Welcome and Guest Introductions

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. Today is a very special edition. It's very, very rare that we broadcast at 8am or 8:23am on a Sunday morning. We do not intentionally mean to compete with church, but here we are doing a very important Mormon Stories podcast episode. The episode we're doing today is on Mormon Church finances. And we're going to be featuring a report that's been devised called the Widow's Might Report, which is a. A report created by a consortium of thoughtful people who are good at finance that are trying to encourage transparency and, and open openness around Mormon Church finances. And we'll get into that in just a second today. Joining me kind of as a co producer is Nate Bird from Black Menaces. Hey, Nate, how's it going? It's good to have you on board.

Nate Bird [00:01:04] Glad to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:05] Thanks for helping out in a pinch, for sure.

Nate Bird [00:01:07] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:01:08] And, and we've included the link to the Widows Might Report in the comments, but we'll have Nate maybe paste it in in a little while, repaste it. But joining us today to help us understand the Widow's Might Report for the first time on Mormon Stories podcast is Spencer Anderson, accounting professor from the University of Illinois. Hey, Spencer, thanks for joining us.

Spencer Anderson [00:01:39] Yeah, pleasure to be here. Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [00:01:42] Yeah, really quickly, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us who you are and why you're here?

Nate Bird [00:01:49] Sure.

Spencer Anderson [00:01:49] Yeah. I was born and raised in Utah. Typical path within the Mormon Church. Served a mission and all of that. We moved out to the Midwest in 2010 about 12 years ago or so and got my PhD in accounting at Indiana University. Currently on faculty at the University of Illinois.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] And mostly something about the Big Ten that's just really important to you.

Spencer Anderson [00:02:12] It's great. Yeah. The basketball, probably. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:15] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:02:16] Yeah. But the, the things that I mostly focus on in my job. I teach financial reporting courses. And then in addition to that, most of my research centers around financial reporting issues, especially about how investors might respond to different ways that a company might account for something, whether they're transparent or not, whether they account for things or measure things a certain way or not and things like that. So happy to be on here to, to help out. And I think, you know, the context of me being on here is that I'm an, I'm independent of the, of the Widow's Might, and so I can hopefully provide some objectivity there.

John Dehlin [00:02:57] Okay. Well, it's great to have you on, Spencer. Thank you so much for coming on. We're also excited to have a Few other faces that should be very familiar to you all. Radio Free Mormon is in the house. Hey, Radio Free Mormon.

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:13] Hey, how you doing?

John Dehlin [00:03:14] Now, if it's 8 o' clock here, something tells me it's 7 o' clock there.

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:18] It's earlier here. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:03:20] How are you doing?

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:21] It is early this Sunday morning. This session of Mormon Stories is being broadcast live from the General Conference center in Salt Lake City.

John Dehlin [00:03:31] Well, it's great to have you rfm. I know you feel passionately about this stuff and I think you've been a maybe an informal consultant a little bit to the widow's might, is that right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:40] Yes, I am one of the few people who's had a hand in it that will allow their name to be known, even if it's a fake name.

John Dehlin [00:03:46] Okay, well, thanks for joining us, Radio Free Mormon. And then finally to round out the wisdom of our panel is Rebecca Biblioteca. Hey, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:03:58] Good morning, John.

John Dehlin [00:04:00] Thanks for, thanks for joining us today.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:04:02] Oh, you're so welcome. This is such a hot topic and an interesting topic I think, to everyone and we're excited to hear what Spencer has to say to kind of clarify it for all of us.

John Dehlin [00:04:11] Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself or what you do or anything?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:04:15] Yes. I am a former employee of the BYU library, so I'm all about books. I run the Good Book Club, which is a reading group for post nuanced Mormon. And I have a little podcast called Mormonish Podcast where we actually kind of to do with this topic, recently released an episode where we went through and sort of data mined TBM responses to the SEC report. Very interesting to see what they think of it.

John Dehlin [00:04:42] Yeah. Well, it's great to have you on, Rebecca. And of course Radio Free Mormon runs his own podcast called Radio Free Mormon and he's a part of the wonderful Mormonism Live podcast that you can see every Wednesday night at 6:20pm Utah time. Is that right, Radio Free Mormon?

Radio Free Mormon [00:05:01] Yes, that's exactly right. Now you've proven you know the time.

John Dehlin [00:05:05] Okay. And I'll be. Will I be held responsible if my podcasts overlap? Is that what you're saying?

Radio Free Mormon [00:05:11] I think now, yes. Henceforth you must be.

Background on the Widow's Mite Project

John Dehlin [00:05:14] Okay. All right. All right. So, so, so Spencer, before we begin, or as we begin, maybe we should start by having you give us a little bit of background on the widow's might and kind of what we're going to be doing today. Is that all right?

Spencer Anderson [00:05:32] Yeah, that sounds great.

John Dehlin [00:05:33] Okay, so why don't you jump in and then we've got some slides that we can turn to whenever. Whenever you want us to.

Spencer Anderson [00:05:40] Okay. So I was part of a book group that started out called the Book Good Book Club that Rebecca. Rebecca's in charge of. And she reached out to me and said that, you know, the Widow's Might people are looking for somebody who could potentially look through the models that they've used the source data and things like that and provide some sort of. I don't know if I would want to call it assurance or an audit or something like that, but something that would give some confidence around the numbers that are provided.

Spencer Anderson [00:06:09] And I was so excited about this idea. When I was a kid. I used to want to not be a general authority. I got really excited when the statistician would come up and say, this is how many members are in the church. And also the numbers have been audited. I wanted to be one of those two people.

Spencer Anderson [00:06:29] So for me, this is like a dream for me has always been to see the financials of the church. And obviously this is not that. But I will say that, you know, it was nice to be able to go through all of the publicly available data that Widows Might has, you know, compiled meticulously and review all the models, review all the data.

Spencer Anderson [00:06:54] And honestly, I cannot imagine this being anything less than the gold standard going forward for an estimation of what the church is worth, an estimation of what the church brings in and how it uses its money. Until the Church at some point in the future decides to be more transparent about what it does. It's still an estimate and there's going to still be some uncertainty surrounding some of the things that Widows Might has done, but they've done a really good job. And so just wanted to set that aside in terms of where I am coming from, what I'm trying to provide.

Spencer Anderson [00:07:31] But, you know, from the Widow's Might perspective, they had this project founder and you could go to the first slide if you want at this point.

John Dehlin [00:07:37] But before. Before we actually go to the goals and the methods, is there anything you can tell us about the founding of the Widow's Might? And I know, I imagine the people who are part of it want to remain anonymous for whatever reasons. But what can you tell us about the founding of Widow's Mite?

Spencer Anderson [00:07:56] Yeah, so the founder was a very active member. And when this project began and became a little bit concerned when the Mormon Leaks information came out, the founder is involved in the finance industry and the project didn't have a name then or anything like that, but this person then began to Dig deeper and dig deeper and try and figure out, you know, like, what are, what is the truth? And part of the problem, I think, was that he was feeling as though there were two different stories, two different truths being held at once. Like where you have some people that are saying that, like the church is worth a hundred billion dollars.

Spencer Anderson [00:08:36] You have some people that are saying it's worth next to nothing. You have some people who say that it's the greatest charitable giving organization in the world, that it gives more charity than anybody. And then you have somebody, some people saying that they hardly give anything.

Spencer Anderson [00:08:49] And to have a conversation about, about this stuff, you have, you at least need to come to a common ground first. And that was what sort of, was the impetus behind getting this started. And then just as a public service, he just wanted to kind of figure out if, if he could help move that conversation along.

Spencer Anderson [00:09:13] And so the Mormon leaks report was alarming to this person. There was a lot of misinformation, misunderstanding around the numbers, and the church said practically nothing about it. Spencer left it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:09:27] Yeah, Spencer, RFM here. That revelation, that leak from Mormon leaks, that was five years ago, I think. And this was the one about the $32 billion in the stock market, right?

Spencer Anderson [00:09:36] Correct. This was the one that showed first that the church was using various different companies to invest in the stock market. That's right. That's how it got started. It started with one person, started building up with more people. They started collecting information, building models, reading. They come from various backgrounds. Right now I think it's actually grown to about a team of about 10 to 12 people I've met personally, three of them. And in terms of like, you know, a person to person basis, you know, I could give, you know, person to person assessment of their sincerity and their credentials, for sure. They're a little on the older side from my perspective. They're, you know, in their 40s or 50s.

Radio Free Mormon [00:10:29] So they're hey, hey, hey.

Spencer Anderson [00:10:33] They're a little bit. What that means to me is that they're, they're well into their careers. They're. They're very professional. And so far none of them wants any publicity for the effort. So initially, you know, you had, you start out with 5, now you have like something like 10 to 12 or something like that. They come from diverse backgrounds, diverse schools of thought. One thing that I thought was interesting was that they were diverse politically.

Spencer Anderson [00:11:02] So to them it's not about figuring. It's not about trying to make an argument about what the church should do with its money. It's about just trying to figure out what the church does do with its money. It's more about the numbers and providing an accurate, informative estimate about what the church's wealth is all about.

Spencer Anderson [00:11:25] And this has been such a long undertaking. I don't know if I'm bouncing all over the place, but it took about three years of research to just get the first report done in 2021. And so this has been a five year project that has been continually improving and going on. And one of the nice things that I think is great about it is that, and this is probably what makes it the best available information that we have in terms of the church and its finances, is that it builds on the stuff that's been done before. And we'll talk about this, I'm sure, in a little bit, but it takes some of the good things that have been done by people like Michael Quinn and others and the Mormon leaks and it compiles it all.

Spencer Anderson [00:12:12] And it's not a stagnant document. And so if somebody comes, let's say that anybody in the audience today knows about something about the church, public information that maybe somebody in widows, my team doesn't know about or, or hasn't thought about.

Spencer Anderson [00:12:28] You could email them, you could contact them, and I'll tell you right now that the, they would probably get back to you within a couple of hours. The way that I've dealt with these people, it is, it is. They are very passionate about this and, and they'll update it, they'll update the model, they'll make it more accurate. It's not about like this isn't like a set in stone kind of estimate either. And so that's one thing that I really find appealing to this concept. And they also have. So within, like, within their project, they've done a couple of different things. So like, one of them is that they've built like an entire overview of church wealth.

Spencer Anderson [00:13:10] How much is the church worth? Another one is they've kind of looked at tithing. They've also looked at things like how much do general authorities make? They've looked at temples and how much it costs to build a temple.

Spencer Anderson [00:13:22] Real estate, how much real estate does the church own? They've looked, they've done a really deep dive into Ensign Peak. They've started. And I think they're close to finishing a BYU report using audited financial statements from the BYU University system.

Spencer Anderson [00:13:39] And they're collaborating with a lot of people, including current and former BYU employees with that. And so they've done a lot of this Work with professionals, real estate professionals, social media moderators, people on the team are involved in philosophy and law, in finance, in economics, in accounting. And.

Spencer Anderson [00:14:02] And so it's been really cool to see kind of everything come together. And one of the things that I guess, like the Widow's Might person wanted to emphasize is that there is no criticism that's seen as too harsh or no sensitivity that's too small to look at. If, you know, if you feel like there's something off, then maybe you could reach out to them and they'd be happy to adjust. And that happened throughout the process. So as I was. As I was going through the models, there were several questions that I had.

Spencer Anderson [00:14:32] Most of them were answered right away and they had a good reason for what they were doing. A couple of them. There were some adjustments that were made and, and that was great. And Radio Free Mormon obviously has been a part of that as well. The head of the widow's might told me that Radio Forman has made some incredible contributions, many of which no, nobody knows about because it's stuff that he helped push to the table to the cutting room floor. So it's stuff that you don't want in the report that that Radio Free Mormon helped out with. So any questions? I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:15:07] Like, yeah, I do have a question. What? So the, the website is Widows Might Report. That's M I t e widowsmightreport.WordPress.com for those who want to check it out. What's the email address if you want to actually reach out to them and contact them. Do you know, Spencer? Anybody know?

Radio Free Mormon [00:15:32] I don't.

John Dehlin [00:15:34] Okay, well, I do know it's on. It's at the bottom of their website. I just, when I click on it, it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:15:40] I have a cell phone number I could share.

Spencer Anderson [00:15:42] It is the.widows.mint.reportgmail.com okay.

John Dehlin [00:15:49] All right. The.widows.mint.report Gmail.com. okay, we'll. We'll add that maybe as a comment. Maybe we'll have Nate add that as a comment. Okay, so without any further ado, then we've got a bunch of slides. Like what, 60 slides? How many slides do we have today, Spencer?

Project Goals, Methods, and Website

Spencer Anderson [00:16:06] Yeah, it's about 60 slides. Sorry, everybody.

John Dehlin [00:16:09] Okay, well, we'll. We'll jump into it. And the first slide is just around the project goals and the method. Should we start there?

Spencer Anderson [00:16:16] Yeah, let's do it.

John Dehlin [00:16:17] All right, let's.

Spencer Anderson [00:16:18] And I think this is such a familiar sentiment, this first slide. I think that people will be able to feel if you Go to like a social media post that has anything to do with the church and its finances, you will see a litany of responses and they are all over the place. There are people that say things like the church is the greatest giving organization in the entire world. There's no data to back that up. And they'll say that. There are also people that say, you know, I think the church is actually worth a trillion dollars. Or there might be people that say, no, the church used to be worth a billion dollars, but it's $100 billion.

Spencer Anderson [00:16:55] But now it's worth 32 billion. And then there are some people that say it's worth 100 billion. And here's the site and it's. And every single one of those comments is wrong, by the way. And so as a finance person or an accounting person myself, I find this very frustrating. And I think that the widows, my team, feels the same way.

Spencer Anderson [00:17:17] And so the goal behind this is to sort of come to a common ground so that debates can be had. The goal is not to provide some like, theological argument, although I'm sure in the podcast today we'll be talking about that.

Spencer Anderson [00:17:31] The goal is simply to recognize and analyze the data. It's all publicly available data, use the best methods possible to perform essentially a financial analysis, which is what some of the people in the widows might report would do in their profession and then share it so that people can see it, people can verify it, and they can get real up to date information on it.

Spencer Anderson [00:17:58] And that way, you know, you can, you can start the conversation at least at the same, at the same level. So I think a great goal from this, a great outcome of this would be that faithful members and less faithful people within the church could, could come together and could at least agree on what is happening in the world when it comes to the church's finances. That, that would be a huge hurdle that could be overcome.

Spencer Anderson [00:18:30] And it's really hard to do that because as soon as you start having a conversation about this stuff, it, you emotions start to run high because you have your, your biases set in. It's not even clear to me where the bias should go. So if I'm antagonistic towards the church, do I want the church to be more wealthy or less wealthy? I don't know what the answer is to that. And I think likewise for people who are faithful members of the church, Do I want them to.

Spencer Anderson [00:19:00] Do you want them to give more or less or do you want them to have more or less? There's not a clear directional bias and, but the emotions are still bubbling within you, and it can just make things really difficult to talk about church finances without some common ground.

Sources of Data Used in the Report

John Dehlin [00:19:20] Okay, so now that we've kind of established kind of the project goals and the, the methods and what we're trying to accomplish, let's. Should we go to the sources?

Spencer Anderson [00:19:34] Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

John Dehlin [00:19:35] So what are the sources that we're drawing from here?

Spencer Anderson [00:19:37] So, yeah, we have a lot of, like, church provided data within the church provided data. You have things like the 13F filings. You have the form 990Ts to the IRS that are provided. You also have like, a few things like the statistical reports that are provided. Every once in a while, the church newsroom will come out with something that says, here's how we deal with our reserve funds.

Spencer Anderson [00:20:03] BYU has to have audited financial statements. So there are some, there's some financial data there. That's all the byu. BYU Idaho and BYU Hawaii. And. And what's the one in Salt Lake? Ensign College or I believe. And then there are also a few countries where you have to provide financial data as a church. And so that includes Canada, Australia and the UK and so you can kind of glean from all of those sources to try and kind of put together a bigger picture. They used all of those sources as well as media coverage that they could find when it comes to the church leaders making some claim about the church or its wealth.

Spencer Anderson [00:20:44] Any previously leaked documents. Now, this part is important here because when I say leaked documents, I don't mean that they're private. I don't. It just means that it's been leaked to the public. And so it's not as though they have any. They're using in this model, any private information here.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:05] They're not saying, like, well, we know something you don't. And this is why the church is worth what it is. They also wanted to make it very clear that if you have any information, please share it with them, but do not leak confidential data. Don't break any confidentiality agreements for this. It's dishonest. It could be illegal to do so.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:29] The whistleblower issue is a very different thing because that's a, that's a legal action that you could take. But, you know, they would not advocate towards this. That's not the goal behind any of this.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:21:43] So I have a question, if I could ask really quickly. So when you say the church provided this data, do you really mean that it's available? They basically. They didn't make it available. You found it. Is that Right. Is that what you're saying?

Spencer Anderson [00:21:58] Correct. Yeah. So, like, most of the time, what I mean by that is that they are required to provide.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:22:03] Yes, that's where they provide it.

Spencer Anderson [00:22:06] Yes.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:22:06] Right. And I would say that maybe other charitable institutions or churches perhaps make reports themselves, like what the widow's right might is creating and make that available to members or anybody else that wants to see it. But in this case, we have this independent think tank that's out there creating this on behalf. For. In behalf of the church.

Spencer Anderson [00:22:25] Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. It would be nice if the church compiled all this because they have all the information. They have all of this. They, and they could easily give any of this out, and they, and they just choose not to. So what they have been forced to provide is what's being used to try and, and trying to almost reconstruct some financial statements in the way that they would want the church to provide them, potentially.

John Dehlin [00:22:50] Spencer, really quick, just talking about the whistleblower thing, like, I think I get that the widows, my team, you know, they don't have a goal as, as trying to encourage people to violate their confidentiality agreements. But, but it, it's also probably not saying that it's unethical if, if you're part of an institution that might be breaking the law. I don't think the widow's might team is saying unethical to serve in a role of a whistleblower. If you feel like your, your organization, even the church, is violating the law, how would we thread that needle, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:23:32] Yeah, so the easy way to thread that needle for me is that whistleblower. A whistleblower. To be a whistleblower, there's a certain channel you go through. That channel is not to email the widows, my team. So they don't want to have just like this, like private data sent to them. And they have had private data sent to them. If you want to be a whistleblower, go through the proper channels. Right. Go through the David Nielsen channel and be a whistleblower in that way.

John Dehlin [00:24:05] And that would mean something like what, Like a lawsuit.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:09] Right. So you go and you talk to John or what? Mark Nagel.

John Dehlin [00:24:12] Mark. Mark Pugsley.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:14] Mark Pugsley, that's right. And, and you could find and talk to him. Right. And see if, if you have something that can be provided.

John Dehlin [00:24:24] Okay, so if, if it's.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:26] There are some things like where, like Mormon leaks, for example, found publicly available data that the church didn't realize was publicly available. So they found that the IP address,

John Dehlin [00:24:37] actually, I think Someone contacted them and sent them information because I've been contacted by the source of the Mormon leaks. Leaks.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:44] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:24:45] And it's a private individual that. That went out and found this information and shared it with Mormon leagues, so.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:52] Right. And that one wouldn't be a problem either, because that was publicly available data as well. The church was off. Was inadvertently potentially signaling out through its IP address the. The information about where these filings were coming from. And that's publicly available data. So if you've signed an agreement with the church to not divulge something, widows might. Doesn't want anything to do with that.

John Dehlin [00:25:20] But if you feel like, if you work for the church and you feel like the church is violating the law or doing something very unethical, then call Mark Pugsley or a securities or tax attorney that's a specialist in whistle. In whistleblowing, and they'll help you take that through the proper channels. And then once that information is somehow made available, then the widows might. Would use it. Is that right?

Spencer Anderson [00:25:47] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:25:48] Okay, got it, Got it. Okay, good. All right, Spencer, let's go back to the slides. And there's some other sources of information. Right. That we haven't covered yet.

Spencer Anderson [00:25:58] Yeah. So like, I mean, financial professionals will often use the Bloomberg terminal. And so there's just, you know, a lot of information there. And in terms of, like, finding a lot of the analysis that was done was, like, making assumptions about, like, okay, well, how do we know what the average performance would be if they were investing in international stock funds? We don't know what their performance was, but we know what the average performance was. And so things like that, they might need to kind of aggregate more larger data sets from. From the public. For. For some of their estimations, they looked through some web archives.

Spencer Anderson [00:26:35] They looked at books and articles from the past. We talked about, like, Michael Quinn will talk about that in a minute. But just so many different sources. And I think that one of the great things about this project is that sometimes there would be cases where. And we'll talk about this in a moment, but where a church, an estimate or a claim was made about how much the church was worth. It was like up here and Widow's Night was down here. And that discrepancy suggests that there's something wrong. Either somebody's missing some data, or they could both be wrong. And that's frustrating.

Radio Free Mormon [00:27:10] Right.

Spencer Anderson [00:27:11] And in every case where that's been the case, widows might. Has been able to sort of reconcile that and figure out why one was different from the other and adjust and the same would go for when there are two that are very similar and that they do reconcile over time.

Spencer Anderson [00:27:32] That provides some confidence around the estimate that widow's mind is providing. There's still a chance that they could both be wrong. But as you see, more and more data sources come from different areas that all kind of collaborate around one estimate. You start to get closer and closer to the right. What I would say is the right answer in terms of what is the church's wealth?

Spencer Anderson [00:27:59] And so what the widows might. What one of the members of the widows might said to me was that their goal is to move from oceans apart in terms of estimates to within at least the same zip code. And I think that that's what they've done by gathering all of these different sources. It's been really helpful to see that.

John Dehlin [00:28:19] Okay. Anything else you want to say about the sources used?

Spencer Anderson [00:28:23] No, I guess I want to go back a little bit about the. A couple of the details about the project. One thing that they also said was that they don't want to accept any donations. They never will. This is not about fame for them. That's why they. None of them wanted to get on the podcast themselves. They don't want to debate theology or the truth claims of the church. That's not what they're about. I think I mentioned that. Let me just make sure that I'm kind of.

John Dehlin [00:28:51] Are you. Are you able to. Are you able to say if there are any faithful, believing participants of the widow's might, and it's okay if you can't answer that question?

Spencer Anderson [00:29:00] I'm not. I'm not sure to what level. I mean, that's a subjective evaluation. Right. What does it mean to be active? But they are. They are in. Yeah, they are in various levels of activity. So some of them are still going to church. I can say that.

John Dehlin [00:29:14] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:29:18] I. I would also say that they're equally likely, in my opinion, to call out misleading statements by critics of the church and defenders of the church apologists. And. And so far, you know, the public response, I think, has been really overwhelmingly positive to this.

Spencer Anderson [00:29:37] And. And I think that when there has been criticism to the team, it has been from both sides, which I think is actually a really good sign that they're doing something right. There have been some believers that accused them of being biased, promoting some agenda, and I think a lot of times the numbers just speak for themselves. And a number of. Of ex Mormon who would also say, you know, that they're being secretly apologetic, that they have some agenda going on as well.

Spencer Anderson [00:30:06] And, but you know, there's a lot of compliments that they've been getting where, you know, hopefully, like if you're an ex Mormon and you have a believing spouse, maybe this could be something where you could, this could be a common ground where you could kind of come come around and have a discussion around this because it's something that should hopefully equally, equally make people mad, I guess, or equally. Equally call out and also attribute good things to both sides of the argument.

John Dehlin [00:30:44] Sure. Really, really quickly, Spencer, I it tell me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the the Mormon Church used to be public in its finances up until like the late 1950s, maybe 1958, 1959. And there are a lot of churches that do choose to be transparent in their finances. It there was a deliberate decision in the late 50s, early 60s for the Mormon Church to hide its finances. Am I right about that, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:31:15] Yeah, yep. And exactly. Yep. And that's where I think we'll talk about Michael Quinn in just a couple of slides. And I think, yeah, it's, this is not something that doesn't this is not something Transparency is not a doctrine or the lack thereof. It's not a doctrine of the church, as far as I'm aware. It's not an unchanging doctrine, that's for sure.

Radio Free Mormon [00:31:38] No, it's not an unchanging doctrine, but it is a promise given by the acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Elder Ballard, when he said we are as transparent as we know how to be. That's, that's what Jesus would do. So maybe not a doctrine, but, but a promise. So I'll tell you what I see going on here, which I think is absolutely fascinating, is we have this church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which keeps absolute secret what it has as far as its finances, as far as its holdings, what it pays to its general authorities. And this is a huge detective story where these really brilliant, it's like 12 Sherlock Holmes have gotten together and put the pieces together to figure out what is it that they have that they're hiding.

How Wealthy Is the Church?

Radio Free Mormon [00:32:23] If they just told us what they had, there wouldn't be any need for the widow's might report. Right. And it seems that at every opportunity, whenever the church or its leaders speak about the issue of what it has, it's always in a way to dumb it down to make it sound like they really don't have that much. I think it's disinformation. And I am of course thinking of Gordon B. Hinckley's statement about that the leaders get paid a modest stipend.

Radio Free Mormon [00:32:51] Yeah, I wish I had that kind of a modest stipend, I gotta tell you. And also a leader saying that we're good people. No, we're. We're not a rich people. That's it. We are not a rich people. We're poor people. But we give what we have. So every time they speak about it in general terms, it's disinformation. They're always trying to lower people's expectations about what's really going on behind the scenes. And that's what I'm looking forward to getting into in this show.

John Dehlin [00:33:20] All right, thanks, rfm. Should we go ahead and just jump into one of the major topics everyone wants to know?

Spencer Anderson [00:33:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:33:28] How wealthy the Mormon church is. Is that the next topic?

Spencer Anderson [00:33:33] Yeah, that's great.

John Dehlin [00:33:34] All right, so I'll just. Yeah, let's go ahead and jump in.

Spencer Anderson [00:33:38] Yeah, so this is like a huge takeaway. And I think, you know, how much is the church worth? So if you say there's an. The church is an X billion dollar church, what's the number that you give people? What's the number that you should offer?

Spencer Anderson [00:33:51] And as of the latest estimate, which was at the end of 2022, the widow's might would project that the church is a $236 billion church. Now, that includes operating assets, that includes all of the churches, the temples, byu, things like that, as well as its investment fund.

Spencer Anderson [00:34:12] And so, you know, you can round around there. But are we talking about a $500 billion church? Absolutely not. Are we talking about a $100 billion church? So when people call this the church, a $100 billion church, they're actually very far off by more than double.

Spencer Anderson [00:34:29] The church is worth close to 250 billion dollar church. And so what I would say is, you know, the church is roughly a 250 billion dollar church. A couple of things to note here in terms of the slide, and I think people can just kind of read it for what it is. But one thing that you notice is that from 2021 to 2022, the operating assets have gone up in terms of value and the investments have gone down. That is not the norm.

Spencer Anderson [00:34:58] In fact, mostly what you are going to see is that the investment side of things is growing much more rapidly than the church, part of the church. So this last year was sort of an anomaly in that sense.

Spencer Anderson [00:35:15] But the other thing that I would say is when you just look at the numbers, it's almost. It's almost exact that the church has two more churches behind it. What I mean by that is there's an $80 billion church and then they have enough money behind it to create two more to replicate the church two more times. That's how much money they have behind the scenes.

John Dehlin [00:35:44] What do you mean, what do you mean by that, replicating the church? What do you mean?

Spencer Anderson [00:35:47] I mean that if it, if it takes $80 billion to create the church now to, you know, that's what the, the, the when I say the church, I mean the ecclesiastical church that people see buildings and things like that, that they have the investments behind that, that they could, they could triple the number of universities they have. They could triple the number of temples they have the chapels, everything. They can triple it all and, and make three Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Okay. That we see visible to the public eye.

John Dehlin [00:36:19] So you're saying that their investments are worth twice the, the assets, basically.

Spencer Anderson [00:36:27] That's exactly right. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:36:28] Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's significant. Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:36:31] Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:36:31] Can I make one comment quickly, Rebecca? I like what you said, Spencer. Tripling the church. I feel a big problem with this is that people can't comprehend how much money that is in our minds. There's no. Between maybe 10 billion, a million. People just don't understand the amount. But when you start talking in quantifiable entities like that, I think people get an idea of how much excess there is. So I would love to see more things like that, even charitable things where you could say this amount of money, $5 billion will eradicate this. I think that helps people understand what the church could do and what they're not doing. So I like it when you talk in those terms.

Spencer Anderson [00:37:07] Yeah. Yes, that's good. And the other thing I would note too, in terms of like the historical context of this is like Michael Quinn went back in the 50s and 70s and he tracked what was from investments and, and the church had investments back then. At first the investments were to give control for sort of the church.

John Dehlin [00:37:26] Is this the next slide we're going to.

Spencer Anderson [00:37:27] It's not. I don't think it's the next slide.

John Dehlin [00:37:29] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:37:29] But it was allocated a lot of that investment was to pay for the apostles some salary. Right. But the thing is, is throughout that time, the investment portion of the church was relatively small. And really this, this issue with the investments being huge is a recent development. This is a, this is a 10. A last 10 to 20 year problem. I would call it a problem for the church that had to deal with.

John Dehlin [00:37:57] Is it Fair to say that it started sometime in the 90s when Ensign Peak was created, that basically Hinkley, maybe with Eyring, and we're speculating here, said, whoa, now all of a sudden we've got literally billions of surplus funds. We need a way to manage that effectively, and that's the birth of Ensign Peak. Am I right about that, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:38:18] Yeah, sure. Seems to be that. That was an inflection point. They already had 7 billion at that point, which is a substantial amount as well. But to see the way it's grown, that's unprecedented for the church. And so in some ways I do commiserate, not commiserate. I don't have that kind of money. I sympathize for the church leaders who are, they are addressing a new problem for the church. This isn't an old thing that they've had to deal with before.

John Dehlin [00:38:49] Spencer, really quickly. So going back to the slide about the total wealth of the church, around 236 billion, one question that I have is how do we know how much we don't know? In other words, international funds that we have no idea exist. Maybe that maybe the church created 30 shell companies and they just did it in other ways. Maybe they've got offshore stuff in the Cayman Islands. Like how do we know about the stuff we don't know when we use 236 billion in, in confidence, does that make sense?

Spencer Anderson [00:39:25] Yeah, it absolutely does. And I think it's a great question. I, I think it's a valid question. And honestly, there are some things that we don't know and that the church does have. But I think that it's not about the fact that the church does have some things that maybe we don't know about. It's, it's that I don't think that it's material.

Spencer Anderson [00:39:45] The, the, the large bulk of the wealth within the church was concentrated in Ensign Peak. And I think that the nail in the coffin on that argument was the SEC cease and desist letter that came out. They established Ensign Peak as the premier and central and only operator of the assets of the investment assets of the church.

Spencer Anderson [00:40:12] And so at that point, for me, yes, there are probably some international things going on, but even Enzyme Peak is in charge of that. And so, yes, there are probably some things going on behind the scenes that we aren't aware of. The thing is, you got to remember too, is when the SEC calls, they are grabbing your email servers, they're not asking questions, they're saying, this is what we need and you have to give them Over.

Spencer Anderson [00:40:43] And so if there were. If there was some second ensign peak out there, the SEC would know about it by now. It would be. It would be impossible for that to.

John Dehlin [00:40:54] Or the church would be literally risking its status as an ongoing concern by knowingly deceiving the sec. Is that what you're saying?

Spencer Anderson [00:41:02] Oh, that would be. That would be prison time type of fraud. Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:41:06] Okay. Okay, cool. So anything else you want to say about the church's wealth before we go to the next slide? No.

Spencer Anderson [00:41:14] Yeah, that's great. Let's go to the next slide.

Pre-Internet Church Wealth History

John Dehlin [00:41:16] Okay, so the next slide is pre Internet church wealth. A deep dive.

Spencer Anderson [00:41:21] Yeah. So a couple of things have been done in the past to evaluate church wealth that I. That I know about. One of this is this. What is it? Heinerman and Shoop. I can't remember what his first name is. Heinerman Shoup. Yeah, that's right.

Spencer Anderson [00:41:35] They ran. They had an analysis that they did back in the nineteen nineteen eighties, and they looked through hundreds of documents, thousands of different pieces of data, and followed the paper trails. And what they did is they did an analysis that is sort of a balance sheet approach to estimating church wealth. And what I mean by that is they tried to look at each asset that the church owns and then tried to assign a value to it. And they did this like, down to, like the cattle, like down to each. What's. What's a cow worth? And, you know, they would do that kind of thing.

Spencer Anderson [00:42:12] And so widows might took a similar approach in terms of they didn't do that to that extent. But the. They. They broke down the wealth estimate in the same way, sort of saying, well, here are the operating assets of the church. This is the thing that keeps the church running and in its ecclesiastical mission. And then you have on the other side, the investment side of the church, which is all about, you know, just growing this support system.

Spencer Anderson [00:42:41] And the reason that widows might kind of tried to attempt to do, to compare the Heinerman and Shoup estimate to its estimate is to see whether they were within a reasonable range. So according to Heirman and Shoup, there was about 9.3 billion in total assets for the church in 1983.

Spencer Anderson [00:43:04] And in order for the church to grow to 236 billion, operating assets would have had to grow by 7.2% and investment assets would have had to grow by 9.8%. And that is a reasonable range. Like if it was something like 20% or 1% or a negative percentage or something like that, it would have. We would have had a problem. But I guess what I would take away from this is that, you know, some of this work that's been done in the past has been really helpful to provide some test of reasonableness in terms of the estimates that have been made in the past for today.

John Dehlin [00:43:43] Can I just say 10% annual return on your investments? That's really high. I mean it, you know, you think about Fidelity or you know, any mutual fund company, if they can boast over a multi decade period, a 10 annual return, isn't that not just good but like super good, Spencer, or do I have that wrong?

Spencer Anderson [00:44:07] Yeah, it is super good. It's a little easier if you don't have to pay taxes on it. So that's, that's at least one element to, to that. It is a little bit in the higher range, but it's not, it's not out of, it's not out of the ballpark at all. But you're right, like for you or me to do that, to get 10%, that would be amazing.

John Dehlin [00:44:30] Yeah, yeah. I mean, if a hedge Fund could boast 10 annual returns over multiple decades, that would be seen as something to jump into, right?

Spencer Anderson [00:44:42] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:44:42] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:44:43] Yeah. And so the growth comes from a couple of different sources though too. So the growth comes from not just the investment growing, but then also there's more principal coming in from the excess time.

John Dehlin [00:44:56] Oh, that's a good point. That's a good.

Spencer Anderson [00:44:58] So you have the, the tax free income that's coming in, you also have the extra principal, the extra. Right now it's around a billion a year that's being added on to the pie.

John Dehlin [00:45:09] So that helps.

Radio Free Mormon [00:45:11] Right. And I'm actually hearing in from one of the main people behind the widow's might report, and he's addressing the same issue. He's saying it's not a 10 return, it's really a 7% return is what they're making. And the, the rest of that 3% has to do with inflation. And also they spend tithing each year to buy more assets. And I think that's what you were talking about, Spencer. They got tithing coming in as well as just using what they started with, the 7 billion. So it continues to be replenished. I also wanted to make a comment, if we can. Can you put that slide that was up on the screen up again?

John Dehlin [00:45:45] It's back. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:45:47] Okay. I just want to make a comment about that because this is something that was confusing to me not being in accounting, which is that where you've got the boy, it looks fuzzy to me now the nine point something billion.

John Dehlin [00:46:00] 9.8 oh. 9.3 billion.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:03] Oh, suddenly it's better. 9.3 billion. And the other one's the 2, 3, 6 billion today. Yeah. Those lines that look almost like negative lines. That's not negative. 9.3 billion. That's a squiggly line. And that means around. It's an approximation.

Nate Bird [00:46:19] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:20] So that was something that I had to learn as part of this. But and especially when it's up there like that where it's harder even to see, it's a squiggle, at least for me. So that's just a sign. That means approximately 9.3 billion. 83. And now approximately 236 billion at the end of 2022. 2.

John Dehlin [00:46:37] Thanks. Thanks. RFM. That's good to know.

Spencer Anderson [00:46:41] I'm glad you have an inside source. We're going on right now. So if he. If Widows might team has anything to say in the middle of it, please have them text you more rfm.

John Dehlin [00:46:52] We're delighted they're joining us.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:54] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:46:54] Correct. Correct any mistakes I make for sure.

John Dehlin [00:46:57] All right, Spencer, anything else you want to want to say about this slide before we move on?

Spencer Anderson [00:47:01] Oh, that's. No, that's great. Yeah, let's move on.

Misreported Data and Wealth Estimates

John Dehlin [00:47:04] Okay. All right, let's go to the next slide which is misstating source data exacerbates confusion.

Spencer Anderson [00:47:11] Yeah. So like I said before, the Widow Smite team is not. They're not going to kind of critique only one side of the issue. One thing that they noticed was on Mormon stories in August 2022. I don't remember who the guest was. I'm sorry, John. But one of the guests was looking back at this Heinerman and Shoup study and saying like, you know, they talked to somebody, a controller for the church who had verified that this was actually quite accurate as an estimate the Heinerman and Shoup study. But they also misremembered that the Heinerman and Shoup study had come to a 1983 estimate of 9.3 billion and not 120 billion.

Spencer Anderson [00:47:54] And so because of that one misremembering, and this is just like, this is a. It was a, A great comment that was being made, but that one, that one mistake in terms of. Of misremembering the number ended up causing this person on the podcast to extrapolate that the church was a trillion dollar church today.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:15] And. And so that's just not true. It was. It's a very easy thing to kind of correct. And I think that the Widow's might was trying to kind of point out that, look, we're making mistakes on both sides of the table here in terms of what we say. We've got to be more careful about the numbers that we use. And I guess to the audience, you know, when you go and speak on social media, be careful about what you say in terms of what the numbers are. Go back to the widow's might report, kind of see and make sure that your numbers are right before you, you assess this.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:45] And just one analogy that I have is, you know, this was, this statement was 15 times what was actually stated. But, and I know it's numbers and when we talk with big numbers, it's like we can't even conceptualize the difference between 9.3 billion and 120 billion really in our heads. But imagine saying something that like Joseph Smith had instead of 30 wives, he had 450 wives. Like that's the, that's the magnitude of the, of the misstatement that was made. Right.

Spencer Anderson [00:49:15] So we could all do, you know, a little bit better here. And, and I, I don't think that they mean anything malicious about this. This is an act of love from them. And that was.

John Dehlin [00:49:25] Yeah, I think I, I think I, I might, before knowing about the widow's might report, I think that I had a confidence level that the church was worth in the hundreds of billions, probably more than 200 billion, given the stocks and the cash and the municipal bonds and the real estate, plus all the church's core assets.

John Dehlin [00:49:45] And I think my view has just always been that the church is certainly worth hundreds of billions, somewhere between 2 and 400 billion probably, but that using just a 7% or more annual return, and now we know it's potentially 10% if you add surplus tithing and inflation.

John Dehlin [00:50:07] It me, you know, it does mean that the church, at some point soon, probably still within my lifetime, the church will be a trillion dollar church. And, and I hope I feel bad if, if at times I've contributed to that misunderstanding by speaking more carelessly, but I'm also very grateful the widows might organization reached out to me and called me on that. And so I'm grateful that they're doing their work and I'm grateful that they would call me out because I want us to be as accurate as possible. So, so the church is worth a little bit more, you know, than 200 billion likely right now. And that's something that we should all, that's a number we should all get kind of firm in our brain.

Spencer Anderson [00:50:48] Yeah, 250250 billion dollar church is a great rounding number, I think. Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:50:54] Yeah. So I was gonna ask Spencer, I tend to use the word gajillion when I describe it. Is that accurate with the widows? Might be okay with that.

Spencer Anderson [00:51:00] That's. Yeah, that's great. Well, that's actually not bad because then you kind of. You kind of.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:51:05] Yeah, it's a general. Yeah. It just kind of says so much more money than God, basically. We just can't even comprehend it.

Spencer Anderson [00:51:12] Yeah, that's great.

John Dehlin [00:51:13] Okay. All right. Anything else with slide three. With. With this next slide. With the slide. Move on.

Spencer Anderson [00:51:22] No, like, I appreciate your response on that, John, because I think. And honestly, it's not even your fault. Like, it's the church. The church could correct it. Right.

John Dehlin [00:51:29] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:51:30] So this is, you know, let's kind of point the finger at where it actually belongs in this case, which is, you know, if all of this could be fixed, you know, we. There wouldn't be this whole dance around what is the church worth if. If the church just let us know.

John Dehlin [00:51:44] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:51:45] So why doesn't the church just let us know? You don't have to answer that. But that's the question that's going on in my mind. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:53] Yeah. Good question. Rfm. Maybe. Maybe we'll get there soon in part by thanks to the contributions of the Widow's Mite and Radio Free Mormon and Mormon Stories and Mormonism Live and the Good Book Club and everywhere else. Who's.

Radio Free Mormon [00:52:11] But especially Radio Free Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:52:12] Especially. But mostly Radio Free Mormon.

Spencer Anderson [00:52:15] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:52:17] All right. Should we go to the next slide, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:52:20] Yeah, let's do it.

2022 Tithing Inflows and Spending Outflows

John Dehlin [00:52:22] Okay. Next slide is our 2022 estimate of donation inflows and spending outflows. So that's. Is this tithing. Is this basically how much tithing the church.

Spencer Anderson [00:52:33] Yeah, there's so much going on in this, in this slide. So I'm going to try and keep it simple. I'm not going to get into like where they got their estimates and things like that because people can go back to the source information to figure that out. But another way to estimate church wealth is to kind of look at from the. How much money they're bringing in and how much money is going out and how much money is left over that could then be used to build the war chest, I guess. And so that's kind of what this is doing. It's trying to estimate out the different expenses that the church has, as well as the inflows from mostly tithing coming in as well as fast offering and humanitarian aid donations and so as you can see, one thing that you'll notice is that none of the tithing is actually flowing into humanitarian aid or welfare programs except for a small portion of overhead.

Spencer Anderson [00:53:28] What I mean by overhead there is, is that there's. And you can't even, I don't even think you can see the line on this, but there's a tiny little line that goes from tithing up into the church welfare and humanitarian aid.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:53:40] A

Spencer Anderson [00:53:42] and that tiny little piece is tithing that is paid to pay for managers and employees of LDS Charities essentially. But other than that, you know, when you pay your tithing, none of that is going towards church welfare, none of that is going towards humanitarian aid. And the widow's might has taken a pretty strong stance that when you pay your fast offerings, it's in all likelihood staying in that purpose within that purpose. It's not getting moved to build temples or anything like that.

John Dehlin [00:54:14] Really, really quick. Spencer. Yeah, I think it's important that we kind of really call out at least two numbers here. What's the total revenue coming into the church of tithing, fast offerings and missionary donations estimated by the widow's might. What's the total revenue brought in? That's non investment revenue.

Spencer Anderson [00:54:39] Yeah, I want to say it's not on the slide, I don't think, but I think it's 6 to 8 billion in or sorry, in this case it's 5.6 billion. Now that's an estimate in this case, 5.6 billion in tithing and then 0.8 billion and 0.3 billion in fast offerings and humanitarian aid and then missionary donations respectively. So I think that that actually squares pretty well with what we've seen with like the IRS letter. With the IRS letter it said something like that there was 6 to 7 billion. What was the number I'm trying to remember here?

John Dehlin [00:55:19] I'll just say I had in my mind the total revenue coming into the church annually as being somewhere between 8 and 9 billion.

Spencer Anderson [00:55:29] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:55:29] And then operating and that, that means nothing. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just saying that's the number that I had and that operation operational expenses were something around 6 to 7 billion, which would leave a billion dollar surplus every year. Those are the numbers I had in my mind. Rfm. I don't know if you're chatting with the widow's might person who could address that.

Spencer Anderson [00:55:53] I found it, but the, the IRS letter. So the, the Nielsen whistleblower said report said that 5 to 6 billion was in tithing and that 6 and set 6 to 7 billion included fast offerings. And so that squares pretty well with what's here, with what the whistleblower said.

John Dehlin [00:56:12] So upwards of $7 billion total revenue. That's non interest, you know, non investment

Spencer Anderson [00:56:19] related income money coming in from members and elsewhere.

John Dehlin [00:56:23] So we, so the, the number we need to get firm in our minds is kind of 7 billion right now of revenue coming in.

Spencer Anderson [00:56:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:30] Annually.

Spencer Anderson [00:56:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:31] Okay. Rfm, Were you gonna say something?

Radio Free Mormon [00:56:33] Just gonna say that's my recollection. Seven billion coming in, six billion required. That's annually, of course, six billion required to meet the overhead for the church, leaving them an additional $1 billion per year that can then get thrown into the EPA account to help increase the size of that.

John Dehlin [00:56:51] Got it. Okay.

Spending Patterns and Mission Mismatch

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:56:53] I have a comment about this slide. Very quickly if we can show it again. So I feel this slide really shows that the money doesn't match the mission, if that makes sense. Think about the fourfold mission of the church, because they did add a number four a few years ago is perfecting the saints and proclaiming the gospel, redeeming the dead and feeding the poor and hungry. So when you look at where the money is being funneled, it's very disproportionate as far as the mission. And nowhere is one of the fourfold mission, you know, have an incredible surplus stockpiled and invested in Ensign Peaks. So to me, this slide was very revealing as far as the money doesn't match the mission. Do you have any thoughts on that, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:57:33] Yeah, I mean if you look at these line items, if, I mean, if you agree with the categories that are split out right, and don't try and combine any of these categories, then the, the largest place that the money goes is to this investment fund. More of it goes to that than to any other purpose individually. And so that's a, it's, it's a, it's a big chunk of. I mean, is that one of the four? Is it, is that the fifth?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:57:57] It's the five fold mission now. Yes, we need to add that.

Spencer Anderson [00:58:00] Yes. Yeah, I mean it's, it's fresh. It can be frustrating to see that when you say, okay, well why. Especially when you see that one of these line items is things like chapel construction or utilities and building maintenance. That, that small f. You know, that that thing is smaller than maybe it should be. If you could just pay your people to, to clean the church and the temples and, and instead, you know, it's going to these investment funds. So there's a lot of like you could you could almost like envision a lot of money that could go from B in that investment fund to any of those other line items and, and be well justified.

Spencer Anderson [00:58:46] And you know, this is all a subjective evaluation. Most the widow's mind is just about trying to provide the information as it is. And let me give you one example of how maybe you could see things differently as a faithful member versus a non faith, non believer.

Spencer Anderson [00:59:00] If you look at item J right now, missionaries, they provide 400amonth, I believe, to be a missionary. Right. Or is it 450? I don't remember if it went up or. But it's, it's around $400 a month to be a missionary. In actuality, it's costing about $1,200 a month to be a missionary.

John Dehlin [00:59:23] So it's her saying it's 500. I'm not sure.

Spencer Anderson [00:59:26] Oh, is it 500? Okay. Raising to 500. Okay. So the missionary is paying 500 of that and the church is subsidizing a portion of that. Now one way that you could think of that is like, well, maybe the church should raise the cost of a mission to 1200amonth so that they pay for it all. Or you could argue that the church should be paying for it all, the subsidizing the full 1200. You could also argue that the church should be paying the missionaries so that they, you know, that it's not for free that they're actually getting paid. And so I vote for that.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:59:59] My son's on a mission.

Spencer Anderson [01:00:00] Yeah, there you go. That's right. So I, so I, there are so many different ways of looking at the numbers, but it requires us to at least know what the numbers are.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:00:10] And that's, that's, don't you think missionary work? It's basically, it's a sort of a customer acquisition cost. Right. They're, they're subsidizing the mission because the missionaries are going to go out and find tithe payers to put more money back in.

Spencer Anderson [01:00:24] That's right. Yeah. A lot of this stuff could be thought of as an investment in and of itself itself, but it's an investment within the mission of the church versus something that's completely ancillary, which would be this investment fund thing has nothing to do with the, the mission of the church in terms of, of helping people or, or whatever their mission might be seen as. Yeah. All right, so we could go to the next slide if you're, if you're, are you happy with this one?

John Dehlin [01:00:52] Yeah, let's do it.

Spencer Anderson [01:00:52] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:00:53] I Mean, I'll just say just, just kind of anecdotally. A couple thoughts I have on that one is that, you know, I'm talking to my dad and he attends a award building in Florida. He's 88. He's got bad hearing. His comment when he started hearing about Ensign Peak and the church misstatement of its finances and the hiding of its wealth. He's like, I sure wish they would invest in a better chapel because our chapel's really run down. He says, I wish that they would invest in better hearing equipment so that when I actually attend church, I could understand what was being said, you know, so that there are a lot of people that wish that.

John Dehlin [01:01:34] I'm sure that the church could build BYU's in Europe, in Africa, you know, in Asia, in. In Mexico, in South America if they wanted to. They're choosing not to do that for whatever reason. I think that's interesting. But then if you think about missionary work, do they want to double or triple, you know, their, Their investment in missionary work? Because the missionary work is declining in its effectiveness. We're at sort of historic lows at effectiveness in the missionary program. So I can see why the church doesn't want to throw good money after bad in the missionary program.

John Dehlin [01:02:12] And so, and we know that the church is kind of hemorrhaging its members. So if you look at what I grew up with, with the threefold mission of the church, it's proclaim the Gospel, perfect the saints, and redeem the dead.

John Dehlin [01:02:26] Proclaiming the gospel is a. Is a money loser right now, especially because we know there's less than 10% retention rates in the missionary program, probably. And perfecting the saints is kind of a money loser because people are hemorrhaging out of the church. So what does that leave us? That leaves us with redeeming the dead.

John Dehlin [01:02:46] And while that's probably worth the investment, because we, We've heard that if you build a temple, tithe. Tithe payments increase in the area immediately around where you build the temple. And so that's where the church can invest. And thus we see a gazillion, to quote Rebecca, a gazillion temples being built now because we've got the money, we need to spend it at least somewhere. Let's just build a bunch of temples because at least we know that is going to lead to an increase in tithing. Now, you know, those are just a couple quick thoughts that I have. Anybody else want to respond to that?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:03:26] Yeah. Can I just say that the building of temples is also an Investment back to the church because they've purchased property. They purchased land, they've built a building. Sure, it's tax free now, it's charitable, but they can easily turn around and sell that. So again, it's an investment back to themselves. But it looks really great on paper and it's great to announce that. It makes everybody all warm and fuzzy, but bottom line, it still belongs to them. It's a property, it's an investment, it's money.

Nate Bird [01:03:51] So I've got a question.

John Dehlin [01:03:53] Oh, Nate. Yeah, Nate.

Nate Bird [01:03:54] Yeah. So, you know, I was talking with someone once who did construction for the church and they told me that it costs an average of I think 3 to 5 million for a steak center and around 50 million for a temple. Is that correct? Or like, how much does it cost to build a church building? How much does it cost to build a temple?

John Dehlin [01:04:12] I've heard numbers similar to that, but we're all speculating. Spencer, would you have any additional info and rfm you can check with your sources too?

Spencer Anderson [01:04:18] Yeah, maybe have RFM check. I have it somewhere here in my document, but I'd have to kind of look at it. But we could answer it by the end of the show for sure. Okay, I agree with you. That's a good question to ask. John, I agree with you and Rebecca about the threefold mission. And what's interesting to me about that is that if you talk about the biggest money maker, strategically, the fourth mission is probably the best investment that the church could actually engage in, in my opinion.

John Dehlin [01:04:47] Humanitarian aid, you're saying?

Radio Free Mormon [01:04:48] Correct.

John Dehlin [01:04:49] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [01:04:51] People are going to convert to the church when they see that the church does good. And they're not going to leave the church when they see that the church does good. And they're going to be willingly giving their tithing when they see that the church does good.

Spencer Anderson [01:05:05] Okay, we can talk more about that in a little bit. But from, from my perspective, you know, if you shifted the proclaim the gospel mission to. To help the poor mission and you made missions completely humanitarian aid missions, you would convert the missionary, you would convert the people, you would do a lot of good that would end up helping people lift themselves up out of poverty to then pay tithing and they would fully convert. They would actually really convert.

Spencer Anderson [01:05:37] And I think part of the reason for that would be that they're converting to something that is a little more wholesome than and less corruptible than a testimony of Joseph Smith. Right. It's a testimony of love and of feeling closer to others. This is all my non accounting perspective. But yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:58] Really quickly we have one of our participants who is stating that it's 30 to 50 million per temple. I don't know if that's.

Spencer Anderson [01:06:10] That seems about right.

John Dehlin [01:06:11] That's one contribution. Okay, do we want to go ahead and go to the next slide, which is Quinn's 2017 tithing estimate?

Spencer Anderson [01:06:21] Yeah. So, you know, we said that, you know, tithing was around 5.6 billion, I believe, and this was very difficult. You know, we talked about using different sources. In 2017, Michael Quinn published a book that had tithing around 30 billion, I believe, at this point, like around the time of 2010 or so. And that is a huge discrepancy. Right. 30 billion versus 5.6 billion.

Spencer Anderson [01:06:49] And so widows might dug really deep to try and figure out how in the world are you going to have. How are you going to reconcile these two numbers? Right. And one of the nice things that Michael Quinn did is he went through in the 60s and he found essentially, like a real paper trail, but his 1960 number was likely very correct, which was around 60 million in tithing.

Spencer Anderson [01:07:17] The one issue that he made, like, he made, like, one mistake in his model and it really affected things, which was that there would be a constant 12.9% growth in tithing year over year compounded. And that, as you can see, like, if you see that blue line, right, that would have led to, like, an exponential growth of. Of tithing coming in, which is just not realistic when you think about the way that the church grew in terms of membership and the way that wages and, you know, wages grew and things like that as well.

Spencer Anderson [01:07:51] So you can't assume, even, like when you're thinking about a company, you can't assume a constant growth rate. When a financial analyst tries to figure out how much a company is going to grow over the years, they eventually kind of smooth out to, like, the industry average with what we call a terminal growth rate. Because if you were to assume like a 12.9% growth rate forever, what you're assuming is that the church is going to take over the world. And that's a. I mean, I guess it's a. It could be a claim that you

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:20] could say that, like, there's something wrong with it.

Spencer Anderson [01:08:24] It's. It's. It's mathematically somewhat impossible for you to keep that growth sustainable. And I, you know, honestly, no doubt in my mind that Michael Quinn, if he had seen this, if widows might. Had, con. Had, you know, if he was still around, unfortunately, he's not. If he was still around and had been confronted with this data, he would have readily said yes. Yeah, you're absolutely right. This is, we've got to adjust for this.

John Dehlin [01:08:51] Well, let's face it, Michael Quinn, number one, didn't have the leaked information, but he's also not a finance guy. He's more of a historian. So we appreciate his contributions, but we, things got much better in the past decade or so, I think.

Spencer Anderson [01:09:07] Yeah, his efforts as a historian are incredible. And so I, I think that they're, they're trying to be careful not to say that, not to, not to say that Michael Quinn was, was a poor, was did a poor job or anything like that. It's just this one little mistake and, and this is how it's reconciles. So. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:27] Okay. Anything else we want to say about that slide?

Spencer Anderson [01:09:30] No, that's great. Let's go to slide eight.

How Tithing Flows Into Ensign Peak

John Dehlin [01:09:32] All right, let's go to slide eight.

Spencer Anderson [01:09:37] This is more just informative for people that want to know, like, how does it, how does the money flow for the church? And you know, it could pretty much follow this simple formula, this simple process. First, church members give donations, either tithing or fast offering or both, and humanitarian and missionary donations. And then after they've kind of allocated all of those costs, the budgeted costs that they have to like run the chapels, run byu, run the temples, create more temples, everything that they're doing as a church, they then save a portion of that into this portfolio that we now know as Ensign Peak. Okay. So all of the leftover, the surplus, and we've estimated that to be, or they have estimated, I should say have estimated that to be around 1.1 billion this last year.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:35] And then those profits just stay there. All of that excess tithing is for the most part, with very few exceptions, they just get reinvested and reinvested and those returns get reinvested, leading to this compounding growth for the church.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:54] And this is, it makes sense when you think about one thing that the church has always kind of done. They've always had this rule where they won't spend more than they take in, at least in the modern church in the, in the more recent few decades. And so there's not going to be a year, in my opinion, where this doesn't happen, where they aren't going to have some excess savings that they're going to throw into the investment fund, even if it's a poor, you know, difficult year or something.

John Dehlin [01:11:22] I mean, I guess, I guess the only possibility is if for some reason there was this, they had made project expense projections and they had Made an expense budget, and then some event happened where there was a dramatic drop in tithing donations, then you could envision a year where the church brought in less than it spent. Yeah, I'm guessing, Spencer, you're saying that that likely has never happened.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:50] And also they can. They can also limit their expenses, should

Spencer Anderson [01:11:54] that happen at that point? Yeah. Assuming that they can see that, foresee that the pressure is so great to not spend more than what you have within the church that before they would ever dip into this investment fund, they would. They would strip every program that they need to. To. To the bones in order to. In order to not spend more than what they brought in that year. It's sort of a. It's sort of a common rule. And. And I agree with you, John. If there was some crazy catalytic cosmic event where maybe this is the year that this happens. Right. Maybe tithing just goes really under the floor for them, and maybe that would happen. But.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:12:36] And I think in that case, who they throw under the bus is the mission of perfecting the saints. Because already ward budgets are so low. I personally bought so many crayons for my primary class out of my own pocket. It's already very low. So I think they would take a lot of that out of the perfecting the saints category.

John Dehlin [01:12:53] The other thing I'll say, just for those who are saying, why doesn't the church just pay for all the missionaries and, you know, use its money for that so that missionaries don't have to pay their own way? I am guessing the church has a policy which is whatever members are willing to pay for themselves, let's let them. Let's not ever pay a dollar that we can't get the members to pay themselves. Fair to say.

Spencer Anderson [01:13:21] Fair to say.

Radio Free Mormon [01:13:22] Yeah. In a real simple way, if there's a problem, to limit expenses is simply to slack up on all the temples you're building.

John Dehlin [01:13:32] Oh, yeah. Like push. Maybe to push a project into a future year instead of go forward with it.

Radio Free Mormon [01:13:42] Yeah. All the temples that they're building. And they're building a ton, as we know. None of that's coming out of the investment fund. That's all from tithing proceeds. That's from the excess that they have.

John Dehlin [01:13:53] Right.

Nate Bird [01:13:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:13:56] Okay. All right. Anything else, Spencer, we want to say about this slide?

Radio Free Mormon [01:14:03] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:14:03] Is the audience asleep yet?

John Dehlin [01:14:04] I just want to make sure things like that, like, we do long form

Spencer Anderson [01:14:08] here, so I'm used to being an account. Yeah. Okay. But I describe to people my job, and they say, oh, accounting research. And their eyes start to Glaze over, like, immediately. All right. Okay. Yeah, we can go to the next slide.

John Dehlin [01:14:21] Okay, let's do it. All right, here we go.

Church Secrecy and the Ensign Peak IRS Letter

Spencer Anderson [01:14:25] This one's pretty simple, I think, just for your viewer. Audience probably already knows about this, but, you know, Mormon leaks came out in. Or, sorry, this was the. The IRS letter, but, you know, blew the lid off the roof in terms of, you know, how much the church owns. And even then, you notice that the headlines are a little bit off. It was. Even then, it was about 132 billion or something. But Wall Street Journal came out with information about this, and all the major news outlets talked about it. But a former employee of Ensign P came out, and through a whistleblowing effort, I. I guess it wasn't through him, but the information came out that. That he had revealed the information that Ensign Peak was worth a lot of money and where the money was going, and the fact that it was all tithing surplus, which in essence, makes it tithing.

John Dehlin [01:15:22] And just for those who don't know the story, apparently David Nielsen, who is working for Ensign Peak, resigns from Ensign Peak, collaborates with his brother Lars on a whistleblower report to the irs, and then Lars, as I understand it, goes rogue and shares that whistleblower information publicly, as I understand it, without David's consent. And that's how we got that information. But the person that we should credit is David Nielsen as the courageous whistleblower who is a former Ensign Peak employee. Right. Did I get that right?

Spencer Anderson [01:16:01] Spencer, you did it way better than I could. Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:04] Okay, good. And. And the. And the amount, again, just to summarize, the amount of total wealth of the church at the. At 2019 was what, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:16:15] At the end of 2019.

John Dehlin [01:16:16] Yeah, approximately.

Spencer Anderson [01:16:18] Ensign Peak, I believe, was. Oh, shoot, I want to say 132 billion.

John Dehlin [01:16:24] Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:16:24] But it's going to be in the fact check me. Go to the widow's. My report at some point. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:31] Approaching. I mean, it's looking like it's approaching 200 billion.

Spencer Anderson [01:16:34] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:16:35] Assets plus Ensign Peak Investments. That sound right?

Spencer Anderson [01:16:40] Yes, that's right. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:41] Okay. Anything else with this slide?

Spencer Anderson [01:16:44] Nope. That's great.

John Dehlin [01:16:45] All right, let's go to the next one.

Spencer Anderson [01:16:47] So this one's interesting because I think it can generate quite a bit of conversation, and I think RFM and Rebecca would probably have a lot to say about this, but all three of the reasons for having this, all of this wealth and keeping it a secret were offered In February of 2022, by the ends, by Roger Clark, and I believe by it could have been by one of the presiding bishopric. One of these arguments could have been as well.

John Dehlin [01:17:14] But in any case, it was like the head general manager of Ensign Peak. Is that right?

Spencer Anderson [01:17:19] Correct. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:20] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [01:17:21] And so the first one is that, you know, if members knew they might stop donating. Can talk about that one for a little bit. The second one is that members might mimic church investments. And then the last one is that the public might critique the use of, of sacred funds. And yeah, I think we could probably go through each of these. For me, the, you know, maybe let's start with the first one. If members knew they might stop donating. All of these, all these arguments are based in fear. And they're not fear about what God thinks. They're all fear about what other people think.

John Dehlin [01:18:03] Well, first of all, is it okay, Spencer, if we ask whether that rationale is justified? Not, not in terms of morality, but in terms of accuracy? In other words, if the church were to publish its finances and let all the members know that it had, you know, upwards of 200 plus billion dollars just in reserves, would that lead to a decline in tithe, in. In tithes paying. Rebecca, can you channel your faithful Mormon self and think about whether you and your husband are young kids struggling to make payments and then you find out the church has $200 billion in reserves. Would that have affected you, do you think?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:18:47] I'm not sure if I ever was a faithful Mormon. Let me see if I can channel this. But no, I would say anecdotally, look, look at Jana Reese put an article out and said I'm no longer paying tithing. I'm going to pay it to charities. I anecdotally know many people that finding out about that decided not that they were not going to stop donating, but just not to the church any for. Because I think they just got that sense. They have so much and it's very nebulous. What are they using it for? A lot of people want to find out exactly where their money's going.

John Dehlin [01:19:15] Yeah, let's ask our, let's ask our viewers and listeners to, to comment really quickly in, in the comments. But rfm, channel your believing self. I'm curious what, what you would say

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:28] to that as a channel my believing self. Well, here's my comment regardless, is that first off, as a believer, you do not expect the church to be doing things that they are ashamed of or that for some reason they want to keep other people from knowing about. Right. We don't expect that because that's the opposite of transparency. We Associate that kind of attitude with wrongdoing. Wrongdoing is when you hide things, when you're doing the right thing and the, The. The work of the Lord, you're open about it. Right. Just like Jesus was in the New Testament. So that's the first thing. But time after time, whether it's finances, now we're seeing this is just a replay of the thing that the church does with history.

Radio Free Mormon [01:20:13] The church history, Right. Which is that there are things that the church knows about that it doesn't want anybody else to know about. And time after time after time. There's one thing you can bet sure. Money on, John, is if you go to the table and you bet that the church is going to hide it, you will win every single time. Because that's what they do. This church hide things. In fact, that headline from, I think it was the Washington Post or the New York Times, that the church managed to keep the biggest secret in the history of the US Stock market. Well, bully for you. I'm really glad the church is good at something, but apparently the thing that it's best at is. Is hiding things.

John Dehlin [01:20:54] Okay, and. And thank you for that rfm. That's an important perspective. I totally agree. The church hides things. I think it gets that from Joseph Smith and all the polygamy Joseph was engaged in, the. The Kirtland bank scandal. Like, hiding things goes back to the very history, you know, kind of the very foundings of the church, and certainly all throughout the 19th century as the church was running from the law. But I do. But I do think it's important to just establish whether the church is right. And Nate, I'm curious to ask you, you know, if you're channeling your believing self. I knew you, you know, you were recently on Mormon Stories podcast. You and your family grew up in, what, Hawaii and Michigan. What do you think about you and your family if this information had been released? Do you have thoughts on that?

Nate Bird [01:21:45] I think. Excuse me. I think for my family, I don't think it would have changed very much because we were very much. We overlooked a lot of things. You know, looking back, a lot of the things that. That went down, I feel like they were just kind of internalized rather than. And rather than blaming the church, it was, you know, more just kind of internalizing those things and turning it into something else. And so I, you know, I talked about how I think that some of the things that we absorbed through the church contributed to where we all are now in different stages of our lives.

Nate Bird [01:22:19] And, yeah, I don't think that this would have affected us. This kind of would have just been like a, there would have been some way to rationalize it. And I think a lot of members do that where they'll hear something like this and they'll either not pay attention to it or not do the research. Because I remember, I think it was President Hinckley that encouraged people not to look at, quote unquote, anti Mormon literature. You know, and I, I carry that fear that, oh, you know, if you look at anti Mormon literature or if you hear people say bad things about the church, that's going to damage your testimony.

Nate Bird [01:22:47] And I think I, I, I carried that fear all the way up until my mission where I was like, oh, I don't want to lose my testimony. So I'm not going to look at the bad things that the church does or the things that don't make sense. I'm just going to put all those on the shelf. So I think this would have been the same thing.

John Dehlin [01:22:59] Yeah. I talked to my sister Julianne, who's a faithful devout member just yesterday and her husband's stuck investor and a trust manager and she didn't care. She's just like, I, I don't care about the SEC stuff. I think the church is true and I'm paying my tithing. So I guess, I guess to answer this question, me personally is, I think there's a percent of the members that would be affected by this information, but I think it's relatively small. I think it's probably maybe less than 10% of the active membership that would even bat an eye. They would even hear that there was an SEC settlement.

Nate Bird [01:23:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:23:39] Let alone care that there was a settlement. So I guess I'm saying the brethren are right. Some would stop paying tithing, but I think it would be a single digit percentage of active members that would stop paying tithing because of this story.

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:54] Yeah. And getting back to Spencer, this is part of the fear that I see or lack of faith, which is itself a kind of fear, lack of faith over and over again. The church leadership shows lack of faith in the members, lack of faith in God. Every single thing that they do. Their whole strategy is based upon this lack of faith, or in other words, fear. And there I'm handing it back to Spencer, hopefully, if he wants to pick up on that.

John Dehlin [01:24:19] Yeah, yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:24:20] I mean it's just, it's frustrating to see when I just don't think that fear should ever motivate the decision here. Right. So what are you afraid of? Why are you so scared of what members will do. You say that tithing is an act of faith, but you're not giving them the opportunity to exercise it by letting them know where it's going. Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:24:44] And I guess I would say too that for that first rationale, if members knew, they might stop donating tithing. If they knew what? Like if they knew that the church owned a lot of money, then that's, that's one thing. But I, I do know that a lot of people would probably lose their faith when the church, when they find out that the church lied about having a lot of money. And so there's this opportunity cost here that they haven't really factored into the decision or at least in their response that I think is, is an issue. Right. So like, what would you rather have people leave the church?

Spencer Anderson [01:25:18] What's greater? What's the greater cost? Like? Honestly, I think that unless you think you're never going to get caught, getting caught is going to lead people to. That's a shelf item for sure.

Radio Free Mormon [01:25:29] Right?

Nate Bird [01:25:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:31] With, with water, with Watergate. It was the COVID It was the COVID up that was the problem, not necessarily the break in. Right?

Radio Free Mormon [01:25:39] Yeah, yeah. It's always the COVID up. And the leaders of the church can never figure out that they're always going to get caught. They always act like they're never going to get caught. It's like Wiley Coyote or something, you know, and they always get caught. They always get caught. Maybe they got some things that are still under the radar, but those are going to come to the surface too. And they never get the message that they should just be honest. I know it's a radical concept when you're an apostle of Jesus Christ and everything, but just be honest. But they always all doing all this skullduggery because of lack of faith in the members to pay tithing, lack of faith of God, lack of faith in God to provide.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:17] Right. God's going to provide. Just do the right thing. Let the consequence follow. God will provide. And who will protect you for doing the right thing? There's. They never figure it out. And it's like Loki says to Thor in the first Avengers movie, are you ever not going to fall for that? Are you ever not going to stop hiding things? And apparently so far they haven't gotten the message. And with their track record, I doubt that this last SEC order from last week is going to get the message through to them because it seems like they are on autopilot. Hide everything, Hide, hide it all the time.

John Dehlin [01:26:55] Yeah, well, I'll just say and we'll turn it back to Spencer. I think in their conscious minds they hide the history because they're worried that it will lead to a decrease in faith. And, and I think they're right. But I also think the COVID up leads to its own maybe bigger problem later. And I think it's the same with finances. I think one of the main reasons they had their finances is because I think people, some people won't pay. I think they're right. But I think now they're going to be sowing some of the deception that they've, that they've reaped or reaping some of the deception they've sown one of

Radio Free Mormon [01:27:32] those two possible deniability.

Nate Bird [01:27:34] Right.

John Dehlin [01:27:35] Okay, should we get back to the slide? Do you want to keep going, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:27:37] Yeah, and I would just say also that there's not, it's not a one or nothing, an all or nothing kind of response either because like you could, maybe you start paying net, right? You start to rationalize or you start to say like, oh well, maybe I'll, maybe I'll start paying to a different charity, but I'll still call it tithing. There are lots of responses that members couldn't make to this. And honestly, I think that good on you. Like, I think that a lot of members are out there who are trying to reconcile their relationship with the church in a way that they still feel they have a testimony of tithing and they're still trying to find a way to do it without giving to essentially building a, a giant fund here.

John Dehlin [01:28:19] Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:28:19] So, and I, and I think I, I commend them for, for going through that exercise, which is a difficult exercise. The second, the second reasoning here is actually a really good reason, honestly, when I say it's a good reason, it's a good, it's a good concern. Members might mimic the church investments. It would be a horrible, horrible idea for members to mimic the church's investments based like their 13F filings.

John Dehlin [01:28:47] Really?

Spencer Anderson [01:28:47] Most absolutely. Because the 13F filings are filed 45 days after the quarter end. Well, the filing deadline is 45 days after. But they actually most, most companies will file day 44 and a half. Enzyme Peak, I'm sure is no different. And so you're using very stale information. So imagine like looking at what all these smart investors have done three months ago and then saying, I'm going to go and train, replicate that. Like you are so far behind the game to try and replicate that. That would be a horrible, horrible thing to do.

John Dehlin [01:29:24] So if you Read in the stalic Tribune that last quarter the church bought or sold a bunch of Tesla. And so you buy it. You might be buying not, you know, you. You might be. Not be buying the dip. You might be buying, you know, the peak. The church actually sold the Tesla. But you don't know that yet. And then all of a sudden you're going to ride that way down. Exactly what you're saying.

Spencer Anderson [01:29:48] Yep. While you're buying, they might be selling. So they're taking money from you in both ends. The church in that sense. Yeah. So in. In. But the. Either way, though, it's still a horrible argument in the sense that, like, what's the response? If you're worried about members mimicking church investments, what do you do? I think that the right response would be to not to tell them to not do that. Don't mimic our investments. Explain to the members what I just explained to the audience and trust that they aren't stupid. Right. Rather than just hide all the information and treat them like babies, just tell them, don't mimic our investment strategy. It would be very poor idea. It would be a very bad idea for you.

John Dehlin [01:30:33] Just to be clear, that's because of timing. Right. Like if you.

Spencer Anderson [01:30:36] Because of timing.

John Dehlin [01:30:37] If you were to analyze en sign peak in terms of how well they've done at buying and selling the right stocks over time, you'd probably say they've done a good job of buying and selling the right stocks over time. Is that right or not?

Spencer Anderson [01:30:52] No, I honestly wouldn't.

John Dehlin [01:30:54] Like I insign peak hasn't done a good job of investing.

Spencer Anderson [01:31:00] It's average, I would say. Average. Yeah. Thanks, Rebecca. Yeah, so, like, I don't think that they've really done much different than the. Than if you were to just invest in S P500. We actually have a slide on that.

John Dehlin [01:31:12] So later, if the church had what? Okay, we'll get to that. Because I'm yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:31:17] Tracking the S P500 with a few variations.

John Dehlin [01:31:20] What's that? RFM.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:31:21] Exactly.

Radio Free Mormon [01:31:22] Yeah, they're just basically tracking the S P500. There's a couple variations, but they're not far off. And so what they're doing is not remarkable.

John Dehlin [01:31:31] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:31:32] They have a lot of money to do it with.

John Dehlin [01:31:33] Okay, we'll cover that.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:31:34] Can I make one comment really quickly? I don't think that they want to shine a spotlight on the fact that they're investing at all. I don't think they even want to bring that up, which is why they're not going to tell people, don't invest as we invest, which I think Jesus said that do not invest as I invest. But I, I just wanted to make one other comment. So when I was growing up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, investing was an absolute. No, no. For Mormon, there was this school of thought that it's gambling, it's speculation. My own parents, I remember thinking, oh, should we buy some land?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:32:03] No, no. The church has warned us against speculation. So this was definitely a school of thought back then. So I just find it incredibly ironic that the entire time the church was doing this, yet sort of sending out the message, it's gambling. So the regular members never had the chance to do it.

John Dehlin [01:32:19] Yeah. Okay, so that's the second. That's the second rationale. Let's talk about the third.

Spencer Anderson [01:32:26] Spencer, I don't have anything else to add about that. I. I just think that you should never do something because you're worried about what other people think. I just. It's a moral argument, though, so.

John Dehlin [01:32:38] Oh, oh. I was saying about the third rationale. Did you want to talk about that?

Spencer Anderson [01:32:42] Yeah, that's all.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:32:43] I.

Spencer Anderson [01:32:43] That's what I mean. I just. You shouldn't worry about what other people are going to say.

John Dehlin [01:32:47] Okay.

Nate Bird [01:32:47] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:48] Why are you worried? If you don't think you're doing something wrong, why would you care what other people say? That's. That's a throwaway excuse. It doesn't wash. It doesn't make any sense to me. The second one doesn't make any sense to me either because once again, more transparency is better. Just go ahead, be transparent about what you have and tell the members. Look, don't follow our pattern because you're not going to know about it until like four and a half months after we've been doing this. So don't do it because it's not going to be good for you. The first reason, I believe, is the real reason. That's the reason they kept it secret, because they don't want the members to know how much money they have because they don't want them to stop paying tithing.

John Dehlin [01:33:35] Can I. Can I challenge that a little bit? Rfm, I think there's truth to what you're saying. But I was talking to my sister last night and she said one of the major reasons that she believed the church has hidden a lot of this is because of the third reason that you've got on this slide, Spencer, that the widows might have included, which is the public might critique the uses of the sacred funds. Remember all those rumors for decades that the church invested in Pepsi, that the Church invested in tobacco companies.

John Dehlin [01:34:07] You know, my sister mentioned a concern that the church invested in, or might invest in Johnson and Johnson, which, you know, in my sister's mind would be a company associated with the manufacturing of birth control and, or abortion medical devices. And so there is this concern, you know, there's casinos, you know, there. If the church is opening up, how it's investing its money, then people can look and say, that's inconsistent with the word of wisdom. That's inconsistent with the law of chastity. That's inconsistent, blah, you know, with, with, you know, gambling's a problem. And if, if the church can just keep all that from the membership, they don't have to answer to those types of critiques.

Radio Free Mormon [01:34:52] But that's getting back to the same problem, I think, which is if they're investing in things that they know they should not be investing in because it's inconsistent with the values that they represent as leaders of the LDS Church, then don't do it. Don't hide it, because you're worried that someone will find out and accurately say, hey, that's inconsistent.

John Dehlin [01:35:13] I think we're talking past each other a tiny bit because, because there's why they do it and then there's whether it's moral. And I'm just saying I can see why they wouldn't want, you know, people scrutinizing what stocks they buy from what companies. Now, whether that's moral, that's a separate question. But Spencer, that's, that's legitimate from their perspective. Right?

Spencer Anderson [01:35:38] Yeah. One thing that they could do to address this is to just invest in the S and P. It's boring. It's. And, and then nobody would be able to really critique it. And you'd always have the answer. Just say, this is the policy.

John Dehlin [01:35:53] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:35:54] I mean, the church is. You would think that it would be adept to dealing with criticism. Right. But seems to be not the case.

John Dehlin [01:36:04] Yeah. Okay, let's go to the next slide, which is comparing the church's wealth. And in this case, it looks like it's only comparing Ensign Peaks wealth to, to a lot of other institutions. Talk us through this slide.

Ensign Peak Compared to Major Institutions

Spencer Anderson [01:36:20] Yeah. So a lot of know, universities or companies will have set aside cash on hand as well as investments in order to kind of fund their operations. And with all of these, especially, you know, these, this, these university endowments, they're pulling money each year out of these endowments. And so it's, it's not as though, whereas with Enzyme Peak, it's just growing. Right. There's very little that's being done to pull anything out.

Spencer Anderson [01:36:47] But, you know, it is interesting to kind of look at. If you look at the, you know, the, the cash and investments minus debt that exists. When you look at Enzyme Peak versus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, mit, These are the five largest university endowments in the world. And Enzyme Peak is close to being as large as all five of them combined.

Spencer Anderson [01:37:08] This is at the end of 2021. So at this time, enzyme peak was 180 billion. Now it's closer to 160. And the, you know, Harvard at that time was around 50 billion. It's gone down since then as well, I'm sure, because of the, of the market last year.

Spencer Anderson [01:37:25] For those of you in the audience who aren't aware of what Berkshire Hathaway is, that's Warren Buffett's company. It's the wealthiest investment firm on the planet. I think most people would argue that it's the most successful investment firm on the planet. And Ensign Peak is about half its size, which is a compliment, or in terms of how large it is to Ensign Peak. To be half the size of Berkshire Hathaway is. Is quite, quite the accomplishment now. So it's just hard to. It's hard to really conceptualize how impressive this is.

John Dehlin [01:37:58] So, I mean, there are people listening that can't see the chart. But tell me if I've got this right, that Berkshire Hathaway at, let's just say 380 billion, is the largest known. You know, what. Hedge fund? What are we going to call that?

Spencer Anderson [01:38:16] What are we calling probably in terms of investment firm and public investment firm? I would say. Yes. Okay. There are some, like, countries that, like sovereign wealth funds that invest in. In the stock market, and they have trillions, and so they're. They're going to be larger than this. But.

John Dehlin [01:38:32] Yeah, but those, those weren't included on, on this, this graphic. No, no, but it's basically showing the value of Ensign Peak at being around half that of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Is that right?

Spencer Anderson [01:38:45] Correct.

John Dehlin [01:38:45] Yeah. Nate. Nate's over there shaking his head. I think you. You were, you were impressed by the, the numbers here.

Nate Bird [01:38:54] Yeah, that was to see that they're half the size of Berkshire Hathaway. That's. That's no small feat.

John Dehlin [01:38:59] That's.

Spencer Anderson [01:38:59] No.

Nate Bird [01:38:59] Berkshire Hathaway has been around for a long time.

John Dehlin [01:39:01] Yeah.

Nate Bird [01:39:01] You know, longer than Ensign Peak. I think so.

John Dehlin [01:39:03] Yeah. No small thing. Yeah. And then you. You could add up Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and it's still bigger than the aggregate of all those endowments, which have been around since the six, I don't know, 1600s.

Nate Bird [01:39:14] So it definitely helps to have a bunch of tax free income like that.

John Dehlin [01:39:18] Yeah, yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:39:19] And if I compare those, those private, and these are all private, so they also don't have to pay taxes either, these universities, but they, but they use the money and that's why it's not, that's why it hasn't grown the way that it has. I think Harvard and Yale and Stanford could have grown theirs to be much larger. But they use their money for their students and, and for projects and, and Enzyme Peak is just growing it. They just aren't using it for almost anything.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:39:45] Yeah, yeah, I was going to mention that. I love graphs like this because again, I think it shows us who are trying to wrap our brains around this amount of money exactly what it is. And then you go one by one through the other entities on the page and they, like Spencer said, they are all putting money out, creating products, humanitarian giving out, endowment, you. Nothing is happening at Ensign Peak. It's completely stagnant and just growing like a monster

John Dehlin [01:40:13] or like a beautiful, you know, garden, depending on your, Like a garden.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:40:17] I picture the end of it. Sort of like Scrooge McDuck. There's just one person sitting up at the top of a gigantic pile of money.

John Dehlin [01:40:27] All right, anything else, Anything else you want to say about this slide? Rfm or, or Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:40:33] No. Next, Next slide is a big takeaway.

John Dehlin [01:40:36] Okay. Rfm, anything you want to say about this slide?

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:38] Looking forward to the big takeaway.

Projections Toward a Trillion-Dollar Church

John Dehlin [01:40:40] All right, let's do it. So what, what is. Tell us what this slide is and, and, and describe it for our audio listeners who aren't watching the visual.

Spencer Anderson [01:40:49] Yeah, so this is kind of trying to attempt to see how large the com. The, the enzyme peak could grow and how big the church could be in the future and how long it would take for the church to become a trillion dollar church. And using what is basically a very conservative estimate, they basically cut tithing surplus in half to make this estimate to only 500 million instead of 1.1 billion.

Spencer Anderson [01:41:16] They estimate that around 2044-2050, if the church continues on its current course, the church will be a trillion dollar church. Most of that wealth, the vast majority of it at that point being within Ensign Peak. And there's, that's just a staggering number. And as you can see that within the graph, for those of you who can't see, it's, it's the cumulative interest, the cumulative growth that is starting to come out of that. You'll you'll be able to. It wouldn't take much longer for then to become a $2 trillion church at that point.

John Dehlin [01:41:54] And if I'm reading that graph right, it's saying that between 20 and 30 years from now, with very conservative estimates, the. The Mormon Church is going to be likely worth a trillion dollars. Did I get that right? And that. That is within. That is within my lifetime.

Spencer Anderson [01:42:09] Yep. Yep, you're right. Within your lifetime. Unless the church changes course but. Or unless somehow the economy changes course but in a way that is permanent. Not some sort of, you know, market fluctuation or depression or anything like that. But, you know, or, or if I.

John Dehlin [01:42:29] If I die mysteriously or.

Spencer Anderson [01:42:30] If you die. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:42:33] Too early. Okay. Yeah. So that's pretty. That's pretty stark. Rebecca and rfm, anything you want to say about that?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:42:46] Again, I asked the question, what are they going to do with that money? What is the purpose?

John Dehlin [01:42:53] Yeah, well, we're going to talk about humanitarian stuff in a second. Rfm. What do you want?

Radio Free Mormon [01:42:58] There are moments when unbidden come emotions of why the heck did I spend my life impoverishing myself for the LDS Church just so that they could enrich themselves gigantically and not do anything with the money? I mean, I was paying my tithing in good faith, thinking they were doing good things with it. And I know that a lot of that is paying salaries for BYU professors and keeping up building maintenance. I understand that, but just hoarding it in 150. 250. Or is it 150 now? How much is it? I lose track with all these billions of dollars.

Spencer Anderson [01:43:34] The church is 250. Ensign Peak itself is about 160.

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:40] Oh, let's just go with 160. I mean, what's a few billion among friends? That's got $160 billion, by the way. That's my money. That's your money. For anybody who's ever paid tithing, that's all of our money. And they're just sitting on it. That's all they're doing. And at times, emotion gets the best of me and I feel mildly irked over the situation.

John Dehlin [01:44:06] Well, rfm, I really do believe that in the brethren's mind, they think that tithing benefits the people who pay it. And so even though we can ascribe to them a motive of pure greed, I. I think that when they were bishops, when they were stake presidents, they saw faithful church commitment and obedience as leading to an improvement in the lives of the members, including eventually financial prosperity. So I think that they believe the spiritual and the temporal blessings of tithing are primarily for the benefit of the members. I think they really do think that. And that if, if, if they made the announcement that members no needed. No, no no longer needed to pay tithing, they would. They believe that they would be doing the members a disservice by making an announcement like that.

Nate Bird [01:45:04] I, I have a friend who shared a clip. I can't remember which general authority it was. I want to say it was Elder Packer like a long time ago, but I could be wrong. But it was said that there would come, you know, he was basically saying there would come a time where the church didn't need to, or church members didn't need to pay tithing anymore.

John Dehlin [01:45:20] I think we have a slide about that. Is that right, Spencer? Yeah, Spencer.

Spencer Anderson [01:45:24] Yeah, we do.

John Dehlin [01:45:25] Okay. Okay, but keep going. But you can finish your thought.

Spencer Anderson [01:45:27] You're just, you're just. You're prophetic, man.

Radio Free Mormon [01:45:29] Yeah, yeah, that and Nate, that was a talk. I did a show about it not too long ago, so I re recall it too. That was President Packer speaking in General Conference. It was around maybe 19, 1980 or so. But he was quoting the 1907 statement from Joseph F. Smith, that same one, that the time will come when the church isn't going to need your tithing anymore because we'll have plenty to pay all of the, the, the finances, all the things that we need to do to run the church. We'll have it on hand and you won't need to pay anything that you want other than what you want to give voluntarily.

John Dehlin [01:46:05] Yeah. Okay. And we'll, we'll cover that in just a second. Any, any final thoughts just about the church becoming a trillion dollar church within the next 20 to 30 years. Anybody want to, you know, make a final reaction just to this slide?

Radio Free Mormon [01:46:22] Well, I think that if you take that same graph and take that upward slope and then make a reverse of it, like a mirror image going the other way, that the upward slope is the money and the downward slope is the members.

John Dehlin [01:46:35] Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:46:35] Amen.

John Dehlin [01:46:37] Well, yeah, and the other, other thing I'll say RFM is it's getting to the point where that number is going to do what it's going to do without members. Like I've, I've been making the observation lately that the church is going to be a trillion doll, trillion dollar church without any members at all. In other words, if the church just continues investing its ensign peak wealth like it has been, or if it just were to sell everything and just put it into an S P500 index fund. They're going to become a trillion dollar church without an additional dollar of tithing. Spencer, am I, am I wrong about that?

Spencer Anderson [01:47:14] No, I mean, like, you're right. In general, I don't know if they've run the numbers on this, but the reliance on tithing for the fund to grow is diminishing more and more each day because you've, you've built this huge nest egg that it's not going anywhere. So. Yeah, you're right.

John Dehlin [01:47:33] Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:47:34] I just wanted to say what you said, John, made me think of a couple years ago. They had leaked or published the articles of incorporation for the church. And basically the ecclesiastical arm is what they called it. The church is just a part of this massive corporation. And it's true, the ecclesiastical arm could just kind of fall away and this would continue to exist into infinity.

John Dehlin [01:47:58] Yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead and go to the next slide that says after losses in 2022, savings equals 20 to 30 years of expenses. Go ahead and tell us about this slide, Spencer.

Spencer Anderson [01:48:13] Yeah, I mean, I think my takeaway from this slide is first of all,

John Dehlin [01:48:17] describe it for those who are just listening.

Spencer Anderson [01:48:19] Yeah. What it's doing is it's trying to look at the estimates that we do have about from the whistleblower documents in terms of calculated estimates for like how much Enzyme Peak is worth from 2002 to 2012. And then also there's a year in 2018.

Spencer Anderson [01:48:42] Those are pretty well established. And then you have these gap years. And so what the widows my team did is they said, well, based on our model, can we get from point A to point B and reconcile what we do know from the early 2000s and from 2018 and connect the dots essentially.

Spencer Anderson [01:49:05] And that's what they did. So through this basically back end testing of their model, they were able to see that the model fits pretty well with the data that we do seem to have that's fairly accurate or reliable. And then going forward, we don't have any new whistleblowers, you know, after 2019, any new data coming out of from Enzyme Peak. And so it is an estimate. You know, the Enzyme peak could have shifted its strategy here and there. We don't see all of the investments that Enzyme Peak has even after this 13F thing, obviously.

Spencer Anderson [01:49:42] And so this is an estimate. There's a range of reasonableness around that estimate. And as you can see, there is, you know, that range right now is pretty small. And I think that that's what gives me so much confidence around the numbers that widow's might is providing is that, you know, you play with the numbers a little bit. It's not the big picture takeaway is pretty, pretty much the same. So like on the low end, enzyme peaked, you know, might be worth 148 billion. On the high end, it might be worth, you know, maybe 165 billion, 170 billion.

Spencer Anderson [01:50:14] And, and you know, the act, the actual number is 157 billion for the, for the base estimate, but for the most part is, you know, the difference between 149 billion as an estimate and 170 billion as a high end estimate. That's a pretty small margin in the grand scheme of things when you don't have all the information available. I think that that's a really good props to widow's might on this one in terms of trying to, to figure out a way to, to make sure that they, their estimates are, are accurate.

John Dehlin [01:50:47] Excellent.

Opportunity Costs of Withholding Humanitarian Aid

Radio Free Mormon [01:50:50] John, you know something that I find goading? Tell us that at the very same time that this is just massively taking off and they're increasing their holdings by so much, they're changing the procedure for the church giving assistance to its own members.

Radio Free Mormon [01:51:08] Now, I remember coming into the church back in the late 70s, in the 80s and the 90s, it was very, very clear that you avoided going to the government for any assistance. That was something that was really frowned upon. You don't want to go on the government dull, which is an old word back from I think the 30s, but you remember that. I'm sure in the last few years it has been that. They change the handbook. Now for bishops, it used to be you do it yourself or you go to family or you go to friends, and if you can't get any money from them, then you go to the bishop.

Radio Free Mormon [01:51:43] Now they've added, you do it yourself or you go to family, or you go to friends, or you go to the government. You now are supposed to go to the government before you go to your bishop for assistance, which means the bishop's going to be asking you, did you go to the government?

Radio Free Mormon [01:51:58] So while they are massively increasing the money they have, they're also massively decreasing their output just to help their own members by forcing them to go to the government for assistance before they come to the church. That's what I find goading.

John Dehlin [01:52:14] Gerardo, you know, usually doesn't swear. But yesterday he sent me a text of a link to a recent comment made by Elder Ballard, which is one of the most senior apostles in the church, who tells this Story of. Of a single woman, you know, that he knew of, I think as a bishop who was broke and out of money.

John Dehlin [01:52:36] And how. What Elder Ballard did as a bishop, if I'm remembering right, is he tracked down this woman's brother who happened to live in New York and was this wealthy guy. And how he told the brother as. As this woman's bishop, he tells the brother who was out of touch with his sister, hey, your sister really needs your help. Three days later, the. The brother in New York flies to, I assume Utah to reconcile with his sister, financially supports her rejoin, kind of reactivates in the church as a result of it. And now, you know, the woman has financial support.

John Dehlin [01:53:18] The brother got to give the brothers reactivated in the church. And I think part of what he was also trying to say is, and the church never had to spend any of its money. And, and Gerardo is really infuriated by that message that with all this wealth that Ensign Peak is holding, why would the church try so hard to avoid using any of its money to help the members who are struggling? I think that's why Gerardo was so outraged.

John Dehlin [01:53:48] I. I also want to add that we did. We recently interviewed a whistleblowing Mormon bishop from Mexico. Just last week or this week on Mormon Stories. It's all blur. And he made the interesting point that in Latin America, you know, bishops are discouraged from ever spending more fast, know, fast dollars.

John Dehlin [01:54:13] So I'll say this again. In Latin America, bishops are discouraged from ever allowing fast donations to be used towards things like rent. Whereas in the United States, they're allowed to use bishop, you know, bishop obtained fast donations towards things like rent. In Latin America, you can't.

John Dehlin [01:54:35] Which is kind of inexplicable because you would assume that members in Latin America might need their rent covered more than someone in the U.S. u.S would. But that's not how. How it kind of shakes out. Any other comments on. On this kind of topic before we move to the next slide?

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:52] Yeah, just to take the obvious. I'm sorry, Rebecca.

John Dehlin [01:54:55] Okay, Rebecca, then RFM Just going to

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:54:57] quickly say I saw that same tick tock. I just put in the notes that it's. It's curly on. How do you even pronounce that word? Curlam Hunter, look that up. Because the other disturbing thing is that Elder Ballard is telling this story story to two other apostles or general authorities. And they're all kind of nodding, you know, and he says, basically, of course, you know, we weren't going to get, you know, but we did this other avenue and they were all in agreement, just nodding. Well, of course, that's not our policy. We would not give money to her, but we'll try to find these other outsourced ways. So, yeah, I think there was a lot of. A lot of people that were incensed about that. That video yesterday.

John Dehlin [01:55:31] All right, rfm, you want to add anything?

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:33] Yeah, we're paying our tithing. We're paying our fast offering. And now if we fall on hard times and we need, I don't know, some of it back to get us through. No, no, no. You got to go to the government first. We are your last stop tithing and fast offering. That comes off the top, but when it comes to assisting members, you are the last on the list.

John Dehlin [01:55:52] And I just. I just found that link from Gerardo and I will include it in the show notes, and I just pasted it into the comments. If anybody wants to grab that link from for later. Also, we just received our first super chat. We've got a thousand people who have joined us on the live chat. Please take a minute to subscribe to our YouTube channel or to our Facebook channel while you're here. That really helps with the algorithm. Please. Like this episode with the thumbs up button, whether you're on Facebook or YouTube in the live stream. And for those of you who want to support us financially, you can always give us, throw us a super chat through the YouTube feature.

John Dehlin [01:56:32] Mindy just sent us a super chat. And Mindy wrote. So true. We grew up in the same era. Wick services was bad. Got the mom when I had to use them years ago. Love the show. P.S. can't find book club. So I don't know exactly what Mindy means by that, but Mindy, thank you so much.

Spencer Anderson [01:56:55] Be talking about the good book club.

John Dehlin [01:56:57] Yeah, yeah, the good book club is a good thing. So maybe we'll include a link to that in the show notes. Okay. Any other comments before we move to the next slide? All right, let's go ahead and move to the next slide. What does 30 years of savings look like, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:57:15] Yeah. So this slide, for those of you who can't see it, what it's trying to do is kind of trying to conceptualize what would it look like if you. You were to act like the church acted and wait and wait 30 years accumulating wealth before you decided to generously give to the poor and the needy. And, you know, if you made $7,500 a year, which is the average household income for people in South America, then that would mean waiting until you have $202,500. If you made $67,500, which is the median income in the United States, then you would have to wait until you made that you, you had accumulated 1.8 million.

Spencer Anderson [01:57:58] If you made $200,000 a year, you would have to wait until you made 5.4 million before starting to give. And, you know, this kind of just, it's trying to kind of scale down the numbers. Right. And so I understand that, but I think that there's an argument to be made here about what is the right approach. And I, I think that this is a personal question for each of us that we really need to think about. You know, and I think we do address this question for ourselves each day. Sometimes we say we're going to wait until we give, and we don't have the money today, but, you know, someday in the future we'd like to have enough money where we can give more to charity or something like that.

Spencer Anderson [01:58:39] And I'm not, I'm not a moral arbiter on this or, or somebody who's like the best of this or anything like that, but it is something to think about for sure. Like, what is your moral framework in terms of when money should be given and not.

Spencer Anderson [01:58:54] I talked to a faithful accounting professional about this idea, and he brought an interesting idea I thought to me was, was that if the church hadn't accumulated all this wealth, then they won't. Wouldn't have been able to do the good that they can now do.

Spencer Anderson [01:59:13] So in essence saying, you know, yes, the church, look how much the church could do now, but the only reason that they're in this position today was because they were hoarding the wealth. And they use this anecdote about Warren Buffett. And I don't know if it's even a true story, to be honest, but the anecdote goes that Warren Buffett's wife came up to Warren and said, you know, we should be doing more to help with racial inequality.

Spencer Anderson [01:59:41] And Warren Buffett said, well, okay, well, give me 10 years to build more than what we have today, and then we'll really be able to make a dent in improving racial inequality. And I don't know what the right argument is here on this. I don't think that there's. I don't think it's like one or the other, because at one point, at some point, you've got to decide to pull the trigger, right?

Spencer Anderson [02:00:08] But there is, there is some truth to the fact that you need to save up in order to have enough to Make a meaningful difference. And I don't know what people think about that. Maybe that's just something to, that's introspective on my behalf.

John Dehlin [02:00:20] But I mean, I, I, I like the idea of. Thanks, Scrambled egg. Scrambled egg just made the comment. I give my tithing to Mormon stories. For real. Thank you, scrambled egg. I, my, my reaction. Oh, and by the way, we just got a couple more super chats. Jewel Brown just said, I'd rather give to truth tellers than truth hiders. Thanks, Jewel Brown, for that super chat. And Jay Larsen also just donated something. I'll just make the point going back to this slide. What if the members had decided instead of paying their tithing to invest their money and just said to the, if they just followed the church's logic, what if the members had just said, what if any of us had said, hey, instead of donating to the, our tithing to the Mormon Church, we'll just hold it for 30 years and then we'll donate what would have been our tithing.

John Dehlin [02:01:14] You know, look at how much money they could have accumulated not just for themselves, but also for the church. I think that's probably a comment worth making as well. Or did I misunderstand you, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:01:26] No, that's a fantastic, that's a great way of looking at it as well. Yeah. So if, if the church is going to use that argument, then they have to be willing to have members make that argument as well for themselves. And, and obviously they're not willing to make that. Let them do that.

John Dehlin [02:01:42] Yeah. Okay. Any other, any other comments about this slide?

Spencer Anderson [02:01:47] The other thing that, you know, what if, what if Bill Gates had decided, you know, instead of attacking malaria and, and polio in Africa today, what if he had just sat on it for 10 extra years or 15 extra years and said, then I'll have enough wealth to really make a dent in it, then I think that something that's not talked about in this conversation is the opportunity cost, which would have been people would have lost their lives.

Spencer Anderson [02:02:18] There are people right now that are hungry, and for every day that the church decides not to use it, that's, that's a cost. I, I'm not arguing that the church is, is killing people, but it's, it's, it's a real cost. That has to be, these opportunity costs have to be brought into the equation. So just saying, like, oh, well, I'll be able to help people in 15 years. But yes, in that path, there have been people that you've decided to step over, you know, in the Same sense of like a Good Samaritan sense, right. Where you're just watching people as you go on your path to wealth and not helping them.

Spencer Anderson [02:02:58] That has to weigh on your conscience. That's a cost that has to weigh on society. There's a societal cost to it. There's the membership losses. Along that way, when people don't understand what is happening and they feel like they've lost trust in the organization, all of these costs seem to not be built into their model.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:03:20] I just kind of feel that. Why is the church the gatekeeper to charitable giving? I. I saw a comment on the screen, and I agree with this. Why wasn't there a culture? Instead of discouraging investing like I talked about my parents thinking that's gambling or speculating, why wasn't it something where members were encouraged? In that way, everyone wins, right? We come out ahead. We've invested, we have more resources.

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:43] We.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:03:43] We can do more charitable giving. We can also do charitable giving through the church. It's a win win. Because I think people, when they think about tithing, they don't realize it's not just your tithing. It's the return on investment for decade after decade that you didn't get. The church got it sitting on it. It's not helping anyone. It could have been a win win. Everybody could have been able to give, and everybody could have come out ahead.

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:06] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:04:07] The one comment I want to make is, and hopefully this isn't too obvious, is that Jesus kind of weighed in on this matter, didn't he? There's the parable of the talents. And I don't know if any of you want to quickly look that up or bring that in or varfm, if you remember the basic gist or Rebecca, of the parable of the talents. Does anybody remember what Jesus said about this? When you've got some money, what you should and shouldn't do with it. Rebecca, you're nodding. Do you want to. Do you want to weigh in?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:38] Oh, I'm nodding because I was realizing that I don't remember it as clearly as I used to. Isn't that funny when you attend church all the time and you hear it, but I don't remember. Yeah, it supports the church hiding them, right? It does support the church position.

John Dehlin [02:04:52] How so? RFM?

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:53] Well, because the guy who gets five talents invests, it makes five more. The guy gets 10 talents, invests, it makes 10 more, and they're all great. You know, yay in the parable. But the guy who gets the one talent, right, he buries it, and he doesn't increase the value of it. And then when his master comes along, he's in trouble. So it discourages not investing and it encourages investing, at least on the surface level.

John Dehlin [02:05:19] Well, rfm, I guess it depends on your interpretation of what Jesus meant by a talent and what he meant by using it. Did he mean investing in the. Did Jesus mean investing in the stock market?

Radio Free Mormon [02:05:35] Yes, the S P500. It's right there in Matthew, chapter six. Or did.

John Dehlin [02:05:41] Or did Jesus mean buying by how to use your talents? Did he mean, you know, using those resources towards. What Jesus would have said is what he stood for when he said, inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me. You know, clothing the naked, you know, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the poor. You know, I. I guess we could all interpret what Jesus would have said according to our own understandings or what he meant according to our own understandings. But I guess what I would have interpreted from Jesus was that he wasn't making a case for alms. I mean, the widows might. The. The term widows might literally comes from the New Testament. Am I right, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:06:34] Like, there's a scriptorian, but yeah, I

Radio Free Mormon [02:06:37] mean, you might be right.

John Dehlin [02:06:38] Yeah, it does. And, and, and, and I think Jesus probably, if we're trying to understand what he intended, he probably would have said, do everything you can to help the poor and the needy and the afflicted. So, rfm, I don't know if you were kidding or not, but I don't think. I don't think Jesus would have made the argument that this money should have been invested in the stock market. I think, you know, he said, you know, consider the lilies, take no thought for the morrow. It seems like he would have said, there's a. There's evil sufficient in the day thereof that needs to be attended to. That it would be going against his will or heavenly Father's will to neglect the poor and the needy and the suffering now for some future that may or may not come. Now, does anybody want to weigh in on that? Am I wrong? Am I all wet?

Radio Free Mormon [02:07:33] Well, you just. You jumped to Matthew 25 with about, you know, doing unto others and to visiting those in prison. Etc. The reason that the parable of the talents appears to be contradicted by just about everything else that Jesus said on the subject is what makes it such a famously problematic parable.

John Dehlin [02:07:55] Right. Okay. Rebecca, anything you want to add?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:07:58] Well, maybe it's more. Don't hide your bushels of Money under a bushel, something like that. Right. You need to make sure that you get that in play in the world for humanitarian purposes. But absolutely, Jesus's message was help everyone. I mean, he traveled without person, script, right around helping everybody. So I think that's the message for sure.

John Dehlin [02:08:17] Nate, do you have an. Do you have an opinion on this part of the discussion at all?

Nate Bird [02:08:21] You know, I. I don't have anything as far as that goes. I think it's an interesting interpretation on like, the parable of the talents and. And the things that Jesus said. I definitely think that there's a lot of hypocrisy within the church when it comes to this issue. No matter what way you look at it, what they're doing with the money is not. It doesn't align with the teachings of Jesus that we find in the Bible. And then there's a couple other things. We got a couple more super chats, one from Ray Allen and Nathaniel Bennion. So thanks to y' all as well.

John Dehlin [02:08:53] All right. Okay. All right, Spencer, so let's go back to the slides. And should we go to the next slide?

Spencer Anderson [02:09:02] Yeah, let's do it.

John Dehlin [02:09:03] Okay. All right. So why so much money?

Rationales for Church Financial Secrecy Examined

Spencer Anderson [02:09:07] Yeah, these are the reasons for why. So last time before we. We looked at, you know, the reasons that the church gave for. Hi. For hiding the money. Here are the reasons for actually growing the money that the church gave. The first one is to help sustain church growth in developing countries.

Spencer Anderson [02:09:28] The second one is to save prudent reserves for a rainy day. In other words, sort of a self reliance motive. And the third one was for some unknown purpose yet to be revealed purpose some people would offer the second coming, they, you know, and for all three of those, I find those. I find them very severely lacking.

Spencer Anderson [02:09:51] But in terms of both, like whether the church actually would do it and whether the church has actually demonstrated through its actions that it is serious about these arguments. So, for example, the first argument helps sustain church growth in developing countries. Well, the church has a very strong policy to not spend more money than it takes in. And so as the church has grown in third world countries, what has it done? You know, growing in a third world country requires money from outside right. To. To grow it. And so it could potentially take those investment funds and help funnel those funds to Africa or Philippines or Brazil to fund that growth.

Spencer Anderson [02:10:34] Right. The church has not done that. The church has instead cut programs within the United States or had sufficient tithing access to. To. To allocate. It does not need this extra investment fund or has not up to this point demonstrated that that's the case that they would ever need Enzyme Peak to help provide growth in poor countries. So that one, to me is, is empirically false.

John Dehlin [02:11:00] If I, if I can just add my understanding from inside sources is that the church made a decision a while back that they would basically tell non US Countries, look, raise whatever money you can, but we're not going to be investing in you.

John Dehlin [02:11:18] We'll, you know, we can take whatever donations you're able to accumulate and, and we'll build chapels and maybe even temples. But don't expect, you know, money coming in, in the United States to really have any outflow into developing countries. We also know, our understanding is, is that with all the fast offerings that are being given each year, especially in the United States, that, that still developing countries like Mexico bring in more fast offerings than they spend and that there's no flow of money from the wealthier countries into the developing countries in terms of fast offerings. Instead, even the poorest of countries seem to be contributing their excess fast offerings back to the corporate headquarters.

John Dehlin [02:12:17] Does anybody disagree with that or have a different understanding in terms of the flow of money? That in every, no matter how poor the country is, if there's a flow of money, it's from the poor countries to the United States to the corporate church. Is that everybody's understanding?

Spencer Anderson [02:12:33] I, I would, I would disagree to some extent. I would say that the, there is some subsidy going on, especially for things like temples in, in some of the poorer countries from the United States. But I agree with you that that is not what the messaging is. So when the leaders come to Africa or to Mexico and they say, they, they, they impose the burden on the members to continue to pay tithing to support the church because otherwise the temple won't be possible. Right. This is not something that we're just going to hand over to you. Right.

Spencer Anderson [02:13:14] But mathematically it would be impossible, I think, for the church to be building the way that it is in Africa, just with its ecclesiastical buildings in a lot of the areas that it's in without some subsidy. But where that subsidy is coming from is interesting to me. And it's just from tithing and from global tithing. Right. I don't have a problem with this at all with the flow.

Spencer Anderson [02:13:39] I have a problem with the flow not meeting the messaging. Okay, that's, that's my. Does that make sense what I'm saying? Like, I do think that the subsidy is happening, but I do see where that concept that, where that conceptualization is coming from where that perception is coming from where the fast offerings aren't going anywhere but to the United States, also within fast offerings, I would say it probably does stay within country, but that's not necessarily a good thing. I. It also stays within United States. It doesn't necessarily go out of the United States when it comes. Starts. Starts there.

John Dehlin [02:14:14] And Spencer, did I just hear you say that, that this. The main subsidy that you're referring to is the construction of temples? Is that what I heard you say?

Spencer Anderson [02:14:24] I think it's just the most. The most obvious, large expenditure, fixed expenditure, that would require tithing from the members that members within that community probably wouldn't be able to support.

John Dehlin [02:14:38] So at least from a financial perspective, my understanding is the church sees temples as a way to grow tithing. Rebecca, is that what you said earlier in the episode?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:14:50] Well, and I think temples are really the only way to show any kind of growth to members anymore. That's the only thing. It's, you know, membership's dropping, other stats are dropping. But when you build a temple, that implies that there's some kind of upward trajectory. So. Yes.

John Dehlin [02:15:06] And you can't just keep building chapels because you like Scientology. We're running out of members to fill the chapels. So in terms of chapels, other than like in Africa, the church is actually not tending to build chapels these days because they don't have members to put in the chapels. In terms of growth numbers.

Radio Free Mormon [02:15:26] Right. They, of course, have the same problem with temples, because you can build temples until hell freezes over, you're not going to have enough people to put in the temples or even the staff of them. But the good thing about temples is there's no window, so you can't actually see in from the outside to see that there's nobody in there.

John Dehlin [02:15:44] Okay, let's go back to this argument about the second rationale, which is to save for a rainy day fund. Like, if you think about the adversity, Spencer, that the church has had over the years, especially in kind of the late 19th century when the government was seizing the church's assets, you know, we remember. Was it Lorenzo Snow, where. Where there were famine or whatever, and. And the. And. And there was a call for an increase in tithing because.

Spencer Anderson [02:16:12] Or even.

John Dehlin [02:16:13] Even in the 60s when there was deficit spending and the church actually was going into the red. Like it is consistent with the church's moral beliefs to have savings put away for a rainy day. So I. I do think that a rainy day fund is a legitimate rationale for accumulating wealth and one that's consistent with the church, what the church teaches its members. You would agree with that, right, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:16:38] Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that. And if you're, if you run into a former member who is kind of arguing that the church should give it all away or shouldn't have savings, it's like, or when, when faithful members try and straw man the argument to say that, like, well, you just don't want the church to have any money. I, I think that that's, that would be ludicrous. I think it would be very smart for any organization to have some savings set aside for sure.

Radio Free Mormon [02:17:07] Right.

Spencer Anderson [02:17:08] And I think is for a rainy day, like, how much rain are we talking about? How many days are we talking about? And if the rain is falling, it's falling on the fund too. And so at what point does the fun not. Is it no longer helpful? You know? So like, for example, if the, if the, if we're talking about a zombie apocalypse type of situation or the economy implodes, their money's not worth anything at that point anyway. And so there's no, there are a lot of rainy day situations that don't really work here. And, and I would love to hear what this rainy day is that, that, that you would need this much for.

Radio Free Mormon [02:17:50] Spencer what we know for a fact is that a two year worldwide pandemic is not the rainy day.

Spencer Anderson [02:17:58] That's right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:17:59] It's got to be something bigger, man.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:01] This is like this rfm. You're gonna get me all mad. So this is the.

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:06] I do that to a lot of people.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:07] I'm supposed to be even keel. I'm trying to be all just about the numbers. Okay? I, you know, I found out about this in, in 2020, you know, the, the just like a lot of you did. And I thought it was a perfect timing for the church. The church came out and they said, this is for a rainy day. A month later, Covid hits. And I thought the church is going to look so prophetic. All they have to do is they got to take a bunch of that money out and they got to say, see, look, here's the rainy day.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:38] All you faithless heathens, you know, you want to criticize the church for building up all this wealth, well, here you go, you know, here's, I hope you're happy. Now we have vaccines six months faster or something, you know, and it is shocking to me from a strategic perspective that the church did nothing with it. Shocking. That's all I'll say. Sorry, It's. I'll get mad about it. If I talk too much about it.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:19:03] Yeah, I think they're very blind on that. And I can't even believe that they still have the nerve to list rainy day as one of their reasons for the fun. Because that came and went. That is passed now. I grew up in the Skousen, Ezra, Tef Benson, Birch Society era. My parents were very into that. So I was always taught that the purpose for any money that the church had would be to save the government, perhaps, you know, put in a theocracy, and to save the Constitution, which was hanging from a thread. Have any of you guys heard that? And you feel that that's maybe an underlying motive? People still think that there's. There's something in play there.

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:45] I'll tell you what I think. What I think is that they have no reason for accumulating all this wealth. It's just something that they're doing. And there's a total lack of creativity, a total lack of charity, empathy, responsibility, with this. And then these. These excuses for why it is they're accumulating and hoarding all this wealth. That's not why they're hoarding their wealth. That these are just the excuses for getting caught with all this money on their hands. I don't think this is their directing and guiding policies. This is just what they're saying after the fact.

Spencer Anderson [02:20:20] Right. I agree. They're scrambling, in a sense, and this is a new problem for them. And I would love to give them ample opportunity to kind of figure out that problem and. And do something great with it. But the excuses so far are not hitting. They're not landing.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:20:38] Do you feel. Do you feel it has anything to do with prosperity gospel? That the fact that the upper leadership are businessmen and the way that you show things are true or working is through money and accumulating wealth? I've wondered about that. If it's just literally a prosperity. Prosperity gospel situation.

Spencer Anderson [02:20:58] Yeah, I. And they might be just surprised at how well it's worked.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:21:01] Exactly. It's out of control. Yep.

Spencer Anderson [02:21:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:04] Really quickly, Spencer. I remember working at Microsoft and how proud Steve Ballmer would be to announce how much cash Microsoft had in the bank. And I think we may have some slides about this. You tell me if we do or don't. But like corporations like Amazon or Apple, they definitely maintain a lot of cash and investments. Like, what's a reasonable amount of cash and investments, you know, based on kind of the corporate standard? Because, I mean, the church is a corporation, after all, so it's acting like a corporation. What's a reasonable amount of cash and investments for a corporation to hold.

Spencer Anderson [02:21:42] Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, you have to address a few things. So like one thing is that you have your debts that you have to pay off, so you have interest payments and things like that that you've got to keep paying off.

Spencer Anderson [02:21:52] A second reason for that is if you do have a rainy day essentially to ensure that you have solvency, long term solvency. And the reason for that is, let's say that something like Covid does hit for a corporation, you want to have some extra cash on hand so that you can pivot if you have no cash on hand and then suddenly nobody wants to lend to you any money.

Spencer Anderson [02:22:15] If you want to adapt to changing circumstances, you don't have the cash on hand to do so. But this is a controversial subject even within corporations. There have been shareholders that have been critical at companies like Apple, for example, for sitting on to what they would call sitting on too much cash.

Spencer Anderson [02:22:33] Because the shareholders want them to do something with that cash. They want them to turn it into more cash. Right. For, for, or give out a dividend to the back to the shareholders. And there have been times where there have been critiques on companies for having too much cash on hand.

Spencer Anderson [02:22:51] Sometimes that cash is trapped overseas and they don't want to bring it back because they'd have to pay a repatriation tax. And there's all sorts of reasons why they might want to hold on to more cash than others. But Spencer. Yeah?

Radio Free Mormon [02:23:03] Can I ask you a question? I've sometimes heard that businesses to be financially responsible should have say three years worth of what it is they owe annually. So in other words, if the church has expenses, which it apparently does have, about $6 billion a year, then to have three times that, $18 billion. And that that is generally understood, or a certain number of years worth of that amount is generally understood to be the prudent thing and you're safe and you're conducting yourself well. Have you heard of anything like that?

Spencer Anderson [02:23:36] I don't know of a rule of thumb personally, but normally what I would do is I would look at the industry average because there is a such thing as too much cash on hand. It's actually detrimental to the company because they could be generating more cash elsewhere. They should be using that cash in some way.

Spencer Anderson [02:23:58] And there's such thing as having too little cash. And so you don't want to say like, oh well, you should max out the number. And so it's a little more nuanced than all of that. But, but yeah, for, for certain though, we can, I think we can agree that the church is well beyond that. The church is far beyond the three year mark. It's, it's. And we can talk about this in the next slide. Actually this is our next big takeaway. But it's, it's almost staggering how much money that it's decided to kind of. Oh, it's, it's, it's different than any other corporation in terms of the way that it's structured.

John Dehlin [02:24:35] Well, really quickly, before we jump to the next slide, I just want to address the third point in this slide, which is, you know, the one that's most often floated, which is that Jesus is going to need all this money in the millennium. And I kind of joke about that like, okay, I was taught that in the millennium, for a thousand years, everyone in the world that doesn't die, you know, when Jesus comes, is going to be doing genealogy, which means if we've got, let's just say 6 billion people survive Jesus's return, they're all going to need computers to start doing their genealogy. Because for a thousand years we're going to be doing work for the dead.

John Dehlin [02:25:13] And if you think about all the temple clothing that everyone would need to be doing baptisms for the dead 16 hours a day, plus all the temples. Sorry, plus all the computer. Yeah, plus all the computers that everyone would need to be doing temple work for the dead and doing genealogy research, plus all the temples that would need to be built such that, you know, proxy baptisms for the dead and ceilings for the dead and endowments for the dead could all be done in all the temples by the 6 billion people. Well then all of a sudden you need $200 billion in assets. Jesus would need that to be able to build all the temples, buy all the temple clothes and pay for all the computers and the data services to do all the work for the dead. Now, Rebecca, rfm. Nate. Can any of you argue with that logic?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:26:02] I feel like. Has anyone read Revelations? You're not going to get a good Internet connection in the Apocalypse. It's not going to happen.

John Dehlin [02:26:09] Well, in that case, Jesus could use his special powers to protect the broadband.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:26:15] So that may be it. That's it.

John Dehlin [02:26:18] Jesus protects the broadband in his return. Okay, that. Now, now disagree with me. Assuming Jesus protects the broadband.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:26:29] Okay, I can't then. You're absolutely right. You've hit it. We know now we can end the broadcast.

John Dehlin [02:26:34] You did it. We need it. Rfm. Any other, you know, challenges to my theory?

Radio Free Mormon [02:26:39] Well, Once again, this shows the absolute lack of faith of the leaders of the church, of the apostles of Jesus Christ in their Lord and master, Jesus Christ. Christ, because he can't take care of crap himself, he's got to have these guys down here taking care of it for him. And this is the huge dichotomy throughout the New Testament. Do not put your trust in the arm of flesh. Do not put your love with riches, because where your, your treasure is, there will your heart be also right? So what we're seeing is these apostles of Jesus Christ falling into every single error and treasure trap that was mentioned by their savior back 2000 years ago when he was on the Earth.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:18] I don't know what he's telling them now, but apparently it's something different from what's in the New Testament. The other thing is that this whole idea that we have members who are willing to ascribe to the leaders some kind of insider knowledge, right, that they know something that we don't know and they're not telling us, but we don't expect them to. This is how bad the culture of secrecy has gotten in the LDS Church is that not only do the leaders keep things secret, but now the members, not they expect them to keep things secret from them, and they think it's a good thing that they keep things secret from them so they know something we don't know.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:54] The time is ticking. Jesus is right around the corner, and so they got to have this money. For some reason, we're not going to think about it too much like we've already done here on the show, just thinking about it, saying, well, what does that mean to have money when he comes again? And how is that going to be useful? And I like Spencer's saying that the rainy day the rain falls on the fund too, so it becomes useless. The, the worse the rainy day, the more useless the fun becomes insofar as that rainy day impacts the economy on which the fund thrives.

John Dehlin [02:28:25] No, that's a great point. And I'll just say to kind of echo what you said, rfm, and then we'll get to the next slide. It's just that it's just hard to imagine Jesus, like, going to a bank to like, register for a checkings at a savings account and Jesus getting his debit and his credit cards and like, using the money. Like, isn't Jesus the creator of the universe? Like, you would just think that Jesus wouldn't need actual cash and stocks and bonds and credit cards and debit cards when he returns? I mean, that's kind of. That was the joke I was kind of making.

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:01] Well, yeah, as James Tiberius Kirk said, what does God need with a 150 billion dollar investment account?

John Dehlin [02:29:07] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right, well, let's go ahead and jump to the next slide.

Church Leader Quotes on Finances and Tithing

Spencer Anderson [02:29:15] Yeah. So this is the next big takeaway.

John Dehlin [02:29:17] The church's endowment is more than sufficient. Go ahead.

Spencer Anderson [02:29:21] Yeah, this is the next big takeaway. Basically the takeaway here is that the church has enough money in the fund that you could use the money off the fund and fully run the church forever. So the church does not need your tithing. I think this is maybe the big takeaway from this. And not only that, but not only does it have enough, it has. It would be able to draw an extra 1 billion in addition to its current expenditures each year to reinvest or to give charitable aid.

John Dehlin [02:29:54] And Spencer, for those who are just listening and can't see, will you just talk us through what this slide basically says?

Spencer Anderson [02:30:01] Yeah. So like, let's pretend like the church treated Ensign Peak as an endowment fund the way that a lot of universities do where they say they kind of like draw from it, but it is in small pieces, small enough pieces that it.

Spencer Anderson [02:30:14] You're only really drawing from the interest of the fund. And that way the actual size of the fund doesn't diminish over time. So it just stays at the same size. And you're only drawing out enough to, or drawing out a small enough amount that you, that you never change the size of the fund.

Spencer Anderson [02:30:36] Well, if you tried to do that with this fund, you could take out about $6.7 billion a year. That's a 4.25% annual distribution out of the fund. You could use that to operate the church. Now remember, $6.7 billion tithing is around 5 to 6 billion dollars. And so you already have enough to run the entire church. Now that extra billion is.

Spencer Anderson [02:31:04] That extra billion could be used for any number of purposes. You could throw it back into the fund. You could. If you think that there's going to be more in the church, that for some reason that there's going to be a rainy day or something like that, you could throw it back in the fund.

Spencer Anderson [02:31:19] You could use it for humanitarian aid. You can use it for any purpose. And I really like the analysis that widows might did here. They were very thorough in terms of what they assumed. They included every type of expenditure. They included cost inflation within it. They included membership growth.

Spencer Anderson [02:31:38] So they assumed that, yeah, the costs are going to increase over time. Of course they will because there's going to be more members and there's going to be inflation and they still are able to come out with this.

John Dehlin [02:31:50] All right? So I think that's an important point. The church doesn't need your money to grow. And like we said before, they don't even need your money to become a trillion dollar church within the next 20 to 30 years.

Radio Free Mormon [02:32:02] Right. And this isn't just Spencer saying it or you saying it, John. This is what Elder Bednar said at the press conference, Club conference y just within the past year he was asked the question, he said, the church doesn't need your money. One of the worst admissions any sitting apostle of the church has ever made, by the way.

John Dehlin [02:32:20] Right.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:32:20] But at the same time they also tell us you can't afford not to pay. Right? Because that's what locks you in. That's what makes sure you're connected. I mean, I once confessed to being a partial tithe payer and I happened to work at BYU and my job was absolutely, absolutely threatened. So I quickly gathered the money and paid so. And you also can't attend the temple if you don't pay tithing. So despite the fact that the church is now basically a perpetual motion machine, it does not need us, it does not need tithe payers. We still have to pay in order to participate fully.

John Dehlin [02:32:48] And I'll just lock down from a psychological standpoint or from a sociologic, sociological standpoint, what, what's, what we know is that the more an organization, and specifically the more that a church demands of its members, the more faithful the members are going to become. If the church starts requiring less of its members, you know, reduce the amount of time they're spending on Sunday, reduce the amount of time they're serving in callings, and reduce the amount of money that they pay to the church. The ultimate outcome is you get less devoted members. Jehovah's Witnesses expect more of their members. And what we see is, especially over the past 10 years, that, that they've had growth rates that, that have escaped the modern LDS Church in the past 10 years.

John Dehlin [02:33:39] So the fact that the church is actually trying to make it easier to be a Mormon, including reducing, you know, Sabbath attendance from three hours to two hours, they're actually weakening member commitment to the church. And so if, if they were to make the announcement, hey everyone, we don't need your money anymore.

John Dehlin [02:33:59] We've got enough. No need to pay tithing, they would actually be harming member commitment to the church. And I think that's factual and I'd Love to hear anyone try and tell me I'm wrong.

Radio Free Mormon [02:34:12] Well, I won't tell you you're wrong, but I will say that in almost every other instance, that's exactly what they're doing. They're limiting church from three hours to two hours. They're making it easier and easier and easier to be a member because they keep thinking that's the problem. Because these damn people, they're so lazy that they don't want to be in for everything. So we'll cut things back. We'll make it easier. Tithing is the one thing that they are not making easier, which I think says something about the importance they place on tithing.

John Dehlin [02:34:41] Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, RFM. Thank you, Rebecca. Spencer's asked that Nate read the next three slides. So, Nate, we're going to put you on the spot here. And, Spencer, do you want to set these up first before we. We have Nate read them?

Spencer Anderson [02:34:59] Yeah, I mean, they're just quotes from prior. Prior quotes from. From church leaders. And Nate alluded to all of them in the past. I. Previously. And so he was thinking ahead, and I thought that, you know, he should get the credit to read these things.

John Dehlin [02:35:12] So, Nate, because you're a prophet, we're going to have you read these next three slides. Is that all right?

Nate Bird [02:35:16] Sounds good.

Spencer Anderson [02:35:17] I'll.

Nate Bird [02:35:17] I'll channel my powers of revelation.

John Dehlin [02:35:19] Okay, here we go. Just go ahead and read the slides.

Nate Bird [02:35:22] All right, let's see here. So it says, we are not a wealthy people, but we are a good people, and we share what we have.

John Dehlin [02:35:30] Tell us who said it and when.

Nate Bird [02:35:32] Elder Neil L. Anderson in Africa, December 2018.

John Dehlin [02:35:35] Let's say it one more time.

Nate Bird [02:35:37] We are not a wealthy people, but we are a good people, and we share what we have.

Radio Free Mormon [02:35:43] That's like three misstatements in one sentence.

John Dehlin [02:35:45] Why? Why? Rfm? Tell us why.

Radio Free Mormon [02:35:47] Because they are wealthy people. They're not a good people, and they don't share what they have.

John Dehlin [02:35:52] Okay.

Nate Bird [02:35:53] Not to mention where he's seeing this as well, which is in Africa. We don't know what country he was in. But, you know, the way that the church portrays African people within the gospel is very childlike, very poor, very humble. And so for him to go there and say something like that, knowing that they've got $105 billion in investments is just. Just despicable, to be honest.

John Dehlin [02:36:19] Okay. All right. Well, that's. That's the first quote. Spencer, Rebecca, anything you want to add to that?

Spencer Anderson [02:36:25] It was in Zimbabwe, and he offered the quote to the. In context to him responding to a call from. Help from the vice president of Zimbabwe. So Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean. Zimbabwean vice president was looking for help in. In building water wells for the community. And that was his response. So I think the context actually makes it worse.

Nate Bird [02:36:50] That's so much worse because as far

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:36:52] as I know, prosperity gospel, again, the only way, you know, for you to rise your. Raise yourself up is to give to us. That's classic prosperity gospel right there.

John Dehlin [02:37:03] And Nate, were you anything else you want to say?

Nate Bird [02:37:06] Oh, I was going to say, I don't even think that creating wells is that. That expensive. You know, we hear about, you know, people doing that all the time, and it wouldn't have taken that much money. But I think part of the reason he said that is because it would have set a precedent. If they help one. One country or one organization, then they have to, you know, then there's an expectation that they'll be able to do that for. For a lot of others. And then that that web of secrecy that they've tried to. To maintain for so long will just continue to fall apart once people start to realize that they have the resources to help a lot of other people. So I think that's probably a big part of why they. They don't want to help as well.

John Dehlin [02:37:40] Yeah. All right, let's go ahead and go to the next slide. And Nate, if you'll first read who's saying it to whom and when and then read. Read the quote. Is that okay?

Nate Bird [02:37:52] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:37:52] All right, so what's the next one?

Nate Bird [02:37:54] All right, so this one. Elder David A. Bednar to the National Press Club, May 26, 2022. He said, the church doesn't need their money, but those people need the blessings that come from obeying God's commandments. For the first time ever, a senior apostle suggested that the church no longer needs tithing.

John Dehlin [02:38:11] What thoughts on that, Nate?

Nate Bird [02:38:14] I mean, he was being honest in

John Dehlin [02:38:17] that instance, so that's good.

Nate Bird [02:38:19] I guess you told the truth.

John Dehlin [02:38:21] Rfm, any comment on that? On that quote?

Radio Free Mormon [02:38:24] No, but it was significant. I say no in that comment. Of course. Yeah, that was the one that was so significant. We have, actually, I don't think ever heard a sitting apostle admit that the church doesn't need your tithing. We don't need your stinking tithing, but keep paying it anyway.

John Dehlin [02:38:41] Rebecca got a comment.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:38:43] Basically, they were saying, we don't need you, but you need us.

Radio Free Mormon [02:38:48] Yes, you need the blessings of not having enough money to feed your children or pay your electricity bill.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:38:53] That's how you Grow. That's the only way you'll grow.

Nate Bird [02:38:56] And that's a very manipulative thing to say as well. You know, people will say, oh, you know, I understand the church doesn't need my money, but I get so many blessings from it. And it's like, well, okay, if, you know, the church doesn't need your money, then why don't you give it to an organization that does need your money? Or why don't you just go out and donate some of your time?

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:12] Time?

Nate Bird [02:39:13] You know, you could be at a homeless shelter feeding the homeless. You could be donating to, you know, a local charity or a local church that's actually out in the community doing different things. Why do you need to give your money to this place that you know doesn't need your money and then say, oh, but I'm getting blessings from it? Like, won't you get those blessings from. From doing the same thing somewhere else? You know, so it's a very manipulative tactic, and it just kind of plays into that whole. That whole narrative that they're trying to spin.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:39] Nate, there are special, amorphous, otherwise unidentified blessings that you get from God for paying tithing to the LDS Church you can't get anywhere else. I'm telling you.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:39:48] Can I ask RFM with that statement?

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:54] Sorry. I'm sorry, What?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:39:56] I just wanted to ask you, rfm, could that statement be used in court for any kind of potential class action where he literally says, we don't need your money?

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:05] Oh, well, I hope so. I hope all of these. These statements that they've made, and there's a whole lot of them, and we've talked about some of them, tonight will come home to roost like chickens.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:40:16] Got it.

John Dehlin [02:40:17] Spencer, let's give you a chance to weigh in on this quote.

Spencer Anderson [02:40:20] Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna go in a different direction with this, but, like, I was talking with a widow's might member on this, and my question is, where does. How does Elder Bednar know that Elder Bednar is not in the First Presidency or in the Presiding Bishopric?

Spencer Anderson [02:40:35] How could he make a statement like that if he doesn't know? Or does he know? So what we thought we knew about this, about the First Presidency and the Presiding Bishopric being the only ones that are privy to the information within enzyme peak. I. I just. I'm. It's. It begs the question, you know, what are. Maybe it isn't secretive anymore within the quorum of the 12. Maybe it never. Maybe it is informally known. Maybe he's read the widow's Might report by then. You know, maybe it was. So he's just heard these estimates.

Spencer Anderson [02:41:06] I don't know. But it does just make me wonder, like you're, you're arguing on behalf of this committee that you presumably don't even have the information available for you.

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:18] Yeah, right, Spencer. I think that was like half a year ago he made that statement. And I've got to think that at some point with the church is dealing with the SEC and trying to come up with this resolution, that they are going to give some advanced notice, at least to the senior leadership that this is coming. So maybe there were some meetings along those lines that Elder Bednar is privy to that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the SEC investigation, and that maybe haven't happened for the last 20 years. But now he's getting into the loop and now he's got the new information and like the new kid on the block who's got the new information, he accidentally blabs it to the entire world.

Spencer Anderson [02:41:53] Yeah, that would be great. I would love that if that was the case.

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:57] Well, I mean, that he did when he said the church doesn't need your tithing.

Spencer Anderson [02:42:01] No, I, Yeah, I hope that that's the case. I mean, I, I think that that's a, a valid potential explanation too. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:42:09] And I think that if anybody who values his role as an apostle of Jesus Christ says, okay, the church doesn't need my money, but I need the blessings from paying it, well, you know, the blessings I've gotten from paying it haven't been that great anyway. So I guess I'll just keep it or donate it somewhere else to somebody who can really use it and isn't just hoarding it in an account with billions and billions and billions of other people's tithing.

John Dehlin [02:42:36] I will say there, there are a lot of people that believe that if you pay your tithing, you prosper financially. And there may be some people who, when they pay their tithing, they prosper financially. But also, you know, every time the rooster crows, the sun rises. There's the question of what causes that. I know a lot of people who have left the Mormon Church and have become way more fabulously wealthy. I don't think it's logical for, for the average member to think that paying tithing is necessarily going to lead to greater financial wealth and prosperity. I do think that's worth noting because I've seen tens of thousands of examples of where not, you know, not paying your tithing has, has been succeeded by wealth increases that were previously Unimaginable by those who choose. Chose not to pay.

Spencer Anderson [02:43:36] So can I, could I offer something in a. Maybe for a. For a faithful member who's struggling? One thing you could do, if you're feeling this way, because I agree with you, John, and it's so hard to disentangle what is like an unobservable counterfactual. Right. You don't know what would have happened if you hadn't paid your tithing.

Spencer Anderson [02:43:55] And so try it out. I would, I would say try it out for a couple of years. Try paying. You could either try paying to charity, or you could try not paying any. What you would call tithing altogether.

Spencer Anderson [02:44:09] Try it out and then see what happens and look at what other people have said about what happens when they stop and when they start. And you know, if you have to, you pay back tithing. Right. If you, if you realize that you were in. You were having a mistake. But I'm confident enough in that that this is not.

Spencer Anderson [02:44:30] This is not an effect. This is not really happening. Right. At least in. In any material, observable way where you pay your tithing and you're getting blessed for it.

John Dehlin [02:44:40] Yeah. And. And if there's any doubt about that, then another thing you can do is just follow the church's example and invest all the money that you would pay in your tithing and wait 30 years and just keep track of how much tithing you would have paid. And, and then when the 30 years have gone by, you can decide if you want to go ahead and pay your tithing or not. I can say I meet a lot of people who end up losing their faith in the church or leaving the church, who really end up regretting the tithing that they paid. I can tell you that's something that I've seen tens of thousands of times.

John Dehlin [02:45:16] And so those of you who are still faithful, still paying your tithing and are listening or viewing. I want to just plant that seed in your mind that, that, you know, I'm not. We're not trying to say don't pay your tithing, but we're saying that if you are struggling financially and, or if you want to test this idea that, that maybe your prosperity won't be linked to your paying tithing. Just follow the church's example. Put all your surplus money in savings, allow it to grow, get a good S&P 500 index fund, or however you want to invest it, buy real estate, and then just wait.

John Dehlin [02:45:54] And if you end up losing your faith, I know for sure you'll be glad you didn't pay the tithing. But if in 10, 20, 30 years you are still a believer, you can always then back pay the church what you would have paid in tithing. And you'll have a big old surplus that in addition you can use for your retirement. Any other quick comments before we go to the next slide?

Radio Free Mormon [02:46:16] Yeah, I can't speak for everybody as to whether if you pay tithing it's going to benefit you financially in some other mysterious way. And you get the, the moneygram on the door. The next day the knock comes, you know, and you get exactly the same amount that you need, whatever it is. I tend to doubt those stories. I know that I never experienced that in my own personal life. The only thing that I am sure of is that if you pay your tithing, the church will benefit financially whether you do or not.

John Dehlin [02:46:43] Absolutely, that's for sure true. Okay, let's go ahead and go to the next slide. And Nate, we're going to have you tell us who, who stated this. We've referred to this already in the episode, but it's probably worth reiterating one more time. So take it away, Nate.

Nate Bird [02:47:01] Yep. So this was Joseph F. Smith and General Conference, April 1907. Let me make this a little bit bigger here. So it says we may not be able to reach it right away, but we expect to see the day when we will not have to ask you for one doll donation for any purpose except that which you volunteer to give of your own accord because we will have tithes sufficient in the storehouse of the Lord to pay everything that is needful for the advancement of the kingdom of God.

John Dehlin [02:47:31] And then what does it say about that, Nate?

Nate Bird [02:47:32] So said, by every measure, the church does not need more money. President Joseph F. Smith anticipated a financially self sufficient church.

John Dehlin [02:47:41] And I think that's significant because that's kind of like Joseph, you know, Joseph F. Smith laid the groundwork so members can know that a prophet, when he was a prophet, foresaw the day where the church would say we don't need your money anymore. And Spencer, I have to ask you as a financial expert, do you, you know, based on the church's finance, you know, you, you probably have. Spencer, tell me if I'm wrong. Have you been trained in sort of like doing a, analyzing, you know, the, the financials of a church, the, the P and L, the cast position and sort of analyzing the financial health of, of a corporation? Have you, have you, you know, studied that in your life? Is that.

Spencer Anderson [02:48:22] Yeah, financial anal analysis and, and financial reports? Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:48:26] And if you were Moody's or whatever and you were to kind of give the church a grade on how well they're doing financially, what, what type of grade would you give the church?

Spencer Anderson [02:48:35] Oh, geez. Well, they don't even have debt and Moody's evaluates debt, so he's already a AAA rating there.

John Dehlin [02:48:41] But given, given 200 billion. What's, what's, what's the rating you're going to give them, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:48:46] Aaa.

John Dehlin [02:48:47] How about Quintuple A? Can we do a Quintuple A?

Spencer Anderson [02:48:50] I don't think so, but if Moody's decided to, they could.

John Dehlin [02:48:53] No.

Spencer Anderson [02:48:53] I mean, yeah, they're an extremely well hyped stories.

John Dehlin [02:48:57] Can we give the church at quintuple?

Radio Free Mormon [02:48:59] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:49:00] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [02:49:00] We'll give the Mormon stories gold star.

John Dehlin [02:49:04] So if there were ever a time that the, that we could declare the church in a comfortable enough status to be able to sort of say, okay, we don't need your tithing, you know, Spencer, in your professional opinion, do you think we might be there?

Spencer Anderson [02:49:20] We're there. We already are there.

John Dehlin [02:49:23] We're there.

Spencer Anderson [02:49:23] I'm not, I'm not. This isn't, there's not a lot of room for, for judgment that would suggest otherwise. It was, it's, it's 99.9% positive that it's, that that's the case that we're in. That's the situation we're in. They don't need any more tithing. They, they're a self sufficient church.

John Dehlin [02:49:44] All right, any other comments from the panel?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:49:47] Yeah, can I just say, I know when he said that that was the goal, but then in the 60s, there was a financial crisis with overspending and building, and so then they resurrected the old windows of heaven mythology. And there was a huge push in the 60s. I feel that my parents were sort of victim of this where tithing was, where it was at. They were huge tithe payers. I believe they probably put 30% of their income into that fund right now. And, you know, from the 60s on. And so at that point it just, I think, became this like moving entity where you would not stop paying.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:50:20] There was a huge push in the 60s that continues to today. And it's just something that you do. I mean, I was a kid that we took our tithing jars down on Christmas morning in case we got some cash. We had to tithe it right there. So tithing is real. The trauma of tithing is real, right?

John Dehlin [02:50:37] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:50:37] What other obligation is there in the LDS Church? And there's a lot of Them, Right. Do this, don't do that. What other obligations you have in the LDS church, that once a year you are required or expected to sit down with your bishop to go over this particular obligation and then ensure your bishop that you are fulfilling this particular obligation. It's not the word of wisdom.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:50:57] No.

John Dehlin [02:50:59] Right. Or honesty. How about. How about being honest to your fellow humans? Yeah. Okay. All right, nrfm, how many minutes you got? You left. We know you got to leave some point soon.

Radio Free Mormon [02:51:14] 10.

John Dehlin [02:51:14] 10 more minutes. All right, well, we got RFM for 10 more minutes. We'll take care. We'll squeeze every minute out of our. Out of our FM that we can. But let's go ahead and go to the next slide, Spencer, which is that only six church leaders have full access to Ensign Peak. And this is a really important issue because I remember after the Ensign Peak story broke, somehow we found out, maybe it was through David Nielsen's disclosures that, like, there was a moment where he realized that Boyd K. Backer, who at the time was the president of the quorum of the 12, was out of the loop on how wealthy Ensign Peak was. But go ahead and talk to us through this, Spencer.

Who Controls Ensign Peak's Financial Data

Spencer Anderson [02:51:49] Yeah, so, I mean, just like there's a strengthening the Church Members committee, there's what's called the IPC or the Investment Policy Committee, and the Investment Policy Committee. My understanding is that at least once a year, the committee visits the entire Enzyme Peak team.

Spencer Anderson [02:52:05] They get an update, and they also offer their counsel to the Enzyme Peak employees. But this is, this is. I'm not exactly sure where this policy came from, why it is what it is, but it's problematic for several reasons. But the, probably the largest reason is that when you have fewer people involved, you have a lot higher chance. I don't want to be conspiratorial here, but for any time that there's fraud or anytime that there's anything nefarious going on, you think about the 13F filings, for example, misreporting there.

Spencer Anderson [02:52:50] Fewer hands makes fewer eyeballs on the, on the data, makes it much more likely to happen. And so, and this could be broadly applied to transparency within the church. You know, just let the whole church know. But they're, They're. They're not even letting the top 15 know. I mean, that is, that is a hyper level of secrecy that you just don't see anywhere that I know of, especially in today's world. Today's world values transparency so much.

Spencer Anderson [02:53:20] Everybody values it as a, as a given. It's not even something that has to be explained. Transparency fosters trust. And yet even within the quorum of the 12, there doesn't seem to be a lot of transparency when it comes to these finances, at least at a structural level. Like I said, when Elder Bednar made that comment, it kind of makes you think that maybe they do know that it's informal, but.

Spencer Anderson [02:53:48] Yeah, that's, that's what, that's what I think about, about this whole idea about having it all consolidated to six people knowing what's going on.

John Dehlin [02:53:57] Yeah. So just to reiterate, as far as we know, only the First Presidency and the Presiding Bishopric know about these numbers. The rest of the quorum of the 12 and the presidents of the first of the 70 are left off. And that makes sense. They'd want to keep the circle in terms of privacy, as small as possible. Really quickly, Spencer, in terms of, like, corporate practices, let's just say within Apple or Google or Microsoft, how big would the circle be of those who really knew the full financial picture of a major corporation of, of this size? In, in a major corporation of this size? Do you even have an idea?

Spencer Anderson [02:54:34] Well, the board of directors certainly would, but at various levels throughout, you're going to see people that have information available to them. And, but far and above beyond that, you also have independent people. So you have an audit committee that provides oversight for the company, sets the procedure, you know, sort of, kind of sets the internal procedures and controls to make sure that people aren't able to commit fraud. And then you have an external audit that normally will come in. And when the external auditor comes in, they get.

Spencer Anderson [02:55:09] What's the word? Carte blanche or whatever they get, they get whatever documents they're looking for. And so at that point, the books are all open to everyone. And as a public member, maybe we don't get to see the full financial ledger of Walmart. Right. As a, just a, as a normal person, a member of society. But when we see that the auditor has evaluated the, the ledger, has evaluated the reports and, and has provided some assurance on those reports, we can then know that what we're seeing is actually true and accurate and complete and, or at least have some really high confidence in that. Right. We don't see any of that here. And so if it is secret,

Radio Free Mormon [02:55:56] if

Spencer Anderson [02:55:56] it is secret, then, you know, you need to have an external audit. You need to have some sort of external assurance service that would then allow people to then place trust in these six people that do have the information. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [02:56:09] Yeah, right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:56:10] It's so secret. I mean, that's how secret this is. This is super secret squirrel stuff, even by Mormon standards. Only the First Presidency and only the Presiding Bishopric and only the General manager of Ensign Peak Advisors. Those seven people in all the world are the only ones who get to know how much the LDS Church really has. And if they had shown a little foresight, a little prophetic ability, perhaps what they would have realized that if and when this blows up on them and it comes to light what they're up to, that they have also severely limited the number of people that they can point the finger at.

John Dehlin [02:56:52] Right. Beautiful. All right, well, this has been such a fascinating panel so far. Really quickly, I want to highlight at least one more super chat that was just given by H. Benzula. I don't know, Nate, if you can find that comment and show it really quick, but we have covered so much good ground today. Thanks, HB Ben. How do we pronounce that? Ben Zula, for that super chat donation, H. How many, how many slides have we covered so far, Spencer, versus how many we have left?

Spencer Anderson [02:57:34] 20 out of 59, unfortunately.

John Dehlin [02:57:36] So we're not even half of the way in. So we're gonna do an audible right now.

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:40] We could be here till midnight. We play our cards right.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:57:43] I'm in. I'm totally in.

John Dehlin [02:57:45] And I mean, and this is Mormon stories and all, so we don't shy away from 13 hour episodes. But I think this is a lot to digest. So what I'm gonna do, based on chat behind the scenes and our knowledge of the fact that we're not even half way done with the slides, is this going to be part one that we are just concluding. So before people bail, we're going to do some closing comments. So everybody on the panel, please get your closing comments ready. But what we're going to do is we're going to come back and do a part two and or a part three to discuss further.

Remaining Topics and How to Give Feedback

John Dehlin [02:58:17] Because Spencer, if you wanted to just really quickly lay out the. The main sections or groupings of slides that we have remaining. What have we not covered that this widow's My presentation is still going to cover? What do we have left? Oh, you're muted, Spencer. Go ahead and unmute yourself.

Spencer Anderson [02:58:39] Thank you. Sorry. So we've covered a lot of the higher level stuff. And so now what we would be doing is a deeper dive into Ensign Peak, its performance as an investment portfolio. Then we would dive into humanitarian aid. How much the church actually spends on humanitarian aid per year relative to what it could Temple spending, how much it would cost if the Church wanted to build a thousand temples by 2040.

Spencer Anderson [02:59:10] Would it have to dive into Ensign Peak to do that? We'll dive into church real estate, how much real estate the church owns. And then there are a couple of sort of subtopics about like the tax controversies with, in Australia and Canada that people I think are still pretty interested in and just kind of offer an opinion on that, that stuff as well. So it's a little bit more of a deep dive, a little bit more of a really interesting information, I think in terms of like how the portfolio is doing, how the, how the investments work within Enzyme Peak. I think that that part's really interesting.

John Dehlin [02:59:49] Okay. Yeah. So for those who joined us late, there are a couple shout outs we want to make. One is just, again, this is a my thanks and a personal shout out to the Widows Might Report and the team behind the Widows Might Report because they have done a huge service already to all of us. So the website that you can go to to read this from the Widows Might report's mouth is widowsmightreport.WordPress.com that is the way that you can actually get, get their report. There is a presentation that is developed for Mormon Stories. So if you want to go to widowsmightreport.WordPress.com MormonStories, that's the presentation that we have prepared for today.

John Dehlin [03:00:44] Now, previously, Spencer, you know, we want to be able to give the Widows Might Report team feedback. And previously we identified what the email address was for the Widows Might Report. If any in the panel can remember what that was. Can somebody speak up and tell us again? Was it the dot Widows Might Report gmail dot com. What was it? Anybody remember?

Spencer Anderson [03:01:08] Yeah, that's right. I, I put it in our private chat.

John Dehlin [03:01:12] Okay. Okay. Yeah, so it's the, the widows m Report gmail.com. one thing I know about Gmail is you can remove the dots and it all works the same. So if you literally wanted to do the widows might report gmail.com I know it would work because I'm, I'm a tech dude that way. Okay, so we have, we're gonna do at least one or two more parts. Somebody asked.

John Dehlin [03:01:39] I want to thank those who just gave some super chats. We're really grateful for those. Rebecca Raven also just gave $10. Those, you know, those super chats go to pay co hosts when we can to pay for the ongoing operations of Mormon Stories and the Open Stories Foundation. So thanks for your super chats and thanks for your donations.

Final Reflections from the Panel

John Dehlin [03:02:03] Really quickly, before we end, I want to go around the horn and give everyone a final chance to make any final comments that they have. And so Radio Free Mormon, just in case you need to be the first to bail Radio Free Mormon, do you want to give any closing thoughts or comments?

Radio Free Mormon [03:02:24] I want to make the closing comment that everything comes back to the fact. And I cannot stress this enough, that the reason that we're having this entire conversation, the reason the widows might report exists, the reason that all of these experts in their field have poured so much time and energy and research into trying to figure out what the holdings of the church are and all these other different questions about the church related to its finances is because the church refuses to be transparent to its members about what it is that they're doing with the money they got from the members in the first place.

John Dehlin [03:02:59] All right, well, that's really important, rfm and I just have to say we're so grateful to have you on the show. You are a light of truth and a beacon of humor and truth and wisdom to all of us. And I also want to say please check out radiofree mormon.com please donate to radiofree mormon.com to to make it so Radio Free Mormon can fully retire from his law practice like Bill Reel has recently retired and be able to give Mormonism and Mormon commentary and insight and analysis and humor his full time commitment. Also check out Mormonism Live Every Wednesday at 6:20pm Mountain Time and any, any other closing plugs you want to make RFM before you go.

Radio Free Mormon [03:03:45] I think that covers it. But yeah, donations are appreciated to keep this beacon of truth burning.

John Dehlin [03:03:52] Yeah. And so, you know, active believing Mormon, if you decide from this disclosure that maybe the Mormon Church doesn't quite need your tithing, maybe you can tithe to Radio Free Mormon and to Mormonism Live. Right, right. Radio Free Mormon.

Radio Free Mormon [03:04:10] Right. But the great thing about Radio Free Mormon is that if you pay as much tithing, as much donations here as you hope to make next year. Yeah, we'll cover that promise.

John Dehlin [03:04:22] All right. All right, Ready? Free Mormon we, we love you. You're the best. Thanks for joining us today. And you take care and stay healthy. All right, thank you.

Radio Free Mormon [03:04:31] You too. Bye bye, everybody.

John Dehlin [03:04:32] All right, thanks, rfm. Okay, the next person we want commentary from is the Rebecca Biblioteca. Rebecca, what are your closing thoughts?

Rebecca Biblioteca [03:04:41] Well, I think we've seen a lot of things come out about the church and we weigh in and we talk and we get a little cranky. But this, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this as far as just the frustration and almost devastation with people. And I'm talking about regular people like me, people like bigger podcasters, where you just. You just feel them this frustration that how can people not see this? With the SEC report coming out, there's just sort of this outcry of come on, like, like, you've got to see this. Right? And as I said, I kind of went through and data mined a lot of faithful sites to see what the faithful are or the more nuanced members are thinking about how they're justifying this, you know, and the answers are what you would expect.

Rebecca Biblioteca [03:05:25] And I think a lot of that comes from reading only a few sources. Maybe the Deseret News, maybe ksl. I would say to everybody, you know, read some alternate sources, read the Widow's Might report, read the actual SEC report. Just try to get an understanding of this, because it's just bigger than I think a lot of people realize. And there is an incredible frustration that people don't see or understand this. So I think this kind of a podcast is really important.

Rebecca Biblioteca [03:05:51] I'm glad we're breaking it up into maybe three parts. There are so many amazing slides, and I think Spencer is doing an amazing job of helping us all understand and make it very clear exactly what is happening and then we can decide what action we personally or maybe as a group would like to take.

John Dehlin [03:06:07] Brilliant. And Rebecca, I just also want to add your. Your support of the Mormon Stories Book Club has been great. And just your advocacy for literacy and reading books and discussing books with the Good Book Club. And of course, there's Mormonish podcast that. That you run. I just want to make. Give you a chance to make all the plugs as well.

Rebecca Biblioteca [03:06:29] Oh, I think you just made all my plugs, John. So I just appreciate being kind of a fly on the wall in this whole situation. I'm learning so much from everybody.

John Dehlin [03:06:36] Does Mormonish podcast take donations or does the Good Book Club take donations?

Rebecca Biblioteca [03:06:40] You know, I don't know. I. I haven't gotten that far. One of these days, I'll have to pick one of your guys's brain and figure out how it really works. Right now we're just having fun, connecting to people and putting. Putting out content that we hope is interesting and like you said, helping people read and explore, so.

John Dehlin [03:06:54] All right, well, Rebecca, you're just a joy and a. And a gift to us all. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Rebecca Biblioteca [03:07:01] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:07:02] All right, really quickly, Nate, before we give Spencer the last word, Nate, I was really honored to have you on Mormon Stories podcast just a few weeks ago. Your work with the Black Menaces has, like, been a game changer, and we all thank Brad Wilcox for helping to make that happen. But we really appreciate you being a co. Co producer today, helping out with the production. Any final comments for you or plugs or both?

Nate Bird [03:07:29] Just that this whole thing has been very enlightening for me. It's, you know, these are always things that I've been curious about, so it's good to see them laid out. And it's kind of sad that this information hasn't been made readily available to members. I. I think that, you know, I was watching the movie Creed 3 last night, and there was a part in there where, you know, he was fighting with the dude and. And one of the coaches said, he's showing you who he is. Believe him, you know, And I feel like in this instance, the church has been showing who they are for quite a while, and I think it's just time for more people to believe that.

Nate Bird [03:08:00] As far as plugs go, I am a member of the Black Menaces. You can follow us on Tik Tok and Instagram and Twitter as well. We also have a Patreon that we're. It's not active right now, but we're working on getting that more active. And then we also have the Black Menaces podcast. So I'm actually here learning from John about how to make our podcast better and more enjoyable. We do have about 35 episodes for y' all to tune into if you're interested. You can find it on.

Nate Bird [03:08:25] On Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, all of those places. So feel free to check that out as well. It's called the Black Menaces podcast, and that's hosted by me and Rachel.

Spencer Anderson [03:08:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:08:35] And check out my interview with Nate, because it was super good. All right, thanks. Thanks, Nate. Great to have you.

Nate Bird [03:08:41] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:08:42] And Spencer, because you are the sage of Illinois, the sage of Champagne Urbana, we're going to give you the last word today.

Spencer Anderson [03:08:52] Yeah, you're really nice. It was so nice having Nate and Rebecca and RFM add their comments. I love all of them and it followed all of them. And Rebecca in particular was really helpful in my faith transition. It just so happened to coincide that I joined this book club, this random book club, at the time when I needed to find new. New ideology, new theology for myself.

Spencer Anderson [03:09:17] And no plugs or anything like that, just that. Remember that these are widows, mites, right. That are. That have been accumulated. There's a lot of numbers behind all of this. And it's easy to kind of forget that all of the sacrifice that has been put in to creating what is now this, this huge portfolio. And I hope that you know, whatever side you land on with it, that hopefully having the information available at hand helps you as you navigate that process. It's a very difficult process. Even though it's numbers, I understand that it becomes very emotional and it becomes immoral issue and, and I think that John, you've done a great job at navigating that in a way that is fair to believers and non believers and really big I guess shout out to.

Spencer Anderson [03:10:05] I guess I do have a plug for the Widow's Might report itself. They've done so much work behind the scenes. I mean if I could show you the spreadsheets and upon spreadsheets of just data that they've run through is just, it is just insane. It's, it's. It's more than what you'd normally do as a financial analyst for any firm.

Spencer Anderson [03:10:25] They've just, they've been working on this for a long, long time and it's really a great public service. And the fact that they don't even want to any credibility for it or anything like that. Credibility. They don't want any fame or fortune from it is pretty amazing to me. So. So props to them.

John Dehlin [03:10:43] Yeah. Well, Spencer, it, it's. None of it's good if there's not someone here to help us digest it and understand it. So we want to just thank you for being willing to come on warmer stories and lend us your expertise.

Spencer Anderson [03:10:56] Oh, thank you.

John Dehlin [03:10:57] And the only reason we're letting you go is because you promised to come back for parts two and maybe three. Is that all right?

Spencer Anderson [03:11:03] Sure, yeah, that'd be great.

John Dehlin [03:11:04] All right. All right, thanks. Spencer Anderson, Accounting professor at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana. We appreciate it and we look forward to having you back soon. All right, really quick, one more final shout out to one of our Super Chat donors. Swanee Speed Ramsey just donated 10 bucks. Said great show. Thanks for all the detailed reporting. Thanks to everyone who joined us today on the comments.

Closing Remarks and Audience Questions

John Dehlin [03:11:31] We wish that we could incorporate more comments and questions. Maybe we will do that in one of these future episodes. Just kind of do a live Q A for people to call in. But we. Yeah, let's just close by by saying again, thanks to Widow's might. Thanks to Spencer, rfm, Rebecca and Nate and all of our viewers.

John Dehlin [03:11:51] Thanks to all those who donated through super Chats. And finally, if you value this type of programming on Mormon Stories podcast. And if you want to redirect or just direct some of your disposable income to support a worthy cause, if you want to see this type of thing continue, we at the Open Stories foundation on Mormon stories, we lose 10 to 20 regular donors a month, I think these days. And if, and if we don't replace that over time, then our revenue goes down and we're not able to offer the, the services that we do offer. So if you value this program, you want to see it continue, Now's your chance to become a monthly donor.

John Dehlin [03:12:29] You can literally just go to mormonstories.org you can click on the donate button at the top of the page and you become a monthly donor. Just like with churches in the United States, your donations are tax deductible. In the United States, unlike churches in the United States, we're transparent in our finances. So we publish our 990s every year. You can know how much I make. You can know how much the Open Stories foundation takes in. You can even see the main categories of where we spend our money, how we spend it. So, and the other thing is, we promise to spend the money that you donate furthering the mission of Mormon Stories in the Open Stories foundation, which is to provide, you know, informed consent for Mormon and for people investigating the Mormon Church and for the rest of the world, we want informed consent about Mormonism.

John Dehlin [03:13:19] And then of course, we want to support Mormon who are in faith crisis. We know that's an epidemic these days. So we provide podcasts and services to support Mormon in faith crisis and also to support people in faith crisis coming out of other high demand religious traditions. We know that over half of our audience right now on YouTube has never been Mormon because ex Jehovah's Witnesses, ex evangelical Christians, ex Catholics, ex jo Jews, you know, ex Muslims, all sorts of people coming out of high demand religions are needing support and other religious traditions don't have Mormon stories, so they come to Mormon stories. So just know that when you donate, you're not just helping our people, you're helping others as well.

John Dehlin [03:14:05] Quick thanks to Mo, who says peace and love to everyone. Thanks for that super chat donation as well. We appreciate it. And so yeah, your donations can make a difference. So please support us if you can. We've got a lot coming up really quickly. For those who are still on, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That helps with the algorithm. Please thumbs up or like this episode also on Facebook, please subscribe to us and thumbs up as well. That helps with the Algorithm. It helps us grow our influence, it helps us get better guests, the bigger, the larger we grow. And it also helps get the word out there.

John Dehlin [03:14:44] And then just for those who are still on, we're bringing cult expert Stephen Hasson to Utah for Thrive. Thrive is a support group and a community for those who have left Mormonism and are seeking friends and community and looking to heal and grow after Mormonism. So we're having a Thrive day as a part of something called Thrive Unite, which I think is March 18th, if I've got the date right. You can confirm that if you go to thrivebeyondreligion.com go to events, you'll see that in Lehigh and Ogden, in the uk, in states all throughout the United States and even in various cities throughout the world.

John Dehlin [03:15:23] We're going to have a day where progressive and post Mormon can come together, hear good talks, get to know each other, find friends and community and support. Support. We're bringing Stephen Hasson to speak, cult expert. World renowned cult expert Stephen Hassan, founder of the Bite Model, to come to Utah to teach us about recovery from high demand religions. He'll be speaking at Lehigh Thrive Day or Thrive Unite. And at Ogden, Thrive Unite Day, I believe on March 18th. And then on March 19th, we're going to have a full day, kind of like a workshop where Stephen Hassan and I provide a workshop to people called Recovering from Mormonism.

John Dehlin [03:16:08] Basically, for those of you who are struggling to heal and grow, you can, you can sign up for the workshop and we'll help you and spend a day figure out how to heal and grow in response to your faith crisis. There's a student rate for students, there's a couple rate for couples, and then there's an individual rate. So we'll include a link to that in the show notes as well. But we just want you to know, please support Stephen Hasson in his trip to Utah and let's show him a big amazing welcome. All right, so that's all we've got for you today. Thanks again for joining us on Mormon Stories podcast.

John Dehlin [03:16:44] Most importantly, be good to each other and be kind to each other. And we'll see. And check out the widow's might. And we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.