Church Finances

From the 1830s to the 1990s, LDS church finances have experienced many significant transitions.1 This is an overview of highlights during 160 years of tithing, salaried ministry and voluntary service, business activity, revenues, personal use of church funds, church indebtedness, and public disclosure. This chapter shows that LDS finances have not always functioned as they do today and that the financial sacrifices of Mormons have been great, indeed.

To begin, by divine injunction since ancient times, God’s disciples have seen themselves as “not of the world” (John 17:14). This has resulted in various religious communities regarding themselves as outside the ordinary definitions and expectations of society and of the world’s leaders.2

Theologically, Mormonism has never accepted the “worldly” distinctions between secular versus religious, civil versus theocratic, mundane versus divine.3 An 1830 revelation declared: “Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither [unto] any man, nor the children of men . . .”4

In reaction to hostile critics, the First Presidency issued this formal statement in 1907: “The charge that the Church is a commercial rather than a religious institution; that its aims are temporal rather than religious; that it dictates its members in their industrial activities and relations, and aims at absolute domination in temporal affairs,—all this we emphatically deny.”5 The difficulty with such a denial is that LDS leaders were stating criticisms of their church in the categories and assumptions of non-Mormons, but answering them in the categories and assumptions of Mormonism. In Mormon terms the LDS church is not “a commercial rather than a religious institution,” but the LDS church is commercial because it is religious. Likewise, Mormonism’s aims are not “temporal rather than spiritual,” but its aims are temporal because they are spiritual. And all questions of dictation and absolute dominion—economic or political—are based on the Mormon view of the supremacy of free will. In other words, whether it is the political dictates of Mormon leaders or the prosperity of an economic institution of the LDS church, Mormonism has dominion only insofar as Mormons choose to allow it (see chaps. 7-10).

Mormons have always been irritated by complaints and hand-wringing about “Mormon power” (whether financial, political, or social). In 1984, for possibly the first time, two non-Mormon writers declared the LDS perspective of the hierarchy’s financial power: “These are money managers, but unlike any other kind of money managers. . . . The wealth and power, in the end, come down to the essentials: The church is in the business of expanding the church. . . . a temporal structure whose major goal is spiritual—the building of the Kingdom of God on earth in preparation for the millennial reign of Jesus Christ.”6

There are both continuities and discontinuities in Mormon financial history since Joseph Smith, Jr., organized a new church on 6 April 1830. The most significant difference involves the definition of tithing.