Monday, September 2, 2024

Nate B. Oman on the Incorporation of the Church and H. Michael Marquardt

  

The traditional date and place for the incorporation of the Church of Christ, later renamed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York. Because no documents from 1830 attesting this event have survived, some writers have suggested that no such legal organization ever occurred. (Nathan B. Oman, Law and the Restoration: Law and Latter-day Saint History [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2024], 103)

 

See, e.g., David Keith Stott, “Organizing the Church as a Religious Association in 1830,” in Sustaining the Law: Joseph Smith’s Legal Encounters, ed. Gordon A. Madsen, Jeffrey N. Walker, and John W. Welch (Provo: BYU Studies, 2014), 113-40; H. Michael Marquardt, “An Appraisal of Manchester as Location for the Organization of the Church,” Sunstone, February 1992. According to Marquardt, no legal organization was attempted in New York and the alleged incorporation was a later invention designed to fool creditors in Ohio. However, Marquardt, who is not a lawyer, fails to explain how an earlier Church incorporation would have frustrated collection efforts against the Church or Church officers in Ohio. Nor does his article point to any legal proceedings in Ohio in which the New York incorporation was invoked to shield Latter-day Saint debtors, although there were numerous collection actions brought against Joseph Smith in the wake of the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society. (Ibid., 103 n. 25)

 

 

 

 

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