Since there are some odd claims about the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints going around, I thought I’d just mention a few things:

1. I honestly like paying tithing and making other donations. It’s chill, I like not worshipping money, it’s lovely how it tempers materialism, and God watches over us better than money does anyway.

2. The monetary reserves the Church holds (about $100 billion), in the highest amounts I’ve seen alleged, are comparable to the combined endowments of Yale (~$40b) and Harvard (~$50b). The 3 BYUs (Church-owned universities) serve about the same number of students as those two universities, but the Church is a much, much bigger org than Yale and Harvard (and even just discussing the BYUs, they’re operated at a massive loss with the lowest nonmilitary tuition in the US, a far cry from Yale and Harvard). The Church’s worldwide operations include welfare programs active basically everywhere the Church is present, humanitarian operations, facilities, budgets for local congregations, even educational services etc. The numbers in modern finance are dazzling, but that’s because the world is crazy. $100b in the modern economy is ~not~ large at all for a global institution.

3. The Church is tax-exempt. Its investment arm (Ensign Peak), however, is a related but distinct entity and is ~not~ tax exempt. It receives extensive IRS oversight, as does any org handling large amounts of money.*

4. Church investments are largely consistent with the Church’s purpose. One of the biggest sectors of investment is agriculture, which is necessary to sustain the Church Welfare system’s food distribution. The oddball projects are usually offshoots or offspring of various community development projects that the Church has contributed to. (Consider how the Church in Utah was in charge of developing almost everything necessary to build a life in the beginning; it has taken on similar projects in other countries as well.)

5. The Church does report what it spends donations on. Building maintenance, humanitarian needs, welfare, missionary funds, temple funds, etc. It doesn’t specify what percentages go to which, but 1) i’m satisfied as to the legitimacy of each fund, 2) detailed reporting is v expensive, and 3) i don’t really care about the details, anyway.**

*I found this kind of funny, it’s an aside about tax law, but I saw a claim that the Church wasn’t following the spirit of the law in its tax operations in some unspecified way. I just wanted to take a brief moment to note that the Tax Code is the most byzantine, absurd, torturous area of law in the US. There is no “spirit of the law” when it comes to our tax system. (It isn’t even fully consistent with the spirit of raising revenue lol.)

**The trend to demand detailed budget reporting in the name of government transparency is a similar and sometimes vexatious issue. The more detail you demand, the more checks you add in, the more expensive it gets (and it gets expensive fast when you apply it across an institution as extensive and varied as the government). It’s really easy to spend so much on “improving” finance reporting that you burn any savings you’d gain from catching errors.