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It’s still a business with business needs. Kumahito wrote:the church’s budget from year to year is BYU (second only to physical facilities construction and maintenance). I just had to question whether it was fair, truly charitable or even defensible to spend such a large outlay of church $$ to educate 28,000 white kids from the US
You’re not the only one to ask that question. When I was at BYU-Idaho there was a story circulated about President Hinckley (I think it was him anyway,but it could have been one of the twelve). Anyway, they had just finished the Taylor building, which is an absolutely beautiful chapel-like structure and were giving a tour of it. When they were in the chapel area, he look out across everything and went silent. The person giving the tour asked what he was thinking. He said “I was thinking about how much we do for so few, and how little we do for so many”.
That might turn out to only be a faith promoting rumor that the teachers liked to tell, but nonetheless I think many of the church leaders are aware of the problem.
Forgotten_Charity, You don’t need to sympathize with me. I’d much rather have acknowledgment of reasonable statements than sympathy. I’ve worked in the corporate world for 25 years, and I’ve been a high-level manager – in Sales and Marketing. I’m not nearly as naive to business practices as your comments imply.
As everyone here knows, I’m smiling as I type this comment. I’m not upset or mad in any way – but I am struck by your inability to words your comments on this topic in any way that recognizes the leadership of the Church might have pure motives in doing what they do. They might be trying sincerely to be “good stewards”, and they might be trying sincerely to make sure the Church is never in the financial position of the mid-1900’s.
We all know there is a strong corporate aspect of the Church. It is a corporation specifically because the US government wouldn’t let it be a traditional church with polygamy. It was a corporation with mediocre then bad financial management for decades. Now it is a corporation with apparently great financial management. We get it, so please don’t lecture to us about that.
Corporations, sans the people who run them, are as you describe; corporations, however, can’t exist sans the people who run them – and their motivations. There are wonderfully caring corporations, and their are heartless corporations – and the way they manage their finances often has NOTHING to do with the difference. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t. Again, it depends largely on the motivation and focus of the leaders.
It’s really easy to paint in black-and-white. It’s really easy to have a thesis and insist that the facts fit that paradigm. I’m not saying the facts about the Church’s finances can’t fit your paradigm, since I don’t know the top leadership personally, but I am saying you are retrofitting what you are calling facts into a paradigm – not constructing a pure paradigm from an unbiased perspective through the use of clear, indisputable facts. I understand that part of the ambiguity of the facts is that the Church doesn’t publish its financial records, but you are imputing motive in your comments – and that absolutely is a subjective exercise.
Again, I’ve been in sales and marketing for years. Facts aren’t facts; they are things that are manipulated all the time to show what the presenter wants to be shown – and different presenters take the same facts and turn them into competing Truth all the time. It happens every day. “Lies, damned lies and statistics” is a famous statement – and it’s famous because it’s true.
Let me use the most recent example of the use of finances to make my point:
BYU is seen by many people in a bad light, but it is seen by many people in a wonderful light. I’m not a BYU grad, so I have no personal reason to praise or condemn it – but I’ve worked for the last few years in higher education, so I have some personal understanding of the funding issues involved in building and running a university. The LDS Church has created an institution that can be attended by its members for significantly less than it would cost to attend most other really good colleges and universities, and, in the cases of other colleges and universities without huge endowments, the comparative costs to the students and families aren’t even close. The primary difference between a place like Harvard, which can provide its education to the poorest students through only their accumulation of standard student loans, and a place like where I last worked, which cannot do so even though the tuition is around half of Harvard’s, is the size of each institution’s endowment – multiple billions of dollars in the case of Harvard and a few million in the case of my former employer. Harvard can provide a good (not great) classroom education precisely because it has existed for hundreds of years, has educated extremely wealthy students and has gathered billions of dollars in reserves; my current college can provide better classroom instruction than Harvard does, in many cases, but it doesn’t have the reserves Harvard does, so it can’t enroll as many poor to middle-class students. It is largely tuition driven, and the student body reflects that basic reality.
BYU is an interesting example of an institution that couldn’t exist as constituted (allowing even quite poor students to get a quality education) without a huge, on-going investment from non-tuition sources.
That is a charitable expense in the purest sense of the word, since, imo, education is one of the most core, foundational aspects of success there is. However, no critic of the LDS Church is going to count it as humanitarian aid for those students who couldn’t attend if it cost the same as most comparable universities. Furthermore, the mainland BYU’s don’t just serve American white kids, and BYU-Hawaii certainly doesn’t serve just American white kids. That simply is a terrible mischaracterization. The Church’s universities serve primarily church members, and, right now, the portion of the membership who are in a position to attend one of those schools primarily is “first-world” – and primarily white. As the first-world membership diversifies racially and ethnically, as it is doing, the make-up of students at the BYU’s will change accordingly, as it has done.
The Church made a conscious effort a while ago not to try to establish other full colleges and universities across the world specifically because they cost so much to run in a manner that makes them affordable to kids from low-middle socio-economic situations. Instead, they established the Perpetual Education Fund to provide assistance to members who serve honorable missions and then have to return to the poverty they left in order to serve. That allows them to attend college or trade school or some other form of continued education and, hopefully, bring them out of poverty within the society their new stability can bless in some way. They also started giving regularly to schools in third-world countries and to charities in that serve those schools. (Interestingly, those donations also aren’t counted in many critics’ numbers, since many of those donations are given to other charities who get credit for the actual end-point donations.) Iow, the Church isn’t ignoring non-white, non-American students; rather, they are trying to help in a way that really will help without having to expend the type of resources that are required to run full institutions of higher education.
The point is NOT whether or not you and/or I agree completely with that approach.The point is that the characterization of the Church’s education expenses as being race-insensitive doesn’t match how I personally see “the facts” – and framing such a complex situation in such simplistic terms does injustice, imo, to a reasonable discussion of “the facts”. Again, I believe it’s important to acknowledge that we really don’t reach our conclusion from an unbiased analysis of “the facts”; the perspective we bring to the very act of seeing those facts is every bit as important as the facts themselves.
Let me summarize as succinctly as I can one thing I think is important when talking about “the facts” of humanitarian aid (granting that it might be the most obvious, most objective measure of “caring soul” there is for a church): The comparison in the original article is of the LDS Church to the Methodist Church –
a fair comparison given their similar size. So, what are the objective facts? 1) The actual humanitarian aid reported by both churches is radically different. The LDS Church appears to have provided 3.5 times more in actual aid, averaged annually over the past 25 years, than the Methodist Church – and the amount of aid per year given by the LDS Church has been rising regularly over that time span.
2) The LDS Church provides extensive welfare assistance to its members that the Methodist Church simply doesn’t do.
There are more examples I could give, but a comparison of these two churches can tip favorably to the Methodist Church in only one way – by comparing the percent of total “tithing / direct donations” that is redistributed as humanitarian aid. Only in that way can the conclusion be that the LDS Church doesn’t care about people in terms of humanitarian aid given –
and it takes either ignorance or an intentional distortion of the full picture to reach that conclusion in comparison to the Methodist Church. Again, the actual amount the LDS Church donates to humanitarian aid DWARFSthe actual amount donated by the Methodist Church, especially when the welfare assistance is included. Conclusion:
The LDS Church appears to be MUCH more focused on and dedicated to humanitarian aid than the Methodist Church appears to be.
In this specific case, I don’t see how else to view “the facts”.
. Faith has to play a role here because the church does not publish the information except in the UK, where it is required by law. I believe in volunteer and charity work with all my being.
I’m grateful for those experiences inside and outside the church.
I respect that perspective from that type of experience. One quick question:
When you say “Deseret”, what do you mean? Where, exactly, does your father work?
I have a family member who works at Deseret Industries, and what you describe is the exact opposite of his experience, so I’m curious.
Quote:I just had to question whether it was fair, truly charitable or even defensible to spend such a large outlay of church $$ to educate 28,000 white kids from the US ( and yes, I’m aware there are a small percentage of the students who come from overseas) while the church is now larger outside the US than in. How in the world do we ask those dear saints in Guatemala, Cote d’Ivoire, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea to pay their widow’s mite worth of tithing when we spend so much $$ on BYU, a shopping mall, and hunting lodges?
I can’t really talk too intelligently about most of the Church’s financial issues much less its controversial shopping mall and hunting lodges. However, I think it a trifle unfair to characterize the leadership of the Church as uninterested in what happens to members outside of the U.S.A’s borders as far as education goes. For a number of years, the LDS Church has run a preparatory school (kind of a high school) just outside of Mexico City. I served my mission in that area and found that the school’s reputation (at least a couple of decades ago) was so good that many kids would get baptized so they could attend. (Yes, that’s a problem but one for another time and thread).
Some else has already mentioned the Perpetual Education Fund which allows students from different countries to get an education. In addition to that, BYU-Idaho recently began their Pathways education program which was developed in part to provide a BYU-I type experience to those in other parts of the U.S. and other countries. See link below:
http://www.byui.edu/online/pathway-international/international-locations-x40413 Perhaps these efforts might be seen as rather tepid responses to a big issue but ultimately I feel that the Church is moving in the right direction in this particular area.
I did read the article. I found it interesting. I do not believe that this is my issue with the church. From my perspective what the church does with its money is up to those that have this decision making authority. IOW, I believe everything hinges on the paradigm that the LDS church is God’s organization on earth and that giving money to the church = giving money to God and withholding money from the church = stealing from God.
If you believe the above and you don’t have reason to suspect that there is some kind of fraud or embezzlement going on then this issue seems to lose power for me. If you are committed to give a tenth of your income for the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth, then why the uproar when the church invests in for profit enterprises for the same purpose (for the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth).
If you do not believe the above and you continue to pay tithing for other reasons (like continuing to pull your own weight, or to continue to receive the blessing of giving, self sacrifice) then it may seem incongruent when the Church itself may seem less enthusiastic about giving.
In my case, I do not tithe. I give charitable donations to the church. The donations I give are what I think is fair for the building, and the community structure, and the programs that benefit my family. This (for me) is similar to the balloon animal guy at the farmers market. He makes balloon animals for my kids; I give him what I think is fair and I don’t make judgments into how he spends that money afterwards. This is working for me and I am at peace with it. At the same time, I understand that these church financial issues can be a sensitive subject for others -especially those transitioning from one paradigm to the other.
I also agree that the article has a story to tell and it is fairly determined in its telling. Remember Richard Bushman saying that no history is completely objective but the best we can hope for is reasonably balanced history and disclosure of the author’s position. Well this article is not objective, is not balanced, and we have no disclosure of the author’s background or position. Ray has already spoken to the misleading statistic of Methodists vs. Mormons. I also found it interesting that in an organization so dominated by men, Sheri Dew is a CEO – and yet that angle didn’t receive any play. I haven’t taken the time to dissect the article but to me it does seem one sided.
Forgotten_Charity wrote:I only wrestle with the for profit models. Such as my dad working for Deseret.
Hi FC, I also understand that working directly for the church would tend to complicate matters. For example I have read about an institute director that was given what may be termed invasive pressure to perform in certain ways in his church and personal life. Part of the justification for this was that as a public and respected church employee he was held to a higher standard and thus the ecclesiastical leaders felt ok to pry more than they otherwise would have. For me working for the church would be similar to lending money to family/friends, it has the potential to complicate the relationship. I’m sure seeing your Dad go through these hard experiences must have been difficult for you.
Ray and Gerald, I didn’t mean by my critique of the expenditure on BYU to infer a general discontent with the Church’s other humanitarian efforts. In fact, over the past 15 years or so, I’ve been very, very heartened by the Church’s efforts to spread the financial assistance that the relative wealth of the membership in the US can deliver. For example, the construction of so many temples in so many places has made a core aspect of LDS worship available to many thousands more Saints. While there are still some Saints who would have to travel great distances to attend a temple, for the most part where there is a decent-sized concentration of LDS members, you’ll also find a temple. The PEP and the humanitarian missions have all done great service. My point re: BYU is that it’s an anachronism, and an expensive one at that. At a time when the Church was the only entity capable of building and running schools in the West, places like Ricks and BYU were necessary. And at a time when pretty much every LDS family could count on sending their child to BYU, it may have been justifiable (this is no longer true, of course). Now, though, the members of the Church in the US can attend any one of litterally hundreds of state colleges and universities for a similiar tuition expense to BYU. There are excellent institute programs at every major university in the US to facilitate continued gospel study. During my 7-year saga from undergrad to law school, I can hardly count how many times someone from the Big 15, the Seventy or other authorities told us at Institute devotionals that as long as we were active in Institute, we were getting everything we needed and didn’t need to be at a Church school to have a “church school experience.” If that’s true (and I genuinely believe it to be true), then why BYU? I could be persuaded more easiliy if it weren’t such an enormous portion of the church’s budget (assuming my “second-largest line item” info is correct).
And while I agree that education is a worthy subject of charitable giving and expense, I don’t sort the church’s expense at BYU in that category. As I noted, there are literally hundreds of state colleges and universities that are capable and qualified to educate American kids at roughly the same expense tuition-wise that BYU does. In fact, I attended state schools for both undergrad and law school, and spent less on tuition overall than I would have had I attended BYU for both degrees. BYU’s website notes that 93% of its students are from the US, 6% foreign, and 1% unidentified. 86% are white. So I believe my original thesis still stands – BYU is an awfully dang expensive proposition for the Church to undertake to educate a bunch of white kids from the US, when as a percentage of total Church membership the US comes in under half. And every one of those white kids from the US who are at BYU could go down the street to the University of _______ or ________ State University and get a comparable education.
Am I going to leave the Church over any of this? Of course not. Does it rankle me a bit? Yes. But as I noted, above, I think the Church is headed in the right direction. The expansion of temples, the PEP, even BYU-Hawaii, the humanitarian missions, etc. all are great programs that spread the effects of the relative wealth in the US to the general Church membership.
Personally, I have no problem with spending tithing on BYU or any other church school. I think that is a good use of money…and something religion should promote. What bothers me, is GAs family get perks and free tuition to that school… that is crap. Abuse of power. Stop it.
As an LDS member that was a full tithe payer for 18 years…and sending a kid to college next year for 20 grand, and just finishing up paying off my own 28 grand student loan…that REALLY bothers me.
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I don’t have a problem with the money spent on BYU either. In fact, when I heard GBH indicate they weren’t going to open any more schools because they were so expensive, I was bothered by it. I saw it as another indication that the vast sums of money everyone believes the church has were not going to be funnelled into making the lives of the members better. I’m with cwald at some level on the BYU question.
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