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Token donations

So, the LDS church is now bragging about having donated $1.5 million to vaccination efforts.  This should be noted that this is over a two-year period ($0.5 million for last year and $1 million for this year).  There are many reactions I have to this.

First of all, I do not see why this is news.  Yes, $1.5 million is a significant amount of money, and I'm sure it will help vaccinate lots of children that need it.  That's wonderful.  But, this represents less than .02% of the church's revenue (that's one-fiftieth of a percent, not two percent, in other words that's 1/5000).  Of course, the exact percentage can't be calculated, because the church refuses to publish its financials.  But, using a very conservative estimate, the church makes at least $4 billion per year, which would mean that the amount of $1.5 million over two years (making 1,500,000/8,000,000,000) is less than .02%.  If I spent that percentage of my income on donating to some particular charity, that would amount to about $3.  That's why I fail to see how this is significant.  If I donated $3 to some charity, yeah, that would be good--every little bit counts--and I'm sure it would go to helping someone (in a very small way), but I hardly see how it would be worthy of publishing as news.  It's pathetic.  (On a side note, the church is required to release all of its financial information in Canada.  In 2009, they collected a total of $150 million (Canadian dollars), and of that they donated $100 million to BYU.)

Another reaction I have to this is that it exposes the church's hypocrisy.  I don't know how many times in Sunday School I've sat through the whole "don't blow a trumpet before you" lesson.  To be specific, this is the passage from the Sermon on the Mount that is so often quoted.
1 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.

2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:

4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Matthew 6:1-4
I think it's fairly clear.  In fact, I don't see how you can possibly work around what that's saying.  And this isn't one of the passages of the Bible that the LDS church claims was mistranslated or is otherwise not inspired.  It's a passage that they quote all the time.  This is a doctrine that is heavily emphasized.  It is not good to brag about helping other people.  And yet, here the church is doing it.  Whenever they help out in any big way, they have to broadcast it as widely as possible.  They publish it on their news site (Deseret News is owned and operated by the LDS church).  At natural disaster cleanup sites, they have bright, yellow shirts for all of the Mormons to wear that say "Mormon Helping Hands".  It's not enough to just help out because there's a need--they have to alert everyone to the fact that they're doing it.  In other words, the LDS church has become precisely what Jesus was condemning in this passage. They sound a trumpet before them, just like the hypocrites did back in the New Testament times.  They want everyone to see how wonderful they are.

The final thought I had when I read this story is actually just a bit of irony.  I know there are some among my Mormon friends that believe that vaccinations are bad.  They fall for the (rather pathetic and easily disproven) propaganda that vaccines cause autism and other such ridiculous nonsense.  So, I think it's rather funny that there are Mormons out there somewhere who are giving money to a church that is now donating some of its money (albeit an extremely small portion--2 cents per $100) to vaccines that the member giving the money in the first place thinks will cause people to become autistic.

At any rate, I do hope that my Mormon friends ask themselves why the church is so eager to publish the fact that they donated $1.5 million to vaccination efforts over the last two years but is very hesitant to acknowledge that it spent $5.5 billion (that's over 3,000 times as much as the previous number) on building a shopping mall in downtown SLC.  Where is your church placing its emphasis?  What cause is it prioritizing here?

Comments

  1. I agree with your comments. I've been thinking along the same lines how the church is often distant or silent on pressing social issues or participates in only a minimal way when compared to it's vast resources. The stated reason is because the church has a higher purpose. Higher than helping those who need help today? It's a very different underlying theology than most churches. Anyway, I hope to blog about it later today, Best regards, Brad

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  2. Basic economics - vast shopping center downtown SLC = more exposure to temple square = higher numbers of converts = more tithe income. There are a lot of worldwide tourists coming to Utah for ski resorts and Park City for things like Sundance and such, so they have to have projected that this is a good investment.

    Churches are not charities, they are businesses. From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Also from a business standpoint, the PR they are trying to achieve by broadcasting their donations makes sense also. People care about charities, and don't put a lot of research into how much individual businesses make, they just see big numbers and get warm glowy happy feelings. Businesses donate the bare minimum to make their tax breaks more profitable than the donations they made, so they choose their charities very wisely and make a huge deal out of something that is essentially a money saver for them (i.e. they don't give two shits about it, really). Say what you want about nice people in the Mormon church, behind those nice folks are accountants who know how to run the game, same as any Fortune 500 company would have.

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  3. I'm going to quibble with your math. This vaccination effort was a special, one-time initiative. If you really wanted to gauge LDS concern for public health in the developing world, you would divide its spending over a longer period, such as 30 years. Your 1/5000 turns into something more like 1/150000, which would be equivalent to your giving one penny each year to this cause.

    Do you want to hazard a guess as to what it might cost to put those "I'm a Mormon" ads on TV and the Internet and to plaster placards all over New York City and Seattle and other major markets? Hundreds of millions per year would not be out of the question for a national campaign of this scale. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's $200 million per year. Where's the Deseret News article that talks about the cost of the I'm a Mormon campaign?

    Of course, the estmate is still only 5% of revenue to advertise the LDS brand (smaller than breakfast cereals, by far), but in one year the spending dwarfs the official LDS statement of $80 million in charity (cash plus the imputed economic value of labor provided by members) over a 25 year period since the mid-1980s.

    In contrast, Microsoft Corporation announced a few years ago that it had donated $2,500 million in charity over a comparable 25 year period (starting from 1983). In other words, Microsoft, a for-profit business, donated 30 times as much money to charity as a tax-exempt charity with roughly equivalent revenues (in the period being compared, Microsoft gets more now).


    WWJD? I doubt he would adopt corporate PR as a tenet of faith. And don't even get me started on the $5 billion of Church funds spent on economic development for downtown Salt Lake City, including billions for a luxury mall. I'm embarrassed for the transparent crassness of it all.

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