![]() Tithing, with its biblical roots, is seen as a preparatory step before a return to the United Order. ![]() Ultimately, the faithful failed at living this “higher” law. It was a time of communitarian experiments, and the fledgling church was all-in, caring for armies of new converts who arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. Known as the United Order, it remains part of the church’s scriptural canon. Not long after the faith’s birth in 1830, LDS founder Joseph Smith asked believers to share all they had for the common good, taking only what was necessary to live. Mormonism has never separated economics from eternal truths fiscal realities go hand in hand with spiritual needs. Joseph Smith From giving all to giving a 10th Giving 10 percent of his income, Brunson says, “doesn’t hurt me in any obvious way.” Still, the professor acknowledges, he is “coming at it from a comfortably middle-class place.” “It might tie them to the church even more.” Instead, he says, it was “something you did to become a good person.”Īllowing members to attend the temple without paying could be a good move, Brunson theorizes. “In, I didn’t learn about paying tithing as a way to get to the temple.” “Based on the rhetoric I’ve heard, not many pay so they can have a temple recommend,” Brunson says. Sam Brunson, a Latter-day Saint who teaches tax and business law at Loyola University in Chicago, doubts eliminating the tithing question from temple recommends would have much impact on believers’ willingness to contribute to their church. If the church dropped the tithing provision from the temple imperatives, the upper middle class and wealthy (who account for a large percentage of the faith’s total revenue) would be the ones “more likely to cut back,” Quinn predicts. In 2010, he reports, the global faith took in $33 billion in tithing and less than half that, $15 billion, from stocks, bonds, taxable businesses and other enterprises. Quinn's new book about Mormon church finances has just been released. Michael Quinn at the LDS Church History Library on Aug. “But if you cut out tithing, the reserves would be depleted within a relatively short time.” The Utah-based faith earns billions from commercial ventures every year beyond what it collects in member contributions, says Quinn, whose latest book, “The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power,” explores the world of Mormon money. The church’s revenue would plummet, warns the writer, who was excommunicated for his historical writings but remains a believer. “The corollary, that removing the requirement would lead to decreased rates and amounts of tithe-paying, also seems commonsensical.” It does create “a strong incentive for the practice among the faithful,” concedes Patrick Mason, Mormon scholar at Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University. To some, the bigger question is: Should The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do away not with tithing but with tithing as a prerequisite for accessing the temple and its exalting ordinances by which members can qualify for celestial glory? Sure, tithing may seem like buying your way into heaven “in a very strict and misleading way,” Mormon historian Matthew Bowman says, “but I don’t know why that seems more offensive to modern sensibilities than, say, the requirement that one attend one’s meetings.”īowman, a professor at Arkansas’ Henderson State University and author of “ The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith,” suspects the concerns are felt more acutely in countries such as the United States, “a consumer capitalist society that equates money and finances with freedom.”Īmericans view religion “as something that’s supposed to be private,” he says, “and thus if religion becomes involved with employment in any real sense, we tend to think that it’s interfering in realms that it’s not supposed to.” Tithing, they argue, is repaying a debt owed to God or showing obedience. Mormon leaders reject the notion that the process to gain a “recommend” for entrance to an LDS temple is a form of salvation blackmail. Should Mormons’ place in the afterlife, though, be determined, at least in part, by the dollars they give here and now? Should blessings of the temple be withheld from those who can’t - or won’t - pay? Romney once said, “by observing faithfully day by day, and year by year, the law of tithing and the other requirements of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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