Yet in a program taking up such a serious allegation, it was striking that the wide range of ways these funds are perpetually used by the church to fulfill its mission was never really explored at much length - nor were the legal merits of the whistleblower’s claims examined with much scrutiny. Little effort goes into helping viewers appreciate how the faith tradition actually uses its financial resources. Or perhaps they’d explore the extensive educational and welfare efforts measurably helping to lift people from poverty across the globe.īut like the many treatments of church finances before it, CBS rehashed the so-called whistleblower’s inference that the church’s funds were “never used” for charitable purposes. Investigative programs might dig deep into what humanitarian projects the church funds and examine the lives impacted. Imagine if this became an object of interest among news media. Lost in this all, once again, are the actual purposes and uses of funds as members and leaders of the church understand them. Living stipends for full-time church leaders are estimated to be significantly less than the salary of a member of U.S Congress, and hundreds of thousands of dollars less than leaders of large public and private universities or comparable nonprofit organizations. This same story plays out every few decades, despite the church’s commendable self-reliance and efficiency of its humanitarian efforts. Ergo, something nefarious must be taking place.Īlong the way, little effort goes into helping viewers appreciate how the faith tradition actually uses its financial resources. It prefers not to disclose every dollar publicly. In 2012, Bloomberg Businessweek slapped cartoon bubbles over a piece of religious art to depict deity instructing Latter-day founder Joseph Smith, “And thou shalt build a shopping mall, buy stock in Burger King … that shall be largely exempt from the frustration of tax.” That same year, Harper’s magazine claimed, with a rhetorical bravado of inverse proportion to the evidence presented, that Latter-day Saints have an “ethos of accumulation that makes so-called prosperity Gospel seem listless by comparison.”Īnd then there’s Sunday’s “60 minutes” segment. Church News archive: Church issues response to Time magazine story.Church of Jesus Christ nears $1 billion a year in humanitarian, welfare spending.Any other explanations for the hard-fought financial stability of the faith is met with remarkably little journalistic curiosity. It’s a plot twist seemingly too good to resist: a church which claims to care for the poor and follow Jesus - the same Jesus who taught it’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than a camel to fit through the eye of a needle - is secretly more interested in accumulating wealth and power. The “true great trek” of early Latter-day Saint leaders, the piece argued, was to build a wealthy “empire.” Yet by the time the church’s sesquicentennial rolled around in 1997, 50 years after Time’s first cover story, the magazine reverted to the same tropes, printing “Mormons, Inc.” in bold font across the magazine’s iconic cover. And a few decades into its second hundred years, the church still wouldn’t have the funds to complete its main office building on Temple Square.
In conjunction with the anniversary, on July 21, 1947, Time Magazine ran a cover story depicting then-President Smith with his injured eye fixated on a pile of dollar sign-leafed sugar beets in front of the temple with rows of gold plates in the background to drive home the point: What you need to know about Latter-days Saints isn’t the core tenets of their faith, but instead their sideways eye for amassing wealth.Īnd yet, it was just a few decades earlier the church had been on the verge of financial collapse - threatened with bankruptcy and the confiscation of holdings by the federal government. Years later, Smith served as president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the faith’s centennial celebration of the early Mormon pioneers arriving in Utah in 1847. While on a surveying job with Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, some harmful combination of desert dust and a scorching glare of summer sun damaged his vision, causing permanent impairment in his left eye. Church statement: What did it say about the ‘60 Minutes’ report?Īs a teenager, George Albert Smith worked to help support his family.What the ‘60 Minutes’ segment on church finances missed: A rags-to-riches history of faith.
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