Chapter 25

 A breach of fiduciary duty by the LDS church

This book has presented some of the many ways in which over the last 120 years the church headquarters unit has caused the LDS church to deviate greatly from the principles and policies of the original church of Christ established by himself during his life, and then reestablished through Joseph Smith. Those many deviations, done in almost every case to benefit church leaders financially and to encourage their prideful behavior, can nearly all be put under the category of "breach of fiduciary duty." It seems possible that the church leaders' consciences have been seared to the point where they have turned everything around completely. They would say that there IS no fiduciary duty on the part of the church leadership to the membership, and that only the opposite condition exists, with the members having many burdensome duties to the church leadership.

This whole process of deterioration has proceeded so far that it seems impossible that there is anything one could do to re-substitute actual Christian principles for the extreme levels of secularism and philosophies of men that have such a firm grip on the church organization today.

When we bring up the topic of breach of fiduciary duty, the first thing to be noted is that everything today is exactly backwards from what one would expect it to be, and as it once was in the original Christian Church.

Where once the church leaders were the servants of the members, now they see themselves as the masters of the members, as a matter of right, they would probably claim.  The church leaders feel no discernible duty to the members.  The only duties now are those enforced against the members by the leaders.  The duty of a good member is to pay a full tithing and never say or do anything which would put any church leader in a bad light.  Some people want to call the church a cult, and it is this top-down control and the church leaders' sense of ownership of the membership that perhaps gives some meaning to the term "cult." I am assuming that the idea of a "cult" involves some leadership interference with the freedom of the members.

At the beginning, the church was an unincorporated association, partly because it could not be anything else as it kept gathering in different places and moving to other places.  Under that form of government, the church members could hold legally effective votes to choose a trustee to act on their behalf in legal and organizational and all other such practical matters.  However, somewhere along the line, the church rearranged things and declared that church members had absolutely no legal powers to have any effect on how the church leaders managed the money they received or property they owned or any other aspect of church administration.

The process started in 1896 when Wilfred Woodruff decided that church leaders could use church tithing funds to pay their personal expenses.  It accelerated to the point in 1923 when the church declared itself to be operating under a new organizational method.  It encouraged the Utah state government to make available the governmental corporation option called a "corporation sole," which the church adopted. That also makes the church a creature of the state government, which has only bad effects, as far as I can tell. This is the process of "secularization by incorporation," a process validly feared as a corrupting force by other church groups.

The secular attraction of the corporation sole is that it gives absolute control of everything to a single man who holds a specific position, in this case president of the church.  That sole person need not pay any attention to the council or voting of anyone in making any and all decisions.  Certainly, the members of the church today have no right to be heard under this new organization.  And technically, even the other church leaders, such as members of the Twelve, also have no legal right to have any effect on any decisions.  Presumably in practice, the corporation sole, this sole proprietor of this new church, would counsel with others before making a decision, but there is no legal requirement that he do so.

It should be noted that the "corporation sole" feature of Utah law can no longer be used for any new organizations. This was not a "single use" statute, but almost.

This situation brings up the question as to why a church president would even want to become a dictator over all aspects of the church. Christ certainly did not seek any such power. Other charitable corporations require that there be at least three people with governing powers, as part of a committee or board of directors, but here the LDS church does not even recognize the wisdom of an ecclesiastical presidency or bishopric, or even the Godhead, for that matter, as it gives all earthly religious powers to a single person, exactly as is done by the Roman Catholic Church with its pope. That issue of concentration of power was also discussed elsewhere in this book.

That means that where the church members had a recurring opportunity to express themselves in a practical way as when choosing or re-authorizing a trustee, now their votes are of no significance whatsoever.  It may be that public church voting has a ceremonial purpose so that it appears that church members can express themselves in ways that make a difference, but that is pure perception, not reality.  If every person in the church voted against some proposal by the Church president, it would make no legal difference, although in that extreme case, the church leader might reconsider that particular decision, but only as a matter of public relations, not as a matter of legal requirement.

The church leaders have managed to take the original Gospel, in which those who were given the priesthood were held to the standard of "freely have ye received, freely give," and those leaders have changed everything so that nothing important is free, and all the higher ordinances must be paid for at an extravagant rate: 1/10 of a person's income for life. As a practical matter, this means that traditional Christian charity drops to near zero, since all the resources for performing that charity, the typical 10% of religious contributions, now all goes to the central church where those contributions are mostly wasted as far as accomplishing any typical early Christian goals of charity (which in our era should include improving the freedom and success of the entire society).

The money which is received mostly goes to salaries and travel costs and a small part of it ends up funding the construction of buildings.  Perhaps $30 billion out of $1 trillion ($1,000 billion) received by the church over the last 120 years has gone to build chapels, with perhaps another $10 billion being devoted to building temples.  None of those construction projects are required by the gospel program which Christ restored, so one must decide how much of this was spent for the proper benefit of the members and how much was spent as acts of pride by church leaders.  Since the church would have been far more successful if those resources had all been devoted to Christian charity, it is possible that none of that spending was justified.

In summary, in the last 120 years the central church has used its paid-ministry-distorted preaching to extract about $1 trillion from the church members, and the bulk of that has been completely wasted.  Some people have said that the church has about $100 billion in savings and investments, but that is all that is left of that $1 trillion which mostly went up in smoke.  Perhaps that $100 billion could be reclaimed through some process and applied to charity purposes.

There is at least another $10 trillion which can be charged to a breach of fiduciary duty by the church leaders in the case of the church not promoting an alternate Social Security system when that would have been easy to do.  The government made it very difficult for someone to simply avoid some kind of a pension system, and assuming that one could not avoid such a system, there was still the option to create a system on a private voluntary basis using parameters similar to the taxing parameters of the government-administered version of this new pension program.

If the church leaders had encouraged most of the church members to find a way to opt out of the government system and establish their own system, as many others did, by now that would have meant that church members would have received an extra $10 trillion in pension payouts over anything which the government system has provided.  (That would be about 5 million church members each receiving an extra $2 million as part of their retirement package.) We might notice that that is enough money to pay the current budget of the church for about 1000 years, assuming that the current church budget is only about $10 billion a year.  The main point is that this is a huge amount of money which would be free money to those who had retired, and it would have given them enormous possibilities for doing missionary work and charity work and doing other good things in the world on their own, completely outside of the controls of the central church organization. 

Based on other church leader behaviors, one might wonder whether the church leaders made the actual calculation to avoid encouraging any such thing as an alternate social security system, simply because they did not want the church members to have the religious and economic freedom to take care of some of these things on their own.  A highly active membership which was well-funded, might be a kind of embarrassment to the church leaders of today.  Well-funded and enthusiastic church members might very well do things which the church leaders would prefer they didn't. 

For example, the church leaders want to maintain a very bland presentation to all the generally corrupt leaders of the world, so that those corrupt leaders will welcome the church in on its preferred terms of being centrally directed itself, and if there were any church members who were actually promoting freedom in the world, it would make it far more difficult for the church to present itself as a very bland and passive organization (even while being monolithic).  Presumably there are many members like myself who would take full advantage of this opportunity to make a difference in the world if they had the resources to do so.  My activism would likely cause consternation among the highly control-minded church leaders who want to be able to operate without any competition from within.  They don't want their decisions second-guessed or bypassed by enthusiastic members who are better Christians than the church leaders in their impulses.

As a quick review, we might notice that the central church took steps to disconnect itself from the church membership and make itself totally independent, without any legally enforceable duty to do anything to discover and carry out the views of the members.  On numerous occasions, its self-selected impulse to operate above the U.S. Constitution and outside of US laws, sometimes actually cooperating with the political enemies of the US, is something it could not have done without consequence if it still had to maintain the approbation of the bulk of the membership.

Two possible insights into church thinking:

1. Starting with Wilford Woodruff, it is not possible to believe any statement made by the church and take it at face value. The brethren started lying on a grand scale at that point, and on a consistent basis, for their own economic benefit, so it is hard to winnow out the truth. One of the big problems is when they are deceptive about the reasons they do things, perhaps giving a convenient reason but not the true reason. That can present quite a difficulty for any historians trying to understand what was going on at the time.

For example, the case of the end of polygamy and the end of the endowment house seem to be one of these cases where the reasons given were not accurate or at least not complete. Whatever the church may have said, it appears that one of the goals of taking down the endowment house was to end the practice of handing out essentially free ordinances, making it so that people would then have to go to the temples, and at the temples they could eventually be excluded if they hadn't paid their full tithing to the central church offices.

Of course, at the same time, there was this political question of continuing the practice of polygamy. The main problem now is that whatever the church leaders may have said on this subject is immediately suspect because they were twisting and spinning things for their own economic advantage. Without digging very deeply into that piece of history, it is hard to know how much of that change was really assignable to the persecution of the federal government and how much of it was done simply as being convenient to the new church leaders, Wilford Woodruff and his co-conspirators. If the church could blame everything on the federal government and nothing on themselves, that would be the ideal situation, politically, even though it would not be the truth and therefore would damage anyone's understanding of the gospel and how the gospel would resolve many of these issues.

For example, there may have been other forces in play which would have allowed the territory of Utah to become a state without being forced to totally give up the concept of polygamy. The problem here is that it was extremely economically convenient for the church to join with the federal government to stamp out polygamy because at the same time they were monetizing temple ordinances and looking at a future stream of income of $1 trillion, as it turned out.

The completion of the intercontinental railroad in 1869, 30 years before Utah became a state, may have made it such that it was critical for outside interests to make Utah a state regardless of what happened on the issue of polygamy, and based on that calculation, statehood would have been available under almost any circumstances.

2. Today we have thousands of people who are trying to prove that Joseph Smith made a huge number of mistakes in trying to restore the church, so that he is to blame for all the problems we see today. However, that seems to be an error, a "tradition of the fathers", a narrative, that actually benefits the corrupt church leaders. This diversion keeps these complainers away from the actual truth which is far more damaging to the church than anything anyone could say about Joseph Smith. At least this particular popular narrative still seems to maintain that the current leaders are direct and legitimate priesthood descendants of Joseph Smith, even though they may not be.

The truth seems to be that people today look at the church as it is and find it greatly wanting, the management of money being one of the main avenues of attack. The church obviously does almost no charity work at all, and that is certainly not in keeping with the church which Christ restored during his life.

Rather than do the logical thing and blame the current leaders and their predecessors back to Wilford Woodruff, where almost all of these distortions began, people imagine that the church today is actually the same church which Joseph Smith restored, which it most certainly is not. The church today would hardly even be recognizable to Joseph Smith.

The thing which will be necessary is for people to look at the church today and see that it is wrong and realize that it has had all these distortions added since the time of Wilford Woodruff, not since the time of Joseph Smith, and then take the steps to correct it. Apparently admitting that the church has been distorted over the last 120 years is just too much for people to accept. It is apparently too much for them to even wonder about.

A lawsuit would be impractical

Since they have many billions of dollars they could spend in defending their current improper takeover of the LDS church, with its current policies and privileges and revenue flow, and they also apparently have control of the corrupt court system in Utah, it would make no sense at all to attempt to bring a court action against the church, since they have positioned themselves as being above the law. They would win by hook or crook, with no concern for the accuracy of any arguments.  However, they are not above the court of public opinion, and that is where this "lawsuit" struggle needs to take place. Hurting them in the pocketbook by convincing people that they need to go somewhere else to get true religion, would probably offer the only possibility for bringing sanity to the current level of confusion and corruption at the church headquarters. Is anyone ready for a boycott? It would probably come as quite a shock to many church leaders that they are not authorized by the Scriptures to operate exactly as McDonald's does worldwide, avoiding all politics and other social influences and just "selling hamburgers," or, in the church setting, selling salvation by the pound or by subscription, by the month or year.

Another view of "breach of fiduciary duty" by the LDS church

The membership did not vote for that fraudulent takeover in 1923, which I call the "lawyers' coup."  The old "one man, one vote, once" socialist trick was apparently the technique used by the church. That has led to "one man, no vote" as our current condition. This assumes there was a currently authorized trustee who exceeded his authority and decided to turn his temporary authority into permanent authority, as he imagined.

That process happens often enough in the political world where a would-be dictator uses democratic means to get dictatorial control over a nation. The church apparently used that Gadiaton Robber trick on the church itself, accomplishing a direct attack on freedom of religion.

Perhaps it is finally time to start over and reverse that lawyers' coup. Otherwise, the church will continue to be weak and lackadaisical and get even weaker as the pioneer spirit and heritage and population shrinks, since apparently only people from that tradition are willing to put up with this nonsense. No one else in the world is so foolish. Every other Christian in the world understands the actual gospel better than the LDS church does and is rightfully reluctant to join up with such a greedy church.

A breach of fiduciary lawyer explains fiduciary duty and consequences of breach

https://www.nyccriminallawyer.com/fraud-charge/investment-fraud/breach-of-fiduciary-duty/

Church gun control and other political pretensions

The church may have finally gone too far, far enough to cause a formal schism, something which hasn't happened for quite a long time.  People have been leaving the church in large numbers, it seems, through resigning from the church, but very few of them have been starting their own separate churches.  That may be about to change.

As I understand what is going on, Texas has passed a rule which allows and encourages concealed carry of weapons in almost every situation in the state, including in churches.  Texas might have a good reason to do that since unarmed people in churches have been targets of mass killings, as have happened in every other place which someone might guess is a "gun free" zone.

So, without any very convincing evidence, using old cases that may or may not have anything to do with the new policy, the church has declared that as of the first week of August 2019, church members are not allowed to bring weapons of any kind to church, including concealed carry weapons. 

The church claims that it will not put up any signs declaring its churches to be gun-free zones, but it has made announcements to that effect far and wide, so that no one need be in doubt, whether church member or potential terrorist.

This is a slightly ironic policy change since it used to be a requirement that all Protestant church members bring their weapons to church, partly as a way to ensure that they actually had a working weapon. The West was won, especially including the state of Utah, only because of a well-armed and well-prepared populace who would not tolerate hostile intervention by a federal Army. Without those weapons, it is quite possible that the church itself would not still be in existence.

Now we have the church welcoming in gays and telling patriots to stay home with their concealed carry weapons.  In more "loaded" terms we might say that they have been recruiting gays and disinviting patriots or recruiting pagans and disinviting patriots.

This is one example of "jumping the shark," along with the building of a horrendously expensive temple in Rome, something which could be seen as another example of "jumping the shark," or catastrophically going too far. The church appears to be trying to keep up with the leftist movement in this country and other countries and it should not be too surprised if it finds that many people don't wish to go along with that ideological drift.

Recently it appointed itself our political representative, even though we have no say in or ability to elect any church leaders to act as our political representatives, and they have been giving away constitutional rights to gay activists as another ploy to keep up their membership by accommodating the demands of the insatiable political gays, the activists.

As I have suggested elsewhere, they are probably doing this partly to signal to the rest of the world that we as a church are pacifists and leftists so that no dictator need fear that any Mormon will resist their unrighteous dominion, whatever form it may take.  That seems like a very bad precedent and policy to set. Certainly, it is very anti-Zion in spirit. One cannot have a Zion unless one has prepared a place legally and morally to be a Zion.

The church in essence is saying that it is superior to the U.S. Constitution, even where that constitution was incorporated by reference into the LDS Scriptures.  Now it is explicitly rubbing out that aspect of LDS Scriptures and perhaps willingly saying goodbye to those people who actually believe fervently in the U.S. Constitution and its principles.  Perhaps it is saying that the Pioneers, with their extreme emphasis on personal freedom, served their purpose, but we can throw them away too -- "throw them under the bus" so to speak, as the church surges forward into this brave new world of embracing leftism at every level.

The central church offices claim power to exclude people from local chapels and temples concerning firearms. But they may have finally gone too far. At one time all the chapels were owned locally, and only gradually were they transferred to the ownership of the central offices, mostly for convenience. That migration back to the local church organizations could begin as a result of the church imagining that it has more power than it actually has. Obviously, all the local churches were paid for by church members, not by the central offices. The central offices, like any government, can only transfer money from one place to another. They don't actually create any money, at least not enough to worry about.