Church Finances
The claim:
"There is zero transparency to members of the Church. Why is the one and only true Church keeping its books in the dark? Why would God's one true Church choose to 'keep them in darkness' over such a stewardship? History has shown time and time again that secret religious wealth is breeding ground for corruption."[1]
"The Church used to be transparent with its finances but ceased disclosures in 1959."[2]
The CES Letter's money argument bundles several complaints into one. A wealthy church keeps its books hidden, the critics say, sits on a fortune, builds a luxury shopping mall, pays its leaders six-figure salaries, and squeezes tithing out of families too poor to feed themselves. A true church would not act like that. So either the Church is hiding something, or it is simply greedy.
Part of that is true, and here is which part. The Church did publish detailed finances for decades and then stopped in 1959, and it has never gone back to the old level of openness. At one point it hid the size of its investment fund from federal regulators on purpose, and got caught. Both of those are real, and the answer below owns them squarely rather than dressing them up. But almost every other piece of the package works the same way: it takes a true fact and then quietly removes the context that explains it. Put the context back and the picture changes. The hidden money turns out to feed the poor and fund the schools, and the stories about starving families turn out to leave out the part where the Church feeds them.
The broader charge that the Church hides its embarrassing history (the seer stone, the multiple First Vision accounts, polygamy) is a different question, handled in Transparency & Censorship. This page is about the money.
The family that was told to pay tithing, and fed
One story shows how the whole case is built, so it pays to slow down on it.
The CES Letter quotes a December 2012 Ensign article about the Vigil family, recent converts in Argentina who were struggling badly. Their bishop taught them about tithing, and his words are as hard as they sound:
"If paying tithing means that you can't pay for water or electricity, pay tithing. If paying tithing means that you can't pay your rent, pay tithing. Even if paying tithing means that you don't have enough money to feed your family, pay tithing. The Lord will not abandon you."[3]
Read alone, that is a church telling a hungry family to choose tithing over food. Damning. Except the same article, on the same page, contains one more sentence the CES Letter does not quote:
"The family received some commodities from the bishops' storehouse during their financial difficulties."[3:1]
That single sentence turns the whole story inside out. The Vigil family was never told to pay tithing and starve. They were told to keep their covenant while the Church's own welfare system put food on their table. A bishops' storehouse is exactly what it sounds like: a warehouse of food and basic goods that a bishop hands out, free, to members in need. The Vigils were drawing from one the entire time.
Watch for that move, because it runs through the whole finances section. Find a true quote, cut the sentence next to it that changes its meaning, and present what is left. The Church runs roughly 115 of those storehouses worldwide, alongside fast-offering funds a bishop can spend on a family's rent or utilities with no paperwork, all of it paid for separately from tithing and run almost entirely by volunteers. None of that appears in the CES Letter's version, because the half of the system that does the feeding has been edited out. A nearly identical example from a 2017 General Conference talk works the same way: the Cordón story is quoted right up to its cliffhanger, and the resolution where the family's crisis is relieved is left off.
The mall, and where the money actually went
The most emotional argument in the section is City Creek, a $1.5 billion shopping and housing development the Church built in downtown Salt Lake City. The CES Letter sets that price tag against $1.4 billion the Church spent on humanitarian aid across 26 years, and reads the gap as proof of misplaced priorities: a "luxury megamall" while the world goes hungry.[4]
Two things are wrong with that, and they pull in opposite directions.
First, the mall was not built with tithing. In a 2003 General Conference, President Gordon B. Hinckley addressed this head-on: "tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property. Nor will they be used in developing it for commercial purposes."[5] The money came from the Church's for-profit business arm and from the earnings on its investment reserves, not from the donation plate. This is not just an assurance you have to take on faith. James Huntsman sued the Church over this exact claim, arguing he had been deceived about how City Creek was funded. In January 2025 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case 11 to 0, finding that Hinckley's statement matched how the project was actually paid for.[6]
Second, the comparison is rigged. That "$1.4 billion over 26 years" is one narrow line item, cash disaster relief, and it leaves out the storehouses, the welfare system, the roughly $1 billion a year the Church spends subsidizing its universities, and much more. The cleanest way to see how misleading it is: in 2024 alone, the Church reported $1.45 billion in charitable spending, across 3,836 projects in 192 countries.[7] One recent year of giving is larger than the entire 26-year figure the CES Letter holds up as evidence of stinginess. (The chart tracking that giving year by year is in the in-depth version.)
City Creek itself was an urban-renewal project. The blocks across the street from Temple Square had been decaying, and the Church owned much of the land. Downtown leaders credited the development with reviving the city center, and the Sierra Club praised its environmentally conscious design.
"Six-figure salaries" and a church run by volunteers
The CES Letter says the Church takes in billions in tithing and pays its leaders "six figure church salaries." Both halves are slippery.
The salary number is roughly right for the small group it applies to. The Church's senior full-time leaders, the General Authorities, about 117 people, receive a living allowance estimated in the range of $120,000 to $178,000. The Church's official statement is that this money comes "from proceeds of the Church's financial investments," not from tithing, and the stated reason is so that a man does not have to be independently wealthy to serve.[8] (That "investments, not tithing" line deserves a small asterisk, since the investments were themselves built largely from decades of tithing surplus, and a fair answer should say so rather than hide behind the technicality.)
What the framing hides is the comparison and the scale. An apostle leading a 17-million-member worldwide church is paid about what the average pastor of a single American megachurch makes, $147,000 and up.[9] Set him next to Joel Osteen or Kenneth Copeland and the figure looks almost quaint. And those 117 are the only paid clergy in the entire institution. The Church's roughly 30,000 congregations are led by bishops, Relief Society presidents, youth leaders, and teachers who serve for years, give up 15 to 25 hours a week, and are paid nothing while holding regular jobs.[10] Hundreds of thousands of people run this church for free. "The Church has paid clergy" is true for about a hundred people and false for everyone else.
The Ensign Peak settlement
The strongest version of the criticism is not about malls or salaries. It is about a fund called Ensign Peak Advisors, and a faithful answer cannot soften what happened there.
In 2019 a whistleblower revealed that the Church's investment arm had quietly grown to around $100 billion. That number by itself is defensible: large reserves can fund temples, missions, schools, and emergencies for generations, and prudent saving is a virtue the Church preaches. The problem was not the size. It was the hiding.
By law, an investor managing that much in stocks has to file public reports disclosing its holdings. From 2001 onward, Ensign Peak avoided that by spreading its portfolio across 13 shell companies that filed separately, so that no single report would reveal how big the fund really was. In February 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission settled charges over exactly this, and the order documents that the shell companies did no real work (they were filing fronts), and that the First Presidency and the Presiding Bishopric, the highest levels of Church leadership, approved each one. The motive, in the regulator's own account, was to keep the fund's size from drawing "unwanted attention."[11][12]
The clearest read on this comes from Sam Brunson, a tax-law professor at Loyola University Chicago and an active Latter-day Saint, who studied the order the day it came out: "It's not that mistakes were made, it's that the church took deliberate action to do wrong."[13] That sentence comes from inside the faith, and it should not be explained away. The Church paid the fine and stopped the practice, but the $5 million penalty against a $100-billion-plus fund is a rounding error, symbolic rather than painful. This was deliberate concealment, approved at the top, and the only honest move is to own it.
Two smaller items belong in the same column. A Church manual quoted President Lorenzo Snow's 1899 plea on tithing but replaced the words "who has means" with an ellipsis, an edit that nudges a means-tested request toward a universal command; faithful members can fairly wish it had been left alone (details). And Hinckley's 2002 remark that financial information "belongs to those who made the contribution" sits awkwardly next to the fact that tithe-paying members cannot see the books either. Calling that a lie is too strong for an unscripted answer to a foreign reporter, but the tension between what the Church says and what it discloses is real.
What sits opposite these concessions is the Church's response since. It began publishing detailed annual reports on its charitable giving, it now files the investment disclosures it once dodged, and it acknowledged the SEC settlement publicly the day it broke. That is genuine movement, even if it is still narrower than what the Vatican or major Protestant denominations disclose. The ledger does not balance to zero, and a faithful answer should not pretend it does.
Fallible people managed the money
The whole finances section comes down to two sets of facts, both real, and the CES Letter only lets you see one. The set it shows you is the genuine concessions: 1959, the shell companies, the symbolic fine, a curricular edit, a transparency record that is still partial. The set it keeps out of frame is everything it has to leave out to make its case: the storehouse sentence next to the Vigil quote, the resolution to the Cordón story, the funding mechanism a federal court examined and upheld, the unpaid hundreds of thousands who actually run the Church, and a single recent year of giving that dwarfs the 26-year figure offered as proof of greed.
A fair reckoning has to weigh both sets of facts at once, not just the unflattering one. And notice where the standard comes from. The bar the Church is failing to clear here is not one the CES Letter invented; it is one the faith holds over itself. The Book of Mormon describes a society in which "they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor" (4 Nephi 1:3). Measured against Zion, the present record falls short, the deliberate concealment included. But that same Book of Mormon is why the shortfall does not crack the foundation. An unschooled young man dictated it out loud in about sixty working days, start to finish, working from no notes and going back for no rewrites, and in nearly two centuries no one has produced a natural account of how he did it. A church can save clumsily, disclose too little, and still be led by men who are handling something real. Fallible people managed the money. They did not invent the thing the money serves.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 116. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 116. ↩︎
Aaron L. West, "Sacred Transformations," Ensign, December 2012. Tells the story of Amado and Evelyn Vigil, recent converts in Argentina facing severe financial hardship. Bishop Orellana's tithing counsel is on the same page as the article's explicit statement: "The family received some commodities from the bishops' storehouse during their financial difficulties." The article continues with the family's job-promotion story (Evelyn's promotion; Amado's employment), subsequent job losses, and ongoing journey of trust through repeated economic instability. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2012/12/sacred-transformations?lang=eng ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 116–117. ↩︎
Gordon B. Hinckley, "The Condition of the Church," April 2003 General Conference. The foundational public statement on City Creek financing: "tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property. Nor will they be used in developing it for commercial purposes. Funds for this have come and will come from those commercial entities owned by the Church. These resources, together with the earnings of invested reserve funds, will accommodate this program." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2003/04/the-condition-of-the-church?lang=eng ↩︎
Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, No. 21-56056 (9th Cir. en banc, January 31, 2025). Eleven-judge en banc panel; 11-0 dismissal. The opinion documents Hinckley's April 2003 statement on its actual terms and the 2003 Church investment earnings increase of approximately $3.9 billion that exceeded the $1.4 billion City Creek allocation. Procedural breakdown: ten of eleven judges reached the no-misstatement merits; six concurred on those merits without reaching First Amendment church-autonomy doctrine; four would have additionally reached Free Exercise grounds; one held church-autonomy doctrine was jurisdictional. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/01/31/21-56056.pdf ↩︎
"A World of Caring: A Closer Look at the Church's Global Assistance Efforts," Church Newsroom, 2024 Caring for Those in Need Summary. $1.45B in expenditures; 3,836 projects; 192 countries and territories; 6.6M volunteer hours; $55.8M for global child nutrition initiative across 12 high-need countries; 591 food-security projects; 267 clean-water/hygiene/sanitation projects. Partnerships with UNICEF, World Food Program USA, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, CARE International, Helen Keller International, iDE, MAP International, Vitamin Angels. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/2024-caring-for-those-in-need-summary ↩︎
"Do General Authorities get paid?" Church FAQ. The Church's official statement: "None of the funds for this living allowance come from the tithing of Church members, but instead from proceeds of the Church's financial investments." https://faq.churchofjesuschrist.org/do-general-authorities-get-paid ↩︎
"100 Highly Paid Ministry Leaders — 2025," MinistryWatch. https://ministrywatch.com/100-highly-paid-ministry-leaders-2025/ ↩︎
"Paid and unpaid Church leaders," FAIR. Documents the 1996 stipend (~$50,000), the 2014 increase from $116,400 to $120,000, the Hinckley quote on stipend funding source ("from this business income and not from the tithing of the people"), the Otterson observation about former businessmen, and the structure of unpaid local clergy at all levels of Church organization. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Paid_and_unpaid_Church_leaders ↩︎
SEC Order 34-96951, February 21, 2023 — the actual settlement document in In the Matter of Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc., and the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Documents the 13 shell LLCs, the First Presidency / Presiding Bishopric approvals, the deliberate-concealment motivation, and the legal violation. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2023/34-96951.pdf ↩︎
"SEC Charges The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Its Investment Management Company for Disclosure Failures and Misstated Filings," SEC Press Release 2023-35, February 21, 2023. Announces the $5 million settlement: $1M Church penalty + $4M Ensign Peak penalty. https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-35 ↩︎
Samuel D. Brunson, "The Church, the Investment Advisor, and the SEC," By Common Consent, February 21, 2023. Same-day faithful tax-law analysis of the SEC settlement reading the SEC Order's text directly. Brunson concludes: "It's not that mistakes were made — it's that the church took deliberate action to do wrong." https://bycommonconsent.com/2023/02/21/the-church-the-investment-advisor-and-the-sec/ ↩︎