’s 100-acre Manasseh Ranch, arrested the frail 70 year-old Colonel and charged him and several associates with conspiracy to overthrow the government and murder its employees. Although eventually convicted, the ailing Gale was credited with jail time already served and avoided Federal imprisonment. He died on April 28, 1988, and received a military burial with honors; with his passing, the Ministry faded into history.

Memorial graphic for Col. Gale

As for Richard Butler, he fell victim to a political struggle within the Aryan Nations, and was deposed from its leadership. Still, he remained the spiritual head of the Christian Identity movement, a celebrity in the White-racist subculture who stayed active in the fringe-Right underworld until his death at 86 in 2004. 

Today at least three separate factions claim leadership of the Aryan Nations remnant. One, formerly led by South Carolina-based August Kreis III, preaches a mixture of Christian Identity, Islamic, Wiccan and Norse Pagan theology. Kreis made national headlines in 2005 when he proposed an alliance between Aryan Nations and al-Qaeda; imprisoned shortly thereafter, he quit the movement and passed his mantle onto Drew Bostwick.

A second faction, Aryan Nations Revival in upstate New York, is allied with the so-called “Phineas Priesthood”: an unorganized subculture of White-racist militants named after the Biblical hero of Numbers 25 who murdered an Israelite and his Midianite lover for their “race-mixing.” Members of this shadowy movement have been implicated in bank robberies and various other crimes.

Louisianan Morris Gulett leads the most visible Aryan Nations rump group. A convicted bank robber, Gulett has organized his own faction with tripartite membership for “Skinheads,” Klan-connected “Knights”, and outlaw-biker “SS-MC” subgroups. 

When looking at photos of the heavily-tattooed, hard-bitten Gulett, and the various other present-day Aryan-Nations would-be leaders and followers, one can’t help but marvel at how far Christian Identity has strayed from its origins among lower-middle-class White Protestants, and now largely constitutes an outlaw subculture that ministers to the criminal fringes of Euro-American society. 

Still, whether its tenets are shouted on the cell block, preached in country churches, or downloaded from the Internet, the Identity doctrines of Wesley Swift and his successors will no doubt enjoy a long half-life among alienated and angry Anglo-Americans. With Caucasians destined to become a numerical minority within the United States during the 21st Century, there will no doubt be White Americans ready to see in themselves, as Swift did, a Chosen People being chastised by their Lord for their impiety and sinfulness, much as the ancient Israelites were during the Babylonian Captivity. 

Whether one sees in Christian Identity a clarion-call to a people dispossessed of a distinct spiritual and cultural identity, or a dangerous and demented warrant for murder and terror in God’s name, one must acknowledge how well Swift and his followers re-invented the Old Testament mythos of the oppressed-yet-superior Holy Tribe for consumption in an increasingly racially-divided modern nation. Only time will tell how far and wide its influence will be felt.

Sources/Links
The Wesley Swift Library (sermons and other materials from Swift and his cohorts)
Church of Jesus Christ - Christian/Aryan Nations (Kreis/Bostwick faction)
Church of Jesus Christ - Christian/Aryan Nations (Gulett faction)
Seymour, Cheri. Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Right. Mariposa, CA: Camden Place Communications, 1991.
Swift, Wesley A. The Mystery of Iniquity. Marietta, GA: The Thunderbolt, n.d.
Wexler, Stuart and Hancock, Larry. The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012.

Joe Jeffers and the Kingdom of Yahweh

Rev. Dr. Joe Jeffers, founder of the Kingdom of Yahweh

Few nominally-Christian leaders based in California – or anywhere else in America, for that matter – ever advocated doctrines quite as strange, or led lives quite as colorful, as those of Joseph D. Jeffers, founder of the Kingdom of Yahweh. Although Jeffers began his seven-decade career in the American South, and ended it in the Southwest, the dozen-odd years he spent as one of Los Angeles’ most controversial spiritual leaders, and the nationwide influence he wielded during that era, make him one of the Golden State’s more distinctive maverick Christian sectarians.

The son of a Roanoke, Alabama railroad worker, Jeffers was born in 1898 into a family of fifteen children, several of whom later became foreign missionaries. Ordained as a Baptist pastor in 1918, Jeffers became a follower of J. Frank Norris, a key leader in the early years of American Fundamentalist Christianity. Militantly anti-evolution and anti-liberalism, the Fort Worth, Texas-based Norris pastored a Baptist flock of many thousands, ran America’s first radio ministry, and would be tried (but not convicted) for both murder and arson during his ministerial career. Interestingly enough, his protégé Jeffers would later be accused of plotting the very same crimes – among many others.

As Pastor of First Baptist Church in Mexia, Texas, Jeffers spent the early 1920s preaching Norris’ hardshell-Baptist doctrines to a sizable following. There was a ready audience for it -- Fundamentalist theology, with its literal interpretation of the Bible and rejection of “modernist” doctrines, caught fire in a society reeling from the Roaring Twenties’ rapid social, cultural, and technological changes. The First World War, along with mass immigration and Prohibition (and its attendant hedonism and lawlessness) fueled a reassertion of small-town American values, and a desperate need for belonging expressed in Twenties phenomena as disparate as the rise of the Rotarians, the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan, and the growing influence of Fundamentalist Christian pastors like Jeffers.

In 1924, Jeffers took his first wife, Jesse Eubanks. The following year he departed Mexia for the revival circuit, holding tent meetings across the south-central states. Jeffers quickly gained a reputation as both a spellbinding preacher and a combative controversialist – more than one of his revival meetings ended in fistfights and arrests.

Taking a cue from his mentor Norris, Jeffers ramped up his militancy during Roman Catholic politician Al Smith’s 1928 Presidential campaign, warning his followers that a victorious Smith would deliver the fair Republic into the hands of the Vatican. Playing on his White-Southern listeners’ other great prejudice, Jeffers claimed that Governor Smith had appointed Negroes on his New York State staff, and would no doubt revive Reconstruction’s race-mixing horrors on a national scale if elected. Smith’s resounding defeat that year was credited partly to the fears such rhetoric instilled in voters; Jeffers himself preached similar themes to great effect in the years to come.

First Baptist Church -- the center of the violent "Jonesboro Church War"

In 1930, Jeffers was at the center of a genuine American religious war, complete with riots, gun battles, bombings, and National Guard troops called in to suppress violence. In June of that year he landed in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and held a revival meeting that was so successful he was asked to replace the local First Baptist Church’s outgoing pastor. When he took the pulpit in August, however, many of the church’s members protested, claiming that they’d never been consulted on their choice of a new leader. After some deliberation, the Jonesboro parishioners voted in Dow H. Heard of Big Spring, Texas as their minister, and Jeffers went back on the revival trail, seemingly satisfied with the results.

But in August 1931, Jeffers returned to Jonesboro and First Baptist, claiming that the Second Coming was due in May 1932, and that both the Reverend Heard and town Mayor Herbert J. Bosler were sinful reprobates unworthy to hold their offices on the eve of the Apocalypse. On September 9th, fights broke out between Jeffers’ and Heard’s supporters at a First Baptist service; when police intervened, they arrested Jeffers loyalist George L. Cox Jr.

The next day, Jeffers led a mob of his faithful to the Jonesboro courthouse where Cox was on trial.  Rallying outside the building, the preacher called on God to strike the mayor dead, while his followers rioted, assaulting Mayor Bosler and Police Chief W.C. Craig.

Arkansas National Guard troops on patrol during the Jonesboro Church War

Alarmed, Arkansas Governor Harvey Parnell sent a company of National Guard troops, along with a military observation plane, to separate Jonesboro’s warring factions and keep peace. Most of the soldiers were stationed near Jeffers’ revival tent – an immense structure that could hold 5,000 people. 

By September 14, it seemed as if things had cooled down in Jonesboro, and the soldiers were withdrawn. But two days later, someone threw a tear-gas bomb at Jeffers’ tent. And then, on October 25^th, the structure burned to the ground. Jeffers claimed that his rivals were behind the attacks, while his opponents maintained the bombing and burning were false-flag operations designed to smear them and rally support for the fiery Baptist preacher.

Jeffers departed Jonesboro again in 1932. Before he left town, he supervised the construction of a new tabernacle, Jonesboro Baptist Church, where his doctrines would be taught and his supporters would worship unmolested. Jeffers chose Dale Crowley of Denton, Texas to pastor the new flock, and then hit the road once more.

But the contentious preacher just couldn’t keep away from the Arkansas town or its religious real-estate. Less than a year after he left, Jeffers was back in Jonesboro, this time demanding full possession of Jonesboro Baptist Church. When Crowley refused to yield the pulpit, Jeffers just set up his own one inside the building. As a result, every Sunday parishioners had to choose between two different services being held side-by-side by the rival preachers, each complete with separate sermons and competing choirs trying to drown each other out. By August 1933, fistfights were once again breaking out in the pews, and some faithful were even carrying shotguns into church.

When the conflict went to court that October 9th, the law ruled in favor of Crowley. The next day, when Crowley and his bodyguard L. H. Kayre armed themselves and attempted to take possession of the church building, Jeffers’ hired watchman J. P. McMurdo opened fire on the two, wounding Kayre. Crowley fired back and hit McMurdo three times; days later, when the watchman died from his injuries, the Baptist pastor was arrested and charged with murder.

While Crowley was imprisoned in the county jail, someone poked a submachine gun through the window-bars of his cell, and blindly sprayed the room with bullets. Amazingly, Crowley was unhurt, but the attack pointed up how volatile the climate was in Jonesboro, and his trial was moved to neighboring Piggott. In January 1934 a jury found Crowley innocent, and Jeffers left Jonesboro for good.

The Jonesboro Church Wars, as they would later be called, soured the town’s spiritual culture for decades. Nobody was ever charged for the gas-bombing, the tent-arson or the submachine-gun attack, and to this day locals maintain a stony silence about the people and circumstances behind the events. The “wars” also landed Jeffers in the pages of TIME magazine and national newspapers – the first of several major media-splashes the outspoken preacher would provoke.

Part of the contention between Jeffers and Crowley came from the former’s promotion of a strange, and to many Baptists heretical, theology. Around 1933, Jeffers embraced what would later be known as the Sacred Name theology – a movement that started within Adventist Christianity – and preached its tenets for the rest of his life.

Jeffers' core work on Sacred Name theology

Originating largely in the Church of God (Seventh Day), the Sacred Name adherents believed that along with emulating the uses of Old Testament Judaism – Saturday Sabbaths, Jewish holidays, kosher dietary laws et al – they also needed to refer to the Father and Son in their original Aramaic names: Yahweh and Yashua (variously spelled). They maintained that when one prayed to “God”, one was addressing a generic deity, not the Elohim of Israel whose exclusive worship was mandated by the Bible. Some Sacred Name adherents claimed they carried the “Elijah Message,” after the passage in I Kings 18:36 where the prophet Elijah extolled Yahweh as the True Lord to be venerated by the faithful.

As for His Son, Sacred Name believers claimed that “Jesus” was a Latin corruption of the Savior’s birth name that referenced a heathen deity (“Ea-Zeus”), and that “Christ” was taken from a Greek Pagan term referring to being “anointed”. To the Sacred Name followers, the Son needed to be petitioned by the name His Jewish followers knew him: Yashua.

The Sacred Name movement would birth a widely-read periodical, The Faith, as well as several influential theologians and denominations within the Adventist world, and even its own Bible translations. But it took erstwhile Fundamentalist Baptist preacher Joe Jeffers to put “Yahwehism” on the front pages of America’s newspapers, albeit not in the way most of its followers would have wished.

In 1935, Jeffers founded The Kingdom of Yahweh to spread his own version of Sacred Name worship. Two years later, he divorced Jessie (who had bore him a son, Joe Jr., in 1926), and then relocated to the North American capital of new religious movements and maverick prophets: Los Angeles.

In the City of Angels, Jeffers first put his tent-revival skills to work in a more permanent edifice: the downtown Embassy Auditorium, where he preached the worship of Yahweh to thousands of Angelenos. When he’d gathered enough of a following, Jeffers opened his own church, the Kingdom Temple, two blocks away at 927 South Flower Street. Claiming that he heard the voices of Noah and Jesus (or Yashua, as it were), and that he wielded power over his followers’ fates, his sermons were broadcast on KMPC and KGER to an audience that he claimed numbered over 100,000 across the United States.

Jeffers soon became one of the city’s most controversial preachers – not a mean feat in Thirties Los Angeles, whose manifold spiritual and cultural eccentricities were captured for the ages in Nathanael West’s novel, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST. Reviving his anti-Catholic rants of a decade earlier, Jeffers bashed the Papacy and the Roman Church from the pulpit, claiming that “The Black Pope has had his hands in the political affairs here. . . but that is going to be changed.” He also mined a rich vein of anti-Semitism among his Southern Californian followers, decrying the “Communist Jews who are trying to get a war with America,” as well as the Jewish-dominated motion-picture business, which he claimed was corrupting public morality.

Such rhetoric caught the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, DC. According to the nationally-syndicated “Hollywood Merry-Go-Round” column, Congressional investigators found out that Jeffers had toured Europe in mid-1938, and had claimed he’d met with Mussolini and Hermann Goering. They also linked him to the pro-Nazi German-American Bund on the West Coast, and surmised that he would soon head up an anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic mass-movement in California.

Locally, Los Angeles DA Burton Fitts heard rumors that Jeffers planned to burn down the Kingdom Temple for insurance money, that he was involved in a smuggling ring, and that he and his new young wife Zella Joy were throwing “wild parties” at their Wilshire District high-rise flat. Fitts authorized wiretaps to be placed in the Jeffers’ home, and hired investigator Vincent Higgins to infiltrate the preachers’ inner circle, and find out what dirty doings were happening therein.

The DA’s office placed Higgins in an apartment adjacent to the couple’s. Posing as a screenwriter interested in pitching Jeffers’ life story to the studios, he introduced himself to the couple, and was invited over to their place for drinks one evening in March 1939. What happened that night got the Jeffers arrested for immoral conduct, and once again put the Yahweh-preaching pastor in the national news.

Joe and Zella Jeffers on trial in Los Angeles

During the sensational four-week trial that followed, Higgins testified that on the night he stopped by the Jeffers’ flat, Zella Joy had appeared at her door in sheer silk pajamas, with a welcoming glass of champagne in her hand. Sitting him down, she showed the investigator “French postcards”; when he expressed surprise at the novel sexual positions depicted on them, Zella sat in his lap and suggested that perhaps he needed a little instruction in the more exotic erotic arts. Zella and Joe then disrobed, Higgins said, and gave him a visual lesson in lovemaking. At that point he signaled police who were waiting in the hallway; they broke in with arrest warrants and cameras, and caught the Jeffers en dishabille on motion-picture film.

Another witness against the couple was Kingdom Temple member Marguerite Morgan. The attractive blonde beautician testified that one evening, when Joe Jeffers had brought her back to his flat for a nightcap, Zella had answered the door stark naked. Like Higgins, she was given bubbly, shown pornographic pictures, and treated to a live sex-show by the couple; papers of the time obliquely referred to an “unnatural act” they performed for Ms. Morgan’s benefit.

Zella Jeffers on the stand

Prosecutors, who’d screened out potential jury members that weren’t “shock-proof”, played tape recordings and films to the court that seemed to corroborate the testimony. They claimed that orgies were a regular occurrence at the Jeffers household, and that on one memorable evening, Zella Jeffers and a male lover copulated while the pair watched hubby Joe going at it with three women at once. In her sworn pre-trial testimony, Zella maintained she’d gone along with the sexual escapades because “I loved my husband and wanted to keep working with him to win him away from his peculiar ideas.”

But on the witness stand, Zella denied everything. In tears, she claimed that their supposed “friend” Higgins had drugged the couple’s champagne, and had “induced” the couple into immoral acts. At one point, the humiliated, hysterical woman ripped the court microphone off her sleeve and screamed, “Oh, it’s unfair! I’m not getting a fair trial!”

When her husband took the stand, he claimed he’d been framed by “the Communist Jews”, and named Jewish studio chiefs Harry and Jack Warner as the sting’s instigators. (Although the Warners denied involvement in the bust, two years later Higgins sued them, claiming they’d stiffed him on a $50,000 payment they’d promised if he could prove Jeffers was a “Nazi spy”. Higgins lost the case, but during the trial, the head of Warner Brothers security testified that he’d rented the apartment next door to the Jeffers’, and set up listening devices there.)

The jury ultimately decided that the whole affair was blatant, sleazy entrapment, and found the couple not guilty on all counts. Joe Jeffers himself emerged largely unscathed from the trial; during breaks in the proceedings, he’d rallied hundreds of supporters in front of the courthouse, while countless other spectators tried to get into the courtroom for a gander at the lurid evidence and testimony.

After he was acquitted, Jeffers led his followers outside the courthouse in a sarcastic public mass-prayer for the Jews, as well as for the Catholics, the DA’s office, and the rest of his supposed persecutors. When a reporter asked him if he was anti-Semitic, Jeffers responded with a rationale straight out of British-Israelite Adventism: "I'm not against all Jews; we're really all Jews.  But I 'm against Bolshevik Jews.  They caused the Jews’ downfall in Germany. I want to save my people from Communistic Jews.  I 'm not a Jew-baiter.  How could I be when I 'm a Jew myself?" 

And as if to thumb his nose at Washington and the Warner Bros’ suspicions about his Nazi sympathies, he soon afterwards hosted a recruiting night at Kingdom Temple for the Silver Legion, a Fascist paramilitary headed by William Dudley Pelley, himself a believer in Anglo-Israelism, among other unorthodox spiritual doctrines.

Such antics didn’t endear him to the authorities once the United States entered World War II. Still widely suspected of being a Nazi spy, the military probed Jeffers for pro-Axis sentiments in 1943, and even considered banning him from the Fourth Army Corps territory as a dangerous subversive.

That year saw Jeffers in the courtroom and the headlines once again – this time, in a messy divorce case. No longer a mere pastor, he announced to his followers that he was now “Son of Yahweh, Ruler of the Universe” – the voice on Earth of his Father, who commanded the cosmos from His home in the constellation Orion.  The latest of Yahweh’s commands was for the Son to father a “sacred child” in the desert to fulfill prophecy and carry on his holy lineage. Stepping up to the plate as a potential mother was pretty Helen Veborg, one of his many female followers and an aspiring actress.

Jeffers, who predicted that a Biblical-scale drought would soon turn Florida into an arid desert, took Helen on a pilgrimage to the Sunshine State so that he could gift the nubile blonde with his holy seed under the balmy tropical sun. Hot on the couple’s heels was Zella Jeffers, understandably incensed and with a divorce petition in her hand.

When the matter came to court, Zella alleged that Joe Jeffers was “under the delusion that he’s Jesus reincarnated,” and that Kingdom Temple, far from being a true place of worship, was “a mere convenience through which he may and does do business for himself.” In her petition, she demanded one-half of their community property, including the wartime rations of gasoline, groceries and auto tires that the Son of Yahweh had hoarded.

The judge granted Zella her divorce, and awarded her a share of Jeffers’ property, along with alimony. One of the items she gained was Jeffers’ car, an eight-cylinder Cadillac that had been converted to run on butane, and that the papers referred to as “The Golden Chariot of Kingdom Come.”

Helen Veborg, Jeffers' third wife

Right after the ruling, Jeffers took Helene Veborg as his third wife. Then he claimed that Heaven gave him the message to commandeer the Caddy, and asked his followers to “join with the chariot” on a convoy back to Florida. Arrested for driving the stolen vehicle across state lines, Jeffers was soon convicted for violating the Dyer Act, and sentenced to four years in Federal prison.

Jeffers served seventeen months of his term. When he was released on parole, he joined Helene in Florida, but soon returned to postwar Southern California, where most of his faithful followers resided.

In Los Angeles, The Son of Yahweh rented a 32-room mansion on Laurel Canyon Boulevard – a sylvan mountain thoroughfare that had long been a magnet for well-heeled, eccentric Angelenos. Then he filled the house with his followers, mostly middle-aged women who’d been charged between $50,000 and $100,000 for the privilege of sharing living quarters with the Prophet and his wife. Jeffers used the money to purchase an 823-acre ranch near Palm Springs that he dubbed “Yahweh Springs”, and planned to use as a survival retreat during a nuclear war, which the prophet predicted would hit Los Angeles in 1949.

Once again, Jeffers got into legal trouble. It started when his Laurel Canyon neighbors complained to officials about his outdoor, predawn prayer services. They charged that the preacher would lead his flock in loud petitions to Heaven through the wee hours, begging Yahweh to rain money upon them. Arrested for disturbing the peace, Jeffers was ultimately charged with a zoning violation, and fined.

Soon afterwards, more than a dozen disciples sued him for fraud and misrepresentation. They claimed that Jeffers had pocketed donations intended for ministry, and had stiffed them on various contracts. The Son of Yahweh had to settle more than $50,000 worth of claims, and the bad publicity slowed the flow of “love offerings” into the Kingdom’s coffers.

Finally, Zella Jeffers took her estranged husband to court for nonpayment of alimony. Facing the court, Jeffers claimed that although Yahweh had given him $5 billion for his services, the cash was located in the constellation Orion and therefore presently inaccessible for the payment of his Earthly debts. In the meantime, Jeffers said, he was worth exactly $1.53 American, and turned out his pockets for the judge’s benefit.

When the judge asked Jeffers how he could afford to maintain a car he kept at Yahweh Springs, the prophet responded: “Yahweh has all the automobiles in the world. He can use them any time he wants. . . . We have been in communication with Yahweh for years. In the back of my head is a two-way radio set I use to talk to him. It’s two-way, you see, ‘Yah’ going out to Orion and ‘Weh’ coming back to me.”

Along with his claims of direct contact with the Most High, Jeffers also boasted of necromancy: “We know everything President Truman does” he told the court, “because Huey Long [the radical Louisiana politician assassinated back in 1935] covers the White House for us.” Unimpressed, the judge ruled for Zella, and the Son of Yahweh was sent back to the Federal pen for parole violation.

When he was finally released, Jeffers moved to Phoenix, Arizona, filed for bankruptcy, and settled down to shepherd a flock of followers well below the 5,000 faithful he’d claimed just a few years earlier. Now billing himself as “Dr. Joseph Jeffers,” he concentrated on spreading the Yahwist message via the lecture circuit and the written word. Joined by his wife Helene, who, like Jeffers, sported a self-granted Doctorate of Divinity, the pair spent the early 1950s speaking to audiences across America, and researching and writing about the origins and future of Yahwism.

Much of their work ended up in The Kingdom Voice, the sect’s monthly periodical, as well as various self-published books and pamphlets. Jeffers, who still claimed to be receiving regular revelations from Yahweh Himself, added to the Adventist and Sacred Name teachings his own peculiar spiritual touches.

Jeffers' writings on lost continents

For starters, Jeffers adopted the occult legends of lost continents to his doctrine. He maintained that Atlantis and Lemuria had not only been real land masses, but that they had been drowned in a prehistoric flood when their peoples turned their back on Yahweh. But soon they would rise again from the Atlantic and the Pacific, in an apocalyptic Second Coming that would wipe the “negative” (wicked) people off the Earth, and usher in a Seventh Age of Mankind where multiple Suns would light the Earth and banish darkness and baleful moonlight forever.

Jeffers also advocated a vegetarian, raw-food diet. He insisted that, contrary to historical Jewish and Christian teachings, Yahweh had never advocated the sacrifice of animals to him, much less cooking and consuming them. Jeffers believed that there was a hierarchy of Earth creatures, with “spiritual” animals like humans and horses at the top of the pyramid, and vile beasts like rats and scorpions, which had been created by “negative thought”, at the bottom. These nefarious critters, he said, would be swept off the Earth along with all other traces of evil and death when Yahweh cleared the planet.

And the Son of Yahweh was an enthusiastic promoter of the past-lives doctrine. For a $25 donation, Jeffers and his wife would perform “reincarnation revelations” for their followers, tapping into the Akashic records and viewing a soul’s previous incarnations.

Jeffers himself sported quite an impressive set of past-life credentials. He claimed that “…his many lifetimes as a teacher on earth included Adam, Noah, Osiris, Joseph of Egypt [who also designed the Great Pyramid], Joshua, Solomon, Elijah, Hosea, Aristotle (the Persian Zoroaster), Apollo, Amenhotep II, the Great White Spirit of the Inca Indians, Quetzalcoatl of ancient Mexico, Eochaidh the Heremon of Ireland, and Yahoshua the Master of Justice of the Essenes of the Dead Sea.”

These, and the various other strange and sometimes bizarre teachings Jeffers promoted, took the Kingdom of Yahweh far from Christianity’s outer frontiers, into a sort of occult/science-fiction pseudo- Adventism that brought Biblical mythology and exegesis into the New Age and the Space Age simultaneously. Although Jeffers was regarded even in the fringe-Adventist community as something of a kook, his imaginative writings and forceful preaching still captured enough of an audience to keep the prophet and his wife both busy and well-compensated.

But by the mid-1950s, trouble was once again brewing on the home front. For the third time, Jeffers had spurned his current wife for a younger model; now, Helene’s eighteen year-old secretary Connie Bernice was the object of the Prophet’s roving eye.

Eventually Helene divorced Jeffers. Billing herself as Dr. Helene VeaBorge, lecturer on psychic phenomena, she then set up an office in Denver, Colorado. In February 1957, Helene was attacked, beaten and raped in her office by an unknown assailant; three days later, she died of her injuries. The murder has never been solved.

Joe Jeffers, during questioning about
his third wife's rape and murder

Back in Phoenix, Jeffers took Connie as his fourth wife. In 1965 she gave birth to a son; it was the 66 year-old father’s second child. That year, the Jeffers’ were featured in an Arizona Republic human-interest story, where Joseph claimed, among other things, that during his travels he’d been “shot at sixteen times by Communists”, that he’d predicted postwar Germany would be divided into Western and Communist sides years before the fact, and that Vietnam would become “the site and start of World War III.”

The year 1965 also brought a fresh round of legal troubles for the Kingdom of Yahweh. That year the Jeffers were arrested after an investigation revealed that the couple had been taking love-offerings from loyalists, and then betting the proceeds on dog and horse races in Phoenix. The Jeffers justified the gambling, saying that “games of chance were a part of the congregation’s metaphysical research and study of extrasensory perception”, i.e., that they gauged their psychic powers and spiritual development based on wins and losses at the track.

Not surprisingly, the judge didn’t buy it, and convicted them on thirteen counts of mail fraud, fining Joseph and Connie each $500 per count, and placing them on three years’ probation.  But in 1968 the Ninth Circuit Court reversed the conviction, stating that “The spectacle presented to the jury — of a 67 year old eccentric purporting to have psychic powers, and his attractive 27 year old wife betting contributors' funds at the dog races — was so highly prejudicial that we cannot conclude that a fair trial was had….”

By the 1970s, the Jeffers’ were on the move again – this time, to Missouri, just over the border from where Jeffers had touched off the Jonesboro Church Wars forty years before. There the couple purchased a 350-acre tract near the town of St. James, and set up a communal center where they lived alongside several dozen of their followers. The centerpiece of the community was the “Temple” – a pyramid-shaped, 28-foot tall tabernacle where the gathered faithful praised Yahweh. Jeffers maintained that the building would serve as a refuge from a Soviet nuclear attack that he predicted would occur in May 1979, as well as a beacon for Yahweh’s spaceships when they arrived from Orion.

If Jeffers had any plans to spend his late 70s peacefully awaiting the Second Coming, they were quickly dashed. First, Connie divorced him. Then they remarried. Then she left him again, this time taking with her several million dollars the couple had stashed in the Kingdom bank account. When Jeffers pursued his estranged wife to Florida in 1978, he and two of his lieutenants were arrested, and charged with conspiring to murder her. Just to sweeten the pot, the authorities also charged the 79 year-old prophet with statutory rape of a 14 year-old girl at the Kingdom compound.

Luckily for Jeffers, all the charges were eventually dropped. He also won a court judgment against his wife over the pilfered millions, and finalized a second divorce with her in 1979. That year, he once again relocated the Kingdom of Yahweh, this time, to Texas.

But the Son of Yahweh would cap his seven-decade mission with one more embarrassing scandal. In late 1978, one of his longtime followers, a wealthy, reclusive 84 year-old widow named Esther Price, died under mysterious circumstances in her hotel room in Richmond, Missouri. A will written just one month before her death left her entire fortune to Jeffers, contradicting two earlier wills that gave the prophet considerably less. Relatives contested the legacy in court, saying that the aging preacher had manipulated the lonely old woman into naming himself as her prime beneficiary. By the time the case was finally settled in 1982, the $5 million Price estate had dwindled down to a mere $300,000 and some real estate. Jeffers eventually got about half of it, with the remainder going to other individuals and institutions named in an earlier will.

Even in his eighties, Jeffers remained active, continuing to research and write profusely at the sect’s final home back in Arizona. The octogenarian still cut a striking figure; newspapers of the time said Jeffers usually visited his followers clad in red slacks, blue suede shoes, a long white coat and a broad-brimmed white hat. To the end, he kept abreast of nontraditional history and theology, working into his writings ideas put forth by controversial Biblical scholars like John Allegro and Michael Baigent, as well as the latest translations and theories regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocryphal works.

Finally, on July 11, 1988, the 89 year-old Prophet discarded his much-aged body and joined Yahweh in Orion for eternity. The Kingdom was taken over by longtime Jeffers associate Philip Evans – a position he holds to this day.

With its founder gone, and the organized communities a distant memory, Jeffers’ church, now called Yahweh’s New Kingdom, exists today mainly to promote his writings, as well as those of other authors who share his beliefs. Along with a Web site and a monthly newsletter, the Kingdom produces hundreds of booklets and pamphlets with titles like “Scriptural Proofs of Reincarnation,” “Onward Christian Cannibals,” and “What Yahweh Thinks of Christmas.”

The Son of Yahweh may not have lived to see his beloved Father bring forth the New World that he’d prophesied since his days as a 20-something Fundamentalist Baptist preacher. But he did leave a unique legacy to the spiritual landscape of both California and the United States as a whole – a vision of an Adventist spirituality linked with both New Age esoteric teachings and modern UFO mythology, and expressed in a life and career with few parallels anywhere in the modern Christian world.

Sources/Notes

www.yahwehsnewkingdom.com The online home of the Kingdom  of Yahweh

"Jonesboro Church Wars", Encyclopedia of Arkansas

Faiths, Cults, and Sects of America, by Richard Mathison (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960).