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.
