Scott Woodward:
Why did the church file 13F documents with separate shell companies if there was no tax advantage for doing so? Could there be more to the story than simply saying church leaders listened to bad legal counsel in the context of the recent SEC fine? What’s the latest on the case of James Huntsman, who is currently suing the church to get over $5 million of his tithing returned to him? And should church leaders be more transparent with church members about church assets? Why or why not? And what about the size of the church’s multi-billion dollar reserve? How can we best situate or contextualize that amount relative to other large organizations? And with so much money, does the church even need our tithing dollars anymore? How effective is the church at humanitarian work? Like, if we wanted to donate to humanitarian aid, would we be better off giving our money to the church or some other humanitarian organization? And finally, is capitalism compatible with consecration and Zion-building? All of these questions and more coming your way on today’s episode of Church History Matters. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our eighth and final episode of this series dealing with consecration and church finances. Now let’s get into it. Casey, we did it. We made it to the last episode of our church finance series, man.

Casey Griffiths:
I think this is the first time that we’ve had two experts appear because there’s so much stuff to talk about, and we really broke it into early church finance controversies, Elizabeth Kuehn and Jeffrey Mahas did an excellent job answering questions there.

Scott Woodward:
That was very fun.

Casey Griffiths:
But a lot of questions people have are about modern Church finances, and we did an episode on modern church financial controversies, and in the episode we were quoting the same guy a lot.

Scott Woodward:
Over and over again, if I remember right, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So we just decided to go directly to the well and invite Aaron Miller to join us today, so we’ve got Aaron with us. Say hi, Aaron.

Aaron Miller:
Hi, everybody. Scott, Casey, thanks for inviting me on.

Casey Griffiths:
Thank you for coming on.

Scott Woodward:
Honored you to be here with us.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. We’re glad to have you because you work in the Marriott School of Business, correct?

Aaron Miller:
In the Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And Scott and I can barely balance our checkbooks. I don’t know about Scott, but I’m not a financial wizard.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And so some modern things, how you deal with the SEC and tax rules and things like that, we do need some help on, so . . .

Scott Woodward:
We need a lot of help on a lot of things is what it turns out.

Casey Griffiths:
We need a lot of help on a lot of things, but this is one area where we admittedly don’t have a ton of expertise, so we’re glad to have an expert.

Scott Woodward:
Listeners, buckle up. We’re excited to hit some hard-hitting questions today, and honestly, Casey, the questions that came in were incredibly thoughtful and really interesting, and a lot of them I had no idea about, and so I’ve done some background research even to know how to ask some of the questions, so Aaron, just so excited to have you here with us.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. I’ve probably learned more on this series than almost any of the other ones we’ve done, because this is just interesting stuff. So Aaron provided us with a bio. Why don’t I share that? And then we’ll jump right into it. So—

Scott Woodward:
Perfect.

Casey Griffiths:
—Aaron Miller is a teaching professor in BYU’s George W. Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics in the Marriott School of Business, where he teaches business ethics, nonprofit management, and social innovation. He’s also a co-author of the Business Ethics Field Guide and the host and author of the How to Help podcast and newsletter, where he guides people to finding more meaning, integrity, and impact in their work, and prior to teaching at BYU, Aaron practiced law in areas including small business, nonprofit, taxation, and corporate governance. He currently serves on the boards of the Nu Skin Force for Good Foundation and University Impact, and he and his wife, Katie, have four boys. So Aaron, officially, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you with us.

Aaron Miller:
Thank you so much. Very happy to be here.

Scott Woodward:
Turns out Aaron is a fellow podcaster. So tell us about your podcast real briefly, Aaron. What’s the How to Help podcast?

Aaron Miller:
Sure. So I teach a lot of students who are trying to find careers that feel meaningful and impactful in the world. I started the podcast to interview people who have careers doing that sort of thing. I have interviews with leaders of large nonprofit organizations, people who were remarkable for their integrity in difficult moments, Habitat for Humanity CEO; a Theranos whistleblower; the head of a huge foundation, like, philanthropic organization; a variety of guests like that, and experts who research this kind of stuff, too.

Scott Woodward:
So cool. All right. So if anyone wants to dig deeper into that, we recommend the How to Help podcast. You can find it at how-to-help.com. Very, very cool.

Casey Griffiths:
We’ll check it out.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. Should we start firing away some questions?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, let’s get into it.

Scott Woodward:
All right, let’s start with Luke and Kevin, the listeners who sent in similar questions about the SEC filing. So Luke from Utah asked this: he said, “After listening to your episode about the SEC fine, I went and read the SEC order.” Good job, Luke. Way to go. He says, “Can you help me understand what benefits there is to filing these 13F documents with separate shell companies? It doesn’t look like there is a tax advantage, and if it was, ‘bad legal counsel,’ as the church said, why would someone engage in filing those documents in the way they did? I’m trying to understand this but would love a professional opinion as to why the church was engaging in that financial strategy, as bad as it might have been.” Let’s just start with that one from Luke.

Aaron Miller:
Great. Yeah. No, Luke, that’s a great question. I’m glad you read the order. A lot of people jumped to conclusions about what was going on legally without having gone to the source, and so let me begin with just kind of setting up a few details on this that are important to understand the context.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
First of all, this is a pretty niche area of the law. Like, this is not an area of the law where there’s lots of, like, prior judicial decisions, lots of clear regulations, and, in fact, it’s pretty hard to find expert commentary on this. I—this is not an area of the law I had any firsthand work in when I was a lawyer, and if you go look for somebody who says, oh, I specialize in 13F filings, and I have things to say about this, you’re not going to find that person. At least, I’m sure there are some people who exist like that, but they haven’t written anything to sort of analyze the situation.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
So what’s the advantage to doing it? Let’s talk about that part of the question. The church has publicly traded securities. These are the kinds of investments you can buy on public exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
And when you get above a certain size, you have to report those trades, the buying and selling of that, you have to report that to the SEC, and you report it in a way that becomes a public document. And the reason the SEC does this is because they’re trying to make sure that everybody knows where large financial holdings are being moved when it comes to public securities. It’s just a transparency step.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
It’s true, there’s no tax benefit. So filing in thirteen different entities versus one, there’s no financial—there’s no tax difference in doing that, so the church didn’t save any taxes on that. If anything, it increased their regulatory—their, like, compliance overhead because they had more paperwork to do. So the advantage to doing it is that it was a way—the church at the time, we know, was trying to keep as private as possible its financial holdings, and breaking it into these thirteen different entities was a way to enhance the privacy of it. And we’ll be talking more about transparency issues, I think, probably in this episode, but that was the purpose, was to basically enhance the privacy of these financial holdings.

Scott Woodward:
Is this a very common practice for large companies and organizations to do, to use shell companies for privacy purposes?

Aaron Miller:
Yes. And not just for companies, but for individuals, too.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
Most, like, estate attorneys, these are ones who help wealthy individuals manage the legal aspects of their estates.

Scott Woodward:
Uh-huh.

Aaron Miller:
Keeping—like, maintaining as much privacy as possible over their financial holdings is one of the tools in their tool belt, and so they’ll figure out a lot of ways to make sure that they can maintain privacy of their financial holdings as much as possible.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
It’s not a way out there, crazy practice. What’s notable in this case is just that the church has a lot of money, and so there were big amounts involved, and I think that did make it distinctive.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
That’s, I guess, answering that—the first part of this question that—the idea about it being bad legal counsel, it’s hard to draw the line between what the lawyers said that was really smart and what the lawyers told the church that was too risky, because we don’t have all the details public.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
There’s a common misconception about this, which is that these thirteen subsidiary companies were wrong, just de facto wrong. Like they were just—they shouldn’t have done it, period. That’s not technically true. In fact, the issue was the control of the thirteen different entities. Basically, the SEC fined the church because if you’re going to have these thirteen different entities, they have to operate independently of each other.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
They were not doing that. They were operating in a coordinated way, and that was why they got penalized. If, in the management of these thirteen entities, they had been operated truly independently, meaning managing their own chunk of the church’s financial resources in their own way, according to their own best judgment, but without from-the-top coordination, then there would have been no fine because the thirteen entities were totally legal as long as they were independent from each other.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So the issue is not having the entities.

Aaron Miller:
That’s right.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
So what it comes down to with this, and this is why, you know, the church got legal counsel: hey, let’s divide these up into these thirteen. And it wasn’t thirteen all at once. They sort of added them over time, but they eventually got to the thirteen. What was happening is—and it’s hard to know how much it was the lawyers giving them bad advice or managers not following the advice of the lawyers, but the coordination was happening behind the scenes, and that was with—

Scott Woodward:
Both possibilities.

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. And that was what the SEC penalized.

Casey Griffiths:
If I could interject for a second, we had another listener who is a corporate lawyer, and he didn’t send in a question, but he sent a long email with a bunch of context. I’m going to read just a quick excerpt: he said, “The SEC’s rules are voluminous and complicated. Reasonable, experienced people, including seasoned legal advisors, can sometimes interpret them in different ways, and leadership changes at government agencies as a result of presidential administration changes can change the way those agencies, including the SEC, interpret its own regulations.” And then he wrote, “This happens far more than people think. You noted on the podcast,” he continued to write, “that the church may have gotten bad legal advice, and while that’s certainly possible, it’s also possible the church received good legal advice and that the SEC simply adopted a different interpretation of its regulation. So even the value of the advice is at question here. Like, was it bad legal advice, or did the situation change?

Aaron Miller:
And to speculate on that a little bit, and this is without any special inside knowledge, but if you look at the timeline—so there’s a point in which the church started doing all these filings collectively under Ensign Peak rather than through the thirteen shell companies. They basically pulled all the management of all the resources back into Ensign Peak Advisors, and then they started doing the one 13F filing instead of the different ones.

Scott Woodward:
And this is before the SEC fine even was an issue?

Aaron Miller:
A few years before the fine.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
And my guess is that the SEC became aware. The church said, oh, okay, this is how you’re going to see this issue. Well, we’ll do it the correct way. And then you had what I think was probably a couple of years of back-and-forth investigation negotiations. When a settlement document like this is finalized and released to the public, the agreement is that the party that’s being fined cannot dispute what the SEC writes. It doesn’t necessarily mean they fully agree with the SEC’s conclusions. It’s just that they have agreed to settle, and part of the condition of settlement is saying, hey, SEC, you can put this document out there, and we’re not going to then the next day have a press conference to say how dumb you are.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
And so there was certainly a back and forth—there, there had to be. I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a back-and-forth legal negotiation about what should or should not be in this document with the SEC pushing hard on its end and the church pushing back on its end to sort of lay out, like, what should have happened here. You know, someday we’ll get to find out, hopefully, everything that happened there, this life or the next, and it’ll be—for lawyers, it’ll be really fascinating.

Scott Woodward:
I have much more interesting questions in the next life to ask than, “What happened, actually, in this SEC back and forth,” but—

Casey Griffiths:
Actually, that’s going to be my first question when I get to the pearly gates, is “Let’s talk about the SEC 13F forms.”

Scott Woodward:
I just have some burning questions. No, this actually does eat at some people. Like, one of our listeners, Kevin, from Dallas, he said, “I work at an investment management firm just like Ensign Peak, and I appreciate you tackling these challenging topics.” Then he asks, “How does the $5 million fine compare to other 13F fines? Is that high, low, or average, and how often are investment advisors fined for 13F violation?” Start there.

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. I’ve looked for answers to this question, and I haven’t been able to find them. And, again, this has to do with how niche of a topic this is.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
I’ve seen speculation by people saying that this is high and quite a bit out of the ordinary. I’ve seen other people say it’s pretty low, and, like, it’s like a slap on the wrist, you know, or like a—like, I think I saw some commentators describe it as, like, the equivalent of a traffic ticket.

Scott Woodward:
Gotcha. Wow.

Aaron Miller:
I don’t know. And again, because there’s just so little commentary by people with really reliable expertise on this issue. It is definitely tiny compared to the total amount of assets involved.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Miller:
And so I don’t know how relevant that is. And I don’t even know, frankly, if that’s part of how the SEC calculates this. But the answer is there’s not good information out there to determine whether or not this is huge or small, unless something has come up more recently, but I haven’t seen anybody tackle that question with high expertise.

Scott Woodward:
Gotcha.

Casey Griffiths:
Our listener that I quoted earlier, who did list his expertise, but when we reached out to him, he said, “I’d prefer if you didn’t identify me.” He wrote, “In my experience, a five million settlement for an organization the size of Ensign Peak Advisors and the church is a very small settlement.” Then he wrote, “Additionally, the SEC’s order did not impose any punishment on individuals, as the SEC can do in cases where the SEC believes there’s been a serious offense. I’ve been involved in matters where my client had very strong arguments that their actions were completely legal and appropriate, yet settled the matter for much larger amounts than what the church agreed to.” So his judgment was that it was a small fine when compared with the size of the organization and the total amounts involved, so.

Aaron Miller:
Another indicator I’ve read about from people with some expertise in SEC law, is that another—so the SEC also has the power to require what’s called disgorgement.

Casey Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Miller:
And this is clawing back or taking away any profits that are ill-gotten because of the violation of the law.

Scott Woodward:
Disgorgement. Okay.

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. This—so this is forcing you to give up the earnings that you—that were ill-gotten gains, right? The reason this law exists, that—the sort of public policy reason these filings are required is because everyday stock traders have the right to know, is the idea, they have the right to know what the big people are doing. Because the big people have the potential to be market movers, meaning that they can do a trade in one fell swoop that could dramatically shift the price of a stock.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
And these market movers could potentially manipulate a market to benefit themselves and profit unfairly. In those sorts of situations the SEC can and has required disgorgement, saying, look, you are manipulating the market here unfairly, so we’re going to take away the profits that you got from the manipulation. This is also not something that happened with the SEC order. The church and Ensign Peak were not using these thirteen different entities to manipulate the price of a particular stock so that they could get more money out of that stock. And had the SEC found that that was happening, they almost certainly would have punished that as well, which they didn’t.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
So the idea, again, that the church was sort of enriching itself unjustly through this process just doesn’t hold up based on what the SEC has said.

Scott Woodward:
Let me ask you one final question about this SEC: from all of your investigation of this, looking into all the nooks and crannies that are available to you, Aaron, any evidence whatsoever that the church leaders deliberately deceived or misled in any of their investments here? Were they trying to deceive the public, trying to deceive church members, trying to deceive the government? In all of your research, what’s your finding there?

Aaron Miller:
There’s no evidence that the church did this to profit unfairly by taking advantage of keeping the investing public in the dark. Again, if that was the case, you would have seen more survey penalties and more evidence from the SEC that that had taken place. There wasn’t a single claim in the entire SEC settlement that indicated that the church was using these shell companies to profit unfairly off of unwitting investors. So in that sense, we cannot say that they deceived them. There are some people who feel deceived because they feel like they’re entitled to know, for whatever reason, what the church’s financial holdings are.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
You know, that’s a transparency issue we can get into later, but in the sense that the church deceived anybody to take advantage of them?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
There’s just no evidence there. And I guarantee you the SEC would have been going after that intensely had they found that that had been happening.

Casey Griffiths:
So same listener, Kevin, just had a couple of concerns. And maybe I’ll just bring it up directly here: he says, “Can you say that there were no ill intentions related to the SEC fine? Can you explain how having business managers sign off on shell companies reporting assets that aren’t actually managed by the shell company isn’t an ill intention?” So what about the question of intentions here?

Aaron Miller:
In terms of, you know, whether or not there was ill intent behind any of this, going back to the email you referred from the other listener who practices law in this area, there is enough ambiguity and so many legal issues like these that you’re doing what your lawyers have given—what sophisticated expert lawyers have given you as advice to do, and you say, okay, let’s do this. The church was prioritizing privacy of its assets, and in the process, either in the legal advice or in the management of these entities, clearly made a mistake that overstepped the law. Clear after the fact, right? And the church took accountability for it. Never in the church’s history have they had to manage resources this large with as much complex regulation overseeing how those resources are managed and invested, and that’s just on the SEC side. We haven’t even talked about the IRS side of things.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, should we move on to the tax-exempt questions?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
This is where I feel more confident, so . . .

Casey Griffiths:
All right. So, Aaron, a question from Mary, who lives in Bountiful, Utah: she asked, “The church has enormous charity welfare organizations helping worldwide through all kinds of disasters in all kinds of countries. Does our government or other country governments give our church any tax advantages or tax deductions for all the costs of land, church-building, temples, etc.?”

Aaron Miller:
It’s a great question. Well, as far as the U. S. government is concerned, the church, like other tax-exempt charities, gets a huge benefit in the form of tax exemption. Essentially, the way a for-profit corporation is taxed is they make a certain amount of money, they spend what hopefully is a smaller amount in the same year where they made more. The difference is profit, and they get taxed on that. Nonprofit entities or tax-exempt entities don’t get taxed on their profits, on the sort of the net income that they have at the end of the year. The church also benefits from property tax exemption and sales tax exemption in all the states where they operate that have both property and sales taxes. So the church does get substantial tax benefits for that, and it’s not specifically because of their humanitarian work. It’s simply because they’re a church that also does humanitarian work. This is a great moment to just say a very common misconception is that charity means caring for the poor and needy. That is not what charity means under federal tax law.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, what does it mean?

Aaron Miller:
It means a list of things. It can mean youth sports leagues. It can mean scientific research. One of the things that it absolutely includes is religion. So churches are charities, whether or not they do anything for the poor and needy. The federal tax law just defines church as charity, a definition that’s not what people commonly use, but as far as the federal tax code is concerned, the church, whether or not it cares for the poor and needy, is a charity. Now, I’m grateful that we’re part of a church that does care for the poor and needy.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, it does both.

Aaron Miller:
And so that just adds to the reasons that it should be considered a charity.

Scott Woodward:
It’s both.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay. Question from Ryan from Holladay, Utah: “Did the IRS specifically investigate the Ensign Peak whistleblower’s claim that the church violated its tax-exempt status, and is that complaint founded on sound legal footing, or was it more of an attempt to influence public policy, or for other reasons?”

Aaron Miller:
Yeah, so let’s take the first one. We don’t know if the IRS investigated, based on the whistleblower report. The IRS is going to keep an investigation like that private until they have things to make public. It is also true, though, that for the IRS to investigate a church, it requires a higher level of approval and more compelling evidence than for a typical nonprofit. This is done in the spirit of the First Amendment, that the government should not be infringing upon religious freedoms. I would not be surprised if investigators took the whistleblower’s report and took a look at it. Now, to answer the second question, whether or not the whistleblower’s report was based on sound legal analysis, I would say absolutely not. This was actually—this is one of the most frustrating parts of this is that the conclusions that it came to were not guided by somebody with expertise in tax exempts, like federal tax laws that relates to tax-exempt entities. It misdefined certain things. It missed other things entirely. And it was also not written to be a whistleblower report, the kind you would expect to see that is an actual IRS whistleblower, like, filing where somebody is saying, hey, this entity is breaking tax law: you should know about it. This was clearly written for public consumption, and what’s important to understand is that the whistleblower in this case was bound by confidentiality agreements, which—for which there’s an exemption if you’re . . . There’s protection against confidentiality claims if you’re blowing the whistle to a government agency. It was also not the whistleblower himself who made this document public. It was his brother, who had a hand in writing it, and—this is me speculating: It definitely feels like it was written for public consumption, and I wonder if the brother had intended to make it public all along. There’s a bunch in there that, frankly, has nothing to do with tax law, also, which is a strange thing to put in a document that you’re sending to the IRS.

Scott Woodward:
So it seems kind of intended to inflame public ire against the church.

Aaron Miller:
Almost certainly. Even the name of it. It was the title of the—it’s weird to give a title to a whistleblower report. This one got a title.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And the title mirrors a popular anti-Mormon tome that’s on the internet, too. So it—

Aaron Miller:
That’s right.

Casey Griffiths:
—feels like that’s a major clue about intention as well.

Aaron Miller:
Exactly.

Scott Woodward:
Wait, I’m trying to remember the title. What’s the title?

Aaron Miller:
“Letter to an IRS Director.”

Scott Woodward:
Oh, my word.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Does that ring a bell? I mean, geez. Wow.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Yeah. Intentionality coming through.

Aaron Miller:
Their hand was tipped with that. All that to the side, the legal analysis is what really matters, and the legal analysis is incomplete and inaccurate.

Scott Woodward:
Well, I have a follow-up question: A lot of people make it sound like the church’s tax-exempt status is pretty tenuous. Tell us about that, Aaron. How tenuous is the church’s tax-exempt status? Do we need to worry about that? Does the church need to worry about that? What would it take for the church to lose its tax-exempt status? Maybe this is going down a rabbit hole we don’t want to go down, but I know I’ve heard a lot of questions about this kind of stuff.

Aaron Miller:
Well, charities and churches in particular have a variety of ways that they can lose their tax-exempt status. Endorsing a political candidate would threaten that.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, okay.

Aaron Miller:
Enriching people in improper ways with the assets of the church would do that. There are a variety of things that could cause this to happen. I’m not worried. I mean, I think the more likely way that the church loses its tax-exempt status is not because the church missteps relative to the law. The more likely way that this happens is if the law is changed. And I don’t think that’s very likely.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
There is a growing pressure that churches should not be tax exempt. There’s a public policy argument that’s sort of growing in interest that churches of any kind should not be tax exempt. To be clear on that is this would not mean just The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints losing its exempt status: This would mean all churches losing their exempt status, and there are people who argue for that, but I don’t—there are no ways that I’ve encountered where the church is up against the line and I’m like, “Oh, gosh I hope they don’t go too far there, because they’ll lose their status if they do.” They’re exceedingly cautious about this issue.

Scott Woodward:
Well, the way I come down on it is, if Aaron Miller isn’t concerned, I’m not concerned, so . . . All right, next question comes from Keith in Bountiful. Keith asks, “One of the Huntsmans is suing the church to get all his tithing returned to him. Wouldn’t this set a precedent to any dissatisfied member to sue to get their tithing returned? Aren’t these donations freely given?”

Aaron Miller:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Just the general question of can you get your tithing back?

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. In general, no. I mean, a donation to a church is legally considered a gift, and by default what’s called an irrevocable gift. You can’t get it back, nor can you complain. It’s a one-sided thing, right? It’s not a contract. A contract is two—is at least two sides, where the parties agree to exchange value in some way.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Donations to the church are not, by default, a contract; they are one-way. One party, the donor, is saying, here, Church of Jesus Christ, here is my money. And that was the default arrangement under which Huntsman was making his contributions to the church. His claim is that his donation was induced through fraud, very specifically when President Hinckley announced at the pulpit that the City Creek investment was not being paid for out of tithing dollars.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Fraud has a number of elements to it. In order to be able to make a claim of fraud against a party, you have to show that it was a false statement intended to mislead. You have to show that the false statement induced the action, right? In this case, Huntsman being induced to make a donation.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
One of the issues here, though, is that there should be very strong deference when it comes to how is tithing defined. There’s not a legal definition of this. There’s not, like, a statute that says, “This is what tithing means.” So Huntsman can’t rely on anything like that. He has to rely on—well, his argument is he’s relying on a generally understood definition of the word tithing.

Scott Woodward:
Is there a generally understood definition of tithing?

Aaron Miller:
No. There’s not. And more importantly, and this is based on some really smart analysis by Sam Brunson, who’s a loyal law professor and member of the church, and his point is that it’s not just that you use a general definition or a widely understood definition of tithing, that you really—courts need to use the Church’s definition of what constitutes tithing, because there ought to be, where it’s an issue of religious, like, doctrine or belief, you defer to the Church’s definition of it, again, based on First Amendment principles. And so for Huntsman to argue that the Church, in using investment proceeds, was actually using tithing is using a definition of tithing that is not clearly established and definitely is not strong legal justification.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
So there are conditions where donors can be induced to make a donation through fraud, but the lie has to be clear and outright, and this doesn’t even qualify as a lie, in my opinion.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
And so that’s the problem here. I will add that, you know, his case is barely alive right now. The church filed for what’s called summary judgment, which means that even if you interpret all the facts in favor of Huntsman, you still have to kick out the lawsuit, and the district court judge agreed with that. It was the appeals court that reinstated it, but on a split vote, a two-to-one vote.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
The church is now waiting for what’s called an en banc hearing, which means more judges in the appellate level are going to be involved. Even if it gets, finally gets to go to trial, I just don’t see any way in which this wins. And so my opinion, this is what’s called a performative lawsuit, which is a lawsuit designed to draw attention to an issue, not to actually lead to a favorable legal outcome for the person who brought it.

Scott Woodward:
Very interesting. And for those listeners who are not familiar with the Huntsman tithing controversy, Aaron, you just summarized it really great. Only a few details I would throw in that I found interesting was that James Huntsman, so he’s the son of John Huntsman, Sr., and he actually left the church in 2020, and then it was in 2021, in March, that he files this lawsuit to get $5 million back, along with interest in penalties, which he said he had paid the church over a quarter of a century. So I thought that was interesting. After it was thrown out in 2021, then it wasn’t until August of last year, so August 2023, that it gets revived. Then in the months following, a handful of other disgruntled former church members from Utah, Illinois, Tennessee, Washington, and California, who were emboldened by the revival of this Huntsman case, file similar, what they call copycat complaints in an attempt to get their donations back as well. The latest of those suits was filed just a month ago from the day of the recording of this episode. So that’s interesting, right? And then there’s also some legal maneuvering as recently as last month to consolidate all of those separate class action suits into one nationwide case against the church to be hosted somewhere or to play out either in Utah or California. So we’re actually still kind of in the thick of this moment, and all of this is tied back to the City Creek controversy that we talked about two episodes ago, that allegation that the church used $1.4 billion in tithing funds to help pay for City Creek and then $594 million in tithing funds to bolster the Beneficial financial group during the 2008 financial crisis, and at the heart of this issue is, as you mentioned, Aaron, it’s that President Hinckley quote, that 2003 General Conference moment where President Hinckley said that the funds for the City Creek had and would, “Come from those commercial entities owned by the church,” and from, “the earnings of invested reserve funds,” which are the earnings off of invested tithing funds. And so those bringing these lawsuits against the church, the Huntsman, et al. group, they’re actually dismissing President Hinckley’s claim, or actually claiming that he’s deceitful, right? He’s deliberately deceiving church members. Misleading. That’s the heart of the issue. Is that correct?

Aaron Miller:
Yeah, you’ve summarized what’s going on really well. I—the legal reasoning behind all of these, I just have a hard time saying how it prevails. And I’m not the only one. The vast majority of legal commentary on this issue, in particular, by experts in nonprofit law, is that these lawsuits should not prevail for a multitude of reasons, and, really, the whole nonprofit sector should be opposed to a lawsuit like this, because if something can be established to be fraud so easily, right, and in such a one-sided way, then it sets up a whole bunch of nonprofit organizations, churches and healthcare systems and community service organizations—like, all kinds of entities—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
—face the risk that if a donor understood something differently than the way the nonprofit intended it, then the donor can sue. I mean, that creates such a dangerous set of circumstances for nonprofit organizations to operate in good faith, you know, trusting that their donors have given this—given them this money to use it with their expertise. Like, it opens the door to such an unrealistic set of circumstances for nonprofits to operate that I just think the whole sector should be opposed to the Huntsman lawsuit and others like it.

Scott Woodward:
Like you said, this is all centering on the definition of a word.

Aaron Miller:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Tithing. When President Hinckley said the church is using the earnings of invested reserve funds, not those reserve funds themselves, that’s the whole crux of the issue, right? Like—

Aaron Miller:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
—tithing funds were invested, and it’s only the earnings from those funds that were used, but not the funds themselves. The principal wasn’t touched.

Aaron Miller:
Right. If all it takes is for a donor to misunderstand what you meant and all of a sudden it’s fraud . . .

Scott Woodward:
Ooh.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Imagine what this sets up.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Imagine, like, any donor could say, oh, well, you said that, but I thought you meant this, and therefore you were fraudulent. I mean, that is a crazy conclusion to come to legally that just creates so much risk, as any misguided donor, not misguided fraudulently, but, like, who misunderstood what the nonprofit said, could claim that there was fraud and they want their money back That’s, it’s, like I said, it’s pretty dangerous—

Scott Woodward:
It’s wild.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
—for the nonprofit sector.

Scott Woodward:
Well, and like I said, this is still ongoing. We’re in the thick of it now. How do you speculate this is going to all play out here?

Aaron Miller:
It’ll take a while, because appeals, like the court system, move slowly, including at the appellate level. I kind of doubt a class-action will result from this, where all the cases get consolidated, but it’s not impossible. So it could happen, but I don’t think it will. Different federal circuits have kind of different approaches to some legal questions, and so there might be some variability, but I think all of them will conclude with the idea that this wasn’t fraud and that when a donor makes a gift, they say goodbye to it, and that’s the proper conclusion, too.

Casey Griffiths:
Let’s move on to this transparency question. Is that okay? I think that’s a—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
—a big issue. Janelle from Oregon wrote, “I understand enough the church being hesitant to talk about specific numbers, but I do wish it was easier to know about church assets: lands, farms, businesses, et cetera. I feel blindsided when I learn about major holdings from the national media instead of from church leaders. I don’t know how to respond when people bring up several ventures of the church. Any thoughts on this? Do you think church leaders should be more transparent?” She wrote, “It doesn’t affect my testimony, but it leaves me more frustrated than I want to be.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Thanks, Janelle.

Casey Griffiths:
So, yeah.

Aaron Miller:
It’s a very thoughtful question. At the high level of transparency the church has been transparent in its finances in the past, at different times, historically speaking. The reasons that the church would choose to not disclose its financial holdings now are many, but certainly wouldn’t make it an ironclad case. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the future the church started reporting its finances, and I also wouldn’t be surprised if they kept on the course that they’re on. I think there’s a variety of options available to church leaders in how they think about this issue. As regarding the church’s business holdings, I guess I can speak to the way I see those. I think they’re great.

Scott Woodward:
There you have it.

Aaron Miller:
I think a lot of important work and a lot of good can be done through business. At University Impact, where I chair the board, we help socially innovative and impactful for-profit businesses get funding. For example, this is a nonprofit I’m a part of, but we help for-profit ventures and, like, Africa get more capital so they can help farmers grow their crops more efficiently, but it’s structured through a for-profit business. The church’s for-profit businesses all make a lot of sense, and I think one of the most important aspects of this that’s, again, commonly misunderstood is that the church is getting a tax break in some form and that these businesses have an unfair advantage because they’re owned by a church. It’s not true. All of these for-profit businesses pay taxes just like any other for-profit business would. There’s no cover that extends tax exemption to these for-profit entities. They’re independent. In most cases the church owns them entirely. In some cases the church is one of a group of owners. If that business produces profits, the business is going to pay tax on those profits and then distribute whatever’s left to the owners. The reality is every nonprofit that exists that has financial investments is at least a part owner in a business. This is what—and this is where endowments go. Endowments are invested in ownership structures that include ownership of for-profit businesses. In the church’s case, they operate some of them. I think it actually makes quite a bit of sense for the church to have certain businesses, and I also think it makes sense for the church to have, you know, investments in other businesses. Some, again, totally controlled by the church, some where the church is just a part owner. This is how financial assets are managed and controlled these days. What’d actually really concern me is if the church had all this money just sitting in, like, a savings account somewhere. I would be like, wait a minute, you guys really should be managing these assets more effectively than this. So the fact that they’re not doing that now tells me that they’re being very thoughtful and wise about how they manage their resources.

Scott Woodward:
This kind of goes toward another question from a listener. His name’s Andrew from, I think it’s pronounced Issaquah, Washington. Andrew from Issaquah. He simply asked, “How does the church keep its nonprofit status if it has for-profit businesses?”

Aaron Miller:
Nonprofits are allowed to own for-profits as a default position. There are some exceptions to that if the for-profit is somehow benefiting unfairly from the nonprofit ownership. It’s not very common, though. Nonprofits are allowed to own for-profits. They’re separate legal entities, right? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a nonprofit corporation.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Deseret Mutual Benefit Corporation is a separate for-profit corporation, and the same goes for, like, the Deseret Management Group, which runs, like, KSL and other media property. They’re all separate legal entities that have to pay their own taxes and worry about, you know, their own business licensing and insurance and all the other things that separate businesses have to do.

Scott Woodward:
Separate and independent from the church.

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. So nonprofits can own for-profits is, I guess, very short answer. So it doesn’t threaten their nonprofit status at all.

Casey Griffiths:
Aaron, another question: this is from Gabe in Provo, Utah. “Some people don’t have objections to the existence of the church’s reserve, but to its size. Scott and Casey said,” quoting you in an episode, “that if the church stopped receiving any incoming funds today, it would have about sixteen years of continued operation at its current speed. Isn’t that enough of a reserve to feel safe, considering church members are still paying tithing? Wouldn’t it be reasonable, from this point on, for the church to start diverting all surplus funds it receives, the portion they set aside every year, toward helping those in need, rather than building its reserve?”

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. That’s a great question. So the size of this fund, the size that it is, is, in church history, a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s a problem that, I would say, is fifteen years old compared to previous church, you know, assets.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Casey and I have tried to do a little survey through this series of church finances over the years from Joseph Smith’s day to present, and . . .

Casey Griffiths:
It’s a—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, this is a pretty recent—

Casey Griffiths:
It’s a rollercoaster.

Scott Woodward:
—phenomenon. Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. But it’s definitely on the up.

Scott Woodward:
A new problem we’re less familiar with than the other kind of problem. So, yes.

Aaron Miller:
That’s right. And so I think the idea that the church wants to start doing more of this, like, diverting it more toward caring for the poor and needy and other, you know, philanthropic causes, we actually are seeing that happen over the last couple of years. The church has been increasing, at a pretty ambitious pace, the amount of charitable giving that it’s doing to other kinds of work around the world. My understanding is that internally this is being managed primarily through area presidencies right now who are on the ground in those places, seeing where the needs are, and these press releases are getting overlooked by the public, but you can’t go on the church’s, you know, newsroom website without, more than two or three articles in, stumbling to some charitable gift that the church has made to some organization somewhere in the world. We’ve been getting public reports on this now for the last couple years, the Church’s overall caring for the poor and needy initiatives, and that number is growing pretty aggressively. I’m speculating as an outsider here. I’m not privy to those conversations in the church office building about their plans and strategies, but as an outside observer, based on the pattern you’re seeing, the Church is increasing its philanthropic activity. Elder Bednar did say that the Church is not primarily a philanthropic organization. It’s a church.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
Its main job is to care for the salvation and exaltation of God’s children. Its purpose is also to care for the poor and needy, and there’s a lot of that happening, and I think the more important point to this question is there’s an increasing amount of it happening. And so I just say just wait and see because we’re going to be watching more and more of this is my guess.

Casey Griffiths:
And to that point, that the church is concerned with the salvation of men, I think the most obvious sign that this money is being well used is the rapid increase in the number of temples that’s happened the last couple—that’s expensive, and it’s a long-term thing where you have to build and then maintain these temples. I think we’re taking advantage of this season of plenty by trying to get a temple as close to every member of the church as we can, which, again, might not be caring for the poor and needy, but in temples we commit to live the law of consecration, which I hope helps us down that road, too.

Aaron Miller:
So I won’t go into any detail because I don’t want to reveal the context of this conversation, but let’s just say I—

Casey Griffiths:
You know a guy.

Aaron Miller:
I know a guy who was in a conversation at the time—this is years ago—at the time of President Packer, at the time he was president of the Quorum of the Twelve. And it was regarding a very large church investment—not financial investment, but it was some buildings, essentially, that the church was paying to build. During the meeting, President Packer leaned forward and said, “How many temples is this going to cost me?” And the point he was making was, let’s not be reckless with this money. There is an opportunity cost to how we spend it, and if you really want to have the right perspective, let’s put it in the perspective of people being able to make temple covenants.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Aaron Miller:
And it was sort of, like, the perfect tempering message, right? Which was, hey, let’s pay attention to why we’re here and what we’re meant to be doing, and we can’t just spend this money willy-nilly, because what if it came at the cost of temples, for example?

Scott Woodward:
I love that.

Casey Griffiths:
President Packer had a way of just saying, let’s just cut the baloney and get to the heart of what we’re talking about here, didn’t he?

Scott Woodward:
You know, while you were talking, I just Googled “LDS Church Charitable Donations,” and one of the top articles that comes up is actually in the Salt Lake Tribune highlighting the church’s over $1 billion of helping people in the year 2021, and here’s just a quick, little kind of rundown of how both money and hours were used. It says the church gave $1.02 billion in aid, 6.3 million volunteer hours, 3,692 humanitarian projects, 190 countries and territories served, 174 refugee response projects, 11,030 welfare and self-reliance missionaries, 520 food security projects, 483 emergency response projects, and 156 clean water projects. “The church’s humanitarian efforts last year covered a swath of services that spanned every part of the globe.” It continues to go on, but just to your point, Aaron, that this is happening, and it continues to happen. And that’s two years old, that article. I mean, the church continues to pour millions and millions and even billions of dollars into helping the poor and the needy.

Aaron Miller:
And can I speak to this as what a larger version of this looks like for the church? I mean, I think a lot of people have the misconception that it’s just easy to give away large amounts of money. It’s easy to do it badly. You can’t argue with that. Like, you can give away money.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. What do you—what do you mean by that?

Aaron Miller:
Ineffectively, wastefully. Like, it’s easy to give money in a way that essentially squanders it, doesn’t actually lead to an impact, it doesn’t make the world better. Effective giving takes expertise and professionals to administer the philanthropic giving. And so for a presentation I gave to a group last September, I worked up a—what a speculative version of expansive church giving looks like. And so emphasizing that this is speculative, but I want to lay some groundwork here that’s important for people to understand. Because effective giving requires expertise and is time-consuming, it makes it expensive. Most large foundations spend a dollar on staff and resources for every four to five dollars that they give away. That’s how much it costs to give money away effectively, is about—is a dollar for every four to five dollars you’re giving away. Assuming that the church would have smaller salaries, especially at leadership levels, the church could probably operate at a roughly $1-10 ratio. You know, $1 spent on staff and so on for every $10 given away. That would make it the most efficient of large philanthropic organizations if it did that. If the church—let’s say the church dedicated $50 billion for philanthropy. That would mean them giving away $3-4 billion a year, if they were following, you know, typical practices. It would probably involve anywhere from 500 to 1,000 new employees that they would hire to administer this work, and it would mean that this philanthropic entity, by itself, would have annual operating expenses of around $300-400 million, just operating expenses, not the actual amount giving away, but just how much it would cost to operate that. That scale of philanthropy is expensive. I mean, you see how the costs can add up, and you need a lot of expert people to do it so that it’s done effectively. It’s—you just can’t be writing checks and leave it at that because what we know from philanthropy and effective philanthropy is you have to put thought and expertise to do it well.

Scott Woodward:
Giving is expensive.

Casey Griffiths:
Costs money to give.

Scott Woodward:
I’ve heard it takes money to make money. I’ve never heard it takes money to give money away. That’s—this is a new concept for me.

Aaron Miller:
It does.

Scott Woodward:
Makes perfect sense.

Aaron Miller:
Again, if you want to do it well. If you want to do it badly, just put cash in an airplane and dump it out as you fly over some area.

Scott Woodward:
Wow, that’s really helpful perspective, actually. There’s this sense, Aaron, that the church has so much money, and so should church members even pay tithing anymore? Is there even a need to pay tithing anymore? Anything you want to say about that, about church members paying tithing relative to how much money the church already has?

Aaron Miller:
Yeah, no, it is an important question. It’s one that I’ve encountered in conversations about this topic with lots of people.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
It’s important to reflect on why God wants us to pay tithing. It’s a funny quirk in the U. S., actually, which is that in the United States, tithing counts as a charitable donation. It’s not the case in many, many other countries around the world. So tithing isn’t considered charity in other countries. Some, but not all. And—but in the United States it is. And in fact, it’s deeply entrenched in this idea of charity. So I think as church members, it’s natural for us to think of our donations as our personal philanthropy, and I think that can be a flawed conclusion to draw, because the purpose of tithing is, as I understand it, is not to just give it away to good causes: God wants us to give it back to Him, and so tithing is part of how we consecrate today. Will that always be the case? I don’t know. Who knows? I mean, you guys have already demonstrated that tithing has not been this principle that’s always existed and will always exist. It sort of changed shape over the years, and I think it’s certainly possible that it could change shape in the future, but what I worry about happening is anybody coming to the conclusion that they get to decide how they consecrate rather than following God’s commandments how to consecrate. He, in his wisdom, knows what we need and what the kingdom of God needs, and I think it’s good to default to that.

Scott Woodward:
I thought it was very insightful, too, in your interview with Stephen Jones, where you said that, you know, if church members stop paying tithing, we wouldn’t be able to last very long. I think it was, like, somewhere between eight and sixteen years, depending on—

Aaron Miller:
Depending on market conditions and so on, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Like, the church is not without a need of church members’ donations as well, right? Just on that practical level, it is between us and God.

Aaron Miller:
That’s right.

Scott Woodward:
And there’s a reason that God is directing us to tithe to the church so that the purposes of the kingdom of God can continue to go forward. It seems to be an illusion to say that the church has so much money that it doesn’t need our tithing any longer. Like, that’s a fallacy.

Aaron Miller:
And you guys pointed out, and in fact, I think you quoted Nate Oman on this: like, the church is growing faster in parts of the world where tithing cannot sustain—tithing from those local members cannot sustain—the level of church activity that we want them to be able to have in terms of access to chapels and temples and extra programming and so on. The church in Sub-Saharan Africa right now is growing like crazy, and it’s amazing. And the members of the church there are some of the most faithful, incredible people you’ll ever meet. As the church continues to grow in parts of the world where financial resources are not nearly as abundant as they are in, like, the U. S. or Europe, as the church continues to grow in those areas, I will not be surprised to see the church spending down the endowment to service all of that growth.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So cool. Great answer. Here’s another question for you, Aaron. The church has a lot of money. A lot of people see that. Help us put that in context. Like, how do we compare the church’s wealth in an accurate or meaningful way?

Aaron Miller:
Yeah. No. Thank you. So I’ll begin by saying this, and you guys have laid the groundwork for this observation in all the past episodes in this series. The kingdom of God on the earth has never been as big as it is now. It’s never been the case that as many people who are alive today have made covenants, who are actively participating in those covenants, and for whom the church has substantial responsibilities. The church has accountability to all of these people, and the kingdom of God has never been as widespread around the globe, either. And this is, of necessity, a large and complex and financially demanding institution. It’s just the case. And I, you know, I almost feel bad for the leaders—not bad for them, but I feel bad for the leaders of the church having to wrestle with new problems that previous prophets have never had to wrestle with. I’m sure they find insights, and I know that the Savior is leading them in the work they do, but there have never been leaders of God’s kingdom on earth that have had to deal with the complex and large issues that our current church leaders have to deal with, just in terms of legality and finances and so on. To put the church finances into perspective, if you compare the church’s endowment to other large institutions, these are going to include, like, foreign reserve funds, large state or university funds, endowments, pension funds, and so forth, the church is about as big as you’d expect an organization of this size to be, and especially if you look at it on a per capita basis, which you guys referenced before. If you look at it as, like, how much is the church managing relative to the number of people it’s accountable for?

Scott Woodward:
I think we were quoting you.

Aaron Miller:
Yeah, well, I’m going to update that with some new numbers: It’s about $8,800 per church member, but to put that in perspective, Norway has a pension fund, and they’ve got $273,000 per citizen of Norway. Alaska has a permanent wealth fund, a huge endowment that they manage to benefit residents of Alaska, and Alaska has $103,000 set aside for every resident of Alaska.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Way to go, Alaska.

Aaron Miller:
New Mexico State. New Mexico State has an investment corporation that manages a large wealth fund, and they have $20,000 set aside per person, and then you guys mentioned Harvard. I’ll throw Yale in. Harvard, if you include all of their employees and students, has $1.2 million per person. Yale has $1.3 million per person.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Aaron Miller:
And so the church’s financial resources are what you would expect them to be for an organization of this size.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So nothing flashy. We’re just dealing with, like, sheer numbers. Like, when it gets this huge . . .

Aaron Miller:
This is a huge amount of money that the church is managing.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
But for an organization of this size and scope, it’s not, if—in comparison to other similar entities, it’s not necessarily a surprising amount of money.

Scott Woodward:
That’s helpful perspective. A follow-up question from another listener asks about how effective the church is as a nonprofit compared to other organizations that you’re aware of. They ask, like, if given the choice, if I wanted to provide humanitarian aid, would I be better off giving my money to the humanitarian aid fund of the church or to something else? What do you want to say about that?

Aaron Miller:
I’ll say that “better off” is a hard question to answer without knowing the cause that that person cares about.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Aaron Miller:
The way the church does most of its giving is in partnership with other organizations.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
Now, the church has its own welfare system, which you guys have talked about, and which is a highly effective, very impactful activity. The other kinds of humanitarian work that the church does is philanthropic, meaning that they’re giving money to other entities that are doing the good work. If you look at the kinds of organizations that the church is giving money to, and you like those organizations, you could give your money to the church. I actually tell people to look for the causes that they care about and start with that and then look for high-impact organizations working in those cause areas.

Scott Woodward:
What are some examples of humanitarian organizations or charitable organizations that the Church works with? Do you have any specifics?

Aaron Miller:
Sure. The Church works with, like, UNICEF. They’ve paid for quite a—like, I don’t know how many millions of immunizations for children around the world.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Aaron Miller:
To protect them against disease. The Church has worked with groups providing surgical treatments for a variety of things: eye care, cleft palate surgeries, limb surgeries, also providing resources for people to get prosthetics. The church has done a lot of interfaith philanthropic work as well, working with other churches and other religious charitable organizations, with the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church and others around the world.

Scott Woodward:
Very cool.

Aaron Miller:
And so the way you know is just by looking at the press releases that you can find on the newsroom at any given moment, and you can see, like, oh, some of this money is going here. Some’s going here. In fact, I would even say instead of directing your money through the church, find an organization the church is working with that you like, and you can even make donations directly to those organizations. And that works, too.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
It’s important to understand what cause area you care about and then find the high-impact organizations that are working in those areas.

Scott Woodward:
That’s very cool.

Casey Griffiths:
Another question, and I love this question: Ryan from Riverton, Utah: “Is capitalism compatible with consecration?” He wrote, “In spite of all the progress and innovation and freedom that capitalism has created, it also tends to reward greed and exploitation and manipulative practices. Is it possible to create a society in which there is no poor among you, and in which the poor shall be exalted, and the rich are made low,” he’s quoting Doctrine and Covenants 104, verse 16, “while adhering to a capitalist system? In short, what does the ideal city-of-Enoch-type economy look like?”

Scott Woodward:
Whoa. Good question, Ryan.

Casey Griffiths:
Great question.

Aaron Miller:
Such a thoughtful question. This is obviously getting outside my expertise.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, this is not a nonprofit law question.

Casey Griffiths:
A philosophical question, but it’s a nice change of pace.

Aaron Miller:
Sure. So I’ll begin by saying this: There is no economic system that forecloses our opportunity to consecrate. I don’t think there’s any system that says that it’s impossible for you to consecrate under this economic system. I think that’s as true for capitalism as it was for feudalism, right? I mean, it’s certainly the case that some systems have imbalances that lead to unjust or unfair outcomes.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Aaron Miller:
I think that’s going to be true for any system you find, because fundamentally, consecration is about shaping our hearts to desire the things that God desires. Can I imagine consecration surviving in capitalism? I can as much as I can imagine consecration surviving under any other economic system, simply because God is trying to draw our hearts out to the two great commandments. He’s trying to get us to love him. He’s trying to get us to love our neighbor as much as he can.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
And you’re going to find generous people all around the world in every economic system that’s alive today. You’re going to find people who are living those two great commandments. What will it look like in the millennium? I don’t know. I can imagine buying and selling. I think buying and selling is not just a system of—an efficient system of allocating resources. I think it’s also a system of respecting the work of others, and so I could see it persisting, but I would also see lots of generosity happening, people being provided for that don’t have the means to provide for themselves or the opportunity. We don’t have a purely capitalistic system today in the United States. I mean, in the U. S. alone, around $500 billion a year is given to charity, and that’s—

Scott Woodward:
That’s cool.

Aaron Miller:
That’s actually, that puts the U. S. at number one or number two in terms of charitable donations. But if you look at overall giving in informal ways, you see it happening everywhere around the world. People are just generous. It’s—it doesn’t feel like it all the time, but . . . There’s actually one study that came out just last year that did a high-stakes generosity study where they gave people, individuals, $10,000 to say, what would you do with this $10,000? And people spent nearly half of it on purchases that—or donations that benefited others, in some cases also benefited themselves, but almost nobody spent the full $10,000 in a purely egoistic, selfish way.

Scott Woodward:
Very cool. Way to go, humans. Sometimes humans disappoint me, and other times they warm my heart, and that’s a super cool example of that.

Aaron Miller:
I think God sees it the same way as you.

Scott Woodward:
So what I’m hearing you say is consecration is not about a system, not about an economic system, but about your heart.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
I think that’s right. And I think you guys have made a beautiful case of that throughout this series.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, thank you.

Casey Griffiths:
Love that.

Scott Woodward:
Well, Casey, I think we’ve been very well fed this hour. Fun to be with Aaron Miller. Wonderful thoughts, great responses to really good questions from our listeners. Is it okay if we just ask you two more questions?

Aaron Miller:
Sure.

Scott Woodward:
Is there anything in the financial operations of the church as you understand them, and I think you understand them better than most, that you think is concerning or that should be concerning to church members? Casey and I have talked in different series about the hermeneutic of suspicion. Some people just want to kind of catch the church doing something shady. Want to play gotcha with the church. They do it with church history. They do it with doctrinal issues. They do it with financial issues. I want to know from your expertise, like, do you see that anywhere, in all honesty?

Aaron Miller:
So what I would look for, and I say this having seen other nonprofit organizations that have behaved badly in ways that have been illegal or otherwise unethical. The first thing I look for is improper enrichment. Like, are there people who are becoming rich off of what should be charitably dedicated resources, using that broad definition of charity we talked about.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
There just is no evidence of this within the church. There are no hidden Lamborghinis or villas in Italy that general authorities are going away to. It would be too—frankly, it’d be too hard for them to hide.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Aaron Miller:
They live such public lives and are so constantly out there that for the leaders of the church to be enriching themselves . . . It’s a strange way to enrich yourself, because you’re going to die before you can take advantage of it without people noticing, since this is a lifetime responsibility for the members of the Twelve.

Scott Woodward:
That’s true.

Aaron Miller:
There is no evidence of that. And it’s funny, because people keep passing over this. When the controversies come up, nobody asks that question: where’s the unjust enrichment? Where are the people that are becoming rich illegally, unfairly off of this? And it never comes up because there’s no evidence of it. And so as long as that’s absent, my confidence goes up dramatically. Are there ways in which the church can misstep by mismanaging its resources? Of course, and it has throughout the church’s history. You guys have documented that in this series. So there might be moments when the church makes mistakes with its resources, like it did with the SEC fine or going all the way back to the Kirtland Safety Society, right? Like—

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Aaron Miller:
Like, these are things that these are examples of financial missteps.

Scott Woodward:
Human error is real.

Aaron Miller:
Exactly. But there are not people getting rich off of this.

Scott Woodward:
So you don’t see any concern in terms of the financial operations of the church, just to get you on record.

Aaron Miller:
No, it’s a—our leadership is full of people making sacrifices, and not just platitudinal, but very real, substantial, admirable sacrifices, and as long as that’s what we’re seeing instead of mansions and Lamborghinis, I have a lot of confidence in what they’re doing.

Casey Griffiths:
Well said.

Scott Woodward:
Love it.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ve seen the same thing, too, and I’ve only worked on, like, a limited, local level of church leadership, but the dedication and the sacrifice that the local members of the church make is just remarkable in my mind, and nobody’s getting rich, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Nobody seems to be profiting off it. They’re doing it because they’re good and because they—they’re committed to consecrate. They follow the principles of the law of consecration.

Scott Woodward:
Awesome. Okay, Aaron, our final question here: Why are you a believing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Do you mind if we just land the plane with that one?

Aaron Miller:
Yeah, thank you for that question. I believe in the covenants that I’ve made with God. They have been precious to me. I can point to multiple times in my life when God has kept His promises in those covenants that I’ve made with him in ways that I consider to be miraculous. He’s communicated with me multiple times through the Holy Ghost in ways that are undeniable, and I genuinely believe that I am a better person because of these covenants. If I look back on the path of my life, and I see the person I used to be at different stages compared to the person I am now, I’ve seen God taking care and attention to help me be better. That’s what I want, and this covenant relationship, this atonement relationship that I have with the Savior and that He makes available to all of us has been very real for me. It’s been really hard at times, too, in totally unexpected ways, but I can’t deny the abundant experiences of grace that I’ve felt on many different occasions, and that’s why I’m here.

Casey Griffiths:
Perfect. Perfect. Thank you, Aaron, so much. This is so helpful, and we really, really appreciate you and the good work you do, and thanks for your insight.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, thank you so much, Aaron.

Aaron Miller:
My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity.

Scott Woodward:
God bless. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. To hear more from Professor Aaron Miller, we recommend you check out his podcast and newsletter at how-to-help.com, where he guides people to finding more meaning, integrity, and impact in their work. And with that, my friends, we conclude our series on consecration and church finances. We’d love to hear your suggestions for future series on this podcast, so if there’s a church history topic you think would be worth exploring for multiple episodes, send us your idea to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. We promise to consider all suggestions. If you’re enjoying Church History Matters, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.