The main entry lists the available routes by which charismatic authority is routinized, successor, heredity, election, office, text, but does not describe what happens when a movement's followers cannot agree which route applies, and the Latter Day Saint succession crisis following Joseph Smith's murder in 1844 is one of the best-documented cases of exactly this failure to converge.
Smith's assassination left no universally accepted mechanism for succession, and multiple claimants emerged simultaneously: Brigham Young, president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, argued leadership properly passed to that body collectively, an appeal to existing office, and led the largest faction west to Utah, eventually becoming the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sidney Rigdon, Smith's former counselor, claimed a personal prophetic mandate as Smith's guardian, closer to direct charismatic inheritance, but attracted a small following. James Strang produced a letter he claimed Smith had written naming him successor, along with his own revelations and a claimed coronation on Beaver Island, Michigan, combining textual authorization with ongoing charismatic claims, and built a substantial following before his own assassination in 1856. A further body of followers eventually coalesced around Smith's own son, Joseph Smith III, as hereditary successor, forming what became the Community of Christ.
The case is instructive because it shows several of the routes the main entry lists invoked simultaneously by different factions drawing on the same founding authority, with no single outcome determined in advance by the theory itself, and the movement's permanent fragmentation into several enduring, doctrinally distinct denominations is the direct result.