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The IRS whistleblower report argues that EPA is separate from the church and should be taxed that way. If EPA isn’t part of the church, then it is a private foundation that owes tens of billions in back taxes. The Church has been arguing that EPA is a division of the church and not a separate entity at all. If we accept that, then EPA’s money is the church’s money, so your argument of money being “sent to EPA” is meaningless—it is all the church’s money. According to the IRS whistleblower report, the specific funds that were used to pay for the mall were pulled out of EPA before they earned any interest. Assuming he is right, under definition 1 of “using tithing”, tithing dollars were used for both the church’s mission AND for the mall. The church successfully argued definition 2 is the correct definition—if interest income was sufficient to cover the mall, we should presume it was paid for with interest and not principal. But if we are consistent with that logic, interest covers everything, including its mission.

Here is what I believe. Starting in the early 1960’s, N. Elden Tanner made the decision that the Church would always operate on approximately 90% of the current year’s donations and save the balance “for a rainy day.” This was a prudent move for a few years, because like all non-profits, the Church should have reserves. Prompt: In general, should churches and non-profits hold reserves “for a rainy day"? If so, are there general guidelines for an appropriate amount of reserves? Is it possible for reserves to be too high? Please limit your response to a couple of sentences. ChatGPT: Yes. Churches and nonprofits generally should hold operating reserves so they can survive revenue disruptions, emergencies, unexpected repairs, litigation, economic downturns, or temporary donor shortfalls. A common rule of thumb is 3–6 months of operating expenses, though the right amount depends on volatility, obligations, asset liquidity, capital needs, and mission risk. Reserves can be too high if they substantially exceed reasonably foreseeable needs and start to suggest hoarding, weak mission deployment, or donor misleadingness about the organization’s actual financial need. My Perspective In August of 1997, TIME ran a cover story called “Mormon Inc.” Less than two months later, a public charity called "Ensign Peak Advisors" was formed. The only obvious reason why this happened was to get these assets off of the Church’s balance sheet. If there was a lawsuit or a change in laws that forced the church to disclose how much money it has, the Church was going to show the assets it owns directly and not show the assets it had donated to Ensign Peak Advisors. In order to prevent the church membership and the public from knowing how much money Ensign Peak Advisors had, the Church created several LLC’s and falsely reported to the SEC that the LLC’s owned the church’s securities rather than Ensign Peak Advisors. The Church regularly transferred excess money to Ensign Peak Advisors. For several years, it was at the clip of a billion dollars a year. Specifically, this excess tithing was deposited into Ensign Peak Advisors’ Treasury Account. Ensign Peak Advisors had guidelines that about 5% of their total assets would remain in the Treasury Account for liquidity purposes. As the Treasury Account exceeded its limits, funds would be transferred to different accounts to purchase equities and bonds. The actual growth of the funds happens in these downstream accounts, and money has never gone from any of these downstream accounts back to the Treasury Account. When the City Creek project needed $1.4 billion to cover cost overruns, the money came straight from the Treasury Account. That is my perspective. Was Tithing Money Used? Was “tithing money” used? indirectly, tithing certainly was used. I’m not claiming that “indirect tithing” is a thing. Rather, I’m saying that if tithing hadn’t been donated and saved in the first place, there wouldn’t be any money in these accounts to use for the mall, regardless if the specific dollars were labeled “tithing” or “investment income on unspent tithing.” From an economic perspective, all of the money in Ensign Peak Advisors is the original tithing donations that have grown with interest (compare and contrast this with an accounting perspective, where donations and investment income are two different inflows on the income statement, but are intermingled when they hit the balance sheet). Was tithing used directly? That is the question that I think is more silly. Whether it was or wasn’t depends on what it means for tithing to be used “directly.” There are a couple of different ways that “using tithing directly” could be defined: Definition 1: Using tithing “directly” could mean that the dollars that were used came straight from checking account where tithing donations are deposited, or from Ensign Peak Advisors’ Treasury Account, that contains money recently donated from the Church and that hasn’t grown with interest. If you use this definition, then it appears the answer is yes, the Church did in fact use tithing money to fund the mall. We know this because the money from the mall came from Ensign Peak Advisors’ Treasury Account, that only contains recently donated tithing that hasn’t grown with interest. Definition 2: We could set up a mental rule that the total value of Ensign Peak Advisors assets are in two funds: “tithing” and “investment income.” We could also set up the mental rule that when money comes in, donations from the Corporation of the President are strictly credited to the “tithing” account, and all investment income is strictly credited to the “investment income” account. We could set up a corresponding rule that all expenses and withdrawals are debited against the “investment income” account first, and the “tithing” account isn’t touched until the “investment income” account is exhausted. This second definition is a more pedantic explanation of the principal/interest argument the Church successfully made in Huntsman lawsuit. So whether “tithing” was used to build the mall depends upon whether you interpreted using tithing in a broad sense or a narrow sense. If you define it in a narrow sense, the answer further depends on how "using tithing directly" is defined. Because if you look at the specific account the $1.4 billion were drawn against, that account didn’t have any investment income--it only had donations that were recently made by the Corporation of the President, which presumably were mostly tithing dollars. My argument is that what I stated above in the My Perspective section is what I believe is true. Beyond that, whether or not “tithing was used” depends upon how “using tithing” is defined. In 2012, "a clear majority of the believing Latter-day Saint participants in [that] 2012 thread” interpreted “using tithing” in the broad sense, not the narrow sense that the courts have decided is the correct one. I think it’s important to remember that. Bonus Insight If we use the definition of “using tithing” that the courts used to determine Hinckley told the truth (i.e. if expenses are greater than interest income, interest is used and the principal remains untouched), then the Church doesn’t spend tithing on anything. 100% of the Church’s expenses are covered by investment income, twice over. 100% of the churches expenses and charitable endeavors are completely paid for with interest, and 100% of tithing goes to purchase more shares of Nvidia and Meta.

Regarding my actual beliefs, in 2015, I said on this issue: At the time I thought I was pretty much exactly right about all of that, and I still do. (Do you take issue with this post? From my seat you appear to dramatically misread what the apologists were generally saying. Do you misread what I was saying, too?) Predictably nobody up-voted me, but somebody did explain why she thought I was totally wrong about all of that. I was told: She was referring to Kim Pearson’s post, of course, which received about 19 upvotes, and for many people conclusively settled the matter. But of course he was wrong on some very big issues (do you disagree, or do you think he was right?). I asked him: Looking back at it, I turned out to be wrong about the church’s commitment to following the law, but otherwise think I understood what was going on better than the majority of members who were posting here. Regarding the lawsuits, as I recall I always thought that the church’s statements on its finances were neither true nor false, but rather vague. Because of that, I personally wouldn’t say the church was guilty of fraud, even if Huntsman could convince me that he literally relied on this assurance, which I don’t think he could have. But saying all that, I remain adamant that the church autonomy doctrine doesn’t apply here. The issue was never about whether the courts (or members) have the right to tell the church how to spend its money: the issue was whether the church lied to the membership about it. Part of me would love to see the IRS seriously investigate Nielsen’s claims. I’d love the laws to be changed so that Ensign Peak Advisors were taxed like a private foundation--I am against hoarding and hoarding is exactly what Ensign Peak Advisors is doing (e.g. over the last 3 years, MacKenzie Scott has given away more than $14 billion while Ensign Peak Advisors has given away exactly zero, despite Ensign Peak Advisors having over six times as much money as Scott).

I asked ChatGPT the following: ChatGPT Replied Yes — as a back-of-the-envelope model, your estimate is fair and probably directionally conservative/plausible, but not “proven” in the audited-financial-statement sense, because the Church does not publish consolidated U.S. financials. The clean version is: The SEC order confirms that Ensign Peak manages Church “reserve funds,” including securities purchased with “excess tithing,” investment income, and returns generated by Ensign Peak, and that Ensign Peak’s Section 13(f) securities alone were about $37.8 billion by 2020. Its latest public 13F filing shows $56.6 billion in reportable securities as of 12/31/2025, which is only the public 13F-reportable slice, not total reserves. (SEC) If the leaked $122.86 billion total-reserve number from late 2019 is right, and if the fund earned about 7.4% with roughly $1 billion/year added, then roughly $200 billion by early 2026 is a reasonable model result. One arithmetic correction: at $200 billion, 7.4% investment return is $14.8 billion/year. If donations are $8 billion and mission spending is $7 billion, then total economic income is about $22.8 billion, reserve growth is about $15.8 billion, and the split is about 69% to reserve growth / 31% to mission spending, not 67/33. Close enough for an internet discussion, but I’d say “roughly 70/30.” On the other person’s claim: he is right only in the weak, generic sense that reserves and endowments are common and prudent. He is not right if he means this specific pattern is common among mature, well-resourced nonprofits. Normal endowment practice is not “spend every penny of investment return,” but it also is not “spend none of the investment return indefinitely.” Universities generally use a spending policy — often around 4%–5% of endowment value — to support current mission while preserving purchasing power. NACUBO says FY2024 institutions withdrew $30.0 billion, average spending rate 4.8%, and endowments funded about 15.3% of operating expenses; the spending went heavily to financial aid, academic programs, faculty positions, facilities, and other institutional purposes. (nacubo.org) NACUBO’s 2025 summary likewise says endowment withdrawals rose to $33.4 billion, with nearly half going to student financial aid. (nacubo.org) Private foundations are an even cleaner contrast: the IRS minimum investment return for private foundations is generally 5% of non-charitable-use assets, and foundations must make annual qualifying distributions for charitable purposes. (IRS) Religious organizations are not necessarily subject to the same payout rule, but the existence of that rule shows the policy concern: society generally does not treat perpetual tax-favored accumulation as the normal charitable model. The Church of England is a useful religious comparator. Its Church Commissioners’ endowment was about £11.1 billionafter a 10.3% return in 2024, and the endowment contributes about 20% of the Church of England’s running costs; Reuters reported a planned £1.6 billion spend over 2026–2028 funded by that endowment. (Thinking Anglicans) That looks like a normal endowment model: accumulate, invest, and materially support current ministry. So I would frame it this way: The Church’s stated reserve philosophy is common in kind but unusual in scale and payout behavior. The Church publicly says it sets aside part of income as reserves, invests those reserves, and intends them for current and future needs. (The Church of Jesus Christ) That part is not strange. What appears unusual is the combination of: an already enormous reserve, apparently no regular draw from the reserve for current mission, continued annual transfers of surplus donations into the reserve, and reinvestment of essentially all investment return. Your intuition is basically right: a mature endowment normally exists to create a durable funding stream for the mission. It does not usually operate as a one-way ratchet where the endowment absorbs all investment returns plus part of current donations while current mission is funded almost entirely from new donations. I would not say “no nonprofit anywhere has ever shown 67% of annual economic income flowing into net assets,” because in a huge investment-return year, accounting statements can make lots of endowments look that way. But as an ongoing policy for an already massive religious/charitable institution? No, that is not the normal endowment model.The normal model is closer to: earn 7%–8%, spend 4%–5% on mission, retain the balance for inflation, volatility, and future growth. The alleged LDS model is closer to: earn 7%+ on a massive reserve, spend 0% of that reserve return on ordinary mission, and add surplus donations on top. That is not “common and prudent” in the ordinary nonprofit-endowment sense. It may be defensible under the Church’s own theological/future-calamity rationale, but that is a very different claim. It isn’t a challenge at all; they are saving it until the Millenium. Actually, I quoted Harvard University as saying, ""As a general rule, Harvard targets an annual endowment payout rate of 5.0 to 5.5% of market value.” It’s flattering that you think I came up with that benchmark, but I didn’t. This guideline came from Harvard University’s endowment’s trustees and their advisors. Lack of inflammatory language aside, Cobalt’s beliefs were aligned with the critics, not with "The overwhelming consensus among the faithful participants (JAHS, Pahoran, Scott Lloyd, Mola Ram, LeSellers, Jeff K., etc.)” who believed that “tithing money was not used — either directly or indirectly — for City Creek.” I certainly don’t have a “presupposition that indirectly using tithing money is still using tithing money.” My presupposition is that the whole distinction between tithing money and non-tithing money is mental accounting and silly. The claim that “tithing money” is somehow different than non-tithing money and that the Church could use tweezers to extract non-tithing dollars from its portfolio and distribute those dollars is silly to me. That’s how I see it. But how I see it is irrelevant. The point of all of this is to understand what the believers actually believed before the whistleblower gave us more data about what was really going on. “Indirectly using tithing” is a presupposition anybody made--it was the topic of the thread. My point of bringing it up is to see whether Huntsman’s claims about what he believed were reasonable, regardless of whether the level of ambiguity raised to the level of legal fraud. Since you declined to ask Grok the questions that would get to the bottom of this, I decided to pose the question to GPT. I uploaded that 2012 thread and asked the following: GPT: JAHS meant indirect causal funding, not direct checkbook funding. He was saying: the Church says current tithing was not directly spent on City Creek; instead, business/investment money was used. But if those businesses and investments were originally built from accumulated member tithing or consecrated resources, then City Creek was still made possible by tithing in a broader historical/economic sense. Yes, that meaning was clear. The thread participants understood the point. They argued about whether that indirect chain was true, provable, relevant, or morally significant. They were not merely debating the later courtroom distinction between “principal tithing dollars” and “earnings on invested reserve funds.” In that thread, many defenders saying “tithing wasn’t used” appear to have meant not used in the broader disputed sense, not merely “no principal tithing dollars were directly spent.” That is why some reacted as though the indirect claim was an accusation that Church leaders were lying. If they had only meant “investment earnings were used, but those investments ultimately came from tithing reserves,” the debate would have looked very different. With hindsight, the critics were basically right on the thread’s broader issue: City Creek was funded through earnings on invested reserves, and the reserves included tithing-derived funds. The Ninth Circuit accepted the narrower legal/accounting distinction: no principal tithing funds were used directly, while earnings on invested reserve funds were used, and the court held that this defeated Huntsman’s fraud claim. So the clean answer is: The defenders were basically right only in the later narrow sense: direct tithing principal was not used. The critics were basically right in the sense actually being fought over in the thread: the mall was funded through accumulated investment wealth that was connected to prior tithing/reserve capital. And yes, this old discussion helps explain Huntsman. It shows that a categorical understanding of “no tithing funds were used” was not some bizarre, bad-faith, idiosyncratic misunderstanding. At least some faithful defenders at the time seemed to understand and defend the claim that way themselves. That does not mean Huntsman won legally. But it does give real reason to view his claimed understanding with some empathy rather than treating it as obviously impossible or insincere.

You are preaching to the choir on this. This is what people like Craig Paxton and me have been saying all along. That is exactly what Craig Paxton and I have been saying all along. I’m glad you agree what us. I don’t think that captures their perspective. JAHS explained why it was troubling by saying it is "money that is supposed to be dedicated to building God's church and helping the poor; not for building shopping malls." The idea that it is troubling to invest the money in a Salt Lake City shopping mall but not troubling to invest it in shares of Meta and Nvidia is weird. And this goes back to why the Church set up a big set of clone LLC’s--the objective was to hide the nature and scale of its investments from its own membership. Regarding “investing tithes” as a general principle, I think that is even more troubling, and certainly not in line with mainstream views on how churches and charities should operate. Using reasonable guesses, the Church probably takes in about $8 billion a year in tithing, and uses perhaps $7 billion of that a year to “build God’s church and help the poor” and then saves the $1 billion for a rainy day. That $1 billion it saves is added to an investment fund that has over $200 billion in assets and generates perhaps $14 billion a year in investment income. That investment income is all tax-free and 100% of it is used to grow the size of the $200 billion fund. So when you define the Church’s total income as tithing plus investment income, its total income might be $21 billion a year. Of that $21 billion, it deploys 67% ($14 billion) to increase the size of its for-profit investment portfolio, and $7 billion (33%) to “build God’s church and help the poor." Okay. But the psychology behind this is eyeopening. 14 years ago, Craig Paxton correctly explained how the mall was financed, and the “overwhelming consensus” here was he was saying offensive anti-Mormon lies. That he was calling the brethren liars. Now you are reading those same conversations and telling me with a straight face that Craig Paxton was right all along, and that reasonably informed members always believed the way Craig Paxton did. I knew motivated reasoning was powerful, but I didn’t know it was that powerful.

He said, "I wish to give the entire Church the assurance that tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property." That implies that there was some concern that using "tithing funds" for that purpose would somehow be wrong, inappropriate, or at least troubling. It implies he wanted people to know that wouldn't happen. The very assurance itself implies that it is somehow wrong, inappropriate, or at least troubling about using "tithing funds." And the "overwhelming consensus" on this board was that this was meant to be taken in a broad way. For the same reasons it would be wrong, inappropriate, or at least troubling to use tithing funds directly for this purpose, it would also be wrong, inappropriate, or at least troubling to use them indirectly for this purpose. This is simply the way that JAHS, Pahoran, Scott Lloyd, Mola Ram, LeSellers, Jeff K., etc., viewed the issue. I don't get "principal can't be used but interest can be" from what Hinckley said, but your reasoning indicates that we needed assurance that it wouldn't be used directly from tithing and needed assurance that it would be indirectly used from tithing. That doesn't make sense, which is why I don't buy your post hoc rationalization of this. The only place I ever heard of "indirect tithing" was when bluebell used that phrase earlier in this thread. The following three things cannot be disputed: 1- JAHS was crystal clear about what he meant when he said critics were saying "in an indirect way the City Creek mall was made possible by sacred tithing money donated by members." 2- "The overwhelming consensus among the faithful participants (JAHS, Pahoran, Scott Lloyd, Mola Ram, LeSellers, Jeff K., [James Huntsman,] etc.) was that tithing money was not used — either directly or indirectly — for City Creek" 3- We now know that in the context of that conversation, the people who shared this consensus position were wrong and the critics were right--the Church did use tithing--at least in an indirect way--for City Creek.* Here is the thing. If we want to understand what informed members really thought about these issues in 2012, what the members of this board said in 2012 is a better evidence than what a group of California judges decided about it in 2024. I don't have a ton of sympathy for James Huntsman in all of this. If he would have asked me about it then, I would have told him the same thing I told AHS, Pahoran, Scott Lloyd, Mola Ram, LeSellers, Jeff K., etc. _________________________________________ *Whether it was really in an "indirect way" rather than a more "direct way" is also in dispute. According to David Nielsen, about once a month, surplus tithing donations goes from the Church into EPA's Treasury Account. Then according to EPA's investment policy, the money is transferred to other accounts and used to purchase financial securities. Nielsen says that the money that left EPA for the mall didn't actually come from investment returns, but rather came from the Treasury Account itself. That means those specific dollars weren't investment returns on assets, but rather were surplus tithing dollars that hadn't been invested yet. Of course from my perspective this is a distinction without a difference--it would have been a waste of time and transaction costs to liquidate shares of Nvidia and use those investment returns for the mall, and then used the new tithing to buy back the shares of Nvidia; it's more efficient to just keep reinvesting the investment returns and use the fresh tithing money for the mall. But then again, I don't see a real difference between directly using it and indirectly using it.

Motivated reasoning is a powerful thing.

The judges found the Church's arguments more persuasive. And the Church's superstar legal team deserves some of credit for the victory--their ability to persuade is why the Church paid them the big bucks. My point is that the presentation of the data the lawyers gave the judges is different than the presentation the church gave the members. We can't see what "most members" believed, but we can look at what members of this forum said, because we did talk about it. As an actuary, I find that statement meaningless. Actuarial mathematics is based on the concept that money grows with interest. Remember when I took issue with Sam Brunson claiming "every financial endeavor that includes both principal and income on the principal distinguishes the two." Two illustrate why, I told you about how two of my friends happened to both testify on Capital Hill together, so I watched the hearing, and happened to remember this interesting question: Could you give me, the insurance industry in general, how much of, say, auto insurance, health insurance, and long-term insurance, how much goes for claims? In long-term care insurance, the company relies on interest income to pay claims, and it would be misleading to distinguish between principal and interest in this question. Professor Cohen interpreted "premium" as meaning "premium plus accumulated interest," and that is exactly the right way to do it. Citing the American Academy of Actuaries: Mathematically, dividing the present value of claims by the present value of premiums (both discounted to policy issue) is identical to accumulating both premiums and claims with interest until the end of the policy and dividing them. The point with all of this is that to honestly evaluate whether "most of the premiums were paid out in benefits", you can't look just at premiums--you also have to look at premiums and the interest income the premiums generate before it is spent on claims. You have to look at it that way to come up with a number that is understandable, meaningful, fair, and comparable. The value of money is intrinsically linked to time. Interest is the mechanism that links the two. So it isn't the least bit contradictory for somebody to say, "I gave the Church $200,000 over the last 20 years. The accumulated value of those donations is $330,000." That is how I look at it. But to me, it was always quite obvious what the Church was really doing. That doesn't answer the question. I can understand why somebody would be concerned with the church using its resources on a commercial venture in downtown Salt Lake City, but if the Church makes the decision this is a good use of resources, why say principal can't be used but interest can be? Here is the thing. The Church did "use tithing money indirectly." That is an undisputed fact. That concept of "using tithing money indirectly" is perfectly defined in that thread, and the point of that thread was talking about that concept. From JAHS in the opening thread: It is now an undisputedly true that "in an indirect way the City Creek mall was made possible by sacred tithing money donated by members [in the past]." We now know that is true. That is what happened. But at the time, the "The overwhelming consensus among the faithful participants" was that this was not true. The overwhelming majority of faithful participants were wrong. When JAHS, Pahoran, Scott Lloyd, Mola Ram, LeSellers, Jeff K., and the others said they were confident "tithing money was not used — either directly or indirectly", they were talking about a well-defined concept of indirect use. They believed that by definition, using investment income derived from unspent tithing was indirectly using tithing [this was defined in the OP], and that indirectly using tithing is using tithing. Since the Church leaders assured us that tithing wasn't used, they thought that meant it wasn't used neither directly nor indirectly. Their position makes sense--investment income on unspent tithing is just as sacred as the tithing itself, so if it is somehow problematic to use tithing for a mall, it would be equally problematic to use investment income on unspent tithing on a mall. Of course, a few people understood the truth. For example, Craig Paxton said, "I hate that believers get so defensive at the very suggestion that tithing funds were used...or even that the investment income from tithing funds were used...good greif....chill out." But others didn't understand it. Thesometimesaint explained why they were so defensive at the very suggestion that "the investment income from tithing funds were used." Because "The Church officers have publically stated that no tithing funds were used in the purchase of the mall. You are calling those Church officers liars." JAHS, Pahoran, Scott Lloyd, Mola Ram, LeSellers, Jeff K., thesometimesaint, and James Huntsman all interpreted these remarks in the same basic way. Claiming that the first seven on that list always agreed with what you are saying now is gaslighting.

All I can say is that before the IRS Whistleblower report came out, the majority of members saw it differently--back then, they didn't say what you are saying now. Rather, they seemed to believe that since it was somehow wrong to use tithing to build a mall, it was equally wrong to use tithing to buy shares of Nvidia, and then using the investment income on that to buy a mall. They thought indirectly using tithing (as defined by JAHS) was still using tithing.

How much do you think the Church spent defending itself on this lawsuit? As a starting point, 1,000 hours at an average rate of $1,000 per hour is a million dollars. Do you think they spent more than that or less than that on legal fees in the Huntsman case? The reason I bring this up is to highlight that these judges, all of whom I presume were non-Mormon, were fed a carefully curated basket of evidence to support a story that guided them to the conclusion they reached. I'm not saying this is the wrong conclusion: we now know with 20-20 hindsight and with the understanding that in all contexts, "the reserves" refers to unspent tithing money saved and invested for a hypothetical rainy day. But that isn't the way most Latter-day Saints interpreted his remarks before the IRS letter brought this all to light. If someone were to ask today, what Stone Holm asked in 2015, how would you answer? He asked: Now, we would all say, "The money came from the Church's reserves that are held by Ensign Peak Advisors. The Church operates on a fraction (e.g. 90%) of its tithing revenue, and the remainder is put into a "rainy day fund" it calls its "reserves." The money in that fund grows with investment income and new tithing revenue. The money for the mall came from interest earned on this reserve fund (or if you are a pedantic actuary, you'd say, "the $1.4 billion for the mall was a lot less than its annual investment income, so rather than reinvesting $1.4 billion of its investment income in Nvidia etc., it was invested in the mall. In that sense, the money came from investment earnings and not directly from tithing)." That's what we would say now. But how many Latter-day Saints said that then? There has been a huge shift in how you guys typically think about this. How you guys used to think about it was different than how the Ninth Circuit thinks about it now for two reasons: You guys believe (or at least used to believe), that if it would be inappropriate for "tithing" to be used for X, it would be equally inappropriate to use interest generated from unspent tithing on X. They were both equally sacred, so if we received an assurance that tithing wouldn't be used for X, that was meant to be interpreted broadly and include both tithing and interest generated on unspent tithing. The term "reserves" is better defined now than it was then. When Hinckley said "reserves," people thought "financial resources the church has" and not "unspent tithing". I'll answer the rest of your questions, but I hope you'll answer these two from me: 1- Did you ask Grok, "With 20/20 hindsight, and looking at the issue the way these participants looked at in 2015, who was more right, the “faithful participants”, or the “critics”? In other words, was the mall in part indirectly financed with tithing because it was in fact financed in part with investment income derived from tithing?" 2- Why would the members need assurances that tithing wouldn't be used for the mall? Why is it okay for "interest on tithing" to be used for the Mall and not "tithing" itself? In other words, is it okay to use tithing to buy shares of Nvidia? If it is okay to use tithing to buy shares of Nvidia, why wouldn't it be okay to use tithing to build a mall? To be clear here, I'm not saying Hinckley's remarks were "fraudulent." And nobody with integrity has a motive to misconstrue what Hinckley said. But I am saying that the majority of Latter-day Saints on this forum systematically misunderstood Hinckley in basically the same way that Huntsman did. From what you've posted, Grok agrees with me on this. Yes. I'm talking about basic accounting here. There are two main financial statements: the income statement and the balance sheet. The balance sheet shows the value of assets and liabilities at a moment in time (a "stock"). The income statement shows income, expenses, and changes in asset values over a period of time (a "flow"). Accounting uses "double-entry" mathematics. Whenever there is a financial transaction, there is always a credit and an offsetting debit, and usually, one affects the income statement and the other affects the balance sheet. Your checking account works the same way. If you have multiple sources of income, you can't go to the bank and ask them to tell you whether expense X came from your salary or from your bonus or from your investment income. They'd say expense X came from your checking account. The Church could say that it doesn't want to spend more on X this year than it receives in investment income this year. But this is generally a type of mental accounting. I think the Church should be more transparent with its members about its finances. It is an indisputable fact that it indirectly financed the mall through tithing, as defined by JAHS in that thread. The correct answer to his question would be, "yes, 'City Creek mall was made possible by sacred tithing money,' but it was made possible by sacred tithing money donated over the prior 50 years, not the prior 150. And there is nothing wrong with that." That is the correct answer, but how many Latter-day Saints said that at the time? If the Church would have had the same level of transparency as Northwestern Mutual (NM) (i.e. it would provide high-level income statements and balance sheets that show its assets, liabilities, income, and expenditures), Hinckley would have said something like: "As you see from our financial statements, the Church earns well over $1.4 billion every year in investment income. This year, we are going to invest $1.4 billion in the mall rather than investing it in stocks and bonds. We can afford to do so without reducing what we spend on our core mission and without reducing the reserve funds to a dangerous level." This point in the conversatrion is about where @Danzo would show up and remind us that with "fund based accounting", the Church could set up a "fund" that strictly receives tithing dollars, and another "fund" that would receive investment income dollars. That way, these two different funds would be two different assets, and expenditures for X, Y, or Z could be debited against whatever fund you wanted. More abstractly, setting up funds this way is just a budgeting mechanism, and saying "expense X will come out of the accrued investment income fund" is equivalent to saying "we want to make sure that the accumulated amount of accrued interest is greater than the cost of X." And if it is really important from some sort of moral perspective that "tithing" only be used for building temples, supporting the missionary system, and purchasing stock of Nvidia while "investment income" can be deployed more broadly on things like malls, then the Church should be more explicit about this.

Who is arguing that "indirect tithing" exists? How do they define it? In the context of this discussion, "tithing" is simply a source of revenue for the Church--it consists of donations that were designated "tithing" by the donor. My point is simple. This funding can be used for things. The Church can use it to build a temple. They can use it to hire somebody to mow the lawn in front of the Church. And they can use it to purchase Nvidia stock. If they use tithing to purchase Nvidia stock and then use the investment earnings to buy a mall, isn't it accurate to say they indirectly used tithing money to build a mall?

From a technical perspective, I think his comments were too vague to be "true" or "false". Hinckley was an excellent communicator who could have clearly explained what was happening had he wanted to. The fact that so many members, including CPA's who worked for the Church, misunderstood wasn't unintentional. I reject your theory that everybody perfectly understood Hinckley's comments when he made them, but then somehow it was only the critics who remembered and properly understood what he said a few years later. What "I" consider to be "salary" and how it should be taxed is irrelevant. These things are well defined by the IRS in the tax law. The whole paradigm that some of the assets the Church has are "tithing" is vague and imprecise. From an accounting perspective, "tithing" is one of the Church's sources of income, just as "dividend income", "interest income", "livestock sales", "rental income", "realized gains on commercial real estate", etc. are all sources of income. When the money comes in, it goes into various funds. But all of the money in these funds is fungible. Then when it spends money, it spends money from funds, not from sources of income. If Ensign Peak Advisors this year makes $15 billion in investment income, and receives $700 million of tithing income, and then has a $1.4 billion mall expense, then it is fair to say that the $15 billion of investment income is enough to cover the $1.4 billion mall expense. But it is just a heuristic to say that the specific money that was spent was investment income and not tithing. Actually, I'm an actuary. As a specific example, Northwestern Mutual has an asset portfolio that might be about the same size as the Church's. NM has $399 billion in assets, and last year received $24.7 billion in premium, and $15.5 billion in investment income. My counterparts at NM receive a salary, and it would be weird, confusing, and nonsensical for the CEO to say, "I want to assure you that Analytics's salary comes from investment income and not premium."

Tithing was used to capitalize a massive investment fund. $1.4 billion of that investment fund was used for the mall. Do you dispute this? If tithing wasn’t used to capitalize the investment fund and instead was used to build temples, the fund wouldn’t have had any money for the mall. Tithing—>Investment fund—>mall. You can say that isn’t indirectly using tithing to fund the mall, but that is semantics.

Do you need a quote that says interest on the "reserves" was used to fund the mall, and the accompanying quote that explains "reserves" consist of tithing money that is saved for a rainy day? That's the Church's official position in the lawsuits and is derived at by combining two Hinckley quotes that were given years apart. In the context of that old thread, that is precisely what is meant by the idea that "in an indirect way the City Creek mall was made possible by sacred tithing money donated by members," as defined by JAHS in that old thread.

Sure. But there are two parts of this. Do you need a quote about how the church used about $1.4 billion of investment income generated from unspent tithing to help build the mall? Or do you need a quote about how in 2012, the prevalent thought among apologists was that using investment income generated from unspent tithing to build a mall was indirectly using tithing to build the mall?

I’m not aware of any. The Church claims that the mall was indirectly financed with tithing because investment income on unspent tithing was used to finance it, just as Craig Paxton said.

Here are some follow-up questions you can ask Grok. Prompt 1: “With 20/20 hindsight, and looking at the issue the way these participants looked at in 2015, who was more right, the “faithful participants”, or the “critics”? In other words, was the mall in part indirectly financed with tithing because it was in fact financed in part with investment income derived from tithing? Prompt 2: Craig Paxton asked, "I just don’t understand why it’s so offensive to believing posters for me to state the obvious…that the church uses income from investments that originally came from the primary income source that the church has, namely tithing…and reinvested that money in the new City Creek Mall. What is so offensive about saying something that is so obvious.” A poster called “thesometimesaint” answered, by saying, "The Church officers have publically stated that no tithing funds were used in the purchase of the mall. You are calling those Church officers liars. Provide proof of your claim or retract it.” A poster called “selek1”answered it by saying, "Perhaps because it is a malicious falsehood being repeated by those whose goal is to undermine the Church?” With 20/20 hindsight, and looking at the issues the way the “faithful participants” (e.g. thesometimesaint) did back then, were the “church officers” liars for leading the general membership to think tithing funds wouldn’t be used, neither directly nor indirectly? Prompt 3: Say “thesometimesaint” made large tithing contributions, and claimed that he did so based on these assurances made by the Church. Assume he was upset about the church he trusted lying to him and decided to sue for fraud. Do you think a reasonable juror could conclude the church committed fraud by lying the membership about how tithing donations would be used?

I am confident I am correct here. Please read the motion yourself: https://www.scribd.com/document/519664320/Motion-for-Summary-Judgment-James-Huntsman-v-LDS-Church?utm_source=chatgpt.com The ecclesiastical issue the Church talked about in the first motion is different than what you imagine it to be. It wasn't about the definition of "tithing", but rather it was about the Church's right to spend money however it wanted. Specifically: That is what the Church was arguing in their motion for summary judgment. It was a weak argument and it isn't surprising the Church moved away from it. Many members of this forum were confident that the Church said tithing money wouldn't be used, neither directly nor indirectly. That is what they believed. They believed that tithing and interest earned on unspent tithing were equally sacred, and interpreted Hinckley's comments broadly--if it would be inappropriate to spend "tithing" on a mall, it would be equally inappropriate to spend "interest earned on unspent tithing" on a mall. I'm presuming that Huntsman's beliefs and sensibilities on these issues were in fact the same as other tithepayers such as thesometimesaint, Pahoran, and all the rest. Maybe not, but I'm assuming so. If I'm right and he shared these sensibilities with his fellow saints, it was a blunder on his part to express these beliefs and sensibilities in terms of "tithing" being a broad category that includes interest. He should have articulated the same sensibility in terms of "using tithing" being broad usage that extends to using something indirectly. The "indirect use of tithing" was a sincere question raised by a Latter-day Saint in the OP. It wasn't my argument (my views at the time can be read hear and here). The belief that using tithing indirectly is using tithing is how a plurality of members of this board viewed the issue at the time. That was the issue clearly articulated in the. OP. Read the OP: here is the whole thing: Please just read it--from his point of view, using "money from the for-profit arm of the Church" is, "in an indirect way," still using "sacred tithing money...that is supposed to be dedicated to building God's church and helping the poor; not for building shopping malls." This was an argument unnamed critics were making, and in his mind, it needed a response. Based on the same Church statements that Huntsman quoted, these well-read Saints were confident that "if a "genealogy" of Church-owned businesses were to be researched, I am confident that the City Creek Mall's pedigree would trace back, not to the tithing paid...but to the original Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution." These same people said that the claim that the money did trace back to tithing was "a malicious falsehood."

Yes, lots of judges have said something to that effect. My insight is that those judges were wrong. Many people here were quite confident that Hinckley did in fact assure us that tithing funds wouldn't be used for the mall, neither directly nor indirectly. Look at the context of Hinckley's assurance. The fact that he felt the need to make that assurance in the first place implies that according to LDS sensibilities, tithing funds are somehow too sacred to invest in a mall. That's why the the assurance was given in the first place. Many participants here interpreted Hinckley's remarks the same way that Huntsman did. It's in the contemporaneous record. To the extent these Latter-day Saints are reasonable people, a reasonable person could conclude that the church misrepresented the source of funds. That's the truth of the matter.

And some say something that is a little more subtle than this dictotomy. There are a few different issues here, and it seems @smac97 and I are largely interested in different aspects of these events. The fundamental question I am most interested in is whether a reasonable juror could and ultimately would conclude that the Church misrepresented the source of funds for the City Creek project, and whether said reasonable juror could do so without running afoul of the church autonomy doctrine. I think Huntsman’s legal team made a huge blunder early on that caused the courts to frame the issue the wrong way. What I’m more interested in at this point is making a postmortem or after-action review of the case and explaining how they blundered. In their original motion for summary judgment, the Church said this: Note that in that first motion, the Church did not say “the truthfulness of Hinckley’s statement can’t be evaluated without running afoul of the Church Autonomy doctrine.” Rather, it claimed that what Hinckley said was true, implying that the truthfulness of this was a secular issue that the courts could ascertain for themselves on secular grounds. As a refresher, the Church has two sides: a tax-paying for-profit business empire lead by Deseret Management Corporation (DMC) and its affiliates, and a non-profit side that financially is dominated by Ensign Peak Advisors (EPA). Originally, they intended the “commercial entities” (i.e. DMC) to fund the project. When costs escalated, they turned to “earnings on invested reserve funds” (i.e. EPA) to make up the shortfall. For the part funded by EPA, tithing wasn’t used. Rather: Member Pays Tithing-->Tithing in Excess of Current Needs is Invested -->Investments Earn Return-->$$$ From This Return on Investments is Reinvested in the City Creek Mall That’s what really happened, which is why Hinckley was telling the truth. Tithing wasn’t used directly. Rather, excess money was saved into reserves, and the investment returns on those reserves were used. That is what really happened, and you don’t need to look at the doctrinal definition of “tithing” to understand it. And this is where Huntsman’s attorneys blundered. They responded to this with a declaration by David Nielsen where he explained in some detail that, “During my employment at EPA, EPA’s senior leadership and other EPA employees referred to and revered all funds of EPA as 'tithing' money, regardless of whether they were referring to principal or earnings on that principal.” That is exactly how and when the conversation shifted to the definition of tithing and whether interest on unspent tithing is really tithing and so-on. While Nielsen’s statements about how the executives at EPA use the word “tithing” are undoubtedly true, how the people in that secretive universe use language has little bearing on how normal Saints would interpret Hinckley's assurances. With 20/20 hindsight, what the Church was doing is obvious. In fact, the quote above (“Member Pays Tithing-->Tithing in Excess of Current Needs is Invested -->Investments Earn Return-->$$$ From This Return on Investments is Reinvested in the City Creek Mall”) was taken directly from what somebody on this board said on March 22, 2012. We know from the contemporaneous record that many members of the Church found Hinckley’s words to be confusing, because using the interest earned on unspent tithing money is indirectly using tithing money. And indirectly using tithing money is still using tithing money. When Craig Paxton said the truth (“Member Pays Tithing-->Tithing in Excess of Current Needs is Invested -->Investments Earn Return-->$$$ From This Return on Investments is Reinvested in the City Creek Mall”), very few Latter-day Saints said, “yes, that’s exactly what happened, just as the church clearly said.” Rather, they said things like, CFR, Craig's accusation is “fluff and stuff”, that is an assumption with no basis in fact, that is “bluster with no substance”, that that is something only “someone with no awareness of history might assume.” Based on their own Latter-day Saint values and Latter-day Saint vernacular, it was clear to these Latter-day Saints that indirectly using tithing was still using tithing, and that the interest on unspent tithing is just as sacred as the tithing itself. Therefore, they interpreted Hinckley’s assurances broadly, and believed that they were promised tithing wouldn't be used, neither directly nor indirectly. Craig asked, “Why is it such a big deal for you or any other believer to just accept that tithing funds were [indirectly] used to fund the mall?” In response, thesometimesaint said: "The Church officers have publically stated that no tithing funds were used [neither directly nor indirectly] in the purchase of the mall. You are calling those Church officers liars. Provide proof of your claim or retract it." Huntsman’s legal team should not have argued that interest on unspent tithing “is” tithing. Rather, they should have argued that because the Church was so opaque about its finances, and because it was generally known that the church had a for-profit arm that wasn’t financed by tithing, and because of the widespread belief that interest on unspent tithing is just as sacred as the original tithing donations themselves, it is eminently reasonable for Latter-day Saints to interpret Hinckley’s comments broadly: “no thing was used” meant that “no tithing was used, neither directly nor indirectly.”

From my perspective, the only reason the courts consider the "definitional issue" to be an issue is because the Church's attorneys claim it is in an issue. And the only reason they claim it's an issue is to obfuscate the situation as part of their legal strategy. Apparently this is working with some judges, but from my perspective, it isn't a valid issue, and that the proper approach is what Judge Fletcher said: We are not required to rely on or interpret the Church’s religious teachings to determine if it misrepresented how it was using tithing funds. Nor are we required to examine Huntsman’s religious beliefs about the appropriate use of church money. Instead, as presented to us, the questions are secular. The questions are whether the Church’s statements about how it would use tithing funds were true, and whether Huntsman reasonably relied on those statements when he made tithing contributions. My understanding is that when somebody makes a donation to the Church, the donor indicates what the donation is for by selecting things such as "tithing", "fast offerings", "missionary fund", "humanitarian fund", and so forth. If the donor indicates that the donation is a "tithing" donation, the donation is put into the Church's "tithing fund." Am I wrong about any of that? If I'm not, why would any member think the phrase "tithing funds won't be used for X" referred to anything other than the money that was labeled "tithing" by the donor? The issue isn't the definition of "tithing", "tenth", or "increase", or the presumed religious motivations why these donations are made. The issue is "whether the Church's statements about how it would use tithing funds were true, and whether Huntsman reasonably relied on those statements when he made tithing contributions." The statements in question aren't about the doctrinal nuances of what is and is not tithing. The statements were about how the money would be used.

My point is that the tithing cases have nothing to do with the doctrinal definition of “tithing.” That word can remain undefined and the a court could still evaluate whether fraud was committed. When Hinckley said “no tithing funds would be used”, the definitions that a court would need to understand are the definition of "tithing funds" and the definition of “use." That’s it. In this context, tithing funds are an accounting concept; they are the funds that contain money that was designated as “tithing” on the donation slip. That’s it. This is an accounting question, not a doctrinal one.

This next piece is pretty central to the whole thing, because it commits us to looking at Mesamerica specifically. If this proves persuasive, it’s no longer a conversation about whether metal plates or barley or whatever fit into the ancient world somewhere. Rather, it becomes a matter of whether it fits into Mesoamerica. Committing to this can make evidence stronger or weaker. Should this be modified before I finish evaluating it?

Thanks for suggesting this. I reran evidence model with this bit added to the bottom of the first prompt, and it did in fact move the needle, but only by a tiny amount: from H₁:H₂ ~1.2:1 to 2:1 to LR H₁:H₂: ~1.3:1 to 2:1. Here are the updated documents: 05:Limited Geography Model’s Internal Geographic Coherence Critical Rebutal Evidence Item #5 Title: Limited Geography Model’s Internal Geographic Coherence Claim: Proponents argue that the Book of Mormon contains a sustained, bounded, and internally consistent geographic framework—with interlocking directional relations, travel times, military chokepoints, settlement patterns, and land-based constraints distributed across multiple narrative voices and contexts—and that maintaining this coherence under the text’s rapid-dictation, non-iterative production conditions is more naturally explained by dependence on an underlying source tradition than by ad hoc modern invention. Weight: LR (H₁:H₂😞 ~1.3:1 to 2:1. Net effect: slight support for H₁. Commitments added: • H₁: The text’s New World narrative is now treated as containing a durable internal geographic system—not merely isolated place-names—that should remain coherent as further geographic claims are tested. If future analysis reveals that the “coherence” dissolves under closer scrutiny (e.g., irreconcilable directional contradictions, travel-time failures), this entry loses force retroactively. • H₁: Commits to the text’s geography being bounded and regional rather than hemispheric. The older continental reading is now effectively abandoned as textually unsupportable from H₁’s own internal logic. • H₂: Must account for a geographically operational narrative framework that does repeated work across migration, warfare, political division, and editorial narration, produced under rapid-dictation conditions without visible iterative revision. The most economical path is that a moderately talented narrator working from a simple mental schema (homeland/rival homeland, river valley, two seas, a choke point, frontier wilderness) could generate this level of relational consistency without extraordinary difficulty. This is available but represents a real compositional achievement that must be absorbed rather than dismissed. Tensions / costs: • H₁: The internal geography is underdetermined enough to support multiple incompatible external reconstructions (Mesoamerican, Heartland, South American, and others). If the geography were as constraining as sometimes claimed, the space of plausible models should collapse more sharply. The persistence of rival models is a cost to claims of high-resolution geographic specificity, even though it is compatible with a bounded regional system at a looser level. • H₁: The geographic framework, while consistent, does not exhibit the distinctive genre-specific features of the strongest ancient geographic parallels (formulaic itineraries like Numbers 33, administrative boundary lists like Joshua 13–21, or the measured geographic descriptions of Herodotus and Polybius). The Book of Mormon’s geographic discourse is functional and operational but generically so—it does not force a unique ancient-genre reading. • H₁: This is the first item addressing the New World narrative rather than the Arabian prologue. The prior ledger entries (Items #1–4) built cumulative geographic credibility around a specific Old World corridor. This item shifts to entirely different terrain where no external toponymic or archaeological anchor has been established. The two frameworks (Arabian geographic credibility and New World internal coherence) are logically independent, so the Arabian results neither validate nor invalidate this item—but they also cannot be borrowed to bolster it. • H₂: The “single-draft” framing somewhat overstates the constraint. Rapid dictation does not preclude a pre-existing mental model, rehearsed narrative structure, or simple spatial schema carried forward across sessions. The compositional difficulty is real but should not be inflated to the level of “spontaneous invention with zero preparation.” Still, the sustained operational use of the framework across diverse narrative contexts (not just one descriptive passage) is a genuine feature that adds modest cost to H₂.

So far, multiple federal judges disagree with you on this point, so you shouldn't expect that they will suddenly change their mind and unanimously agree with you now. For example: "The church autonomy doctrine has no bearing here. That doctrine protects First Amendment values by prohibiting courts from resolving “controversies over religious doctrine and practice.” Presbyterian Church in U.S. v. Mary Elizabeth Blue Hull Mem’l Presbyterian Church, 393 U.S. 440, 449 (1969). Because nothing in our analysis of Huntsman’s fraud claims delves into matters of Church doctrine or policy, our decision in this case does not run afoul of the church autonomy doctrine." (Opinion by Judge Friedland; Concurrence by Judge Bress; Concurrence by Judge Bumatay) "In the case before us, we are not required to rely on or interpret the Church’s religious teachings to determine if it misrepresented how it was using tithing funds. Nor are we required to examine Huntsman’s religious beliefs about the appropriate use of church money. Instead, as presented to us, the questions are secular. The questions are whether the Church’s statements about how it would use tithing funds were true, and whether Huntsman reasonably relied on those statements when he made tithing contributions. A court or jury can answer these questions based on secular evidence and analysis." (Judge William A. Fletcher) For my part, the case isn't about the religious definition of "tithing." It's about how "tithing funds" were used and the assurances the Church made about how these funds would be used. In this context, tithing funds are simply the funds into which donations designated as "tithing" were deposited. Whether any specific dollars that made their way into that fund meet this or that religious definition of "tithing" is irrelevant. Asserting that this is fundamentally about religious doctrine and not accounting is not only weak, it leads to some weird implications: they are somehow arguing that because of a special religious definition of X, using X to generate interest to finance a mall is not using X to finance a mall, even indirectly. And all of this is based on a religious belief that X is really sacred in a specific way that makes it perfectly fine to invest X in Nvidia but morally questionable to invest it in a Salt Lake City shopping mall.