Mormon whistleblower says his church is a “clandestine hedge fund”
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
- members are encouraged to pay tithing before all other expenses. People are out there deciding whether to pay bills or tithing, while the church sits on this hoard. That’s hard to swallow.
- the church preaches against materialism. Any Mormon can tell you about the “great and spacious building.” It’s a story from the Book of Mormon about materialism or worldliness distracting you from finding the love of God. So what does the church do with tithing? They build an expensive shopping mall right next to their sacred temple and headquarters. What? I don’t have a problem with the mall on its own, but the irony is overwhelming.
- they own, or at least during the leak they owned, tons of stock in Facebook and other big tech. They’ve earned so much against the dangers of social media, it feels really hypocritical.
- they claim to be saving money for the Second Coming. I think this is nonsensical. There are two phases to the Second Coming, calamities/Armageddon, then Jesus comes to fix everything. You don’t need money for those. By all means, hoard emergency supplies, but what are you going to do with your Facebook stock when governments have collapsed?
- obviously, hiding behind shell companies. I expect this from businesses, not from the church who asks their members if they are “honest in their dealings with their fellow man” regularly.
- there are different ways to interpret the original revelation about tithing in the church. They have chosen the maximal version. In the Doctrine and Covenants, it says “one tenth of their interest annually.” Interest is not the same as income. It’s been alternatively interpreted as 10% of any investments, or 10% after all other expenses are paid. At one point a prophet also said that the law is only for those who have means to pay. The conveniently don’t use that quote anymore.
Anyways, this is all very fresh in my mind so these are my rantings.
I do concede that they are subjective though. And obviously many Mormons are aware of the facts and come to different conclusions than me, and I'm ok with that.
Even this $100B hedge fund could be completely spent by the federal government in 6 days and a lot of that would just be servicing debt I've never agreed with carrying in the first place, or funding a military that I don't think makes the world a better place any better than my church does.
Perhaps you're defining "churches" differently than I, but there certainly exist churches that don't endeavor to hoard anything
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/02/10/sec-rep....
The logical conclusion is that the people controlling the church don't consider anyone outside the inner circle to be "their fellow man".
https://www.ncronline.org/news/germany-continues-payments-ch...
I assume there's still some standards for how those churches can use that money though; churches are not meant to be for-profit ventures. Though some of them (older ones especially) are quite rich. Younger churches tend to be poor.
The "church tax" is collected independently from that and it is a "paid" service the state offers to any public organization that falls into the same broad legal definition used for churches. As far as I understand the state actually makes a profit from the cut it keeps.
And since this is France, we of course have upped the game with a special region: Alsace Moselle.
Or is on the border with Germany and has been French or German in the last centuries as wars came and went.
Church there has a special status (taxes, payment of priests, religion at school, concordate with the Vatican, ...) that is historical and nobody ever got rid of it. There are also other specificities because of that, notably social security.
When colonists made it to the New World, who was there to educate the children? The Catholic missionaries and religious institutes founded schools and created whole districts to educate children (yes, even Native and Indigenous children such as we vilify them for in Canada.)
Parents would often have at least one child set aside to dedicate to the Church, as a priest and/or a professed religious. Children would enter the seminary, monastery, or convent. In return, those insitutions would care for the underprivileged and the powerless. Many monasteries provided services to the Church and to the general public: brewing beer, cultivating gardens, baking bread, you name it.
But as all these services and more are privatized and nationalized, it sort of makes the Church redundant, an NGO without purpose, if you're on the outside looking in. So why perpetuate non-profit status of these mere charities when the State can provide entitlements far beyond what meager donations can provide? It's definitely a Sophie's choice, when you get right down to it.
It’s not the states’ fault they choose not to.
[1] https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/05/24/the-finances-behi...
I'd expect a more diligently written article from an average ten year old.
I define "noticeable" as a measure of the Church's proportional amount of donations relative to its income or supposed amount of cash reserves.
At the same time, the Mormon Church spent 3.6 million dollars (6.7 million in today's dollars) in 2000 to lobby the state of California against LGBTQ protections. While that is clearly pennies (or less) for a fund that supposedly is over $100 billion, the point still stands.
If the Mormon Church stepped up during COVID, any Hurricane/Wildfire/Storm or similar times of need to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and a lot of that went to non-members, the Church would be shouting it from the rooftops "look how charitable we are! we help non-tithing members! we help the outside community!" but that didn't happen, did it?
They should be treated as charitable organisations at best, and then also held to those standards. Any church run as a business should not be considered a church at all.
(Disclaimer: I'm a member of a Dutch church, and I have no idea what our tax situation is.)
If nothing else it would keep them from actually saying "You must vote for X" and diplaying electoral posters.
It could even happen that somebody high in a decision chain ends up claiming "we don't care they can do whatever they want" which could be a minor scalndal.
You can’t, because the IRS steadfastly refuses to pursue these violations. I’m an active lifetime member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation; and through our organization these near-constant occurrences of political endorsement by churches have been reported numerous times. To no avail.
To make matters worse, clergy in the U.S. often receive a large portion of their income as a housing allowance which is not taxable, as I understand it. But the majority of course still take their mortgage interest deduction. It’s a racket.
The question becomes: Are the umbrella organizations paying the ministers just the bare minimum to keep them on? So if the tax breaks are stopped, will the church organization cover the new difference, or lose the ministers?
It might still be a racket where the ministers are also getting screwed. The benefit of the tax breaks may not go to the minister who receives the tax break, but instead benefit the archdiocese/convention/council/conference/synod/assembly/convocation/etc who pays
(Some Protestant churches do have national structures, true, but you’re not often hearing about Lutherans doing things)
But even if everyone tollerates the authorities turning a blind eye to the issue many would not tollerate the autorities making it an official policy or slipping up and saying stuff like "a church could run for office for all I care".
The state is protecting churches in ways it should not; you likely cannot defeat this protection, but you can put pressure on the state so that it will be harder/riskier to keep doing it.[1]
[0] at a trend level, or at least for the well connected churches with armies of lawyers.
[1] I must warn that this is close to declaring a war (on a very small scale) and as such you could come out in a worse position than when you started.
I grew up in the south and have been in different churches for most of my life. Outside of supporting soldiers and an occasional American flag in church I’ve only seen a preacher get political once in my entire life. Even that was roundabout too.
Yep.
Anti-Trump Example #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtrxQyf4XrM
Anti-Trump Example #2 (church leader was correctly fired for this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h098Z6g6pCE
Anti-Democrat Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1AlrvZr95k (Threatens to exile people who vote Democrat from the church)
Anti-Biden/Harris Example: https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-greg-locke-says-biden-demon-...
Pro-Trump/Pence Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d24BfefW8M
Local politics example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAcHN-dqpSc
I picked a variety for illustrative purposes. But there's a bit more to the stories: https://ffrf.org/news/news-releases/item/29320-ffrf-sues-tru... This type of "using the official church to endorse/condemn specific candidates and parties" happens all the time, and isn't limited to national politics.
From the size of a parking lot to whether a browser can be included in an OS. To express an opinion on such things is an act of political activism.
Abortion, gun contol, vim. Which one is not political? Which one is not a matter of religion?
I'm also open to discussions of a flat tax and abolishing food tax and lots of other tax ideas. Including allowing tax deductions for charitable giving and tax exemptions for lots of things. I'm ok with allowing some, but I see the room for abuse. We'll never eliminate all abuse and we'll never get everything exactly fair. But we can keep making tweaks in the never-ending pursuit.
The government setting itself up as "god" and interfering with religious liberty is a bit of a Rubicon.
I realize this doesn’t apply directly to taxation but we defer to religion in multiple ways in the law.
https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?re...
The ongoing societal cratering about us will only be hastened by levying taxes on them.
But perhaps that's the goal?
Religious institutions may be some kind of glue, but certainly not a moral one.
If you are funding a political campaign (not just any political speech, but an actual campaign) you have to be set up as a political campaign rather than a church.
> 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics....
In practice, churches are given quite a bit of leeway to engage in what any reasonable person would call political campaigning.
The statement is correct there but it’s not a constitutional thing it’s an IRS thing.
You either misunderstand or misstated. The entire reason they are protected is because of their political speech. They aren't supposed to be actively endorsing, funding, or participating in campaigning for a politician. Most everything else is fair game.
MLK was a Baptist minister.
You are mixing up three things as if they are the same. Opinions are fine.
But no, churches cannot run political campaigns. They are exempt as a religious organization, and in the U.S., religious organizations, like charitable organizations, exempt from income tax cannot participate in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate for public office.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was an American citizen capable of supporting any candidate he liked. His church was not. His church was, however, as all churches are today, able to lobby. Lobbying is not campaigning. Also, they were and are able to speak out for or against executive actions of the government. Doing so is neither lobbying nor campaigning; office holders are neither legislators nor campaigners; they are actually in office.
The only thing that prevents them from doing that is that they are a 501(c)(3). The Johnson amendment requires they not be politically active.
However, if a church decides to register as a 501(c)(4) they absolutely can endorse or condemn candidates tax free.
So why aren't they 501(c)(4)s? 501(c)(3) allows you to deduct contributions to such and organization from your taxes. 4 only gives a break to the organization, not their donors.
The bill of rights is a list of restrictions on the state by very definition.
Tax-exempt charities are prohibited from using tax-exempt funds to engage in certain kinds of political speech. Those that do electioneer or conduct lobbying, for example, have separate non-tax-exempt branches that handle it, with their own funds and strict financial firewalls separating them from the rest of the organization.
Churches, on the other hand, get to flout those rules all the time. And I do mean churches; other religions don't tend to enjoy quite the same latitude.
And that selective enforcement by the government is a separation of church and state issue.
The state should reflect the ethics of the people. Religious morality is a type of speech.
This is immaterial but just in case anyone assumes anything: I'm not personally religious.
Some skirt that line very closely.
If we are talking about law, you are right - the US limits on religious groups getting involved in politics are in the tax code, not in the establishment clause. If they are willing to give up their taxation privileges, they are allowed to participate in politics as much as they like. And, since the tax code is just a statute, Congress could change it to allow them to meddle in politics without losing those tax privileges, and I doubt such a tax law change would be held to violate the establishment clause.
However, “separation of church and state” is also an extralegal principle. And, maybe, too much involvement of religions in politics violates that extralegal principle even when it doesn’t violate the letter of the law.
Then read OPs comment. compare the general, nonuniversal statement they made about political advocacy vis a vis tax status laws in the United States, to the judgements you envisioned of religious people and yourself and your religion.
Virtually every nonprofit is run nearly the same way as a regular business. They still make profits, the only differences are restrictions around distributing income to owners and some mild accountability in how funds are spent.
Donations and equity raises are not taxable income.
Yes, it would make attracting capital harder. It would also make it implausible to ever consider leaving that business and doing something else if you're one of the owners.
> Any church run as a business should not be considered a church at all.
Churches are always businesses. It takes a lot of money to own and operate large buildings, pay people to work for the church, and operate events for churchgoers. Eventually they need to accumulate funds to expand and build new churches. It’s a business, like it or not.
The issue is that some of these churches have taken the original intent of the business supporting the church and turned it into a questionable structure where it appears the church supports the business. Having millions of “customers” worldwide who are obligated to give you 10% of their income every year and to allocate years of their life to traveling the world and convincing other people to join is one lucrative business model.
We can’t really go out and tell people what their religion can or cannot do (within the bounds of the law) but we can, and should, set some limits on the tax breaks we give to these religion-businesses.
The easiest way is obviously to set some limits or thresholds. “Tax exempt up to $1 billion in funds” is hard to argue with and would easily solve this problem.
For limits and thresholds, I'd suggest "No property tax for congregation/worship space up to $X per Y members, no payroll taxes for 1 person involved in services or charity work per Z members".
Most churches don't have millions of members. Mine has about 200. It's part of a larger denomination, but membership is through the local congregation. I suppose religions should have some freedom in how to structure this sort of thing (not all have their leaders chosen by their members, for example, and some are more top-down organised), but I also think it's fair to have some restrictions on the more business-like organisations in order to prevent abuse. And if people really do want a big, monolithic, top-down business-like organisation, they can always just pay their taxes.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong. It even sounds a bit dated to me. But that's the underlying reason.
By targeting their assets?!
Just a matter of tailoring the law in the right way. For example, if you want to hurt church X which has a large following among urban population, just increase taxes on noncommercial private buildings with seating capacity over 50 in areas where population density is over some number. And make allowance for exceptions, so you can claim the law doesn't discriminate, and it's their fault that they didn't get exception.
The fact that exception is impossible to get if people asking for it adhere to some creed is secondary. Even if they get it, the process can be made costly and painful to the point where they run out of money before.
Or you can go explicit in your intentions, and make a law targeting that particular faith by name. It has been done in the past, it is happening now. Look at middle-east for examples.
And you can go for categories too. Say you don't want any foreign religions popping up. Just raise taxes on all, and give exceptions or such to faiths that have over some number of citizen adherents. The possibilities are practically limitless once you accept that law is a tool.
Can’t think of a great example here from a religious perspective.
But there’s an interesting new bill in Florida that cedes control of very specific railways to the Florida Department of Traffic which would only affect the Disney World monorail this is part of the Florida governors battle with Disney. You could probably find similar ways to target religious buildings, businesses and other activities.
https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-senate-passes-tra...
I don't really see your point.
Interpretation can vary but thats not the same thing.
> For many Constitutional law scholars, last years' Dobbs decision on abortion rights at the Supreme Court came as a dismaying shock, because it showed conclusively that conlaw wasn't a realm of ideologically consistent intellectual foment, but rather, a matter of politics.
> Writing for Credit Slips, the finance law scholar Adam Levitin admits to feeling a bit of schadenfreude in that moment. The "blue collar" law scholars in "grubby" banking and money fields have always treated the conlaw set as "slightly clueless toffs"
Meanwhile in Belgium the government gives money to the Catholic church so it is able to survive.
It's honestly understandable in some of these countries, especially when you consider the deep interconnection many countries have with the church (take Rome as the quintessential example; how many of the tourist hotspots are just churches).
Happens all day long, just a little different and that is by allowing "story A" to be declared a religion, but "story B" not.
There are, of course different types of non-profit statuses but nothing special available to churches from a tax perspective.
As it stands any persistent form of power (corporate, religious, perhaps even academic) that seeks to further entrench itself will seek out forms of power such as a government or large multinational to ingratiate itself to.
Separation of state and anything else at all would probably have been the better doctrine to establish and follow, but oh well we’re screwed now
Would a person stop donating $1000 of their expendable wealth to their favorite cause (e.g., hunger, cancer, cloning hitler, whatever) if that $1000 donation no longer reduced their taxes by $200 (for example)? If so, what kind of person would do that? Probably not the kind of person who ever donates to anything in the first place.
Worst case, if there were no more tax-deductible charities: that person would pay the $200 taxes and only donate $800 (instead of $1000) to their favorite cause. Best case: Megawealthy would no longer leave $20 billion to their favorite cause (be that their dog, the LDS church, their love of oil drilling, or whatever), but would pay $5 in estate taxes and only have $15 billion leftover for their love of oil drilling (or whatever be their whim).
If a 503B puts its money into Microsoft stock, the profits that Microsoft makes are taxed. The capital gains the 503B gets wouldn’t get taxed when the stock was sold.
The main argument in the article, not fully stated, is that the Mormon Church doesn’t do enough beneficial works to qualify as a 503b. In the US, Churches are granted 503b status without specific reviews of their societal benefit. If you want to pay someone to operate a homeless shelter or ding a bell all day to prevent the end of times, it is all the same. This is part of separation of church and state as laid out in the constitution. If there was a specific review the State could “put its thumb” on the scales and favor some churches over others in granting non-profit status.
Churches, just like the local soccer club don’t have the same distribution requirements that a donor controlled 503b would have. For example if you are a billionaire and donate $1B of your appreciated stock to your donor directed fund you need to distribute 5% per year on charitable works to keep the 503b status. The article implies that the same requirement should apply to the Mormon Church that applies to a donor directed fund. This line of reasoning is incorrect.
A donor directed fund has substantially no other affiliated activity that has to be considered. This is more like Harvard’s endowment where there is a school controls the fund. In the case of Harvard, if the fund didn’t distribute anything in a year there still would be substantial educational work and research going on. In the case of a donor directed non-profit nothing would be happening. The Mormon Church argues that it operates more like Harvard and that the whistleblower did not have access to the larger organizations finances.
All global churches right now are facing a demographic cliff as wealthy nations are increasingly secular while most religions growth is in developing countries. In most cases Churches transfer a large amount of donations from wealthy countries like the US to less wealthy ones like Nigeria. In another 50 years many of those transfers will cease to be significant unless there is a religious revival in wealthier markets or a significant deviation in the number of children religious families have relative to the overall population in these countries. It is likely that many churches will need to wind down financial activities to be more aligned with the demographics.
This is the dirty little secret of billionaires' private foundations. That 5% has a lot of latitude and little oversight. For example, it includes administrative costs. A private foundation can pay each family member a salary (allowance) and that's a valid cost against the 5%.
As for the Mormon church (or any church for that matter) non-profits aren't meant to be politically active, as in campaigning for a particular party of candidate. We all know this happens all the time..
I'd be fine with keeping tax-deductability for contributions to complying non-profits. But why do they get to enjoy tax free status on, say, investment gains? Or income from investments (including property they own)? Get rid of that and I think a lot of problems go away.
Here's an example of a 503(c)(3) organisation (in politics often referred to as "dark money" organisations due to their lack of need to report the identities of individual donors) putting a family member on the payroll:
https://vtdigger.org/2018/07/29/sanders-institute-little-sho...
There's also the "buy from myself" tactic which possibly isn't that important for the Mormon Church but can certainly be used to boost apparent popularity or to change the format of money:
https://www.greenmountaindaily.com/2019/04/25/bernies-own-bo...
The same can be said for most charitable organizations. The community food pantry being taxed if it moves across town or simply trying to keep the rainy day fund even with inflation.
If a person is of the view that all good things come from the government then taxing charities makes a lot of sense. If, on the other hand a person believes that all good things originate from the people and that the government is just one of those good things it makes sense to allow room for other things that serve the people’s interests but don’t directly serve the governments interests.
I am certainly not saying that bad things don’t come from religious organizations, charities or the government. I am saying there is a belief in the US that power ultimately resides with the people. Actually with the people, not the government or through the government as representatives of the people.
Ahh ... Welcome to the real world. That's what I used to believe long back. Later I realized that most so called NGOs are just for lining up the pockets of the management, and to help them lead a luxurious life paid for by the NGOs 'administrative expenses'.
> David Nielsen says since it was created in 1997, the reserve fund has swelled beyond $100 billion …twice the size of Harvard's endowment or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. David Nielsen: You could solve big problems with $100 billion.
I get his point. But there is a counter argument too.
I have seen some business houses establish Trusts that own shares of various companies. The annual income of these trusts from interest, dividends and profits etc goes into various social activities.
This ensures that the organization will last for decades instead of spending all the money in one go. That allows them to take up long term projects was my understanding.
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The real issue is that the Church claims that they are investing money in humanitarian activities and the whistleblower says that they are not. But I think that the whistleblower might not have access to those accounts as those belong to the Church, he was with the investment arm.
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IRS might be looking to expand it's Tax base. Taxing Religious organizations can be a good rallying cry for Democratic voter base. After the rich and wealthy, go after the religions to raise more Taxes.
Mormonism is a money and political power squiring cult. 10% tithe payments is control.
He does clarify that in the interview: the money coming into the fund has never been used for any of that. It’s 150B stashed vs 1B/year that’s actually being spent on “humanitarian activities”.
The whole issue boils down to these two statements :
>Christopher Waddell: No, because then everyone would be telling us what they wanted us to do with the money.
> Last year the church says it spent over a billion dollars on humanitarian aid, including food production.
> Christopher Waddell: In any given month you may have an average of nine transfers going from Ensign Peak back to the church to fund all church operations. All humanitarian work-- education work, all the work of the church they fund.
> David Nielsen: Money's going in and out of the cash accounts all the time. But Ensign Peak's funds were never used for any charitable purpose, as to my knowledge the whole time I was there. So there's a bit of a distinction here that's important.
I just find it funny ( from what I understood of the article ) that they don't have to give any audit the accounts and submit to IRS.
Let them not get taxed as a religious organization.
But at least the money trail is something the IRS and Government should be made aware of.
So the SEC did what it does to hedge funds for failing to disclose, slaps them on the wrist with some fine less than 1%.
When you've done the rich & wealthy, you'll have already done most of the religions.
Ten years gulag for prostitution, and twenty for the much worse sin of being a nun.
In Utah it was well known and a topic of conversation so to speak that the church had invested so much money into a commercial venture. There also a segment in 60 minutes about the church bailing out an insurance company they control using these funds. It can really get under your skin coming from Utah, where I saw kids from my high school go off to central Africa essentially to convince people to pay tithing to the church, which we'd ostensibly see as not so bad given that it will help people. If it is the case, and if you've ever met some rich boomer Mormon dudes I can assure you it doesn't take a lot of convincing, look how they run our legislature, that the church took people's money, made a hedge fund, and now starts businesses which benefit... only they really know the completely details of... then it does not take much to feel outraged.
But I also the think the church at the very highest echelons consists of what are probably some very distinguished people who've seen a thing or two or feel a higher calling, that also does not seem far-fetched. I'd imagine being in charge of all that money is really something, having a little bit of a persecution and chosen-people complex is also something, as usual there are interesting social dynamics with Mormons.
lol. What is the logic behind this? Why makes religious organizations special?
State control over the church, and church control over the state, is a huge, massive, immense change.
Nothing comparable to any other legal change you've ever hear of.
Allowing a church to build a huge opaque financial empire is the sort of thing that leads to theses being nailed to doors.
Churches pay wage tax, land tax, fines, church leaders even sometimes go to jail. Churches pay purchase tax, take out insurance, although they don't cover acts of God..
Is this a mangling of Stalin's "how many divisions has the Pope?" The Vatican has not had a significant military since the war of Italian Unification ended in 1870.
The response to this is literally thousands of pages long. However, even reading recent, modern western/europeans history in depth (last 200 years), will give you more insight here.
As for "why is it still this way?", you would quite literally have to rip rights out of nations constitutions, re-assess endless past case history, get people to vote on it, and on and on.
There is literally no larger change you could pick, than changing the legal roles of church and state.
It's about hands off. Understand, the church (legally) predates, and is not controlled by the state in western legal case history and laws.
The church came first, not state.
Again, just describing how we got here.
Henry VIII would like a word.
People are still writing angry articles about the monarch being inextricably linked to the church in 2011: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-its-absurd-for-britain-t...
The Church of England is a state religion. It is part of the state (Crown), controlled by the state (King), and until the 19th century participation in it was effectively mandatory to participate in public life. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Acts)
it's not about, for example, a charter for a new religion you'd like to found.
Taxation, and subsequent compliance costs, serve as restrictions on such exercise.
When there are rules for everzone and only some organisations are excempt on religious grounds - then those religious organisation have an advantage over every not privileged organisation, making them effectivly state supported. Which I think should be indeed forbidden.
So the state can and should continue to support all kinds of social organisations. But on an equal and fair base.
I agree with you that it's not a golden cow, but I typically have to question posts like this one to get that admission. Claiming authority from the constitution when you don't believe in it is a cheap rhetorical technique to appear interested in historical America when you aren't.
The main conclusion I would draw is that we have no obligation of "fairness or equality" towards every religion. Our system was built to accomodate certain kinds and those that aren't in direct conflict, it seems a pretty good compromise that's hard to work around.
I think it's possible to establish reasonable accommodation, not full accommodation, which I think your second bullet agrees with.
The bigger issue is the rank corruption done in the name of religion or other "freedoms" that abuse communities and society at large.
Otherwise same rules for everyone, then you can have all the weirdest religions.
(oh and there is connection of communion and human sacrifice. In the catholic church you are eating the body of Christ. Of course metaphorical, but I think in dogma it says it actually transforms into christs body. But that's besides the point. The point is, religios freedom should not override basic laws. And if they do, but only for some religions, then they come close to being state religions)
The brand of humanism you are associating with is a much later development.
My personal taxes more directly deprive me of life, liberty, or property, as protected by the 14th amendment. Even without money, people can worship (which is what I assume "free exercise [of religion]" means).
Trying to interpret the words ourselves is not useful. Throngs of lawyers and judges determine what the words actually mean, what's enforceable.
Not necessarily. Jewish prayer requires a quorum of ten, and requires communal institutions for ritual baths.
A law such as "any property whose primary purpose is for religious observance shall be subject to an additional $x million/period 'religious property' tax" would clearly run afoul of the First Amendment.
Most people and courts accept that some taxation and services and property rights are fine for religions under the establishment clause.
This is not a case of "omg that guy supports the church!". This is a case of nation's founding documents, thousands of years of case law, court case after court case.
Even if every single (for example) American supported a change in the legal staus of churches/religions, it would take decades, for all state govenments, federal government, and hundreds of new pieces of legislation to be passed, to even get close to changing this status.
And that's with everyone on board.
And the same is true of the entire west.
The status of churches (and especially what counts as a valid "church" or "religion", especially non-Christian ones!) varies across the Western world. There is no one approach.
Yeah .. Nah.
Religions aren't generally exempt from taxation or immune to prosecution in Australia.
Those parts of a religions income that are used for charity can be exempt from taxation if the proper paperwork is filed and continues to operate in a transparent manner subject to audits, etc
> To access income tax exemption, a registered religious institution must be a registered charity and endorsed by us as exempt from income tax. [1]
Mind you Australia also recently and famously jailed a tier two 2iC Vatican official Cardinal George Pell so hardly a friend of the Church .. but a country generally agreed to be part of "the West" | "Global North" etc.
[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Non-profit/Getting-started/In-detail/...
I don’t understand why asking religious organizations to report their financial activities (especially the massive orgs that have the resources to do so, unlike teeny tiny 10 member churches) would be such a big deal. But hey, I am no constitutional or government scholar. I am just a dude sick and tired of a rigged system, what do I know?
Sounds like yesterday was too late then. The little good that comes from church is even these days overshadowed by how much they fuck with politics literally everywhere around the globe (= distorting elections in their favor, which means less progress/reversals and less human rights at minimum, and usually they go much further). Also their moral compass is constantly fucked up, they still are covering homosexual pedophilia on truly gigantic scale, as they were so desperately doing last 100 years.
Also, does church helps all people equally including other religions, unlike lets say "mother" Teresa who, apart from stealing millions $$ in donations was by many accounts very selective to whom to provide care, based on their religion and generally favored sick to suffer as much as possible, for some properly fucked up "christian" reasons. Some saint she was...
Lets face it, religions almost unanonymously lost god/God and the original simple ideas. I look at history, since talk is very cheap but 2000 years of walking the talk has actually some weight, I mean all the weight you ever need to make an opinion. In Christianity's case its properly trivial - you have literal 10 rules and thats it, the rest are fantasies of semi-lucid humans from bronze age or right after, that would often end up in insane asylums these days. How much mental gymnastics believers have to do daily to stick with all that bureaucratic/managerial/political/financial stuff and feel righteous and above everybody else is astounding. Also tiny fact - only 1/3rd of the world is christian. So maybe 110 billions of human souls burning in hell?
I think the smarter faithful ones realize these, so they do the usual - wrap it in "its not literal" mantra while church does exactly the opposite. And then cherry-picking some rules they like and ignoring the rest (like stoning to death non-virgin women during marriage or all gays which should include all pedophile priests, I know its old testament but since its not rejected part of christianity, its still valid). But now you created completely different sect my friends, just like Jesus(TM) created completely different sect of judaism (which is a sect of X and that's the sect of Y till we get probably to zoroastroanism or something similar, who knows what beduin tribes believed in during those times).
I simply can't, with straight face, being raised without faith (thus no childhood indoctrination thats extremely hard to shed), accept modern religions any more than I can accept say greek or roman mythology. Same type of moral stories, god(s) on par with original abrahamic god (vengeful, cruel, not caring), and lets be honest - if there is any God, it certainly doesn't completely change its personality just because somebody writes another book about it every millenium or so and claims to be his son/prophet/something. There is a million small and big facts against all this, and 1/3 books written by people millenia ago for it. Very easy to pick the side.
But then there's megachurches which are basically hedge funds.
That bit btw doesn't bother me either, so much as lack of transparency regarding political donations etc. Not American either so meh.
That doesn't mean he's wrong! I don't believe there is much debate about the main facts in the SEC suit anyway, so we know the church owns Ensign Peak, that Ensign peak has at least tens of billions in securities and that they distributed those to a bunch of shell companies so that they wouldn't have to report their holdings, primarily so as to avoid public resentment.
It's been out in the open for years. I was in SLC over a decade ago and there was this big shiny new mall that was completely owned by the Mormon Church.
I don't doubt that the Church gives some of its income towards legitimate charitable causes. But how much of that some in comparison to how much it spends on other things (like private businesses, political lobbying, land ownership for non religious purposes, etc.) is the real issue here....and I would guess the distribution skews heavily towards things that aren't exactly charitable or helpful for the poor and downtrodden.
The Mormon Church is nothing more than a social club that has a large for-profit investment arm.
Meanwhile, there is a constant drive to get people off the "dole" even if they are elderly or infirmed.
External humanitarian giving up until the first time this was pointed out a few years back was on the order of $40M per year. Not counting the free-will time and internal, grassroot fast offerings given to other members at a congregation level.
It's a bit sickening.
I get 0.06% in interest from my bank each year. Accounts in the billions, let alone tens or hundreds of billions probably get rates higher than 0.06%. Hypothetically, The Church donates part of the interest it earns on its account(s) and claims that money alone is enough because the pure dollar amount seems large to folks like you or I - $40 million dollars is a large amount of money and probably does help a lot of people....just not enough people that they could help but make the deliberate choice not to.
A bit sickening? This is a religious organization after all which is supposedly dedicated to improving humanity. It's more than sickening at this state - it's vomit-inducing.
The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries. Buddhist monasteries founded on non-violence became fortresses populated by warrior monks. Hindu religion perpetuated the caste system. And so on. No major world religion is exempt.
The LDS church is a curious speedrun of religion’s possibilities. Should we be esoteric? A state? A hedge fund? A polygamous matchmaker? A business networking opportunity? They seem to have tried everything in less than two centuries.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world, despite all of its problems due to consisting of deeply flawed humans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Works_of_R...
A proper bank, with historic ties to the Mafia.
Ireland used to be the most Catholic nation in the world; not anymore. Their faith was obliterated by the sex abuse scandal.
There is probably not a single country where the catholic church is not the best place for child sex abusers.
Well maybe Islam, as it is having Mohammed, who raped a nine year old girl, as their "Son of God".
The British colonization of Ireland was brutal, but it was corporeal. The spiritual colonization today, materially prosperous and comfortable, destroys the soul.
And I wonder if the parent above knows how protective these Jewish communities are of their own. They do not like to involve the state in their affairs.
So none of this is unique or even extraordinarily present in the Catholic Church.
[0] And by "child abuse", certainly in the Church, it is best described as a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. That is, 80% of abuse victims were post-pubescent teenage males.
*edit: looks like you're an order of magnitude off, the number is closer to 500k [0]
0 - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/08/26/a-portrait-o...
Actually, the Gospels make clear that Pilate found Jesus not guilty, and it was only the threat of a riot by the priests if he didn't crucify Jesus that he crucified him. It's still ultimately the religious authorities who order his death, and in this case, the state is at best acting as a tool of the religious authorities rather than in its own secular authority.
At that is just a small part of the history of the catholic church.
Edit: OP originally claimed that the inquisition killed 50 million people and then edited their response instead of providing evidence. That's better than nothing, but I think still illustrates that OP might have extreme biases when discussing the Catholic church.
Just google "inquisition" or the million other atrocious acts for the church. I don't wast my time doing the work for people who defend the most criminal organization in the world
It really doesn't help when you start your citation to this by comparing it to flat earth--no educated person in the Middle Ages would believe it to be flat; even the standard textbooks of the day (e.g., Ptolemy, Aristotle) would give you several proofs of its spherical nature. It's even mentioned on Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions, which is a clear sign you should purge it from your list of comebacks.
The article is written by someone on the left, whose point is served by magnifying the crimes of the Catholics (and minimizing those of the Muslims). Therefore, it's likely to have a generously large estimate of the death toll due to the Catholic Church. And it says:
The Crusaders themselves suffered; historians estimate that only one in 20 survived to even reach the Holy Land. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died in total.
Historians estimate that 150,000 people were put on trial by the Inquisition, with 3,000 executed.
I'm afraid that is a lot less than the usually estimated 6 million from Hitler alone, and far less than the tens of millions from Stalin and Mao.
The Crusades were also in response to the caliphate conquest which conquered Roman and Persian lands in the middle east and north africa
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t...
Edit: It’s not the goal of life to argue with bad institutions until they become slightly less bad . If an institution has a history of abuse of power or trying to get power trough violence it should be abolishe
edit: I think a poster upthread ninja-edited, making the parent look off.
Historically, churches treat money spent on themselves as "charity." There was an interesting discussion in Christianity Today a long while back about how, on the surface, it looks like Red state residents are more charitable than folks in Blue states -- but the difference was tithing to churches, which overwhelmingly consume those funds on operating their Sunday morning social club & related programming.
If you factored out that aspect, the comparison flipped dramatically.
One of those peculiarities as a religion born in America is the prophecy that when the US Constitution is hanging by a thread, the Mormon Elders will be asked to step in and save it. Saving up a ton of money for that day is in complete alignment of what they (quietly) preach. There is a prepper mindset fairly deeply attached to Mormonism.
I would doubt that this sort of prophesy is a genuine front-of-mind-concern today by the people running this operation at the church. Preparing for the second coming could be a more sincere answer coming from them, but if such an event were to occur I think it would make money worthless, so that doesn't make sense to me.
The concern is keeping the tribe going, and doing whatever it takes to optimize the tribe’s performance. Holding contradictory thoughts is just an inconvenience that can easily be tolerated, or even serve a purpose to weed out those less committed to the tribe. Note that even within the tribe, there can be multiple tribes, for example those of the leaders and those of the followers, who might have different goals.
As I don't know what you mean about the LDS in your first sentence, I don't know what you mean here. Where the Catholic Church is concerned, no change in doctrine can occur; it would invalidate the Church's claim of religious and moral authority. Doctrine can develop, of course. Analogically, I like to characterize this as something like an increase in clarity and depth of prior teachings, or deductions that follows from them, but never anything that innovates or contradicts prior comprehension. We could say that development is monotonic. However, doctrine is one thing, but things like liturgical practice and canon law are another (and still another are the private opinions of prelates, which less educated people may confuse with magisterial Church teaching). These can be adapted in changing circumstances, though obviously not with infinite flexibility.
In the case of Vatican II, it was a valid council and nothing taught in that council contracted what came before the council. Rather, historical circumstances, the cultural turmoil of that period, the resulting confusion, disorientation, corruption, etc. led to all sorts of secondary effects that seized on the fact of the Second Vatican Council. This left many people thinking the Church had changed in some essential way when it had not. Opportunists both inside and outside the Church happily used the appearance of change to promote fashionable nonsense and notions among the ignorant that were never taught by Vatican II. But from a historical perspective, one of many crises in Church history. No historically aware Catholic is freaking out, as dismayed as he may be.
Mystified isn't a strong enough wording to describe how people aren't rationalizing many aspects of the world's religions with all we know today.
The last 3 years events proved it beyond any doubt.
Joseph Smith didn't discover gold plates. He was led to them by an angel sent by God. The question of whether a decendant of inhabitants of Jerusalem could have buried some modified Egyption writings in North America 1000+ years before Joseph was born... that question is kind of small when considering if there is a God and if any such God takes a direct interest in individual people.
FWIW, I happen to believe that there is a God and that God cares very much about you.
Now, about that bridge...
As you go back through history, its understandable that earlier civilizations attribute things happening around them, or things they observe, to some higher power or having completely false notions of the world, like the earth is flat for example. And then humans come to a more accurate understanding via science. How many hundreds or thousands of deities/gods have humans attributed things to during our thousands of years of existence?
God or a higher being isn't the discussion point, the discussion point is how silly it is to think that something like being led to/discovering golden plates happened at that period of time.
The whole book has all sorts of interventions from God. Like every page is about God. If you're hung up on Egyptian writing you missed the whole point. That's the least incredulous part.
And some 18-year-old kid in the 1820s says an angel led him to these gold plates with all this modified Egyptian writing and God showed him how to translate it into English.
So this book is going to be a bunch of crazy nonsense, right? Read it. Seriously, read it. It is a better read than anything you did in your high school or college lit class. We can't have a decent critical discussion about the physics of it until you've read it.
I fell on tough times a few years back and my local Bishop insisted I take some aid, they gave me food for a few months from “The Bishop’s Storehouse”, basically a food bank for members. This is despite me being an inactive Mormon for twenty years or so. They care a lot about their members, even the ones who aren’t going to church.
Mormons are very clear about how they think things are going. What’s funny is the concern people outside the church have with all this.
Your wikipedia link is about some rumor started a half century after the founder was murdered. It's a bit like George Washington's cherry tree. It may be a well-known story, but it isn't part of the constitution or a motivation for any governing action.
I think it is entirely appropriate for the government of Sweden to build some security for a rainy day. I think it is appropriate for my neighbor to do the same. I don't see any reason why the local community church should not. So why should a multinational church be different?
I'm reading other headlines about whether US politicians will extend the debt limit in time. Wouldn't it be a relief if instead we criticized them for building too large a reserve?
That is a strong assumption not borne out by history. Destroying a system leaves chaos, and violent people thrive in chaos.
Better systems come about by incremental reforms and forgiveness for the undeserving.
What I'm advocating is an understanding of this process, and ensuring that systems get replaced before they collapse because our unwillingness to let them go. What I'm advocating is the opposite of chaos, it's controlled renewal.
Incremental reform is rationally a much better alternative, but in practice it doesn't always work, again, systems want to perpetuate themselves over time, so the only way in which they change is by collapsing. Also, sometimes what you need is not incremental changes but paradigm shifts. Another aspect, is that this assumes that we can always design systems on a top-down fashion, I think sometimes it's better to have an evolutionary trial-and-error process.
I guess what I mean to say is I'm not sure any of those you listed had strong philosophical or textual convictions against the counterpoints you provide. And even if they did at given points, that's not enough to judge the overall shape into some particular direction of "corruption"
If anything, I assert that religion is as much reflective of the society it serves, as it is causal. It is one of the primary engines of "True Things" for people, but it also needs to react to new "True Things" from other sources, and integrates them, to provide a more powerful explanatory framework. With some consideration for its own foundational priors and axioms, but even those become malleable given enough social pressure.
So in that light how can we be surprised that modern American incarnations of "Christianity" embrace capitalism as the yardstick for Goodness?
Trying to reverse-engineer a Matrix-transcending vision from a bunch of stories. Lacking any empirical reference or experimental method.
It's inevitably a mess.
Imagine if we did the same with science. We'd be quoting Einstein's holy scripture and illuminating circuit diagrams.
We do both of those things, so that's not what the problem is. Problem would be reinterpreting phlogiston theory to show how corrext it still is.
I'm not a fan of such generalizations, not least of all because the term "religion" is itself commonly thoughtlessly applied and vague. Every human being has a religion according to a technical reading of the term because every human being takes something as the highest good to which all others goods are subordinate and to which he offers some kind of worship. So the question isn't whether someone is religious, but what they are religious about, and then, how good and true their religion is, whether their religion is the best, whether it is the true religion, etc. (Shocking perhaps to the adherents of the blandness that is moralistic therapeutic deism.)
> The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries.
The Church never became a state (though I'm not sure what this is insinuating about the alleged teachings of Jesus). Those with authority in the Church have historically had both ecclesiastical authority and secular authority, yes, and this continues to this day (the pope is the prime example as he is both the supreme pontiff and monarch of the Holy See, and historically, has been the monarch of, e.g., the Papal States). But so what? There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that contradicts the notion of secular authority or that those in the Church might also have such authority. Indeed, it is in the teachings of Christ that we find the very distinction between and recognition of religious and secular authority and institutions in the first place (e.g., Matthew 22:21). The liberal notion of the separation of Church and State is just an exaggeration of this distinction (which is why liberalism is, quite literally, a Christian heresy). You cannot make sense of this distinction outside of the broader Christian tradition. This is probably one reason why American attempts to spread the Gospel of Liberal Democracy have generally been hamfisted failures in other civilizational contexts. In any case, the state is a natural institution according to the natural law and a necessary institution.
Here's an interesting explanation of the significance of the Holy Roman Empire that you and others might find interesting[0].
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/12/what-was-holy-roman...
https://www.deseret.com/faith/2023/5/14/23649253/cbs-60-minu...
https://www.ksl.com/article/50646052/opinion-whats-behind-am...
https://www.christianpost.com/news/mormon-church-fined-5m-fo...
fine was only $5m, but it's on record that they're violators
University endowments are hedge funds too -- they have universities instead of churches attached to them.
The funny thing about this whistleblower is that he has a twin brother named Lars. They both filed this letter about 3 years ago. The fact that it was picked up by mainstream news is actually quite surprising given I lived in Utah majority of my life and none of this stuff made headlines.
"In recent years, there has been a notable shift in online activity from the Social Graph, where users connect and interact with their friends and family, to the Content Graph, which emphasizes the discovery and consumption of the latest and most engaging content.
This transition has changed how people use social media, with many users prioritizing content consumption over social interactions. The focus is now on viral videos, memes, and trending news from unknown sources. No longer do we spend our days reading the personal updates and activities of friends and acquaintances."
(It retains a highly circuitous and squiggly-line but unbroken link to the Roman Empire!)
>Christopher Waddell: Well, we don't feel it's being secret. We feel it's being confidential.
This line ROFL. Seriously, how can you listen to someone talk like this and not think they are completely deceitful?