Armageddon? Church retails to the masses

updated 2:45 p.m. ET Nov. 25, 2008

CORWIN SPRINGS, Montana - They're still ready for Armageddon at the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect that for almost two decades has kept a bomb shelter stocked for 750 people deep in a forest near Yellowstone National Park.

Church leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet has been silenced by advanced Alzheimer's disease. And her followers say they've given up the assault rifles and armored vehicles they amassed in the late 1980s — part of a post-nuclear war "re-emergence" plan that brought national notoriety and a federal investigation.

Scrambling to stay current as it reaches its 50th anniversary, the church has transformed itself into a New Age publishing enterprise and spiritual university. But still in the background is its "insurance" against the end — the shelter buried beneath a hillside on the sect's 7,500-acre Royal Teton Ranch.

There, more than 20 feet underground, 22,000 hours of video and audio recordings of Prophet survive. They're stacked alongside periodically rotated, floor-to-ceiling crates of canned fish, dried meats, grains and cooking oils.

'Ounce of preparation'
"Like Benjamin Franklin said, an ounce of preparation and prevention is worth a pound of cure," said Lois Drake, the church's co-president.

On the grounds of the ranch — the picturesque mountain property just outside Yellowstone the group purchased from billionaire Malcolm Forbes — most of the decrepit trailers and worker's shacks that once housed 700 of the church's most faithful are gone.

In their place has risen a large, two-story office building. Behind the walls of a quiet lobby furnished with antiques, workers in cubicles busily translate Prophet's words into 27 languages.

Nearby, a sparkling new chapel known as King Arthur's Court hosts regular conferences such as the recent "Prayer Vigil for the God-Victory of the Elections and the Economy."

Church wares, available online or from its gift shop, range from a wallet-sized "Chart of Your Divine Self" — $1.25 apiece — to a framed portrait of Elizabeth Clare Prophet for $239.95. The church's publishing arm, Summit University Press, has sold more than 3 million books in the last decade.

The church's parent organization, Summit Lighthouse, was founded by Elizabeth Prophet's first husband, Mark, who spent years touring and preaching from a gold-painted Trailways bus.

Sect relocated after 1973 death
After his death in 1973, Elizabeth Prophet eventually relocated the sect from California to Montana. She preached from an altar crowded with icons from the world's major religions, mixing western philosophy and mysticism with a dose of Reagan-era patriotism — and, by the mid-1980s, warnings of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, according to her daughter Erin, who has since left the church.

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