By Peter Henderson
Reuters SAN FRANCISCO: If the Mormon church were a business,
wealthy adherents like Mitt Romney would count as its dominant
revenue stream.
Its investment strategy would be viewed as risk-averse.
It would also likely attract corporate gadflies
protesting a lack of transparency. They would call for less
spending on real estate and more on charitable causes to improve
membership growth -- the Mormons' return on investment.
Those are a few of the conclusions that can be
drawn from an analysis of the church's finances by Reuters and
University of Tampa sociologist Ryan Cragun.
Relying heavily on church records in countries
that require far more disclosure than the United States, Cragun
and Reuters estimate that the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints brings in some $7 billion annually in tithes
and other donations.
It
owns about $35 billion worth of temples and meeting houses
around the world, and controls farms, ranches, shopping malls
and other commercial ventures worth many billions more.
The church claims 14 million members around the
world, more than half outside the United States. All are
supposed to tithe, or give 10 percent, of their income, which
Mormons frequently interpret as pre-tax earnings. But only about
40 percent of Mormons counted by the church actually attend
weekly services in the United States and Canada, and in many
countries, including Mexico and Brazil, only a quarter of
nominal members are active, according to Cumorah, an independent
research group headed by a devoted, active Mormon.
These active members are most likely to tithe,
and the result is that from a financial standpoint at least, the
church remains largely a venture of active American members,
said Cragun, who adds that U.S. Mormon men tend to be wealthier
than the average U.S. male.
"Most of the revenue of the religion is from the
U.S., and a large percentage comes from an elite cadre of
wealthy donors, like Mitt Romney," said Cragun.
(It) is a religion that
appeals to economically successful men by rewarding their
financial acuity with respect and positions of prestige within
the religion."
The church is full of
successful businessmen, including chemical billionaire Jon
Huntsman Sr., the father of the former presidential candidate,
J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr. and his hotel-owning family, and even
entertainer Donny Osmond.
Romney, the Republican
presidential candidate, gave $4.1 million to the church over the
past two years (amounting to 9.7 percent of his gross adjusted
income, according to the two years' worth of tax returns he has
released). He would tithe on his IRA, valued at as much as $102
million, only when he withdraws from it and pays taxes.
Crunching the numbers
Several countries around the world require
religious groups and charities to file financial reports,
including Canada. The country has only 185,000 Mormon members
but a wealth of statistics on them. Taking total reported
Canadian donations and dividing by the estimated number of
active Mormons and family financial data from the World Bank
indicates that active Canadian Mormons give slightly less than 8
percent of their income to the church.
Assuming that active U.S. Mormons give at a
similar rate and adjusting for higher U.S. income, total U.S.
tithing would amount to more than $6 billion, or about $6.5
billion annually between the United States and Canada.
Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the United
Kingdom, which also require financial disclosures, all have
sharply lower donation rates than Canada. Based on data from
those countries, tithing outside the United States and Canada
totals several hundred million dollars, taking global total
donations to about $7 billion.
Canada also requires the church to disclose the
value of its assets and spending. Using those figures as a basis
suggests the total value of church buildings, including temples
and meeting houses, would be about $35 billion globally.
Church spokesman Michael Purdy declined to
comment specifically on the estimates but said that the church
was different from a corporation.
"Other projections are speculative and do not
reflect an understanding of how the church uses its income to
bless the lives of people," he added, saying the church was
financed primarily from member tithing and offerings.
Focus on business and buildings
Concerned or disgruntled current and former
Mormons complain that the church spends too much on real estate
and for-profit ventures, neglecting charity work.
The Mormon church has no
hospitals and only a handful of primary schools. Its university
system is limited to widely respected Brigham Young, which has
campuses in Utah, Idaho and Hawaii, and LDS Business College.
Seminaries and institutes for high school students and single
adults offer religious studies for hundreds of thousands.
It counts more than 55,000 in its missionary
forces, primarily youths focused on converting new members but
also seniors who volunteer for its nonprofits, such as the
Polynesian Cultural Center, which bills itself as Hawaii's No. 1
tourist attraction, and for-profit businesses owned by the
church.
The church has
plowed resources into a multi-billion-dollar global network of
for-profit enterprises: it is the largest rancher in the United
States, a church official told Nebraska's Lincoln Journal Star
in 2004, with other ranches and farms in Mexico, Brazil,
Argentina, Australia and Great Britain, according to financial
documents reviewed by Reuters.
Ranching and farm industry
sources say they are well-run operations.
It also has a small media empire, an investment
fund, and is developing a mall across from its Salt Lake City
headquarters, which it calls an attempt to help revitalize the
city rather than to make money. These enterprises are also part
of a vast nest egg for tough times. The church expects wars and
natural disasters before Christ returns to Earth in the Second
Coming, and members are encouraged to prepare by laying in
stores of food. Farms and ranches are part of the church's own
preparation.
"The
church teaches its members to live within their means and put a
little money aside for life's unexpected events. As a church, we
live by the same principle," Purdy said. The rainy-day fund and
operating budget rarely mix, officials say.
Cost-cutting is a top priority, church documents
show. It has even laid off janitors and called on members to
clean temples and meeting houses, but the buildout of temples
continues, including one under construction in Rome.
Those temples take a lot of money to operate,
Purdy points out, and many of the grand church buildings are
short on congregants, says David Stewart, a physician who leads
the research group Cumorah.
"I have been to beautiful church buildings in
Hungary and Ukraine, and Latvia and other places, and there are
these huge buildings and 35 people there, and you say, how can
this work financially? The math - it just doesn't work."
In contrast, the Seventh-day Adventist Church,
which had about 17 million members a year ago, appears to be
getting a better return on investment: It builds smaller meeting
houses and lots of schools and hospitals, and its numbers are
swelling faster than the Mormons', said Stewart. The Adventists
claim a million new members join annually, compared with every
three years or so for the Mormons.
"The Seventh-day Adventists clearly have a much
more expansive humanitarian project in terms of building
hospitals and medical schools and schools and universities and
long-term developmental infrastructure around the world," said
Stewart. "It's paid off for them."
The Mormon church, meanwhile, appears to be
decreasing transparency and member control of donations. New
tithing slips give fewer donation options and come with an
expanded disclaimer saying the church has sole discretion over
spending, even though it will make "reasonable efforts" to
follow donors' wishes.
"Hey, where's the slot of 'shopping malls'?" a poster said of
the new slips on exmormonforums.com, one of several dissident
sites.
Many faithful
have no such issues. On chat boards and in private
conversations, they emphasize that volunteering for the church
and giving to it are worthy deeds in and of themselves.
"The funds are used to build and maintain temples
and meeting houses, as well as take care of the many expenses
associated with helping the work of the Gospel of Jesus Christ
roll forth. I love to pay tithing," Carl Ames said on one church
site.
Purdy did offer a
list of spending priorities: building houses of worship,
supporting Brigham Young University and a seminary system,
operating nearly 140 temples and the world's largest genealogy
research program, and humanitarian aid for both members and
non-members.
Since 1985
the church has spent a total of $1.4 billion on relief for
disasters such as Japan's earthquake and Ethiopian famine, and
it operates 129 "bishops' storehouses" with food and household
items for the needy.
Romney himself focuses on the act of giving, not the result. As
he told Fox News Sunday, "Hopefully, as people look at various
individuals running for president, they'd be pleased with
someone who made a promise to God and kept that promise."
