LIKE A STURDY SENTINEL IN THE FINE, FRAGILE SUNSHINE AT THE southern edge of Salt Lake City, an enormous, multistory grain elevator rises, with fifteen barrels painted pure white. Inside is 400,000 pounds of wheat that is not to be moved, sold, or given away. The goal is to have in storage at this and other locations 100 pounds of grain for every LDS man, woman, and child worldwide, a church guide says proudly. It is supposed to be rotated every four years. This is a reserve to be used only in time of need.
What sort of need? “If things got bad enough so that the normal systems of distribution didn’t work,” says a friendly bishop at Welfare Square. “If those other systems broke down, the church would still be able to care for the poor and needy.” The “bad enough” relates to the church’s millennial teaching that before the imminent return of Christ there will come a time of terrible worldwide chaos. That same belief is enshrined in many sectors of conservative Protestantism, minus grain elevators. But “bad enough” can also refer to an ordinary disaster such as flood, earthquake, or even just plain poverty.
Around the corner from the enormous grain silo is something called the “Bishop’s Storehouse.” It looks a bit like a supermarket except that the shelves are filled with products carrying the brand label of Deseret, referring to the special Mormon synonym for honeybee. Deseret Industries is a far-flung organization owned by the LDS Church that produces goods to take care of poor people, its own, and others. There are Deseret-brand hand soaps and laundry soaps, canned peaches from the church’s cannery in Boise, beans from the church’s bean farms in southern Idaho, spaghetti sauce from the church’s plant in Mesa, Arizona, peanut butter from the church’s peanut butter facility in Houston, apples from church-owned orchards in Idaho, and bread, cheese, milk, pudding, cottage cheese, fruit drinks, and butter, all from yet another facility just a few blocks away.
These goods come from the 87 canneries and the extensive network of ranches and farms owned by the church. The products are transported by a large fleet of trucks, also owned by the church, and distributed at 106 Bishop’s Storehouses and 48 Deseret Industries stores belonging to the church around the country. Some of the beef is from cattle born on Mormon land, fattened on Mormon farms, slaughtered in Mormon slaughterhouses, and packed in Mormon packinghouses before being shipped to Mormon storehouses. The goods become part of the church’s own private welfare system, staffed largely by volunteers from church wards who in a typical year log almost 270,000 man-days of labor. All of this is consumed daily in massive quantities by tens of thousands of Mormons and non-Mormons alike who have fallen on hard times.
Welfare Square, refurbished in 2001, is really just a tiny cell in a much larger organism, the church’s mixture of for-profit, nonprofit, charitable, and ecclesiastical holdings. This just might be the most efficient churchly money machine on earth. The welfare plan is one of the Mormon Church’s most intriguing sectors, unique in concept and scope among the religions of America.
Also unique is the broader economic pattern of the Mormon empire. What makes the LDS Church distinctive is not just the amount of money coursing through its congregations each week—though that is also singular for the size of the denomination—but the church’s heavy investments in corporate enterprises. The research for this book produced an estimate that its investments in stocks, bonds, and church-controlled businesses were worth $6 billion as of 1997, and that church-owned agricultural and commercial real estate then had a value of an additional $5 billion. Asked for guidance, one insider told us that those figures “do not appear unreasonable.” The worth of other categories of assets: U.S. meetinghouses and temples, $12 billion; foreign meetinghouses and temples, $6 billion; schools and miscellaneous, $1 billion. The estimated grand total of LDS assets, by a conservative reckoning, would be $25–30 billion. If assets have appreciated as much as they should have in recent times, the figure could go well beyond that.
Yet another LDS trademark is the system of membership tithing that brings in what we project as offerings of $5.3 billion a year, though one knowledgeable source thought $4.25 billion might be a safer estimate. Stocks and directly owned businesses produce perhaps $600 million more in cash income. The estimated yearly annual revenues total $5.9 billion, or by the more conservative reckoning, just under $5 billion. Per capita, no other religion comes close to such figures. (The method for reaching all these estimates is explained in Appendix B.)
Several factors underlie the LDS Church’s prosperity. It has a form of sacred taxation like no other: members are obliged to give a tithe (10 percent) of their income to the church in order to gain access to temples and to participate in the holiest ordinances of salvation and exaltation. The salaried staff is not large, and the performance of most duties by part-time unpaid volunteers cuts operating expenses to the bone. The highly centralized control and flexibility of the system enable leaders readily to modify money flow and alter policies so that current income matches programs. Finally, by all accounts the businessman-apostles maintain effective administrative controls that minimize waste and maximize efficiency.
The strict secrecy with which the hierarchy guards the financial facts is unique for a church of this size. Officials refuse to divulge routine information that other religions are happy to provide over the phone to donors or inquirers. Outsiders’ money estimates always raise disclaimers from officialdom, presumably because of the danger that fat-looking figures might weaken members’ tithing compliance. This has led to a cat-and-mouse game with various journalists who have attempted over the years to unveil the vast empire of corporate Mormonism.
When the estimates given here were first sketched out in a 1997 Time magazine cover story, the managing director of the public affairs department at LDS headquarters made this formal reply: “Leaders of the church were disappointed that you created a false impression of the church’s income and wealth. Your estimates were greatly exaggerated. The church’s income is not nearly what was reported. Also the church’s assets are primarily money-consuming assets and not money-producing.” Of course, this spokesman did not provide even the vaguest hint as to what was wrong and what the truth might be, either then or in response to a further inquiry for this book.
It was not the first time the church had reacted swiftly, and negatively, to a money piece, nor was Time the first to make such an attempt. In 1962 Esquire magazine ran a cover story and in 1974 two reporters at the Idaho Falls Post Register took a stab at it. In 1978 Los Angeles-based reporter Jeffrey Kaye tried to expose the western ranges of the Mormon financial empire for New West magazine in a piece titled “An Invisible Empire: Mormon Money in California.”
A few years earlier Kaye had interviewed N. Eldon Tanner, the man credited by observers with dragging the church into the era of modern finance after a liquidity crisis in which bank balances hit a dangerously low level. (It was at that point that the church stopped giving its members summary financial reports.) The interview, recounted by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley in America’s Saints (1984), became an unavoidable enticement to investigative journalists looking for a challenge. Church money figures are “never disclosed,” said Tanner. They used to be, said Kaye. “Yes, years ago.” Why not now? “We just didn’t think it was necessary.” How do you respond to critics, then? “We don’t respond!” “You don’t respond?” Tanner concluded, “We respond by silence.”
By the early 1980s the researcher John Heinerman, then Mormon, and the sociologist Anson Shupe mounted what remains the most detailed attempt. Using extensive material provided by church insiders (in one incident, Mormon security tossed Heinerman out of an archive), the two published their account in The Mormon Corporate Empire (1985). Understandably this book was deeply resented by the church, not only for its financial disclosures—which in most cases were probably quite accurate—but for its conspiracy theory according to which the church wanted nothing less than to take over America in preparation for the 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ.
In 1991 the daily Arizona Republic threw half a dozen reporters at the problem for more than six months, and while the effort produced a major newspaper series, the reporters could only scratch the surface. Though lacking Heinerman’s internal records, the team unearthed lots of interesting material as they combed property records in 120 counties and 22 states. The result was a finely detailed look at many properties and commercial developments the church holds. The church also declines to list its employee total but the Salt Lake Tribune in 2002 estimated it as Utah’s biggest employer with a payroll of 33,355 (including BYU). The piece reported a recent and unusual cut of 600 staff slots, indicating a dip in income.
It is simply impossible to tally Mormon assets or income with accuracy, just as it would be to try to figure out the finances of a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation without access to inside accounts. The only writers to get such a glimpse were Heinerman and Shupe, who clearly got some of the goods on such specifics as church bond holdings but provided only a partial view of the Mormon entity. Shupe has said the book’s estimate of $8 billion in church assets as of 1983 was intentionally very conservative. “We were easily 30 percent low,” in which case a better estimate back then might have been $11 billion or more. Shupe thought church assets might be in the “$20–30 billion range,” but admittedly he had not worked on the topic in years.
The data that investigators do get their hands on, as Arizona Republic editors told the New York Times, can be “incomplete, partly outdated and sometimes contradictory.” When reporters locate what they think is a solid number, it has often turned out to be wrong. Esquire ran with a wild guess by the non-Mormon mayor of Salt Lake City, who put church income at $1 million a day, or $365 million a year, as of 1962. D. Michael Quinn saw the actual figure for that period—$100 million—so Esquire was off by 350 percent.
The church vigorously denounces and discredits any attempt to estimate its finances. When the Arizona Republic estimated income from tithing and other sources at $4.7 billion, of which $4.3 billion came from the tithe, the church public affairs department said this was “grossly overstated,” just as Time had “greatly exaggerated” six years later. Quinn, who spent many years poking around Mormon archives during his years on the BYU faculty, said it’s hard to see $4.3 billion as a gross exaggeration. Using the known tithing revenues from 1952 to 1962 as a baseline, Quinn wrote that “the church’s tithing revenues for 1990 would be far in excess of $4.3 billion. From this perspective that estimate seems conservative.” Adjusting for inflation from Quinn’s account, Time’s $5.3 billion in tithing revenue is nearly reached or even seems low, and that assessment was made without even considering the huge membership growth—assuming, of course, that most of the converts remain steadfast in the faith and in making the expected contributions to it.
To gauge the unusual nature of LDS investments, consider a denomination of similar U.S. membership, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The ELCA holds only the portfolio of stocks and bonds that covers employee pensions, and in 1997 that amounted to only $152 million, compared with the billions in direct Mormon investment. Like most large denominations, the ELCA spends most of the contributions it receives on a combination of charity, real estate maintenance, and staff salaries. “Our stewardship is not such that we grow the church through business ventures,” remarked ELCA Pastor Mark Moller-Gunderson when told that his church was being compared with the LDS Church. Typically churches spend most of what they take in and maintain modest “rainy day” margins.
Not so the Mormons. Their enterprises range from a $16 billion insurance company to perhaps $6 billion in stocks and bonds, if not more. There’s a $172 million chain of radio stations (seventh-largest in the country). The church’s more than 150 farms and ranches, including America’s largest cattle ranch, make it one of the largest landowners in the nation. The farms and ranches encompass somewhere in the neighborhood of one million acres, roughly equal to the size of the state of Delaware.
The talented church managers run a tight and profitable financial ship and can spend the cash any way they choose. They are not held accountable to the unquestioning flock in any way. The officials make their investment decisions in secret and report no dollar figures to anyone outside of the group of white-haired, life-tenured gentlemen at the top. One thing, however, is known. The church is on a building binge of historic proportions, part of an attempt to match its burgeoning global membership. It is building 350 meetinghouses or chapels each year and has 124 of its trademark temples in operation, with more in planning. Large temples cost $18 million or so a pop. All of this is financed with cold, hard cash. The church tells its members to avoid debt, and it practices what it preaches.
Thoughtful Saints might wonder whether the church should spend more of its assets on programs that benefit the membership rather than further enriching an already huge financial base. The Hinckley-era campaign for new temples and meetinghouses is a step in that direction.
The scars of history lie behind much of the church’s management system, which from the beginning was secretive, hierarchical, and authoritarian. It had brushes with bankruptcy in Ohio in the late 1830s, in Utah at the end of the nineteenth century, and—unknown to the membership—that hidden crisis shortly after the church released its last public accounting of expenditures in 1959. Although the subsequent cutoff in financial information was never explained, there was no grumbling from the compliant membership.
The church’s leaders may be amateurs in theological training, unlike top bureaucrats of other churches, but many of the highest authorities were successful businessmen before becoming full-time church officials and are fully able to provide professional financial guidance. And then, too, in the Mormon system there is that large amount of free administrative and mundane labor from lay volunteers at the lower levels, which remains a huge cost-saving factor.
The heritage of pioneer self-reliance remains significant. Brigham Young once said, “The kingdom of God cannot rise independent of Gentile nations until we produce, manufacture, and make every article of use, convenience or necessity among our people.” Present-day President Hinckley has echoed this: “Our commercial properties are largely the outgrowth of our pioneer enterprises…. In the early days of the church, the church had to step in to fill a void that existed.” Said Republican Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, whose grandfather was a church president, “In Brigham Young’s day the church was the only source of accumulated capital in the territory. If anything was built it had to be built by the church because no one else had any money.”
Accordingly, the church owned virtually every enterprise of any size, and the cultural byword was, even then, self-reliance. In the nineteenth century this took the form of cooperative communitarian economics. What emerged often looked very much like complete vertical integration, with the church owning every step of the production process. So busily did it involve itself in the economy of the pioneer West that, by Quinn’s estimate, during the first century of corporate Mormonism the ranking General Authorities were partners, officers, or directors in more than 900 different businesses, ranging from banks (48) to lumber companies (34), newspapers and magazines (60), mining firms (55), railroads (55), and hotels (9). A conglomerate from its first such opportunity, the church has always preferred to marshal and invest its own capital—with varying degrees of success—for reasons related both to pioneer survival and to its heritage of millennial and apocalyptic theology.
Church officials extended a degree of cooperation to Time correspondent S. C. Gwynne when the magazine was producing its 1997 cover story. Though authorities would disclose neither specific amounts invested in enterprises (unless regulatory requirements had made this information publicly available) nor total assets, tithes and other contributions, or investment income, they did agree to talk about how many enterprises of what type they managed. They also discussed the church’s internal structure and what bodies or persons controlled which companies and investments.
Gwynne was generally impressed by the scrupulous integrity as well as business acumen of those guiding church finances. Of course, the wall of secrecy would tend to prevent outsiders from divining any lapses of fraud or ineptitude that can occur in a large organization in which administrators manage large sums of money and decisions are affected by fraternal trust. As with other denominations, the top LDS leaders have a modest lifestyle compared with executives holding secular corporate responsibilities.
It is unfair to characterize corporate Mormonism as a runaway beast with a voracious appetite for gobbling up as many American assets as possible, as some have suggested. The truth is that, despite its expanding membership, the LDS Church has been steadily divesting itself of various businesses since World War II. In the past four decades the church has bailed out of banking and hospitals and sold off manufacturing operations.
That is not to say that the church is not in a mild expansionary mode. It is growing assets like its radio stations cautiously and conservatively. It is acquiring new farm and ranch land, also cautiously. Nevertheless, Hinckley has ordered the General Authorities, who used to acquire a handy form of personal income by sitting on many corporate boards, to relinquish these posts, a major change in how the church relates to the business community around it. In effect, the General Authorities have shifted focus to concentrate on managing the global growth of the church.
A perfect example of the church’s business professionalism is Rodney H. Brady, president and CEO of Deseret Management Corporation, a holding company for virtually all of the church’s commercial enterprises. Like many other high-ranking church officials, Brady has both extensive experience as a Mormon-style lay clergyman and an extensive worldly background. Holder of a Harvard business doctorate, he is former vice president of Hughes Tool, executive vice president of the pharmaceutical giant Bergen Brunswig, and onetime assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The businesses Brady oversees employ about 2,500 people (more during harvest). No church tithe money flows into these enterprises. Agribusiness functions under two other Deseret holding companies, AgReserves and AgriNorthwest; about 150 farms and ranches are owned by the church. Of these, about 100 serve its welfare system while 50 operate on a for-profit basis, though Deseret reported in early 1999 that there were then only 25 commercial operations. (The exact number of for-profit properties varies as land is shifted between welfare use and commercial use.) The for-profit operations pay government taxes as well as a 10 percent tithe on operations that is given back to the church.
All this adds up to a sizable operation. One holding is the 312,000-acre Deseret Ranch outside of Orlando, Florida, the largest cattle operation in the United States, larger even than the famous King Ranch of Texas. Based on recent real estate transactions in Brevard County, the land is worth $858 million. The church owns one of the largest potato producers in the country, is the largest producer of nuts through its farms in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and has extensive orange and grapefruit holdings in Florida and corn and apple production in the Northwest. One of the church’s many cattle ranches in the West, Deseret Ranch on the Utah-Wyoming border, exceeds 200,000 acres.
Life insurance sold exclusively to Mormons is a vestige of an earlier era when the church set up companies to provide services no one else would or could. Deseret Management owns several insurance companies, including Beneficial Life, Continental Western Life Insurance Company, Pacific Heritage Life Insurance Company, Western Life Insurance Company, and Utah Home Fire Insurance Company. Beneficial Life is by far the largest, with $16 billion in insurance and assets of $1.6 billion. Beneficial is now run as a purely commercial concern and insures many non-Mormons.
The church’s media holdings include Bonneville International Corporations, which owns twenty-five radio stations, a television station, and other media enterprises. Bonneville sales in 1996 were $172 million. Bonneville donated an impressive $35 million to community services in 1996, according to the Radio Business Report.
Presiding Bishop H. David Burton, the top LDS financial officer despite his pastoral-sounding title, saw these media outlets as giving the church a voice in the community, not only to disseminate ordinary news and information but also to speak on moral issues. “We have had a number of opportunities to pick up Howard Stern and dismissed them immediately,” he said. “That’s just not our style of broadcasting.”
Bonneville also owns Salt Lake City’s 73,000-circulation Deseret Morning News, a daily that recently built itself a fancy new building using $15 million of its own reserves (no tithe funds). Church authorities formerly ran the paper with an iron fist but no longer even sit on its board, and recent editor John Hughes, former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, was non-Mormon. Through Deseret Management the church operates a sizable chain of U.S. bookstores.
Through a number of subsidiaries, the church is quite active in real estate apart from temples, chapels, ranch, and farm land. In Salt Lake City the Hotel Temple Square Company owns several pieces of real estate in and around Mormon headquarters buildings; other property is held through Zions Securities, a real estate management and development company. The Arizona Republic in 1991 estimated the church’s Salt Lake City holdings at more than $137 million. The church also owns various properties in other states, including office buildings in California, Florida, and Arizona and 24,000 acres of land in places like Jackson County, Missouri—where Mormons believe Jesus Christ will return and reign—held for what Brady called “special purposes.”
A company called Hawaii Reserves manages extensive LDS real estate development in Hawaii that includes the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC): the 2,000-student Brigham Young University-Hawaii (BYUH); and Hawaii Resources, Inc. (HRI), a development company in Laie. HRI, a subsidiary of Deseret Management, operates a shopping center, has some business and residential real estate holdings, and provides the 7,000 residents of the Laie community with road and utility services.
Together these church-owned companies have a profound impact on the economy of the island. The LDS Church was expected to spend more than $1 billion there in the 1990s, a projection made by the church in 1995 based on the $100 million invested in 1994 alone. They provide more than 3,400 jobs in Hawaii. The Polynesian Cultural Center provides 1,100 jobs, 600 of which are held by BYUH students. According to the church, the non-profit PCC has contributed more than $150 million to BYUH since 1963, making it one of the country’s leading corporate supporters of education.
The Polynesian Cultural Center is one of the more intriguing Mormon investments, in part because it demonstrates so clearly how the church chooses to use its temporal investments to further its religious goals. Located thirty-two miles from Waikiki, this forty-two-acre park contains replicas of seven different types of Polynesian villages and attracts one million visitors a year, making it one of Hawaii’s premier attractions. Like some latter-day Disney, the church also owns the Laniloa Lodge resort as well as a significant amount of residential housing and the local sewer and water systems.
Working through BYUH, next door to the park, the center provides legal employment for student converts from the Pacific Rim who lack U.S. green card residency work permits. Adults visiting the park spend on average between $44 and $59 a day; children spend $30 to $39. Official earnings are not published, but this suggests revenue in the range of a minimum $40–45 million a year.
The rest of the church’s holdings, outside of Deseret Management, consist of its stock and bond investment portfolio; its meetinghouse and temple real estate; its educational holdings, including BYU in Utah, Hawaii, and Idaho, a BYU center in Jerusalem, the LDS Business College in Salt Lake City, hundreds of seminary and institute buildings, and a smattering of secondary schools in places like Fiji and Samoa; the ranches and farms in its welfare system; miscellaneous commercial and real estate holdings around the country; and “special purpose” real estate such as its genealogical archives, libraries, and historical properties.
If the LDS Church were a U.S. corporation, by revenues it would rank around the midpoint number 243 on the Fortune 500 list. (Revenues are the best standard of measurement. Ranking a religious body by assets has little meaning since so much is locked into purely religious-use real estate.) The church’s gargantuan assets dwarf anything in that revenue class. If one were to add in the gross revenues of all church-controlled business entities (more in keeping with the Fortune 500), the total would be vastly higher.
As for comparison with religious bodies rather than corporations: the Seventh-day Adventists, with a similar global membership, reported total revenues of $1.6 billion. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with a similar U.S. membership, had $1.7 billion in revenue for 1995 versus the Mormons’ estimated $4.9 billion in U.S. income the same year, making the LDS Church nearly three times as rich on a per-member basis.
How does the church spend its money? Assets were not revealed in the last financial accounting to be issued, but Arrington and Bitton summarized 1958 expenditures in The Mormon Experience: ward and stake buildings and activities, $28,313,005; schools and education, $15,508,502; missions, $13,034,893; welfare, $6,881,667; construction and operation of temples, $2,756,550; general administration, $2,264,940; central church buildings, $1,242,913; genealogy, $1,748,831; men’s and women’s auxiliaries (spending from their funds), $664,625; other, $378,380. Total expenditures for 1958: $72,794,306.
Though conditions have changed markedly since 1958, the breakdown of major priorities might be somewhat similar today. The cost of church-wide administration remains low, as is typically true for religious denominations.
President Hinckley was emphatic in pointing out that most of the church’s assets are “revenue-consuming and not revenue-producing.” True enough. Like other religions, the LDS Church spends its money largely on buildings for worship and fellowship, education, missionary programs, maintenance of existing structures, and welfare for its own members and others. But as it invests in temples and meetinghouses, the church shores up its potential base of tithing income. And then there’s that investment portfolio. Church doctrine encourages members to set aside money and food reserves, and “the church practices what it preaches,” said David Burton. “Do we net to zero? No, we don’t net to zero.”
The main source of revenue, the tithes, comes directly into Salt Lake City. Said Former Sunstone editor Elbert Eugene Peck, “All dollars go to headquarters, and then headquarters disburses it. The collections are taken on Sunday, and by Monday the church knows every cent it has collected and calls go out to bishops to make sure the money has been deposited in banks.” Burton confirmed this, saying that all Mormon finance is “centralized” in Salt Lake City. Fast offerings stay a bit more local: they are collected and used for the welfare needs of local stakes.
A tithing dollar raised in the Philippines becomes just part of the church’s general funds. As a practical matter, of course, some of that tithe money raised in Philippine pesos will be spent in Philippine pesos, and therefore the church would have local currency accounts in Manila. Tithes go into a number of consolidating bank accounts around the world, from which the Mormon financial managers can make money go where they need it to go. That is partly because the church is growing at such a breathtaking pace, and this growth has put enormous strains on the Mormon financial and organizational structure.
The church has handled this growth by, in effect, completely retooling itself as though it were a multinational corporation. President Hinckley, faced with the exponential growth of the church, shifted local-level financial decision-making, including especially building projects, to headquarters in Utah. More recently part of the burden of local maintenance funding has been returned to the wards.
This global growth, of course, transfers much church wealth from the developed world to the developing world, especially Latin America, where the expansion is particularly successful. The wealth moves generally in the form of building projects and not, as one might expect, in welfare from congregations in the United States to congregations overseas. Since welfare fast offerings are retained at the local level, this means that fast offerings in the Philippines are made to help Filipinos. Furthermore, converts to Mormonism may not be middle-class, but they think they are middle-class and are usually literate, so their self-reliance and belief in work are not altogether different from the beliefs held by a Mormon in Bountiful, Utah.
Perhaps the most interesting problem the church faces is how to maintain such a far-flung multinational organization and still control its home base. After all, this was a church that for years was largely located in Utah and a few western states. It had a very homogeneous membership.
“They’ve got a couple of problems,” said venture capitalist Bradley Bertoch. “First, the church needs to recruit labor to drive their business growth beyond the borders of Utah and the United States. But at the same time they have to make sure they don’t lose control of the home ground. If you are a multinational company, you face the same problems of resource allocation in new markets. The difference, of course, is that it’s all much easier if you have the tether of brotherhood.”
One of the guiding principles of Mormonism is self-reliance, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the church’s remarkable welfare system. The church teaches that if a person encounters hard times, his first duty is to solve the problem himself. If he cannot solve the problem, he is directed to look to his extended family for help. If he still cannot solve his problem, he is to ask his bishop for the church’s help. By church precept, only as a last resort is he to go to the federal government, understood as a sometimes necessary evil. Avoiding outside help as much as possible applies to good times and lean. It is the reason the church maintains those huge grain silos. No matter how hard times get, it can still feed its own. In this sense, it can seem as militantly self-sufficient as any militia-survivalist with a bunker in his backyard—except that Mormons believe in sharing rather than guarding a hoard with a gun.
When a person comes to the church for help, a large and highly efficient church-run system kicks in. Facilities have paid professionals as necessary, but most of the labor in the storehouses, all those canneries, and even some of the agricultural operations, the sixty-one social service centers, and the well-patronized Deseret Industries thrift stores, comes from Mormon ward volunteers. Many Mormon couples joke about having furnished their first homes with “Early DI.”
Volunteer labor not only stretches the philanthropic dollar but solidifies church ties as members work together. And possibly most important, it helps the church remain truly independent of any government or corporation. It can grow its own food, process it, can it, ship it. There are, of course, some items it does not produce, such as plastic garbage bags, but these are not deemed necessary for survival. Anyone interested in survival should check out the church’s prodigious bean-growing and-processing capabilities.
Does the Mormon welfare system actually work? The best assessment an outsider can make is that, yes, it seems to. A recipient of Mormon welfare may be paid in cash or may be given coupons he or she can use in a Bishop’s Storehouse for some of those Deseret-brand foods. All Mormons are supposed to receive monthly visits from ward “teachers,” an office in the lay priesthood, and these teachers can help bishops and relief society presidents assess member needs. Everything a welfare recipient receives is controlled by the bishop, who has complete flexibility to deal with the church member as he sees fit. It is not unusual for the church to help a church member finish an education or receive vocational training if that is deemed the problem.
Above all, what is stressed are permanent, not temporary solutions, and welfare recipients are almost always asked by the church to do something in exchange for the help they receive. The church’s employment offices are another important part of this system. In 1996 they placed 47,239 people in gainful employment.
According to Keith McMullin, a General Authority who oversees the welfare system, “the average recipient gets aid for two and a half to three months. The average cash value of the aid is $300. A good portion of that comes in the form of commodities.” McMullin added that less than 5 percent of the church’s membership in the United States and Canada uses the system today; 25 percent did so during the Great Depression, when the system was started.
With its emphasis on self-reliance and meticulous attention to detail, there may be no charitable organization on earth to match the Mormon Church, pound for pound, volunteer for volunteer. It works as well as it does in part because of its unusually high degree of vertical integration. The Mormons grow the peaches, can the peaches, ship the peaches, distribute the peaches, and, yes, eat the peaches, but not before actually working in the store to help pay for their welfare by, among other things, stacking the peaches. Another reason the Mormon welfare system works so well is that, though the goal is not profit but philanthropy, it is run very much like a business.
The welfare system is funded out of the fast offerings, in lieu of eating two meals, that Mormons give the first Sunday of each month in addition to their tithe. These funds stay local until they meet the needs of the ward. Once local needs are met, they flow to higher levels to be used elsewhere. “Elsewhere” could be humanitarian aid virtually anywhere in the world. Some production takes place on church property outside the United States. Zimbabwe, for example, is home to church-owned farmland, and there is a spanking-new cannery in Yerevan, Armenia, for the use of church members and volunteers.
Nonfood items are packaged in south Salt Lake City’s Humanitarian Sort Center to be shipped for international humanitarian aid: reconditioned medical equipment and sewing machines, school supplies and blankets, thousands of tons of secondhand clothes for poor people, and disaster relief. As with other charities, the Sort Center seeks donated goods from businesses as well as individuals for these projects. Once largely dependent on distribution networks of other churches and charities outside the United States, the LDS Church is increasingly developing its own channels.
In the fourteen years from 1984 to 1997, the church said, it made a total of $30.7 million in cash donations to non-Mormon humanitarian aid (not counting the worth of commodities and goods shipped) in 146 countries, including the United States. Its efforts have included responses to flooding in the U.S. Midwest (1993), the earthquake in Kobe, Japan (1995) and the Korean crop failure (1996–97). In 1997 there were 1,272 welfare (as opposed to evangelistic) missionaries serving two-year terms in the United States and abroad. LDS cash donations for humanitarian aid in 1997 totaled $4.6 million. A report for 2005 listed distribution of 7.6 million pounds of food, 2 million pounds of clothing, 1.3 million pounds of medical supplies, a million hygiene kits, and provision of 57,138 days of volunteer labor for disaster relief. Some projects were in cooperation with Catholic or Muslim agencies.
All churches, of course, perform charity and mercy work, but it is difficult to compare those efforts with LDS humanitarian programs. In 1997 U.S. congregations of the similarly sized Evangelical Lutheran Church in America raised $11.8 million in cash donations for worldwide hunger. The same year it raised $3.64 million for domestic and international disaster response, for a one-year humanitarian cash total of $15.44 million, more than half the amount the LDS provided over fourteen years. Then there were the Lutherans’ many assistance programs apart from simple cash donations. Like the Lutherans, many Protestant and Catholic agencies at home and abroad do extensive—and expensive—medical and educational work. The LDS Church no longer maintains hospitals, and its short-term missionaries concentrate on proselytizing for converts.
Nevertheless, in their commodity production and welfare systems, the Latter-day Saints have created and maintained a remarkably massive and efficient mechanism for meeting human needs of their own members. No other religious denomination has attempted to follow in their path.