Economics – By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

The Church, the Investment Advisor, and the SEC

February 21, 2023 by Sam Brunson 245 Comments

By now, I assume you’ve heard that the church and Ensign Peak Advisors have settled an SEC investigation, with EPA agreeing to pay a $4 million fine and the church agreeing to pay a $1 million fine. (If you haven’t, you can see some excellent reportage on the issue here, here, and here, among other places.)

So what should practicing members make of this? I think it’s tough, and I’ll try to address that at the end of the post. But first, what exactly happened?

On Not Filing Form 13F

To understand what’s going on here, we need to start with Rule 13f. Under Rule 13f, investment managers must file a quarterly report with the SEC where (a) they “exercise investment discretion” over (b) accounts containing at least $100 million of (c) “13(f) securities.” (13(f) securities are basically stock traded on a securities exchange.)

Between 1997 (when it was formed) and 2019, Ensign Peak Advisors did not file a Form 13F.

But it’s not just that EPA didn’t file a 13F for 22 straight years. It’s that EPA, at church leaders’ behest, structured their investment to avoid the rules.

About Those Lost Billions [Updated] …

January 12, 2023 by Sam Brunson

A couple days ago, the Tribune reported that for the third straight quarter the church had lost billions of dollars on its investment portfolio. As it stands, on September 30, 2022, Ensign Peak Advisors, the church’s investment arm, had $40.3 billion of assets under management, down from a high of $52.3 billion on December 31, 2021.

Now frankly, that the church’s investment portfolio is down is no surprise to anybody who has made the mistake of looking at their retirement account over the last year or so; the markets in general are down. But I was curious how the church’s returns compared to the market in general. And it turns out that Ensign Peak Advisors is required to file a quarterly report listing the value of its assets under management (you can find the reports here). It’s been filing the reports for every quarter since the quarter ending December 31, 2019. So I took its quarterly reports, stuck them in an Excel spreadsheet, and graphed them.

And how has the church’s portfolio done over the last three years? Well, it’s up from three years ago, though down significantly from its peak.

Church Finances in Canada and Australia

November 4, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Over the last week or so, a number of people have pointed me to investigative journalism regarding the church’s finances in Canada and Australia and asked my opinion on them. Which is flattering but, unfortunately, right now I don’t have a ton of spare time. So rather than go through in detail, I’m going to try to contextualize a little bit of what I think is going on.

And what I think is going on is two things. First, the church thinks of itself and, to the extent it legally can, operates as a single economic entity. Over the last several decades or so, it has consolidated its finances in Salt Lake (which significantly diverges from most religious organizations I’m familiar with, including other hierarchical religions like the Catholic church).

Second, the church is obsessed with being financially opaque. It values its financial privacy to a degree that it can be harmful to the public’s perception. (I’m sure I’ve blogged about this, but I’ve also written about the history of the church’s varying levels of financial transparency/opacity for Dialogue.)

And these two things, I believe, underlie the stories coming out of Canada and Australia. And frankly, my quick blog post (written between getting kids up for school, getting them breakfast, and getting ready for work) may or may not be satisfying. It’s not meant to convict or exonerate the church. And pretty much everything I know about this comes from two articles. And I believe that the church should be more financially transparent, and that such transparency would be good for it in both the short and the long run.

$906 Million

October 7, 2022 by Sam Brunson

The church recently released its 2021 Annual Report. The church’s Annual Reports detail its humanitarian and social safety-net endeavors.[fn1] These endeavors should come as no surprise: as in years past, the church has been tremendously active in providing food, clean water, education, and vaccinations, among other things. It engages in these activites on its own and it partners with other charitable organizations.

The aid it provides is unsurprising because it’s the same kinds of things the church has highlighted in previous Annual Reports.

What Can We Do About Gun Violence?

May 24, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Like so many others right now, I’m numb with sadness and rage about the murder today of at least fifteen people (14 of whom were elementary school children) in Texas, following on the heels of the murder a week and a half ago of one in a California church, following the racist murder of ten in Buffalo. And that’s not to mention the mass shooting that killed two in Chicago (in fact, a block north of my office) last week, or countless other acts of gun violence and murder we and our neighbors endure on a far-too-regular basis.

So what can we, as Latter-day Saints and as U.S. citizens and residents[fn1] do?

We should advocate for better laws, laws that will make these deadly shooting less likely. And I use “should” deliberately; the church encourages us to “play a role as responsible citizens in their communities, including becoming informed about issues and voting in elections” and to otherwise engage in the political process. And while the church has taken no formal stand on gun regulation, Pres. Nelson said, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, that “men have passed laws that allow guns to go to people who shouldn’t have them.” As Saints and as humans, we should recoil at the idea that someone can march in and murder elementary school children, or Black Buffalo residents doing their grocery shopping, or a physician worshiping at church.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Society & Culture Tagged With: gun violence, Guns, mass shootings, murder

The Church, the State (of Utah), and Welfare

December 5, 2021 by Sam Brunson

On Thursday, ProPublica and the Salt Lake Tribune published a fascinating article detailing a link between Utah, the church, and welfare payments. I assume most readers here have already read it. If not, you really need to read it. Maybe before reading this post but, if not before, definitely right after.

The tl;dr of the article is this: since about 2009, Utah has underspent on its social safety net. Also, based on an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) it signed with the church, it has counted volunteer hours performed for the church in calculating how much it has spent.

Reading the article the first time, though, left me with questions. And it turns out I’m not the only one who didn’t entirely understand what was going on: on Friday, the Editorial Board of the Tribune published an unsigned op-ed, the heart of which were these three paragraphs:

Mitt Romney, the Expanded EITC and Marriage Penalties

October 2, 2021 by Sam Brunson

On Thursday, Utah Senator Mitt Romney sent a letter, signed by him and 34 of his Republican colleagues, to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden. In the letter, he objects to marriage penalties built into the House’s reconciliation bill, marriage penalties, he claims, that are exacerbated by the changes made to the earned income tax credit (the “EITC”). He concludes his letter saying, “We believe that marriage is a vital social good. It is misguided and unfair for the government to build bigger barriers for couples to marry.”So is Sen. Romney right? Does the reconciliation bill (available here) increase marriage penalties and disincentivize marriage?

Let’s Talk About Money

August 21, 2021 by Sam Brunson

I don’t have any idea if $100 billion is a good amount for the church to have in its endowment. Personally, I tend to think, given its revenue and expenditures, that the number is high. At least as long as it continues to bring in a significant amount of tithing annually, it feels to me like it doesn’t need a cushion quite that big.

But the thing is, I don’t know. Church leaders are completely opaque in how they’ve made their investment/spending decisions. And to be honest, I suspect that it has been a decision only in the loosest sense. Inertia is a powerful force and decisions made 20 years ago carry a lot of weight.

But arguably the church should communicate its financial thinking better. And I don’t mean that the church needs to tell members exactly how much it has in assets (though it certainly could). But I believe that if the church viewed members as stakeholders, it could and would communicate its thinking to us. What considerations has it made in deciding whether to spend or invest? How did it decide how much it needed for current expenditures and for future expenditures.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics Tagged With: disclosure, endowment, transparency

The Child Tax Credit and You

June 21, 2021 by Sam Brunson

The American Rescue Plan, signed by President Biden in March, includes a lot of things. For many U.S. readers of this blog, perhaps the most notable and salient is that it increased the child tax credit and, starting next month, will send monthly checks for a portion of the credit to taxpayers.

I wrote about the details over on the Surly Subgroup, but wanted to highlight a couple things about it for a specifically Mormon audience. It isn’t, of course, particular to Mormons but, falling birthrates[fn1] notwithstanding, we still tend to have (marginally) more children than the average American. Which means that the child tax credit, and its prepayment, are going to be relevant to many of us.

Of course, to understand what’s going on, we need to answer a couple questions.

Republicans render unto Trump that which is God’s

August 28, 2020 by Carolyn

Scripture is replete with warnings about placing faith in political leaders above God.

God repeatedly calls the faithful to reject kings and idols, to disperse power away from any singular charismatic personality. “Ye shall have no king nor ruler, for I [God] will be your king and watch over you.” (D&C 38:21).

Why? Because we know from sad experience that as soon as men “get a little authority, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” (D&C 121:39). Kings, with their greater authority, wreak greater unrighteousness.

Religious Freedom vs. Public Interest (Working Women)

July 9, 2020 by Angela C

I dissent.

Let me start off by being clear that I am not a lawyer (on a blog with many lawyers). I have multiple decades of experience as a business executive in large corporations, overseeing the employment of thousands of people. As an executive, I understood very well what the applicable anti-discrimination laws were. Now that I’m a small business owner, I also recognize that many of those laws are not required for me, but based on my personal conviction and principles, I still run my business as if they do.

In a 7-2 decision, SCOTUS recently upheld a completely discriminatory ruling to allow employers (that are not directly affiliated with any church) to refuse to cover birth control in their employee healthcare plans. This decision rests firmly on a few shaky foundational assumptions: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Children, Church Programs, Current Events, Economics, Education, Family, Gender & Sexuality, Media, Mormon, Politics, Rants, Religion, Society & Culture, Theology, Doctrine & Policy, Women

The Temporal Urgency of Faith

April 4, 2020 by Carolyn

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

Introductory Note: Several years ago during General Conference I started journaling the messages my soul most longed to hear. I posted one of those last Conference. I’m doing so again now. This requires a suspension of disbelief: it contains a mix of true and aspirational content, and is written as if I had been asked to speak during General Conference. I do not purport to actually have any authority to speak on behalf of the Church.

Faith without works is dead.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to cast our spiritual burdens upon the Lord, rely on the grace of his Atonement, and put our faith in him during adversity. But the Gospel also preaches that our spiritual health is intertwined with the physical welfare of our neighbors. Pure religion looks not just to eternity but to now.

“If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them: ‘Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled’; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?

Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. (James 2:14-17)

Domestic Violence and Coronavirus

March 22, 2020 by Guest

Laura Brignone Bhagwat is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley where she studies technology and domestic violence. Her dissertation tracks a public health intervention in hospital emergency rooms meant to prevent intimate partner homicide.

Imagine yourself scared. Maybe you’re scared for your life; you’re definitely scared for your health and wellbeing. You’re probably scared for those around you, and scared for what your future holds. Imagine yourself terrified to go to the doctor, unable to secure your financial wellbeing. It probably isn’t that hard to do, as we’re all living in the age of the coronavirus.

Now, imagine that this coronavirus-like being lives in your house. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Family, Guest Post, Health & Medicine, Religion, Science Tagged With: abuse, coronavirus, covid-19, domestic violence, hotline, rainn, support, upheavel, violence

What is the right level of panic for the new coronavirus pandemic?

March 20, 2020 by Guest

Today’s guest post is courtesy of Rachel H. DeMeester, MPH, a public health expert and Latter-day Saint living in the Seattle area.

Living in Washington state and being a public health professional, Covid-19 is on my mind almost constantly, but really, there are few places it hasn’t touched. Public health’s greatest challenge is giving recommendations that don’t induce panic but also aren’t ignored. That clearly has failed so far as people hoard toilet paper (irrational) and masks (ineffective since healthcare workers need them) and in many cases ignore pleas to spread out. Do we know everything we need to know about the virus? No. Do we know enough to act? Absolutely. No matter how independent we feel we are, we all have some level of social contact and therefore a personal stake and responsibility in Covid-19. Those who believe in God receive an extra reminder that we are all God’s children and are expected to care for each other as such. We should be concerned—not panicked—enough to act. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Guest Post, Health & Medicine, Science, Society & Culture Tagged With: coronavirus, covid-19, flatten, pandemic, public health, q&a, social distancing

Did You Know Parsonages Are Taxable in Utah?

March 2, 2020 by Sam Brunson

Churches & Parsonage, Antrim, N.H. From the New York Public Library. Public domain.

This week is my week to blog over at the Nonprofit Law Prof Blog. And for today’s post, I did some absolutely blatant self-promotion.

And you know what? That self-promotion may be of some interest to BCC readers, too, so I thought I’d mention it here. I recently posted God Is My Roommate? Tax Exemptions for Parsonages Yesterday, Today, and (if Constitutional) Tomorrow to SSRN. I’ve posted a number of times about Gaylor v. Mnuchin, the case challenging the constitutionality of providing an income tax exclusion for housing allowances paid to clergy. And this paper derives from that decision.

Broadly speaking, I look at the current and historical property tax treatment of parsonages and other clergy housing in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. And that history is absolutely fascinating! And also, that history resonates with Mormonism in two places: Utah and Idaho. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Society & Culture Tagged With: gaylor v. mnuchin, Idaho, mission president, parsonage, property tax, rectory, utah

Some Thoughts About Ensign Peak Advisers and the Church

December 17, 2019 by Sam Brunson

The Religion Unplugged and Washington Post stories raise (at least) three important questions. I’m going to try to address all three here (though at least one will be really quick), and I suspect that this post will be unsatisfying both to those who want to see the church vindicated and those who want to see it get its comeuppance. And that’s because, contrary to popular perception, the tax law isn’t an area full of clear answers and bright lines. It’s also because many tax issues are fact-dependent, and we lack many of the facts. To the extent that you want more information and analysis, Peggy Fletcher Stack has been doing some great reporting on this.

The three main issues I see are these:

Does the church have $100 billion in securities-type investments?
Should the church have $100 billion in securities-type investments?
Does the $100 billion in investments violate the tax law?

Now, I have absolutely no answer to number 1. I’m slightly skeptical, just because growing $12 billion in 1997 to $100 billion today (with two significant market downturns happening in those 22 years) strikes me as requiring some pretty aggressive assumptions. On the other hand, it’s at least plausible. And notably, the church has the ability to tell us how much it’s worth. To the extent it chooses not to do so, assertions like this will continue to find traction. Since the ball’s in the church’s court here, and since I have neither knowledge of nor the ability to find out the net asset value of the church’s investments on my own, for purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that he’s right, and that the church has $100 billion invested in Ensign Peak Advisers.

Utah’s New Tax Bill

December 16, 2019 by Sam Brunson

Sales Tax by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, you’ve probably heard by now that the Utah legislature passed a tax bill last week in a special session. The governor has apparently said he plans to sign the bill.

The bill has been controversial, to say the least. It was even protested by an odd assortment of characters including not only Utah Legislative Watch and Alliance for a Better Utah, but also Santa Claus and the Grinch. A lot of the objections seem to be to process—the bill went from proposed to passed in less than a couple days, and was passed in a special session (though, as a non-Utahn, I don’t actually know what that means). But there has been pushback against the substance, too. A lot of that pushback resonates with me: there have been significant complaints that the changes amount to a more-regressive tax burden on Utahns, with new taxes burdening the poor, while tax cuts redounding to the benefit of the wealthy. And that, in the words of both of Isaiah and the Twitter feed of the greatest blog in the universe, would be grinding the faces of the poor.

So is that what Utah’s doing? Not entirely, it turns out. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Politics, Society & Culture Tagged With: candy, grocery tax credit, income tax, regressive, sales tax, tax base, utah

On Satan’s Plan, Tax Edition

August 9, 2019 by Sam Brunson

A couple days ago, I got a message from a friend, asking how I respond to people who claim that taxes are Satan’s plan. Honestly, my instinct would be to respond, “That’s stupid,” block the person on Twitter, and get on with my life.

But that doesn’t work in every circumstance. I mean, if your interlocutor is standing in the checkout line next to you, blocking isn’t really an issue. And if your interlocutor is, I don’t know, your father-in-law, calling him stupid may not be the optimal approach. (And honestly, if the person is speaking in good faith, dismissing them like that is rude and unfair.[fn1])

So how would I address a good faith assertion that taxation is Satan’s plan? Depending on the person, I’d probably take one of a couple routes: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Politics, Society & Culture, Theology Tagged With: agency, compulsion, consequences, free agency, satan's plan, taxes

Terrorism and Hospitality

May 7, 2019 by Angela C

In 2012, I stayed at the Taj Mumbai Hotel. I was there on business, my third stop visiting our India offices that fell under my jurisdiction. My manager assistant who was traveling with me was raised in Mumbai (which he insisted on calling Bombay, the name the city was called until 1995 when political parties changed). The hotel is a luxurious Colonialist structure (built in 1903) with 120 rooms and several high end restaurants. The reception staff proudly mentioned (for my benefit, as an American) that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had stayed there in 2009 and pointed to the place just outside the security-walled entrance where President Obama made a statement to the press. These events were noteworthy because the hotel was among locations that were attacked in 2008 by Pakistani terrorists who landed a boat a few yards from the entrance, then went on to massacre nearly 200 citizens, wounding 300 more, at 12 locations around the city. Because I had stayed in the hotel, I was intrigued about the limited release movie Hotel Mumbai that just came out, so we went a week ago last Friday. It was a haunting experience. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Education, Film & Television, Media, Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Politics, Society & Culture Tagged With: hospitality, mumbai, Terrorism

New Zealand, Missionaries, and Inland Revenue

March 11, 2019 by Sam Brunson

Photo by Saaby. CC BY-SA 2.5

Effective January 1, 1991, the church equalized the cost of missionary service. Before, a missionary had to pay the actual costs of his or her mission.[fn1] Now, a missionary pays a set amount to the church, and the church pays the costs of missionaries’ missions irrespective of where they go.

Why did the church make this change? A bunch of reasons, I suspect, but one was because of the tax law. I’ve blogged about Davis v. United States before, and I have a chapter in my book that goes into extensive detail about both the litigation and the thinking behind the case. The short of it, though, is that the Supreme Court held that payments from parents to their missionary children did not qualify for the charitable deduction. Donations from parents to a church-controlled fund (at least, as long as those payments weren’t earmarked particularly for their children) did qualify.

Almost thirty years after the Supreme Court decided Davis, the question of the deductibility of missionary payments is back. Kind of. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: charitable deduction, davis, deduction, gift, inland revenue, missionary fund, new zealand

Explainer: Utah Stealthily Raised State Income Taxes

February 20, 2019 by Sam Brunson

At the intersection of Mormons and tax policy? This article is pure #BrunsonBait. Paging professor @smbrnsn https://t.co/rJ29KNG4p8

— Sheldon Gilbert (@sheldongilbert) February 20, 2019

This morning, I woke up to this Twitter notification. (Turns out that Sheldon does really know me: this was #BrunsonBait in basically its purest form.) I immediately knew I was going to write a BCC explainer, and I figured it would be a quick and easy explainer: Utah’s tax conformity to the federal income tax meant that, when the TCJA reduced personal exemptions to $0, Utah’s personal exemptions fell to the same rate.

It turns out the story is more complicated than a story of the inadvertent loss of a tax benefit: Utah legislators did this deliberately.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. What’s the this that is happening to Utah taxpayers? In short, according to the article, the elimination of personal exemptions meant that Utahns, with their larger-than-average family size, would face a higher tax bill in 2018 than they would have without the federal TCJA.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Politics, Society & Culture Tagged With: children, personal exemption, rate, rolling conformity, state income tax, tax increase, tcja, utah

The Church Is Going to Pay More In Taxes

January 28, 2019 by Sam Brunson

Photo by Ken Lund. CC BY-SA 2.0

In 1972, the church opened its new Church Office Building at 50 East North Temple Street. The 28-story building, built by Christiansen and Clyde Construction Company for $31.3 million, allowed scattered church employees to all work under one roof. Initially, about 1,500 employees, who had been at 16 different locations, moved into the building. It was originally slated to provide office space to over 2,000 employees. And so that those employees could make it, the Church Office Building had 1,250-spot underground parking garage.

And the existence of that 1,250-spot underground parking garage means that the church owes federal income taxes for 2018.

Because yes, the church owes taxes for last year. And, perhaps to church members’ surprise, those taxes aren’t the result of secular liberals who hate Mormons/religion/God. Those taxes are the result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the GOP’s late-2017 tax reform that was both conceived of and passed without any input or votes from Democrats. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Mormon, Politics, Society & Culture Tagged With: church office building, parking, tax, tax-exempt, taxes, transportation fringe, trasit passes, ubti, unrelated business taxable income

A Class Tax: Utah Taxpayers in 1920

December 17, 2018 by Sam Brunson

The other day, I did a quick search on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site to see if I could find any information about prominent Utah or Mormon taxpayers.

See, today’s tight privacy of tax return information hasn’t always existed. For a couple of years in the 1920s, Congress required taxpayers to publicly disclose their tax payments; apparently, newspapers had a field day publishing the tax payments (and refunds) of the wealthy and the famous.[fn1] I was curious if Utah newspapers did the same.

But I got distracted on my first hit, from the Lehi Sun. It didn’t release the names of taxpayers, or what they paid, but it did give a snapshot of Utah’s taxpaying from 1916-1920.[fn2] [Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Society & Culture Tagged With: 1920, federal income tax, taxes, utah

Repent Ye, for Climate Change is at Hand?

November 28, 2018 by Carolyn

I’ve always accepted the scientific consensus surrounding carbon emissions, greenhouse gasses, the ozone layer, and climate change. But for a long time I elected to not care.

Why? Because I bought into the folk doctrines that God created the Earth’s resources to be used, that a global temperature rise of 1-2 degrees over 100 years isn’t material, and in any event, Christ’s imminent Second Coming would renew the Earth and fix everything before disaster struck.

As a religious studies student in college, I once wrote a paper on Isaac Newton’s eschatological prediction that the Second Coming would happen in 2060. Thereafter in casual conversation, I used the 2060 date to support my religious opinion that climate change would never matter. (“The worst predictions don’t even start until 2100 — Jesus will have come back well before then!”) One afternoon at the Indiana University LDS Institute, I tried that line on a Ph.D. student studying ecology. Our resulting discussion did not end well for me. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Doctrine & Policy, Economics, Mormon, Science Tagged With: climate change, environment, global warming, repentance

Go and Do Likewise?

September 17, 2018 by Guest

Rusty Clifton is a longtime friend of BCC.

A couple months ago I came home from work to my wife in the front yard chatting with a lady who, by all visible measures, appeared to be homeless. I had never seen this woman before, but my wife later assured me that she was known by many people in our upper-middle-class Salt Lake City neighborhood. While my natural inclination is to avoid situations that have the potential to unnecessarily add complications to my life, my wife overflows with compassion for the oppressed and downtrodden. So that evening, after determining she was clean from drugs and not dangerous, we agreed to let her stay in our basement (it’s a mother-in-law apartment we use for guests or the occasional AirBNB) until we could help her secure more permanent housing and employment. Over the course of the next week or so we did what we could to accommodate her: secure privacy, food, shower, soft bed with fresh linens, rides to housing offices/employment interviews, and a friendly home base while she worked to get herself back on her feet. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Anciently Revealed, Church Programs, Doctrine & Policy, Economics, Guest Post, Mormon, Religion, Scriptures, Theology Tagged With: airbnb, Good Samaritan

Socialism and Satan’s Plan

September 3, 2018 by Sam Brunson

Via GIPHY

It happened. Again. On Mormon Twitter, someone mentioned socialism, to which somebody responded that socialism was Satan’s plan. (There were a couple other responses I saw that hinted at the same thing, but didn’t explicitly say it. And maybe there were others who said something similar. It’s not like I looked for every response to the tweet.)

To which I reply: that’s not the stupidest assertion based on Mormon theology ever. But it may well be in the top ten. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Modern Era, Modernly Revealed, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: bad arguments, bad assertions, capitalism, communism, etb, Moses, satan's plan, socialism, soviet union, twitter

Money and the Kingdom of God

August 21, 2018 by Sam Brunson

Photo by Pictures of Money. CC BY 2.0

Last week, I was involved in a Twitter discussion that at least implicated questions of economics, government spending, and private spending. A couple of the interlocutors seemed to be arguing under two assumptions: (1) there are only two economic systems, capitalism and socialism, and (2) there’s something quasi-divine about capitalism, and unrestrained capitalism is the only moral or effective economic system.

Now, this post’s purpose isn’t to argue the first of those two points.[fn1] I do, however, want to suggest that we, as Mormons, need to think much more carefully about money than we usually do.

If my experience at church is at all representative, when we talk about money at church, we talk about two things. The first is paying tithing and offerings, and the second is avoiding debt. Online, the discussion usually devolves into the benefits or the evils of capitalism. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Modern Era, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: allocation, capitalism, encyclical, finance, money, scarcity, socialism, third way

Mormonism and the Prosperity Gospel

June 18, 2018 by Guest

Mette Ivie Harrison is a well-known mystery and young-adult novelist and frequent guest here. She is the author of The Book of Laman, published by BCC Press.

Most Mormons have no idea what the “prosperity gospel” is, and if you point them to typical TV evangelicals, they insist that Mormonism is nothing like that. Yet, there are far too frequent occasions when I find myself biting my tongue about something a fellow Mormon says, either casually, at a wedding or other social event, or on the stand during a talk, that translates into precisely that: prosperity gospel.

For the sake of clarity, let me give a useful definition of “prosperity gospel:” a modern version of the gospel in which those who follow God in strict obedience are given blessings of wealth, health, and power. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Comparative/Ecumenical, Doctrine & Policy, Economics, Guest Post, Health & Medicine, Mormon, Rants, Religion, Society & Culture, Theology Tagged With: prosperity gospel

Tithing and Coercion

June 2, 2018 by Sam Brunson

A number of comments on my post yesterday talked about the coercive nature of tithing. I thought I’d follow up on that idea in a new post, with two principal thoughts.

A History of Tithing and Coercion

The idea that tithing is coercive has a long and storied history. It may well predate 1870, but I know it goes back at least that far. I give more details about it on p. 139 of this paper, but the short of it is, the Bureau of Internal Revenue was trying to tax the church on its 1868 tithing revenue. One of the church’s assertions for why tithing was not taxable was that tithing represented a voluntary contribution by members. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Modern Era, Mormon, Pre-Manifesto Era, Society & Culture Tagged With: bureau of internal revenue, coercive, employment, hollister, oj hollister, tithing

$32 Billion?!?

June 1, 2018 by Sam Brunson

On Wednesday, MormonLeaks announced that they had connected the church to $32 billion in U.S. stock market investments. [KUTV story.] And how did it figure this out? Ingeniously, actually: it looked at the Form 13Fs for thirteen LLCs to see their stock holdings, and it discovered that domain names matching the LLCs’ names were registered to Intellectual Reserve, Inc., which holds the church’s intellectual property.

So, should you be outraged that the church has at least $32 billion in the stock market? I mean, sure, if you’re a fan of being outraged by stories of religions having money (though frankly, if that’s what you’re in the mood for, maybe this is a better source of outrage). But it’s probably worth taking a minute to figure out what we do and don’t know before going full-throated outraged. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: $32 million, investment, money, mormonleaks, stock