The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now battling three federal lawsuits centered on the practice of tithing, each with disaffected church members accusing the faith’s senior leaders of fraud and seeking the return of sizable sums of their past donations.
This week, two of the cases are scheduled for rare oral arguments before some of the nation’s top appeals courts, both of them a step away from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rulings in either case could have bearing on a third major tithing lawsuit, involving plaintiffs from five states who are also accusing church leaders of fraud in a putative class-action case recently referred to a Salt Lake City federal courtroom.
If livestreaming technology keeps its promise, interested Utahns will be able to watch the historic arguments scheduled this week remotely, with one session before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals starting Monday at 9 a.m. MDT and the other, before the 9th U.S. Circuit, at 3:30 p.m MDT on Wednesday.
Here are details:
Gaddy, et. al., v. Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Arguments on a key aspect of this federal case originating in Salt Lake City will be heard Monday before the 10th Circuit at the Byron White U.S. Courthouse in Denver.
The main issue before 10th Circuit judges: If “religious facts” are to be given special treatment under the law, do their proponents have to believe them sincerely?
Three former Latter-day Saints — Laura Gaddy, Lyle D. Small and Leanne R. Harris — sued the Utah-based church in 2019 in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, asserting the church intentionally misrepresented basic tenets of the faith, inducing them to donate.
Their initial complaint sought to challenge the veracity of church truth claims about early revelations from God and Jesus Christ to founding prophet Joseph Smith and how foundational scriptures such as the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham were said to have been translated.
Gaddy, for example, contends her faith in church principles began to unravel in 2015, when church leaders pulled Smith’s “seer stone” from a vault and showed it to the media.
According to court documents, the event signaled for her that the faith’s first leader had not translated the Book of Mormon directly from gold plates inscribed with reformed Egyptian characters, but instead had dictated the narrative “from a stone with his head in a hat.”
That crisis ultimately led her to file a fraud lawsuit in August 2019, accusing church leaders of “misrepresenting its foundational facts and continuing conduct of concealing access to those facts” as part of perpetuating an alleged fraud to ensure, among other things, that members’ tithing would continue.
Church attorneys have argued throughout that none of the key questions raised in Gaddy’s lawsuit belongs in a courtroom.
“It is not the province of judges or juries to determine whether Moses parted the Red Sea, whether Noah predicted and survived the flood, whether Muhammad ascended to heaven, whether Buddha achieved a state of enlightenment, whether Jesus walked on water, or whether Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus Christ,” they wrote in a brief. “Each of these issues lies outside the purview of our legal system.”
Among a host of other legal approaches, plaintiffs in the Gaddy case have used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to accuse the church of mail and wire fraud in communicating what the plaintiffs contend are false church teachings.
Ensuing years have seen major portions of the lawsuit — now referred to simply as Gaddy — reviewed and dismissed along the way by federal Judge Robert Shelby, largely on grounds that co-plaintiffs were seeking to inject the courts into religious matters that the U.S. Constitution and legal precedent say are shielded from legal intrusions.
(Leah Hogsten } The Salt Lake Tribune ) U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby, shown in 2017, is the judge in a couple of tithing lawsuits against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The suit was, in turn, reshaped, refiled and reargued multiple times in Shelby’s Salt Lake City courtroom before the judge dismissed it entirely in March 2023 with prejudice, meaning it was barred from being refiled again.
Gaddy’s Salt Lake City attorney, Kay Burningham, appealed on the sincerity issue and other grounds and the 10th Circuit granted a hearing on the appeal in August 2023. Burningham is scheduled to deliver oral arguments Monday for the plaintiffs, while Salt Lake City lawyer David Jordan will represent the church.
In a sign these cases are being closely watched, additional briefs have been filed in the appeal by parties friendly to the church’s legal position.
James Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, et. al.
Oral arguments in this case, originally filed in California, are set for Wednesday before a different appellate court, the 9th Circuit, at San Francisco’s James R. Browning U.S. Courthouse.
The prominence of this lawsuit has stemmed in part from plaintiff James Huntsman’s own celebrity as a notable former Latter-day Saint, a son of the late industrialist-philanthropist Jon Huntsman Sr. and a brother of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.
James Huntsman, who resigned his church membership in 2020, sued the worldwide faith in March 2021. He chose California as the venue for his case because he lived on Coronado Island at the time, according to court documents. Attorneys whom Huntsman consulted in the matter before filing his suit also advised him that California courts in general might view his action more favorably than elsewhere.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) James Huntsman, shown in October 2023, has sued The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His case is set to go before a federal appellate court.
Huntsman’s lawsuit has relied heavily on revelations by an IRS whistleblower who once managed portions of the church’s formidable and once-secret investment portfolio. It asserts that Latter-day Saint leaders misled members about how members’ donations were spent, assuring them in statements over the pulpit that tithing was not used for commercial ventures, including $1.4 billion for City Creek Center, a luxury mall in downtown Salt Lake City.
The wealthy Utah native is seeking the return of a total of $5 million in tithing, plus penalties and interest, but Huntsman has said he has no interest in turning his case into a class action involving additional plaintiffs.
Church lawyers have argued the case seeks to parse details of a sacred practice rooted firmly in faith and that such probes are out of bounds under legal protections for religious beliefs.
Huntsman’s complaint got thrown out in September 2021 by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson but then was reinstated in a split decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit.
The court’s 2-1 opinion found that a genuine dispute over facts and the meaning of official statements by top church leaders remained when Wilson incorrectly granted summary judgment and tossed out Huntsman’s case.
The opinion also rejected church arguments that Huntsman’s fraud suit was barred by the First Amendment and its constitutional protections of religion. Those did not apply in the case, the three-judge panel decided, “because the questions regarding the fraud claims were secular and did not implicate religious beliefs about tithing itself.”
On a subsequent appeal by church lawyers, 9th Circuit judges agreed in March to grant a rehearing of the matter by the full appellate court, known as an en banc hearing, and to vacate the 2-1 decision that reinstated Huntsman’s suit.
Paul Clement, a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney with expertise in religious liberties, will argue Wednesday for the church. Huntsman’s Los Angeles lawyer, David Jonelis, will argue his side.
Briefs have centered largely on issues of religious freedoms as opposed to proving fraud legally in a secular context, but the 9th Circuit threw a major curveball at the pending oral arguments earlier this month.
In a terse advisory issued two weeks ago, the court said some of its judges wanted lawyers for both sides in the case to be ready to discuss the legal question of whether Huntsman was actually domiciled in California when he filed his complaint.
