I have written a number of posts about how at one time members of the LDS Church were also part of an ethnic group known as Mormons. Mormons were an extended family rather than a high demand/low reward organization that is referred to now as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (not Mormons). I’ve also written about how the church culture has shifted from membership in a family to servants of a Church.
During this same era, the First Presidency moved away from suggesting to members that they look to the church first for assistance. Now, members are encouraged to turn to extended family first, then to the state and last to the church welfare program. In the past, the corporate church was also advocating for universal health care and similar things that no longer have a focus in priesthood manuals. I find that change to be striking in today’s political environment.
Another area of change is the enmeshment of church and state in access to welfare — that dynamic has occurred in a rather unique environment and that has created unusual issues.
In the past, Mormons taught that one went to the State last in seeking assistance. Currently, the LDS Church teaches that since members have paid federal taxes, they should go to the government first and seek the benefits they have paid for and earned. I can see the sense in that.
However, due to a number of factors, the State of Utah’s first response to anyone seeking assistance is to send them to the LDS Church.
This situation evolved over a number of years. Almost forty years ago, Public-Private partnerships were encouraged. Private entities were contracted to help distribute aid to many communities. Those entities were often associated with a church while being run as a separate charitable entity. At that time, federal law was changed to allow states to funnel money through those church charitable programs. Research had shown that for every dollar spent, those charities gave more than a dollar in welfare benefits.
The next step was a change in laws to allow state governments to take fiscal accounting credit for the full amount that those churches and other charities spent in charitable giving. Once those numbers were recorded at a high enough level, the states were able to divert federal welfare funds to other projects. In Utah that includes money spent by the LDS Church in other states and in other countries.
The state agency in charge of public assistance in Utah counts a percentage of the welfare provided by the LDS Church toward the state’s own welfare spending according to a memorandum of understanding between the church and the state obtained by ProPublica.
What that means is that over the past decade, the Utah State Legislature has been able to dodge spending at least $75 million on fighting poverty that it otherwise would have to spend under federal law, a review of budget documents shows
https://www.propublica.org/article/utahs-social-safety-net-is-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-what-does-that-mean-if-youre-not-one (note some quotes are paraphrased for clarity).
The result is that the state of Utah provides a great deal less support to the poor than it otherwise would be required to spend by federal mandate. The amount of aid and the number of people receiving it has dropped from about 60% of those living in poverty to about 10% of those who qualify.
As of 2019, the state was providing direct assistance to about 3,000 families out of nearly 30,000 living in poverty, a precipitous decline from the mid-’90s, when Utah’s program served roughly 60% of these parents and children. Utah denied welfare applications, on average, more than 1,300 times every month last year [2018], including during the pandemic.
Pro Publica
This leads to “leadership roulette affecting non-members just like members. Some leaders are expressive with providing aid, others are extremely constricted. And Pro Publica reports:
Many bishops are continually generous with aid. But some might feel justified in politely denying assistance to poor people who are not Latter-day Saints — or to LGBTQ people — even in some cases turning away struggling church members who have not been attending services or paying 10% of their income to the church in tithes.
“There’s this term in the church called ‘bishop roulette,’” said David Smurthwaite, a former bishop in Salt Lake City, referring to the differing choices about welfare that get made by each bishop in congregations across the state
Pro Publica
Of course, there is no appeal past a Stake President and the various rules and demands they or the relevant bishop might make. This leads to strange results in and out of Utah, such as the Catholic Diocese of Stone Harbor in New Jersey providing food assistance to members of the local LDS branch who have been deemed, by local LDS leadership, to not be worthy of any LDS Church assistance until the branch is able to fully staff all of the auxiliaries.
The issue is not that the Church is not spending money on the poor, it is that the system that has resulted has multiple points of failure.
Pro Publica points out that the Church is above the baseline, just as the State of Utah has fallen so far below it. To quote:
Experts on charitable giving note that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members arguably do more than any other religious community to help people in poverty. (In Utah, the church has given tens of millions to fight homelessness.)
Pro Publica
The shift is interesting and makes one wonder what is next.
What do you think?
Wheat & Tares 
Yes, here in Kansas, I know of one family who was told by the stake president to go through the local Catholic Charities for help. I wondered then (and still do) if the church would have helped them if they were ( 1)active, (2) not “repeat offenders,” (3)middle class, not dirt poor to begin with, and (4) white. And then I shake my head as I think about how the church (both the newsroom and many members-at-large) seems so proud of its charitable giving….
I can see why the COJCOLDS encourages its members to seek help from the government first before asking the Church. On one hand, the government has a surplus of funds so why not. And on the other hand, the Church has only limited funds. Imagine if all of a sudden the Church had to pay out $5m to help its struggling members. That could be costly.
It saddens me that you can “donate” for years through your tithing, but if you find yourself needing assistance, there is very little in the way of ROI for the majority of members. Requiring poor members to give 10% of their income ensures that they remain unable to build savings and/or avoid debt for when difficult times arise. There are members that could provide for themselves/avoid the need for assistance if they didn’t feel like they have to give 10%, which is a sad commentary on Leadership.
Yes, the church is known to give generous humanitarian gifts that help others. Yes, they have a comprehensive cannery/bishop’s storehouse system that can and does help many. Yes, they should and do share their resources with the world when those resources are needed (I’m thinking disasters here). These are all good things but are also mostly outward acts. We know from the scriptures that they have their reward. However, when it comes to individuals whose faces you actually have to look into – for too many it’s a different story. For an organization that has as much resources as this one does, who sings “because I have been given much, I too must give”, and also sings “who sued so humbly for relief that I could never answer nay”, you’d think the standard would be generosity. I guess that’s not how one accumulates worldly wealth though – another sad commentary on Leadership.
@Stephen R. Marsh thank you for posting this. My eyes are open even wider now. This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
The common perception that most welfare recipients are lazy people who don’t want to work, who cheat the system, who take away money from the hard-working citizens who deserve to keep it (as I used to think in my naive earlier years, fed by sermons from the podium that government welfare was evil) flies in the face of reality: the majority of recipients would love to be honestly working, self-supporting people with a modicum of respect from those around them. The big cheaters are generally not the recipients, but others who bilk the system. Yes, some recipients are lazy and some are second and third generation perpetual takers, and that is a problem. But because of this, the system has become a byzantine labyrinth to navigate, help often not reaching those who are most in need because they don’t have the stamina to survive the wall of denials they face, or conflicting rules that disqualify them from benefits. A common reason for needing help is because of serious health problems that result in financial ruin. Count your blessings if you have not encountered this personally.
Growing up in the Church, it was 1) get help from family, 2) then ask the Church. Asking the government was considered a moral failure, something you would hide. So now the Church benefits from sending people to the government for help first?
This is a really interesting post, Stephen. I read the propublica article when it came out. It was really surprising. I’d had no idea that the church and state were connected for purposes of welfare benefits. I’ve never had to ask the church for help, but I did try to apply for medicaid when I was divorced and unemployed. It was a runaround, and I can’t imagine trying to work my way through that system for my whole life.
About intergenerational welfare recipients … I saw a brief article recently about the difference between government help given to middle-class people as compared to poorer people. When middle-class people get govt help, it’s infrastructure or a subsidy. When lower-income people get govt help, it’s welfare.
Example: the govt builds a seven-lane freeway so middle-class people can drive long distances to get to work, but doesn’t fund adequate public transportation so people who can’t afford cars can get to work. Poor people can’t get a decent job because they don’t have a car. They need welfare to buy food.
Another example: the city govt builds a park in a middle-income neighborhood and those kids now have a nearby soccer field, a place for teens and kids to hang out and do physical activity, and a community center. The poor people who live in the inner city without access to green space and parks (and no bus to take them to the park), get a govt funded center for afterschool care and homework help, and maybe some daycare for younger kids. This is seen as welfare while the park in the middle-income neighborhood is just a park.
The point was that every income level gets govt help. But govt programs that benefit higher and middle-income communities aren’t seen as welfare. Higher income communities gets parks and good roads. Lower income communities get food stamps and inconvenient public transit.
Also, a second thumbs-up for LHCA’s point that poverty is frequently linked with longterm illness and disability. If you can’t work, then you don’t have decent health insurance, and that pushes you even further into poverty.
Universal healthcare would be such a gamechanger for changing poverty. I have a single mom friend who is the sole caregiver for her seriously disabled daughter, and she also has to work full-time for her daughter’s health insurance. It’s a huge burden, and they live in poverty due to the co-pays and so forth for the medical bills.
I’m glad for all the attention we pay to homeless shelters. I wish we also had free medical clinics.
It’s quite sad to see both the church and the state of Utah share equally in their shirking of their moral responsibility toward the poor. This is par for the course in red states – that is, so-called Christian republican legislators viciously opposing anything that would help the disadvantaged in their state. When the ACA extended funds to expand Medicaid, many red states (including Idaho where I was living) refused the federal funding and refused to expand the program. It took a voter initiative that passed in a landslide to force them to do so. Predictively, the very next move of the republican super majority (which includes a lot of Mormons) was to propose legislation to make it nearly impossible to get an initiative on the ballot. Fortunately, our generally reasonable republican governor at the time said he would veto the bill if it passed and essentially killed it. I simply can’t fathom how a church (and most of its members) which constantly preaches “morality” can continue to saddle itself to a morally bankrupt political party. The democrats are by no means perfect, but you don’t see democrats pulling fascist power moves like republicans did today in Tennessee