Chapter 28
LDS Church Grand Strategy:
LDS Church Grand Strategy:
Past,
Present, and Possible Future
Where are we? Where are
we going?
What is the present
state of the church, and where do we go from here? In recent times the net growth
of the church has been very small, and we keep hearing of many people leaving
the church, supposedly because of the Internet and the opportunity for members
to hear many questions raised about the accuracy of the church history taught within
the church system.
Perhaps it would be
useful to list a sampling of some of the theories and opinions which have been
suggested for why we find ourselves where we are, and where we think we are
going. Jana Riess lists a few of these theories and opinions in her book The
Next Mormons, and I have found a few others:
1. Catholic sociologist Thomas O'Dea, in his 1978 book The
Mormons, based on his research from the 1950s, was pessimistic about the
future of the LDS church arguing "among other things, that higher
education would introduce such a strain of theological relativism to the LDS Church
that it would decrease faithfulness among the religions brightest and best."
But, as Riess points out in her book. "In fact, the opposite happened; … it
is often the best educated individuals who have the strongest ties to Mormon
orthodoxy." Nonetheless, perhaps we can say that, in the end, Thomas O'Dea
was correct in probably unknowingly anticipating the arrival of the Internet
which has had the negative effect that he predicted for higher education,
simply coming from a different source.1
2. Rodney Stark, an American sociology of religion
professor, made some very optimistic projections in the 1980s which would put
the church membership at 250 million by the year 2080. Actually, I think his
rejections were reasonable based on the data he had. It simply seems that he
did not anticipate that the LDS church would actively take steps to neutralize
itself so that his projections were short-circuited. Many of those growth-destroying
steps were taken in the 1960s and 1970s and apparently had not yet shown their
full depressing effects.2
3. A survey of over 3000 individuals, done by a group of
volunteers, and a related summary and interpretive book completed in 2013,
entitled LDS Personal Faith Crisis, seems to do a good job in describing
many of the individual symptoms of faith crises, which have resulted in many of
the best and brightest leaving the church. It points to the Internet and social
media as the main disruptive forces, as they have quickly introduced large
amounts of "uncorrelated" church history data to unprepared church
members. However, it does not seem to offer any specific solutions to these
problems, although it does express a sense of urgency about finding a good
operational theory and solution. Nonetheless, there are hints that a much more comprehensive
main church website might counter the many negative sites, but that appears to
be a nearly impossible and Herculean feat at this point. In my opinion, that
gigantic research and writing effort would be of limited value because it would
not be addressing the main problem. Just expressing love and concern for those
in faith crises seems to be the main proposed suggestion.3
4. David B. Ostler has experience as a stake president and
mission president and has an MBA and has managed businesses focused on
improving healthcare. He has written a book entitled Bridges: Ministering to
Those Who Question. He does not seem to offer a theory about the reasons for
the problems the church is having in gaining and retaining members. His emphasis
seems to be mostly on finding ways to ease the mental and emotional pain of
members who are feeling doubts and conflicts, with listening and seeking understanding
as the main activities.4
5. John Gee is the William (Bill) Gay Research Professor in
the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University.
As expressed in an article in the online Mormon Interpreter, he thinks
that Jana Riess is too pessimistic in her conclusions about the future of the
church. He claims to have seen surveys that give more optimistic results for
the future, but that optimism only seems to go so far as to indicate that the church
is stable and will likely remain static. It appears that he would be perfectly
happy if the church stayed stable and did not shrink, although in my opinion,
if the gospel is as great as we claim, it ought to be growing quickly.5
6. Jana Riess is an American writer and editor, and a senior columnist for Religion News Service, who has
written a book entitled The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the
LDS Church, mentioned above. She chooses not to offer her own personal
theory about Mormonism's future but favors the theory of Armand Mauss that "The
LDS Church has accommodated change before, and it can do so again." That
is a pretty thin and non-committal theory, not implying any particular
direction to be taken, but at least it is mildly optimistic. My observation is
that most past church changes have been driven mostly by economics, and one
might expect future changes to follow the same pattern. Riess points out
"that the literature about Mormonism and social science is so littered
with failed theories that anyone should be humbled by the prospect of adding
one more tombstone to that graveyard."6
7. Of course, church
leaders and speakers would typically say that everything today is just
wonderful, "all is well in Zion," and that the 2019 completion of the
magnificent temple in Rome should be seen as a "hinge point," presumably
the beginning of a story of great success for the church in "gathering Israel,"
also approximately coinciding with the 2020 marking of the 200-year anniversary
of the restoration of the church. My concern is that the 200-year mark is also
typically the point at which a restoration of the gospel starts to fall apart
as in 4 Nephi, and apparently as also seen in the Jerusalem church, to a lesser
extent. I fear that is the more likely outcome, as things stand.
8. In the face of these
fairly limited and unconvincing attempts to theorize about the problem, about
where the church might or should go, or the attempts to simply ease the pain of
the symptoms, without trying to discover and deal with the cause, I am surely
going to seem excessively bold in pretending that I have a fairly comprehensive
theory about the nature of the problem and the appropriate and specific plans
to deal with it. Still, the project should be worth the effort and the risk
since there should be a big practical payoff for the church and, especially,
its members, in finding a workable theory and answer.
My theory in a nutshell
In the LDS church we
have a supposedly Christian church that does not practice, or barely practices,
the main tenet of Christianity as taught in the New Testament – CHARITY. 1 Cor.
13. Less than 1% of the money that goes to Salt Lake City is devoted to
humanitarian aid or other social improvements. What does that tell us about the
church's attitude about the doctrine of charity? This seems to explain essentially
all the problems with today's church, and also implies a set of answers.
Introduction to
the Three
Phases of The Modern Dispensation
The church started out
on the right path under Joseph Smith, and then, 66 years later, at the time of
Wilford Woodruff, veered off the path of the gospel of Christ and gradually reintroduced
the law of Moses nearly 100% as did the Roman Catholic Church as it later developed.
The law of Moses today is no more inviting and exciting and uplifting or
"salable" than it was at the time of Christ, and I believe that
explains why the LDS church is barely expanding at all, or is actually static
or even shrinking. If we wish to see the Gospel reestablish its growth rates
and good influence on the world on the same scale that happened after Christ
organized his church in the Jerusalem area, where remnants of that distorted church
still eventually established Western civilization, then we will have to disassemble
and reverse the new installation of the law of Moses and go back to how things
were during the life of Christ and for about the first 300 years thereafter.
Three
Phases of The Modern Dispensation
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1.
Joseph Smith period (same as Christ's)
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2.
Today
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3.
Future Zion-establishing church (suggested)
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●No tithing – No
central collection of money, no paid central bureaucracy at all -- no
professional priesthood.
●No charge for any
miracle or ordinance
●Members were
expected to take care of each other and perform other charitable works as
wisdom dictated.
●No requirement for
chapels or temples, yet all higher ordinances were available locally, no need
for expensive communication or travel.
●With no building or
travel or communication costs, all personal resources were available for
charitable works.
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●We have most of the ancient
Old Testament law of Moses operating today even though Christ ended it
completely at his time.
●The law of Moses
consisted of paying tithing to support a large professional priesthood who
performed animal sacrifices. We have
dropped the animal sacrifices, but still maintain many temple activities as just
as necessary to salvation. We have the Sanhedrin, the large central
bureaucracy.
●To support this vast
and unnecessary bureaucracy, we have essentially ended all charity, the heart
of the gospel of Christ.
●As under the Law of Moses,
tithing and charity are mutually exclusive: if you have one you do not find
the other.
●The cost of membership
is about $500,000 for a lifetime membership; we might think of each important
temple ordinance as costing about $50,000.
|
●Establish the "New
China Program" which is the same as the old Christian program.
●End tithing again
and encourage wise charitable behavior.
●Replace statist
tax-and-spend welfare programs with charity-based programs which are 2 to 5
times more efficient and they also encourage freedom in general.
●Actively assert
principles of freedom.
●Actively counteract
worldly philosophies including organic evolution.
●Gather all
freedom-loving people in one place for maximum mutual support.
●Set up systems to
employ up to $10 trillion a year in charity operations in the world to raise
social standards to a millennial level.
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Phase
1 economics
Under Christ and under
Joseph Smith, joining the church cost nothing. All miracles and ordinances were
free and available locally. It was hoped that church members would assist each
other, and that would be their main financial commitment, although there was no
specific requirement.
The Jerusalem Saints
showed us that there was no religious requirement for building expensive
chapels or the even more expensive temples, so that essentially all personal
resources could be used for charity work. "Freely ye have received, freely
give" is the rule on how to use priesthood power. Something similar
applied to more worldly resources without any formal regulation. All saving
ordinances should be free and locally administered, removing essentially all
need for a paid central bureaucracy.
Until that crucial
original policy can be restored, the LDS church will likely remain a mere
tribal curiosity as was the Jewish church.
The Law of Moses rules and practices could not serve any but the Jews, being
completely unfit for worldwide consumption and application. The same is true of
the LDS church today among the Mormons.
Phase 2 economics
As with the ancient law
of Moses, today the central bureaucracy of the LDS church collects up
essentially all charity from the members and spends it on itself, with less
than 1% going out as humanitarian assistance or other social improvements. Most
of the rest is spent on unnecessary things.
In today's LDS church
world, the expected cost of a lifetime membership is around $500,000. That could
mean that if a single person received one set of ordinances, their
"endowment," that would be the total return to them on their
$500,000. At the other extreme we might have a family with 10 children who were
all married in the temple, implying a cost of about $50,000 per ordinance. For
someone who did 100 ordinances for deceased relatives, that might bring the
cost per ordinance down to $5,000 each. Again, under the rules of Christ's
Church, or Joseph Smith's church, there would be no cost for any of those
ordinances.
Some Important Events
Along the Way to Establishing Phase 2
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Year
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Event
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Significance
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1896
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Church contributions declared available to be
used for church leader salaries
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Formal beginning of priestcraft and attempts
to maximize headquarters income through new tithing channel to be developed. The
goal was to monopolize and monetize all important ordinances. Federal
persecution was used to the central church's advantage.
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1899
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Tithing re-invented and re-emphasized
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The next step in maximizing headquarters
income announced by Lorenzo Snow.
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1923
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Church incorporates as corporation sole
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Church cuts off all member participation in
church administration. Headquarters claims separate, complete, and even hostile
ownership of all church assets and property.
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1942
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Church embraces pacifism for WW II
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Church decides not to defend freedom in the
United States or anywhere else. Considers itself above the U.S. Constitution.
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1960
about
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Church makes full central tithing mandatory
for temple attendance
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This was the formal end of Christian charity.
Tithing and charity are mutually exclusive in practice.
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1977
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Doctrine of the Gathering abolished
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Lowers general growth of church, but
maximizes income from existing members. Foreign members are trophies and
hostages to extract more money from more wealthy US members. 90,000 members
came from Europe to Utah in the 1850s and 1860s to escape the bad conditions
in their home countries and guaranteed church success in Utah. This vital growth
process was officially ended.
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1978
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Blacks given priesthood
|
It is nice to have all men treated equally,
but notice that with temple privileges came tithing "privileges,"
as well, making it sound like a revenue measure as much as a fairness
measure. This would let the church grow in size, but even more in revenue.
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1979
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Abolish church patriarch position.
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Finalize centralization, monopolization, and
monetization of sealing ordinances. Stake patriarchs previously held all
sealing powers, preventing central monetization.
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2019
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Ban guns from church facilities
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Another blow to gospel freedom requirements. Shows
willingness to degrade U.S. Constitution, not defend it, even though it is
incorporated into LDS Scriptures.
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Consequences
Since 1896, when the
church began collecting tithing centrally and authorizing it to be used for
salaries for church leaders and employees, a rough estimate would be that the
church has collected about $1 trillion from the church members to be spent
mostly on salaries and travel and office facilities for church leaders and
staff, with a small portion being devoted to chapels and temples, perhaps much
less than 10% of the total. For example, if we assign a value of about $30
billion to the church's holdings of chapels, that $30 billion is only about 3%
of the trillion dollars which has been collected over the past 120 years.
(30,000 chapels at $1 million each would equal $30 billion.) Most of the rest
of the $970 billion collected has apparently been spent for living expenses for
church leaders and staff. That is $1 trillion which has been almost totally
diverted out of the set of vital charity applications it was originally
intended to be devoted to by the members who paid it in.
I think it is easy to
imagine that if the church members had applied that trillion dollars
effectively in charitable pursuits, instead of having essentially all of that
money taken and consumed by church headquarters, those church members would
have done a great deal of good in the world. People would see the good works of
the members and would wish to join in themselves, having been shown how to be
good Christians. That vast amount of individual charity work would probably be
the most effective missionary work that anyone could ever do.
In contrast, the church
has essentially ended all charity work of any significance, and they send their
missionaries out, the church's salesforce, for the main purpose of getting new
people to send tithing money into the central church headquarters, where all of
it is essentially wasted, regardless of the amount received.
I am going to assert as
highly likely that this expenditure of a trillion dollars in high-quality
charity work would have easily caused the church itself to be 10 times as large
as it is now, having generated enormous amounts of goodwill by that Christian
behavior. If we actually have 5 million serious and active members today, we
would then have 50 million serious and active members. It is vital to realize
that a very important aspect of this charity program is that it would create a
complete social insurance system for its participants, the members, which could
replace all of the extremely expensive, wasteful, and corrupt government
tax-and-spend "charity" programs that are now in existence.
All of those resources
which are now taken by taxation by greedy governments would be available to
provide charity-based social insurance which would be at least 2 to 5 times as
efficient as anything found available today. That very large amount of
government tax money could be added to the church "tax" money, which
the church calls "tithing," to represent a very large amount of money
available for serious charity work. With that original 10-times increase in
membership, and the creation of this very powerful positive upward spiral, by
now we could have actually already reached another 10 times growth increment,
possibly reaching a total of 500 million worldwide.
Besides providing a
promise of overcoming death with a clearly described afterlife, the church
could also promise to overcome suffering in this life, so that fear of death
and fear of suffering could be greatly assuaged. Someone said that "a
church which cannot save us temporally cannot save us spiritually," and I
believe I have just briefly described how both can be achieved through correct
teachings and policies.
I believe it would be
sensible for the church to increase in size by 10 times every generation, which
would mean by the end of the second generation, or sometime about now, the
church could easily have an effective size of 200 million members or even 500
million members.
As another way to
compute this, we might notice that when the federal Social Security program was
proposed in the 1930s, there was an option to create an alternate nongovernment
system to take care of the pension needs of citizens. Those who did take
advantage of that alternate system option have done extremely well, with their
pension payouts being in the range of 2.4 to 5 times as great as the government
pension system can produce. In many cases, the retirees receive $2.5 million
more than received by those in the government system, and that money is owned
by the pensioner and he can spend it as he sees fit or pass it along to his
children or devote it to charity or missionary work.
If church members had
been encouraged to set up such systems 90 years ago, the typical retirees under
those private systems would have reaped about $10 trillion more in pension
benefits then they would have received under the single option of a government
Social Security pension. That extra $10 trillion could have done a great deal
to accomplish charity work and missionary work, far beyond what has actually
been accomplished under the actual system accepted by the church and its
members.
Precise calculations
are a bit difficult, but it should be easy to see that if church members had had
an extra $20 trillion to spend on charity work and missionary work over the
past 90 years, 20 times what the church took to itself for its short-term
purposes, it is not too much to expect that the church would have reached a 200
million membership level. The world is eagerly waiting for this kind of a
gospel solution to all of life's problems, and millions would rush to join in.
As it is, with a
membership lifetime cost of $500,000, that is an enormous net loss as compared
to an additional increment such as the $2.5 million alternate Social Security
system could provide.
The main point here is
that by taking this money to itself, as a huge and almost prohibitive tax on
church membership and growth, the church has greatly discouraged membership
growth and has made essentially impossible the most effective kind of missionary
work imaginable which is individual charity work on a very large scale.
Phase 3 economics (suggested)
China
is the new Rome
China is the new Rome (but
so is Russia, only on a much smaller scale). Blacks were given the priesthood
so they could go to the temples, after paying tithing, which they now have an
incentive to do, accomplishing the main church goal of increasing revenue. That
action brought the blacks completely into the current system. In the Chinese
case, they ought to be given old-style patriarchs who could bring them all of
the sealing ordinances without the need for temples. That would be inventing a
new system to bring the Chinese into. The same strategy should work just as
well in Russia.
If someone were looking
for a test bed to verify my claims here about how the gospel worked so
successfully before, just after the life of Christ, and could do so again under
the right conditions, all they would have to do is quickly create a very simple
"China program" that was indistinguishable from the church at
Christ's time. As under Roman rule, which
fostered paganism as the state religion, in China there could be no visible LDS
chapels and no temples to
compete with the Chinese "state religion" of atheism, but all the
saving ordinances, including all temple ordinances, could still be delivered
there. Also, the comprehensive social
insurance system that is an inherent part of a charity-based religious society
would probably be very well received and would likely cause the church to grow
explosively. The church would also find itself gently supporting freedom
instead of trying to suppress freedom for its own financial benefit, as it does
today in so many countries by explicitly supporting freedom-hostile regimes, as
the current method of expanding gospel penetration into new areas.
India could be a
similar trial ground, and the new program should be a lot easier to apply there,
since the fanatically totalitarian communists do not have such a tight grip on
that country. However, the temptation
for the church to try to continue its law of Moses imposition in India as well,
would probably doom that program to failure.
Apparently, the original gospel of Christ can only work properly and
reliably, on a long-term basis, in an authoritarian country like Rome or China.
That is, we have the strange situation where an authoritarian government helps
to enforce the correct version of Christianity, where a free country allows the
priests to hornswoggle the members and set up their separate and destructive religious
priestcraft systems, as in the U.S.
The authoritarian
countries try to suppress all competing centers of influence and power,
especially including outside religions that have not been certified as
authentic "warlord religions" supporting dictatorships. The LDS
church would apparently be willing to do that, but, thankfully, has not been
very successful at it. For correct Christian religions to be successful in that
context, it requires that those religions operate at least semi-underground so
that there is at least no visible political and "hearts and minds" influence
and ideological challenge to the reigning dictatorship.
Obviously, if this proposed
China test were successful, it could show the absurdity of what the
"free" West has been trying to do to the gospel, and with the gospel,
by imposing a greedy professional priesthood to exploit and neutralize the
natural charity-based Gospel for short-term financial gain.
Perhaps this suggested
program is what is going on already in China, with the LDS commissariat having
been forced to do what it would never do willingly and spontaneously. But this
new China program would have to be kept more secret in the West than it is in China,
since if anyone in the West knew that they could be active members in good
standing without paying tithing to Salt Lake City, the entire current financing
system would collapse. As it is, here we could have one authoritarian
government (China) keeping another would-be authoritarian government (the LDS
church) straight. There is quite a bit of irony there.
I believe the church
normally demands that an adequate banking system be set up to collect and transfer
money from foreign member locations to Salt Lake City before the church
considers itself to have been established in some country. In the China case, there
could be no import or export of tithing money, especially not through any
official banking system, without putting the church, and especially the
members, in harm's way, so that the churches there would have to be self-contained
as was intended to be true under Christ's church. Again, we would have made a "virtue of
necessity" and accidentally got the right religious answer.
If members were to
travel from China to Hong Kong, for example, to receive temple ordinances, they
would immediately reveal their identity to the Chinese dictatorship and potentially
cause themselves a great deal of trouble. However, if all ordinances could be
administered in China, and done quietly, it would very definitely not be
visible, and the Chinese government may not feel any need to intervene, especially
since there would be no government profit in intervening. If everything is
free, there is nothing to tax or extort, so there may be no reason to intervene
as long as the members are not proposing revolution.
If members were able to
migrate out of China as part of the Gathering, that could give even more
Chinese people an incentive to associate with the church, and the process could
collect the most freedom-loving people out of China and give them a better place
to live and operate. A gradual brain-drain from China of the most freedom-loving
people, leaving behind the "dregs," so to speak, could perhaps be a
gentle reminder to the Chinese Communists that the way to a nation's greatest
success is through establishing freedom-enhancing policies.
The attempt by the LDS
church to add its extra governmental layer of revenue-producing religion over
the top of a communist regime in East Germany, as part of the USSR, did not
work out too well. Hopefully that was taken to demonstrate that Mormonism and
communism cannot be made explicitly compatible, and even complimentary on a
long-term cooperative basis, although they might be able to be peacefully
overlapping in the same space for a short period until greater freedom arrives
as with the fall of the Soviet Union.
The results of such
experiments could reasonably mean that we eventually add 200 million members
each in China, India, and Russia, plus another 200 million in the United States
and Europe, and then, at perhaps 800 million members, we could actually claim
to be a world church, having established a worldwide gospel-based civilization.
This is what could reasonably happen if the church would get out of the way of gospel
progress, and
stop compulsively trying to milk a huge, even obscene profit on every single
person who joins the church anywhere in the world.
Totally charity-based
organizations (such as The Red Cross and Father Flanagan's Boys Home, now known
as Boys Town -- both of which could probably be improved upon) can do very well
in a free society, demonstrating that there is no need to monopolize religious ordinances
and extort the members to get religious operating funds. It just requires an
adjustment in thinking and an adjustment in how one presents projects worthy of
member support. We have the totally non-religious "GoFundMe" or "Facebook
Fundraiser" type of Internet mechanisms for assembling funds for good
projects. Besides, with perhaps $200
billion in accumulated funds, the church could operate indefinitely without
receiving another dime in tithing funds from anywhere in the world, although it
might need to cut down on the number of structures built, which it probably ought
to do anyway.
For some reason, the
church has been afraid to use its $200 billion in reserves to use today's media
outlets to prepare people to receive the gospel. That $200 billion is the same
as about 200 presidential campaigns as far as being able to make people aware
of what is going on. A media blitz on a much smaller scale would be more than
enough to prepare the way for missionaries so that there would be no need for
them to behave as independent unsupported door-to-door salesman, but they could
simply become "order takers" in a system for those who would like to
join the church, empowering missionaries to bring in hundreds of people every
year per missionary. Presumably, those techniques have not been used simply
because the church wants to make no ideological or political ripples anywhere
in the world and is perfectly happy with the current size of the church budget,
so it sees no need to make its presence any better known.
This charity-based technique
or business model would allow the church to draw in hundreds of billions of
dollars from sources outside of its current tithing extraction membership base.
The church could become THE charity organization worldwide with multi-trillion-dollar
budgets. Someone just needs to make the necessary changes in concept and direction.
Further information
For extra detail on
many important points that underlie this paper, see MormonAudit.com, a blog which
contains a book-length work entitled Is the Church as True as the Gospel? A
Constitutional Approach.
NOTES
1.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2649810-the-mormons
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Stark
3. https://faenrandir.github.io/a_careful_examination/2013-faith-crisis-study/
https://faenrandir.github.io/a_careful_examination/documents/faith_crisis_study/Faith_Crisis_R28e.pdf
4. David B. Ostler, Bridges:
Ministering to Those Who Question (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019).
5. John Gee, "Conclusions
in Search of Evidence." Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint
Faith and Scholarship 34 (2020): 161-178; https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/conclusions-in-search-of-evidence/