💸 Charitable Giving¶
Estimated time to read: 13 minutes
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Most of these notes rely on context from the page on tithing, so give that a read if you haven't already. This was a subsection of that page, but became long enough that it warrants a page of its own.
In a lecture given last month at the University of Oxford, Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said that each year The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spends about $40 million on welfare, humanitarian and other LDS Church-sponsored projects around the world and has done so for more than 30 years.
That would account for approximately $1.2 billion on welfare and humanitarian efforts over the past 30 years. Elder Oaks also said that in the last year alone, Mormon volunteers have devoted 25 million hours of labor.
“In the year 2015 we had 177 emergency response projects in 56 countries,” Elder Oaks said. “In addition, we had hundreds of projects that impacted more than 1 million people in seven other categories of assistance, such as clean water, immunization and vision care.”
— LDS Church welfare, humanitarian efforts average $40 million per year, apostle says, Deseret News, 12 July 2016
$1.2 billion is a big number. It’s a much smaller number when we realize it’s spread across thirty years. I will concede that $40 million is also a big number. That third paragraph is worth acknowledging- providing clean water & immunization is a real solid. Unironically, good job. Those are important things that real humans in the world struggle to secure for themselves.
Also, don't overlook the utterance of the forbidden word "Mormon."
I wonder if $40,000,000 per year places the LDS church among the top charitable donors? Let's find out!
Charity lists¶
Forbes¶
Overall, the nation’s top 100 charities took in a combined $58.8 billion in private donations in their most recently reported fiscal years, an 8% increase. In a country with more than one million nonprofits, they received one-eighth of all charitable giving. Combined with the 10% increase the 100 posted last year, this marks the highest two-year gain in the 24 years that Forbes has been putting together this list. The cutoff for this year’s list—No. 100—was $181 million in donations, up from $167 million in 2021.
— America's Top 100 Charities, Forbes
Is the five year gap between 2016 and 2021 too big for a fair comparison? If it is not, the bottom of this list donated 4.175 times more than the LDS church had. That makes it 23.9% of the minimum cut-off to make the top 100 list.
Sure, 40 million is not nothing, and one could argue that the church has done some good with it. I'm not claiming that the money was wasted. I'm saying that flexing that number doesn't make you look as good as you think it does.
Charity Watch¶
Groups included on the CharityWatch Top-Rated list generally spend 75% or more of their budgets on programs, spend $25 or less to raise $100 in public support, do not hold excessive assets in reserve, have met CharityWatch’s governance benchmarks, and receive “open-book” status for disclosure of basic financial information and documents to CharityWatch. Please see the Our Process page of the website for more information on the rating criteria and methodology that CharityWatch adheres to.
— Top-Rated Charities, CharityWatch
Well, I guess I don’t need to spend any more time looking into the LDS church on this site.
WSJ Interview Excerpt¶
I've got some notes (and a link to the source) for this article on another page, but it contains a paragraph on charitable giving that I think fits better here.
A colorful brochure released in 2021 by Latter-day Saint Charities, the church’s humanitarian arm, said it had spent $2.5 billion over the previous 35 years, which included about $200 million in 2020, when the pandemic began—a tiny fraction of its wealth. The church subsequently revamped its methodology for reporting charitable spending and said it spent $1 billion last year and $906 million in 2021.
Ooh boy. I have a lot to say about this paragraph.
($2,500,000,000 ÷ 35 = $71,428,571) 71.4 million
Not sure if the $906 million is counted in that sum. But it does sound like $200 million is included, and is an outlier, so I might adjust that math to get a better average: (($2,500,000,000 - $200,000,000) ÷ (35 - 1)) = $67,647,059
That means we're averaging $67.6 million per year over 35 years. Let's be real— 67.6 million is not as small number. That is worth acknowledging. It's a comically small number, however, when compared to the $46.2 billion as mentioned above.
(67,647,059 ÷ 46,200,000,000) = 0.001464, or 0.15% of the subset of Ensign Peak's US stockholdings. That is just over a tenth of 1% that they'll proudly tout as being the charitable endeavors from the official church™ restored by Jesus Christ himself.
Don't overlook that last sentence: "The church subsequently revamped its methodology for reporting charitable spending[.]" What does that mean? To "[revamp] its methodology for reporting" does not sound like they decided to increase charitable spending by a factor of 14. To me, it sounds like they're stretching the numbers, or quantifying non-monetary services by valuating it through dollars, but surely they wouldn't use fuzzy metrics like that to pad their numbers... would they?
Value of Time¶
Remember how Deseret News was owned by and run by the church? They're always eager to share some information in a positive light.
Following April 2018's general conference, Deseret published a Study shows just how generous Mormons are with their time, money. Note that this is before October of 2018, where referring to church members as "Mormons" became verboten; more importantly, it's just ahead of a whistleblower report.
This article in Deseret (sponsored by LDSAgents.com, no less!) is largely excerpts from "a study conducted with two schools not affiliated with [the LDS church]" that describe how generous Mormons are with their time and money. The link in the article to the study is a dead end, for some reason. Fortunately for us, we have search engines.
The researchers determined that, through volunteering, an active LDS member provides a social contribution equivalent to $9,140 annually. If young, full-time missionaries are excluded, their social contribution still equates to $7,102 per year.
Now... Hold on a moment. When I was one of those young, full-time missionaries, I don't recall donating 9,140 - 7,102 = $2,038 to anything. I was paying into the church itself, which subsidized the rest of the cost. Where in the hell are they getting the idea that 19-year-olds are donating $2,000 per year?
Some online searching takes me to uPenn's website, what looks like the approachable summary of the study in an article. uPenn's publication of the article has the date of April 2012, and the Deseret article was in 2018. Did it take them six years to find someone who said something nice about the church? Or did they keep this in their back pocket until a whistleblower accused them of not spending money charitably?
uPenn's link to the study is also a dead end. Using their internal search, I can query the filename of the PDF that the link was meant to lead to. That led me to an unceremonious download page. Now I've got the study mentioned in Deseret News! Let's look for indications of what missionaries do. You can follow the links provided to read for yourself; I'll have a few isolated excerpts of what stood out to me.
Study¶
Of the 2,664 respondents, 65 reported to be “young full-time missionaries.” We defined a young full-time missionary as someone under 30 who answered “yes” to having served at least part of the last 12 months on a full-time mission.
A subset of 65 ÷ 2,664 = 2.4% of respondents were under 30 and had served missions in the prior year? The study does outline their sample & methodology, and "the average age of respondents is 50 years." Goodness, okay. I guess that accounts for the low percentage of those having served missions in the recent several years. Props to them for not limiting themselves to the university singles ward's around University of Pennsylvania.
Looking a few paragraphs up...
The Independent Sector (2011) assessed the value of an hour of volunteer labor to be $21.36. Based on this hourly rate, an active Latter-day Saint provides through volunteering an annual social contribution valuing $9,140.
Oh no you didn't. Deseret is using this study as a source to prove monetary donations.
In our analysis we allowed a maximum of 60 hours a week of either religious and/or social service. Yet these young full-time missionaries, if serving the full year prior to taking the questionnaire, could add 3,120 hours of volunteering per missionary. This fact may inflate the total hours of volunteering provided by Latter-day Saints. Consequently, we ran the same sets of statistics omitting the young full-time missionaries.
YEAH YOU FUCKEN BETTER OMIT THOSE
I'll acknowledge upfront that this is a bad-faith conclusion to jump to, so hold onto your pants. 2012's General Conference reported 58,990 full-time missionaries, and 22,961 church-service missionaries. I don't know if the church would have the audacity to combine those figures. If this study hadn't omitted missionaries, valuing 3,120 hours per missionary at $21.36 would make 21.36 * 3120 * 58990 = $3,931,282,368. Just under four billion "donated" per year by having a missionary program that the individuals pay for the privilege of being counted in. I can't confidently say that the LDS church is using these numbers in the way I'm outlining here— I'm presenting a worst case scenario in the event that they are.
An average Latter-day Saint provides 427.9 hours of volunteer labor annually (35.6 hours monthly or 8.2 hours weekly). . . . We assessed that an active Latter-day Saint provides through volunteering a social contribution valuing $9,140 annually.
428 hours annually is an impressive number. 8.2 hours weekly does seem like a lot. I have no information to suggest that this is wrong, but I am left to wonder how respondents defined volunteer labor. Setting up folding chairs in the stake center? Accompanying missionaries? Shoveling snow off the meetinghouse sidewalk? More charitably, shoveling snow for elderly folks...? Would a bishopric member in a ward count all the additional meetings before & after sacrament meeting? Relief Society president taking on practically a full-time job of calling responsibilities? The ward clerk counting the hours spent preparing and handling tithing? It's "voluntary", doing the Lord's work, and truthfully, it can be laborious. I can't confidently say for or against those ideas.
Searching the word "bias" in the paper doesn't turn up any results, but I want to acknowledge social desirability bias, where respondents overreport percieved ‘good behavior’ and underreport ‘bad behavior’. Did the surveyors make it very clear that the purpose of the survey is to measure how much Mormons contribute to charitable ends, by time or money donated? "By Jove," a fifty-year-old respondent strawman in my head is saying, "this is our chance to show the world how charitable we Mormons are! Nine hours per week, minimum. We're the best."
Widow's Mite¶
If you're not familiar with the Widow's Mite Report, now's a good time to check in on their findings. It's a group of, reportedly, "current and former Church members, whose professional and educational backgrounds include business, finance, law, investment management, economics, journalism and history." They do a better job than I do of tracking down sources and documents pertaining to the LDS Church's finances, statistics, spending, etc. They present their findings in an easily-digestible slideshow.
Looking through their 2023 report (1, 2, they mention some "fuzzy metrics" starting around page 15. Given the church's opacity in how they determine these numbers to report, all I have to work with is circumstantial evidence, and it doesn't look good.
Canada¶
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is stepping forward to help thousands of families facing food insecurity in Toronto, through a generous $2 million donation to Daily Bread Food Bank. This is the largest financial gift the Church has made in Canada to date, and supplements more moderate donations made to Daily Bread in 2022 and 2023.
— THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST MAKES IMPACTFUL $2 MILLION DONATION TO DAILY BREAD FOOD BANK, Cision Canada
2,000,000 ÷ 135,000,000,000 = 0.0000148148148148
That's enough decimal places to render as 1.418E - 5. That's 1 ÷ 67,500.
That year alone, ... the LDS church sent almost $100 million to its Brigham Young University in the United States.
The majority of that money came from tithing — or the 10 per cent of gross annual income some 200,000 Canadian Mormons ... contribute to the church annually.
In fact, in the last 15 years, the LDS church in Canada has moved more than $1 billion across the border to Brigham Young universities in the U.S., an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate has found.
If members of the church ... were surprised to see how donated money was used, so, too, might Canadian taxpayers. According to tax experts consulted by The Fifth Estate, the church's tax-free status meant the move may have cost the Canadian treasury as much as $280 million.
— Mormon Church in Canada moved $1B out of the country tax free — and it's legal, CBC/Radio-Canada
Maybe I shouldn't be so upset with the church— after all, maybe they received and relied upon legal counsel for how to move millions across the border. That seems to be a valid excuse for other atrocities. Don't forget they made their biggest donation to date back to the food bank though <3