The Trump Story of the Week ™ concerns the recent deportation of one Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a married, employed resident of Maryland, to a high-security El Salvador prison. If this is news to you, you need to fire up your laptop and do some reading. Trump and officials in his administration are defending Garcia’s deportation by claiming that he is not a legal resident of the US (apparently true) and that he is a member of a Salvadorean gang (a questionable claim). Trump has made public statements defending this and related deportations as justified because they are very bad people (as if very bad people have no rights). Trump and his officials have further claimed expansive powers (to basically ignore applicable laws or court orders) under the Alien Enemies Act, a very old law that confers certain powers on the Executive in time of war. All of these various half-baked justifications and defenses are suspect.
The case is playing out before a federal district court judge in Maryland. The judge has concluded that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported given that he was given no opportunity to contest his deportation (that is, he was denied his right to due process as afforded by applicable law) and that the government should therefore facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Furthermore, there was a standing court order issued by an immigration judge that barred Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador given evidence that his life was threatened by the same gang that Trump’s people allege he was a member of. So the deportation was wrongful not merely because no due process was granted but also because it violated a standing court order.
On expedited appeal to the United States Supreme Court by the Trump administration, the Court upheld the district court judge’s order in a 9-0 per curiam order that again required the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. It’s only four pages, including the concurring statement by Justice Sotomayor, go read it. There were no dissents. Reconvening in the district court, government lawyers initially provided no information to the Court about what was or was not being done to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return or what steps the government might take to do so. Consequently, the judge ordered the government to provide *daily* updates in court identifying steps already taken and further actions to be taken to achieve Abrego Garcia’s return. At this point, the government continues to drag its feet (to put it mildly) and has apparently done nothing to comply with the judge’s order. A contempt motion filed by the plaintiffs is now pending.
Here’s where I am going with this: Trump and his team are taking anti-transparency to new heights. Take DOGE, for instance, which proclaims itself to be oh-so transparent, while no one outside DOGE has any clear idea what they are doing or even who they are. Trump and his administration have criticized, insulted, and even sued various journalists and press organizations that provide honest news reporting. I’m fairly certain Trump views the First Amendment as an unwarranted intrusion on his unlimited executive powers. The current court case noted above is the best example of the claim. Even in the face of a court order, even when so ordered by the US Supreme Court, the Trump government is unwilling to provide information.
If you are a US citizen, you don’t get much transparency from your government, particularly from the Trump regime.
Now let’s talk about the LDS Church.
LDS Transparency?
How much do you know about your church? Probably a lot less than you think you do. A couple of quick examples, then an extended discussion and group exercise.
First, the LDS org chart. Here’s the problem: there isn’t one, at least publicly. It’s not at all easy, and is often simply impossible, to figure out who is running various operations and departments of the Church on an ongoing basis. Take a simple example, LDS physical facilities management. Do you even know the names of the departments that oversee and manage LDS facilities? A quick Google search has AI spitting out a couple of names as directors of “Headquarters Facilities,” but that info was gleaned from their Linked In profiles, not from any LDS statement or document. LDS departments seem to have directors or managing directors appointed to run daily operations, overseen by a GA or committee of GAs who meet occasionally to review actions taken and future plans. But the whole structure is almost entirely opaque to the rank and file.
Second, LDS finances. Up until about 1959, the Church released annual financial reports. You as a member (or anyone else, for that matter) could read them and get an idea of LDS revenues, expenditures, assets, and liabilities. Then that stopped (the Church was encountering some financial difficulties and didn’t want the rank and file to know) and has never been resumed. Instead, there is a meaningless “audit report” delivered once a year in General Conference. I say meaningless because there is little point in hearing a report on financial statements you are not allowed to see. Furthermore, the Church undertook a years-long operation of materially misstating its finances to the US government in required investment reports and was subsequently sanctioned for its wrongdoing. But not a word appeared in the so-called “audit report” delivered in Conference. So either the auditors were not aware of those egregiously misstated reports, in which case they are incompetent and their audit report is worthless, or they found wrongdoing but felt no duty to disclose that managerial wrongdoing in their “audit report,” in which case that report is, as I claim, meaningless. In any case, details about LDS finances are simply not available to LDS tithepayers. No one really knows how their tithing dollars are spent, invested, or wasted.
Now for the group exercise. Let’s look at one particular LDS department, the missionary program, in more detail. Initially, you are not allowed to do an Internet search to get information. Let’s see how much or little we know about the LDS missionary program. Here are a few bullet-point questions, then I’ll ramble for awhile. I’m going to talk about the “Missionary Department,” but there may be several relevant departments and it/they may have a different name. That’s part of the exercise.
- Who is the director or managing director of the LDS Missionary Department?
- Who is the GA or team of GAs that supervises the managing director of the department?
- Is there a Missionary Committee of GAs, above and beyond those who supervise the managing director, that sets priorities and rules for the Missionary Department?
- Is there a handbook that gives detailed guidance to LDS Mission Presidents about what they can and cannot do, about what they can require missionaries to do or not do, and so forth?
- How are Mission Presidents selected and supervised? How much discretion do they have?
- What rights do missionaries have who serve the Church? Is there a handbook or document that informs missionaries what rights they have (or what they should do or are entitled to do) if they are sick or injured? If they are subject to unreasonable requests or dangerous requests? Is there anything as simple as a help line or complaint number in Salt Lake a missionary could call?
Maybe you know some of the above or maybe you don’t. Let’s start with this strange creature, the LDS missionary program. It is sort of its own entity within the larger Church. Missionaries do not report to and are not subject to control or direction by local leaders, bishops and stake presidents. LDS Mission Presidents do not report to local leaders or even, as far as I know, to Area Authorities. It is an entirely separate silo or authority structure, sort of a church within the Church.
You can now publicly access the LDS Handbook of Instructions. It changes its name every few years; it’s now called the General Handbook. Until about ten years ago, only the bishop and a few people within the ward or stake got a copy. Regular members were not allowed to read it. I’m guessing there is some form of General Missionary Handbook that Mission Presidents are given. It is not publicly available and I have never even heard a public reference to it. It’s hard to imagine there not being such a document. I’m also fairly sure there are a lot of unwritten rules that don’t get printed in that handbook.
What would be in such a handbook? If you have a young LDS missionary out serving, you are probably more sensitive to this question. What is a Mission President required to do or counseled to do in terms of missionary physical health, missionary mental health, missionary safety, missionary meals, missionary counseling, and so forth? Lots of MPs are quite responsible and take good care of their charges, but not all. The system should have checks and balances, reporting and supervision, in place to make sure all MPs, not just most of them, are acting responsibly and that missionaries have some recourse when there are problems. Has anyone read or even glimpsed such a leader’s missionary handbook?
I led with examples from the US government, but that’s not where I’m hoping the discussion goes. The point, I guess, is that one would hope that the LDS Church does better than the US government in terms of transparency and keeping its members informed. That’s a pretty low bar, but I’m not sure the Church clears it.
Let’s talk about it.
- Do you think the Church does a better or a worse job than the government in terms of transparency and giving honest info about its finances and operations to the general membership?
- What steps might it reasonably take to become more transparent?
- Is more transparency a good thing for the Church? It’s fair to acknowledge that some information is properly not released publicly. As an economist might put it, what is the optimal degree of transparency for a church?
- To look more closely at our LDS case example, what if anything do you know about the detailed directives LDS Mission Presidents are given about the care and feeding of their missionaries?
- Have you ever read, glimpsed, or heard reference to a Mission President equivalent of the LDS General Handbook?
- If you were ever a missionary in some sort of distress, or had a friend or family member in that situation, did you or they know what to do? Who to contact? How to get help? My sense is that LDS missionaries are grossly underinformed about this stuff, even if it often works out that a missionary in distress gets the help they need through regular channels. No doubt you have heard a few anecdotes, but very little official dialogue or discussion.
.
Wheat & Tares 
This being April 15, Tax Day, I figured I should include something on the government in my post, and this was the best I could do. How does the government use your tax dollars? How does the Church use your tithing dollars? Same sort of question.
Distrust between various parts of the government helps with transparency. Legislative bodies will mandate that executive bodies produce certain information. Because the church has no notion of separation of powers, we don’t have that avenue to encourage transparency.
At various levels, FOIA (and similar) processes can force the government to release information to citizens. I wonder if such a request sent to the COB would even get a response, or whether they’d just toss it in the circular file.
What steps would it take for the church to be more transparent?
From the church’s side, all it would take would be a decision to start releasing information. I’m definitely not a lawyer, but there isn’t a lot of information that the church couldn’t just decide to release today. Q15 could decide to be open about their health. Q15 could publish notes from their meetings, who was present, what topics were discussed, etc. Financial statements. Sunday attendance numbers for every unit in the world. You name it.
From the member’s side, the only thing that could be done to increase transparency would be large scale public protests. At some point, protests with 10,000 people holding “we want attendance statistics” signs camped in front of the COB would have to be addressed. It’s a little hard to imagine getting that many people to show up. People privately writing letters, resigning membership, no longer paying tithing, staying home, filing lawsuits, etc., will not have any impact, because they’ve already been doing that by the thousands for years. As with most things in the church, there is a complete and total power imbalance.
Best as I can figure, the missionary department plan is to trust that mission presidents won’t do anything too crazy, and the enforcement plan is that every mission has at least one missionary whose mom is married to the nephew of a GA, and if things get too bad, word will get back to the Q15 and eventually the mission president is removed. It’s amazing that this mechanism hasn’t been copied by organizations the world over.
Until Trump started breaking laws right and left, the government had better transparency. Now, we probably have not seen yet how bad it is going to get under our dictator from day one. But there were things like the freedom of information act that provided some government transparency.
I think churches should be much more transparent, because supposedly the “church” is the people. What’s more, churches should not have top secret information because they do not have weapons of war and war plans. Churches should have nothing to hide, except maybe voting for the new Pope. But when churches start hiding things, you know two things. #1 is that the church’s leaders no longer think of the “church” as the members and are thinking the “church” is the institution that runs the church. This is when they get to worrying more about public image than they do members individual well being and sacrifice sexual abuse victims to “protect the church.” They start keeping financial secrets so that donors do not realize the money is going for private jets and multiple cars and tons of makeup for Tammy Fae (only us old folks will recognize that reference) or so that members do not realize that the church is hoarding some 100 billion, just to hoard money and yet still telling the very poor to pay tithing before feeding hungry children. #2 is that the leaders *know* they are doing things that members will not like.
So, the fact that the church is keeping secrets from its members about lack of growth, to its finances, to hiding sexual abuse and paying off victims with nondisclosure agreements, you know that church leaders think members are less important than the institution and that they know you won’t like what they are doing.
DaveW provides a list of things that don’t work, but suggests that large enough public protests could work. Historical evidence does not support that. Best case, the Church makes sure it gets a public win, then quietly changes its policy to avoid another flare up (see the Coalville Tabernacle incident and the historic preservation efforts made thereafter).
Personally, I’m on a tithing strike. I pay tithing, but I direct it to other entities. Even thought the Church does not need my money, my actions frustrate my ward and stake leaders because they can’t give me a temple recommend, and without that, they cannot give me significant calling. If enough people joined me, the temples would be empty and the wards would be unstaffed. Then, somebody would listen, no matter how big the pot of gold they are sitting on.
A number of years ago, Russian-American economist Andrei Shleifer published a study showing that the best economies around the world have one thing in common, and its not low taxes or low regulations. Instead it is strong transparency and accountability mechanisms. I hear many conservatives go after the Nordic Countries or France or Germany as if they are the enemies whose economic systems would ravage the US. No. These are the good guys who have among the most successful systems in the world. Lower taxation and regulation should not be the goal. It should be more transparency. More accountability. Republicans and conservative propagandists (including many libertarians) have kept saying that the ultimate goal is low taxes and low regulation and then and only them will we be free. Nonsense. How much a country taxes, regulates, or spends on social services is irrelevant. Transparency and accountability are what matter the most. Trump and his cronies are increasingly non-transparent. Trump operates through executive orders, often in defiance of court orders, and intimidation to politicians and judges. He cannot be fully held accountable for his actions and that should work everyone. In fact, his tax-cutting and regulation-rollback are making us less free. We are less free from scammers and fraudsters. Less free from authoritarian rule. Less free to use our first amendment rights of assembly, petition, and speech. Less free from polluters and environment-destroyers. We should demand accountability, demand checks and balances, demand adherence to constitutional order. That is the only way we’ll achieve optimal freedom.
To be clear, I’m saying that large scale public protests are the only thing I can think of (in two minutes of trying) that might work. And if they haven’t worked in the past, maybe they just weren’t big enough. 😉 (I have no idea what would constitute “big enough”.) I have no expectation that such a protest would ever happen. With politics, we can’t escape the government (without moving to a different country) so we protest as a last resort of sorts. With church, escape is (comparatively) easy, and affiliation is voluntary, so too many of the aggrieved would just leave rather than protest.
Like lastlemming, I am also on strike from several things at church. As attendance isn’t one of them, I’m not sure if anyone has noticed but God, and He hasn’t yet mentioned anything to me about it. The problem with these private strikes is that even when The Church can see the impact of the strike (tithing, temple attendance, etc.) there is no way for me to communicate to The Church what I am striking about. For all they know, I’m mad that church isn’t 3 hours anymore. If enough people joined, they might react in some way, but how will they even know what actions to take? (As best I can figure, the current administration would conclude that I’m not going to the temple because it’s too far away and decide to announce even more temples!)
As a missionary in the early 1990s (office elder for a long time) I had access to the MP’s handbook, because he would leave it in his car, which we took to be serviced. As I recall, it appeared to be the same version that went to stake presidents and bishops. No title or section about missions that wasn’t part of the rest of how to administer the church in a district vs a stake. He got specific directions/counsel/guidance from meetings in the Area office in Frankfurt.
I recall a GC talk in which someone (Eyring?) described how missionaries were assigned. Inside the silo of the missionary dept, my experience was that they were very responsive to parents and mission issues such as serious health problems. The Area Presidency checked in regularly and asked questions of missionaries outside the presence of the MP.
None of that is general transparency, but my sense was a great deal of care and concern, though, depending on the mission and MP, YMMV.
A copy of the Mission President’s handbook was uploaded to the web a few years ago. See here: https://docslib.org/doc/4638445/mission-presidents-handbook
I worked for two different LDS contractors in the past and they would bid on every job involving a Church building that came up. I was never high enough in either of these jobs to look at contracts, but typically I had a good idea of who I was working for. And a a ballpark idea of how much money was involved.Not so with Church properties. All you heard about was the enigmatic “FM Group.” (I assumed the FM was for facilities management, but who knows, it could have stood for “feral marmots.”). The FM Group was always looming but never present, and hard to please. I do know they were required to take the lowest bid (the lowest bid was somehow always from Mormon business owner), so we were always pressured to rush and cut corners so boss man wouldn’t lose money. If anyone has any insight on FM Groups I would love to know. Is the Church outsourcing facilities management to an inside organization?
I remembered that the Mission President Handbook was leaked in the past. Here’s a 2006 edition: https://mormonleaks.io/wiki/documents/0/03/Mission_Presidents_Handbook_2006.pdf.
According to that handbook Mission Presidents are supervised by the Area Presidencies. This aligns with what my daughter, who recently completed her mission, told me. She said that the Mission Presidents in her area had regular meetings (usually virtual since they were spread out across a large area) with the Area Presidency where instructions were given. I don’t know that she knew that Mission Presidents were directly under Area Presidencies, but her description of what happens in the meetings seems to imply this is the case (and, again, the handbook seems to indicate this is the case as well).
Much has been said about the power of Mission Presidents over young missionaries with very little accountability. My daughter served in a country with 2 missions. Everything about the 2 missions in terms of people, culture, language, religion, politics, geography, size of mission, number of stakes and wards, etc. is pretty much identical. My daughter was sent to one of the missions, and because we live in the Mormon Corridor, we have a few friends whose children we serving both in her mission and the other mission.
The way the two mission presidents of these two missions ran their missions was night and day. My daughter’s mission president was an authoritarian with an ever more authoritarian wife who exercised a lot of power. I’m super glad that women in the Church are able to have such power, but to those who believe that *all* women leaders will be better than *all* men leaders, this mission president’s wife is a great counter-example. This woman presented training sessions where they parsed every little detail in the “Missionary Standards” manual (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/missionary-standards-for-disciples-of-jesus-christ?lang=eng). She loved to teach that “Obedience + Attitude = Happiness” (I’m not joking–I’ve seen her slides). She and her husband published a large document containing a bunch of draconian rules that stated they were “clarifications” of the Church’s global standards. In reality, the “clarifications” were just a ton of unnecessary, extra rules. A few examples:
1. Missionaries were not allowed to make voice recordings and email them to family or friends on P-Day (no rationale provided). This is pretty common practice in other missions.
2. A companionship of elders could not have a meal at a member’s house if a companionship of sisters was also invited (even if both the husband and wife were present–this was very, very frustrating to members who wanted to help the missionaries out by feeding the elders and sisters at the same time)
3. Missionaries in a district could only have a combined activity on P-Day once a month, and the duration was strictly limited to 2.5 miles.
4. Elders and sisters eating together at an activity like a zone conference or service project could not be able to see each other. There were literally activities where tables for elders were positioned awkwardly around a corner or the opposite side of a wall to make this happen.
Apparently, my daughter’s mission president was called out for these extra rules at one point, and the mission vigorously celebrated for a few days, until the president clarified that the rules actually were still in effect, but his extra rules document was no longer going to be publicly available–only zone leaders and STLs were to have access to the document moving forward. Talk about transparent! This change resulted in a ton of confusion and conflict since no one really knew what the rules were–especially given that the mission president and his wife updated the rules every, single transfer. The mission president could be more certain that the Area Presidency, parents, etc. wouldn’t see his rules document if only a handful of missionaries had access to it.
The Church sends out quite a few surveys to missionaries to gather information on how things are going. My daughter participated in a bunch of these surveys. I think my daughter heard this second hand, but she claimed that the mission president was under a bit of pressure because her mission had surveyed as one of the least happy missions in the world. It didn’t matter, though, since this mission president only had a month or two left before he went home when these results were made known to him, and he made absolutely no changes before he returned home.
The reports we heard from missionaries serving in the other mission in that country were completely different. Instead of focusing on “exact obedience” and creating extra rules, that mission president focused mostly on lifting up and empowering the missionaries and tried to get them excited about being missionaries (even though missionary work isn’t exactly super effective in this country). The missionaries there seemed to be much happier–and much more effective–than in my daughter’s mission.
It was well-known that these two mission presidents didn’t like each other. On multiple occasions, my daugher’s mission president’s wife was asked why they couldn’t try doing some things that the other mission was doing, and the response was, “Well, Mission X doesn’t do things the same way our does things.”, with the obvious implication that Mission X was doing things wrong. An AP to the other mission president, who we know well, said that his mission president told him a number of times how much he disliked my daughter’s mission president. He was fielding all kinds of complaints from members in the country to try to get my daughter’s mission president to loosen up, but he was powerless to do so. His biggest fear was that the Area Presidency would force him to change some of the things he was doing to reflect the way my daughter’s mission president was doing things.
Now that weekly calls home are allowed for missionaries to their families, I imagine that this has helped curb the power of a mission president quite a bit because those phone calls to parents provide a lot of transparency to the outside world about what a mission president is doing. I’m sure that some parents speak up in various ways if things get too bad. I never did do this myself because I feared that the mission president would exact some form of retribution against my daughter (I’m pretty sure he would have done so in subtle ways), so there’s that, too.
In some ways I think it’s good that local leaders, including mission presidents, are given quite a bit of freedom to lead the way they think is best. The needs of local congregations/missions are different around the world. There does need to be more transparency, though, since some mission presidents, like my daugher’s mission president, are just going to do the wrong thing when given too much freedom and are not required to be transparent. Perhaps the Church needs an independent missionary investigation group. Missionaries could somehow anonymously send this group complaints about mission presidents, and this group would be required to investigate and report back the findings/actions to the missionary who anonymously filed the complaint. For example, I think mission presidents have been told not to create their own rules beyond what the missionary department has created for the Church as a whole. Had my daughter been able to anonymously file a complaint about this, then perhaps this mission president could have been forced to stop doing this and live with the rules that the Church defined instead of all his crazy extra rules.
In response to DaveW again.
I did not advertise my tithing strike at first. I was serving as the ward financial clerk when I started and wanted to continue in that position. At the local level, the Church’s financial controls are sound and I wanted to be part of continuing those practices. But although I stopped attending tithing settlement, nobody noticed my strike. At some point the bishop started twisting my arm to renew my temple recommend and I explained why I wasn’t going to do that. He let it slide until he was released. The new bishop didn’t let it slide and I was released (although he and I have never had a conversation on the topic.)
A few months later, I was called into the Stake President’s office and issued a new temple-related calling. Apparently, my old bishop, who was the new first counselor to the SP, didn’t give the SP a heads-up (or had forgotten). Anyway, I had the opportunity to clearly state the reasoning behind my strike; i.e. that it is in response to the SEC fiasco and will continue until the Church achieves a degree of financial transparency that I am satisfied with. (OK, I’m being arrogant, but I’ve never had to pay SEC fines and they have. And it is possible that when they become transparent and I see how much money is going to BYU, I may continue the strike anyway.)
If you are not having your arm twisted to get a temple recommend or being issued callings that require such a recommend, you still have an opportunity to explain yourself–the annual tithing settlement (that I myself avoided, being a coward and all). But only do it if transparency is truly a major issue for you. If you just find the temple boring, you would be wasting your time explaining your strike.
Wheat and Tares:
“These echo chambers reinforce users’ preexisting beliefs by continuously feeding them similar content, thereby reducing exposure to diverse perspectives.”
The same 25 people, with very similar perspectives and beliefs; pretty much saying the same thing – back and forth – reinforcing the writers views.
What a waste of time and energy.
Given the specifics of this thought experiment, I thought I’d link back to my OP that included snippets from the Mission President’s handbook including the list of actions that should be taken if a missionary says they want to go home early: https://wheatandtares.org/2023/08/30/passport-control-missions/
grizzerbear55: nothing says the site is a “waste of time” quite so much as you showing up here every post to say what a waste of time it is.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
I don’t think it’s a waste of time. Spending an hour or two writing a post, then reading all the interesting comments, is one of the highlights of my week.
I’m surprised grizzerbear hasn’t died of a heart attack yet. She seems to go into a hyperventilative state of conniption every time something even vaguely political is mentioned on this blog.
Such a great blog, & lots of good comments! The penultimate for me is this summary by Anna:
“So, the fact that the church is keeping secrets from its members about lack of growth, to its finances, to hiding sexual abuse and paying off victims with nondisclosure agreements, you know that church leaders think members are less important than the institution and that they know you won’t like what they are doing.”
Says it all, right?