A Defense of The LDS Church's $200B Financial Reserve!

Hello all,

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had approximately $206 billion at the year-end of 2024 according to the Widow's Mite report on the LDS Church, and three months later probably has a similar amount.

It is a common criticism of the LDS Church, especially in online spaces like the Mormon and ExMormon Reddit that the LDS Church's $200B investment/savings fund is morally wrong because it is hoarding wealth and it is building up the financial security of the church at the expense of the poor and the needy in the world today.

I would like to share another perspective. I welcome feedback and can do a follow-up based on what you think. EA, or the Effective Altruist movement is a philosophical/practical movement grounded in how to generate the most good you can for your charitable dollar. It has nothing to do with and operates outside of the LDS Church, but it is a group out there of people who are interested in maximizing the utility of every charitable dollar. Interestingly enough, one EA philosopher, Philip Trammell, has argued, again quite independent of what is going on with the LDS Church, that saving/investing charitable funds rather than spending them as soon as they accumulate can actually help more people, generate more good in the world, maximize utility, etc. Part of it is that the power of compound interest allows the giver to give more later by allowing what they have to grow and therefore get more to be able to give more. Here is a summary of some his argument for it below:

"To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that’s all wrong.

If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you’d have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you’d have $17 million.

This astonishing fact has driven today’s guest, economics researcher Philip Trammell at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, to investigate the case for and against so-called ‘patient philanthropy’ in depth. If the case for patient philanthropy is as strong as Phil believes, many of us should be trying to improve the world in a very different way than we are now.

He points out that on top of being able to dispense vastly more, whenever your trustees decide to use your gift to improve the world, they’ll also be able to rely on the much broader knowledge available to future generations. A donor two hundred years ago couldn’t have known distributing anti-malarial bed nets was a good idea. Not only did bed nets not exist — we didn’t even know about germs, and almost nothing in medicine was justified by science.

What similar leaps will our descendants have made in 200 years, allowing your now vast foundation to benefit more people in even greater ways?

And there’s a third reason to wait as well. What are the odds that we today live at the most critical point in history, when resources happen to have the greatest ability to do good? It’s possible. But the future may be very long, so there has to be a good chance that some moment in the future will be both more pivotal and more malleable than our own." https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/?fbclid=IwY2xjawI9xddleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTY5c6zfCPtf8oGOKobfDYDkfuL4M9-CP-Wor2BAlmZV7SccRqx0mZsNlA_aem_klGwFopVGFot3NfHfHxLfQ

Here is another article from the DailyMail citing the Widow's mite that the LDS Church could become a $1 trillion dollar church by 2050. If the Church is worth $200 billon in investments today, that's 5x more. The Church can do 5x more good just by waiting a quarter of a century rather than just giving the majority or all of it away ASAP as many critics of the Church's current approach have suggest. This is an interesting point in favor for me of the Church being a "patient philanthropist" as it is doing currently, again, from a purely secular non-Church POV---->

"Investments make up around 75 percent of the church's total assets, with the rest made up of ecclesiastical buildings, welfare farms and ranches, mission properties and a smattering of small businesses, The Widow's Mite claims.

If the Church sticks to its current financial strategy and continues on its current path of growth, the insiders forecast it will be worth $500billion in 11 to 15 years and $1trillion within 21 to 27 years." https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12369615/Could-Mormon-Church-worth-1TRILLION-20-years-New-report-claims-amassed-bigger-rainy-day-fund-Google-Microsoft-prepares-Second-Coming.html

One criticism that I can think of towards this point of view espoused here is that if the Church is just saving the money, then the tithe-payers don't need to give the money and can just save it up themselves and leave it to the Church in their will. I would agree and I would say the Church should allow "deferred tithing," at the same time, tithing while we are alive, rather than just leaving 10% of our assets in our will to the Church, teaching a principle of sacrifice and detachment for money than can only be learned while living. Part of the Church's job is to educate our passions and make us better members of society. Another criticism of this is that I did not address the shell companies, SEC order, etc. That is a fair point, but I will probably want to address that in a separate post, rather than here, if I do make a post about that issue.

I just wanted to share another point of view that you may or may not have heard in order to, at a minimum, make you think. Hopefully I did that today. Again, I welcome all feedback. Thanks for reading.