If the lawsuits currently arriving in front of legal benches — and the ones that could yet come — regarding the payment and subsequent use of tithing offered by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints underscore anything, it’s that there is a difference between the church and the God the church purports to be owned and operated by.
Nobody sues God.
The church, on the other hand, is free game.
Or might be held legally accountable, anyway, for proclamations it has made for how tithing funds have been and are used. Many Latter-day Saints have been led to believe their donated money — required from members to remain in “celestial” standing — is for sacred uses, for charitable causes and for the upkeep of the “kingdom.” Not to be dumped into investment portfolios — or shopping malls or secret accounts — the value of which numbers in the billions of dollars.
The problem for Latter-day Saints is twofold. The first is a lack of transparency regarding the specifics of what money the church has and how it is used. The second is that, according to beliefs the faithful have had presented to them in rather forceful ways, tithing is not just a financial gift to the church as an organization, it’s an offering to God.
And if the Almighty asks for a dollar, or a million of them, depending on an individual’s annual income, 10% being the “commandment,” the faithful go ahead and scratch it up, no matter how much it hurts.
And for a whole lot of members, it does hurt — maybe not if you’re paying a million bucks, which implies that you rolled in $10 million over that yearly span. But if you’re paying $3,000 on $30,000 of income, that stack of cash can pinch you, pinch you hard.
Nonbelievers will call these faithful folks faithful fools, but that’s not the way so many of the faithful see it, or are made to see it or have seen it. They are convinced that their contributions are making a difference in the world, and they largely don’t question it, haven’t questioned it, because, as mentioned, they’re giving it up for God.
A complication with that is, Ensign Peak Advisors, whether or not the money managers at the firm acknowledge the fact, is not God. No, it’s the church’s investment arm, one that was fined last year by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a misconduct settlement to the tune of $4 million, with an additional $1 million coming from the church itself, for failing to properly disclose past stock holdings and going to “great lengths” to deliberately “obscure” the church’s investment portfolio.
Let me repeat, you don’t fine God. You fine a church and its money people who do questionable or illegal things.
This creates a double-barreled conundrum for the church: 1) It conveys to its members that it does not always act in the proper name of God, and 2) the emphasis on tithing being a supposed divine offering, a direct gift to the heavens, is polluted not just by flawed humans whose hands are all over the money, but that the way that money is used may not be all that sacred. It may be handled in much the same manner as money heaved into the markets by investment firms whose aims are to make as much profit as they can for investors.
What message does that send to honest, hardworking, rank-and-file Latter-day Saints who sacrifice greatly — because they’ve been taught to — to stay in good standing before their God?
It’s been said that one of the reasons the church throws a cloak over its finances is because it’s afraid if its members knew what was really going on with that money and the mountainous amounts that are piling up, they would either stop or slow the flow in what they offer. That might be true, considering the church is rocketing toward $300 billion in overall estimated wealth, and future projections have that total worth reaching $1 trillion in a couple of decades.
But if there is periodic misconduct inside the church’s vaults, even if you charitably want to classify those missteps as unintentional, isn’t transparency and, more importantly, honesty the more celestial path forward?
Of all the mysteries of God, church resources shouldn’t be one of them.
It will be interesting to see where the courts take the lawsuits facing the church. I have no clue how they will play out or, in these cases, pay out.
But because of the huge amounts of money now under the church’s control, the way the faith does its investing and its business, the secrecy of it all, the line between faithful folks and faithful fools, in the minds of the faithful themselves, is susceptible to becoming more and more blurred.
Question is: Is it God’s money or the church’s money?
The faithful will have to figure that out.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tribune columnist Gordon Monson.
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