Church Finances, Corporate Values, and Trust

 

Several months ago, I posted the following to this blog. Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by my boss at BYU Studies, who forwarded to me part of an email that had been sent to BYU’s president by, I understand, a wealthy and conservative Church member (and, I’m guessing, BYU donor). He had apparently come across this post and was very upset. At the time, my profile on the blog included my job description as editorial director at BYU Studies. This man was so angered by my post that he searched through my past posts and found all sorts of stuff he took offense at, including my 17-part series on how a believing Latter-day Saint could possibly be a Republican. The university didn’t do as this fellow demanded (fire me), but they asked me to remove the post and remove from my profile any mention of my connection to BYU. I was fine with that. After all, I was retiring in a few months, and I didn’t want to give them reason to fire me. Anyway, now that I’m retired and no longer associated with the university, and also because I did get at least one comment from a reader who was disappointed I had taken the post down, I am reposting this material, which I feel is important for the Church and its members to address.

 

The recent fiasco over Ensign Peak Advisors and the illegal shell game the Church was playing to hide its money is a sad episode in an ongoing saga of secrecy, dubious values, and a troubling lack of trust on the part of Church leaders. If I understand the facts correctly—and I have read the nine-page SEC document that spells out the details—the Church set up 13 shell companies to hide its wealth—not from the government, but from its own members, probably for fear that if members knew how much money the Church had accumulated, they would be less inclined to pay tithing or other offerings. Maybe that’s a simplistic explanation, but it’s close enough and rings true. The Church says it feared “negative consequences” if the size of its portfolio became known. But what about the negative consequences of keeping it hidden? Were those even considered? It appears that trust in the members was a lower priority than the potential financial gains secrecy might produce.

This whole episode needs to be put in context, and that context can perhaps be explained by an experience I had many years ago when I was working as an editor at Church magazines. Both situations resulted from the adoption by the Church (probably beginning in the 1960s with the Correlation movement) of certain corporate values that were antithetical to the spiritual mission and doctrines of the Church. Specifically, I’m referring to a notion my old friend Kirk Hart at BYU’s Marriott School dubbed “the organizational imperative.” I’ve written about the organizational imperative on this blog before, but to review, the organizational imperative is the idea that since all the good things in our lives come from large organizations, it is imperative that these organizations not just survive but thrive. And this idea opens the door to a whole set of values that turn the world upside-down. In short, they construct a world where organizations are more important than individuals. Individuals exist to serve the organization, not the reverse. Kirk and his coauthor, Bill Scott, identified six specific organizational values that spring from the organizational imperative, but the one that is most relevant here is paternalism, which often manifests itself as managers treating those they manage as little children who cannot be trusted with pertinent information or a voice in the decision-making process. It’s all about trust.

So, back to my days at Church magazines. One summer, department management secretly devised what I have referred to as “the reorganization from hell.” Without consulting with the staff or the managing editors, they sprang this hare-brained reorganization on us one Friday afternoon out of the blue. Staffs were rearranged incoherently and managing editors were demoted without any prior notice. They learned about their new assignments the way we all did—when the new organizational chart was projected onto the conference room screen. Not only was the reorganization itself a disaster, but the way it was concocted and revealed to us was paternalism at its finest. Lives were damaged, and even though I came out of it with better assignments than I had previously had, I was seriously troubled by how it all unfolded and by the harm that was callously inflicted on close friends. But I understood the values that had produced this mess.

Conveniently, the managing director of the Curriculum Department (let’s call him Randy), retired right after the reorganization, and Randy left his successor (let’s call him Dean) with a department on the verge of mutiny. In an effort to calm things down, Dean had HR conduct what he called a “training session.” We were divided up into small groups to discuss what had gone wrong and how it might be fixed. Each group had a large easel board on which we wrote any complaints we had. When we finished these small-group discussions and met together again as a collective magazine staff, we reported on what was written on the easel boards. At the top of almost every group’s list was the statement “We don’t feel trusted.” Lack of trust is an inevitable consequence of paternalism. And at this point, Dean made a huge mistake. Even though he was not involved at all in the reorganization, for some reason he got defensive. He declared, “Trust is something that has to be earned.” Could he have possibly said anything worse? Although most of the employees didn’t understand the philosophical background of that statement, they knew it was wrong, and Dean lost what little credibility he had.

Management philosophies come from basic views of human nature. Dean’s statement that trust has to be earned comes from the view that people are basically evil. Church doctrine, on the other hand, would insist that most people, while flawed, are inherently good and can be trusted. They have to earn distrust. Most corporate values, not surprisingly, come from the notion that people are neutral, neither good nor bad. They are merely malleable and can be turned into anything the organization needs them to be. But what Dean was expressing was even worse than how most corporations view their employees and customers. If trust has to be earned, then you begin with the idea that people can’t be trusted. This is a recipe for organizational failure.

And this brings us to the Ensign Peak revelations. The glaring message that this unfortunate circumstance broadcasts to members is, “Church leaders don’t trust you.” For the past 70 years, they have not trusted the members with even superficial financial information about the Church. I’m not sure why the Church stopped publishing a financial statement in the conference report back in the 1950s, but I can certainly guess. This lack of trust reveals a set of values that reach far beyond just Church finances. These values are deeply embedded in the organization and are causing all sorts of problems. They crop up repeatedly in situations like the one I related above about the reorganization of the magazine staffs. They occur in stakes like mine, where several years ago we had a stake president who didn’t trust his stake Relief Society president sufficiently for her to make an auxiliary meeting presentation without his prior approval of the specific content. He even felt compelled to approve an invitation to the meeting that the Relief Society sent out. Micromanagement, of course, is a side-effect of paternalism. And micromanagement is just another name for distrust.

To use another example, for many years, Church leaders did not trust members (and others) with access to historical documents. Fortunately, that has changed, although the opening of the archives did not come about because the Church abandoned the values that put the restrictions in place. It was mostly external pressure created by the internet and by independent venues such as Dialogue and Journal of Mormon History that caused the change. The Church found it was pretty much impossible to hide the history from most members anymore.

Similarly, the multiple and often redundant levels of approvals we had to receive for anything that appeared in the Church’s magazines was another evidence of paternalism, lack of trust, and the notion that the organization was more important than the individuals who were serving in it. The message all these approvals sent was that someone was afraid that the good people on the magazine staffs might damage the Church if they were left to their own devices. But these were some of the best people I have ever known. I know they could be trusted. None of them would intentionally do anything to damage the Church. But trust at Church headquarters apparently has to be earned.

It’s possible that what lies at the heart of this mistrust is a misunderstanding about the nature of the Church, and I’ve written about this before. Most members, and apparently most leaders, assume that the Church is “the Lord’s Church,” end of story. But linguistically, the full name of the Church is a double possessive. It is the Church of Jesus Christ, but it is also the Church of the Latter-day Saints. It’s His, but it’s also ours. Historically, the Church was organized as “the Church of Christ.” In 1834, the name was changed by vote in a conference of elders to “the Church of the Latter Day Saints.” The first name suggested the Church was the Lord’s. The second suggested it was the members’. But neither was completely true, so a few years later, a revelation to Joseph Smith designated the official name to be The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This name did not come out of the blue as revelation, though. It was not only a combination of the two previous names, but in early Church documents, we find evidence that Church leaders were using this combined name prior to the receipt of the revelation that is now D&C 115. The revelation was more a confirmation of a name that was already beginning to be used in various forms.

So, in theory at least, the Church is not just a top-down organization. In fact, Joseph Smith referred to the Church he had helped organize as a “theodemocracy.” In practice, however, even in Joseph’s day, the organization always tipped toward theocracy more than democracy, but in recent years the adoption of corporate values has increased the authoritarian nature of the organization. Corporations are almost exclusively authoritarian, and authoritarian institutions do not trust. Democracies have to. Right now we’re having a bit of trouble in America understanding this concept in our politics, but I still have hope that we can eventually turn away from the antidemocratic tendencies of, especially, the GOP. But I’m not so sure I have as much hope for the Church. The values that led to the Ensign Peak fiasco are deeply rooted and, as mentioned above, tend to sprout randomly in various corners of the ecclesiastical garden.

My question right now is not whether Church leaders trust me—it is clear that at a very fundamental level they do not. The question is whether I can trust them. Trust shouldn’t have to be earned, but it can certainly be lost. Based on the Church’s statement about the violations and fines, its intent in hiding its wealth from the members, and its recent nonapology, I think any trust I had has been put on the shelf for now. I’m in a wait-and-see mode, but I’m not holding my breath.

If my understanding of the ideally dual nature of the Church is correct, then I should consider myself not just a consumer of what the Church offers but a stockholder of sorts. I’ve invested a lot in the Church over the years. I’m theoretically a part-owner. I feel that I and other faithful members deserve an honest accounting of what our leaders are doing with our investments. Sorry to put this in business terms, but since we’re dealing with corporate values here, it’s probably appropriate. And apparently, President Hinckley agreed with me, at least in word, if not deed. When asked on January 29, 2002, by Helmut Nemetschek of ZDF German Television why the Church doesn’t publish annual finances, President Hinckley replied, “Well, we simply think that information belongs to those who make the contributions, not to the world.” Really? That was 21 years ago, and I’m still waiting. Was he telling the truth to the German interviewer, or just deflecting his question? If he truly believed what he said, why has that information not been shared? Obviously, there is a lack of trust at the heart of it, and great efforts have been made to hide that information from the members rather than share it with them.

Regarding the recent revelation and fine, the Church released this statement: “We affirm our commitment to comply with the law, regret mistakes made, and now consider this matter closed.” This passive-voice admission of guilt and the too-easy dismissal of the matter as “closed” is what I would expect from leaders who feel the organization is more important than the people in it and who feel no obligation to model true repentance. I suppose I’m not surprised by any of this. I’ve been around long enough that this is what I’ve come to expect. My long association with the Church’s bureaucracy and its history has shaped my expectations. But if the leaders think they can just brush this under the rug and carry on with business as usual, I think they’re misreading the situation.

This particular crisis may go away eventually (especially since most members are woefully uninformed about almost everything), but if the underlying values aren’t discarded, other episodes will inevitably occur, and the members will continue to be troubled. There’s really only one correct solution, and that is to trust the members. Most, I suspect, are like me. They care less about how much money the Church has and more about how they are viewed and treated by Church leaders. And paternalism is never easy to swallow.