Real Talk about Tithing

No matter how strained my relationship with the Church has become, no matter how much or how little I've had at my disposal, I have always paid a full tithe. There are people in this world, particularly disaffected former members of my church, who take personal offense at that. 

Why would anyone else care about what I do with my own resources? Why would the money I give in tithing ever be offensive to them?

Because they haven't even begun the process of deconstructing the impulse, especially present in certain LDS families, to be a relentless scold. They don't know how to interact with people beyond being a self-appointed measuring stick for the ethical behavior of others. I have to remind myself that only hurt people do stuff like this, and it truly has nothing to do with me. But the urge to be petty and ask them when the last time they bought something from Amazon was gets hard to ignore.

Another component to this is not understanding that there are legal limitations to how the Church can spend tithes and offerings, as opposed to philanthropically donated lands, funds, stocks, and estates from families like the Marriotts. Philanthropically-donated wealth paid for City Creek, not tithing funds. It's a private investment that has never been touched by tithing dollars. Anyone who doesn't know the difference is unprepared to have an intelligent, good faith conversation about what they're trying to criticize.

In all likelihood, my tithing money is paying the basic operational budgets for congregations outside of the United States. I'm paying electric bills for members of the Church in Europe. I'm paying for the disinfectants to clean the toys in Primary in New Zealand. I'm paying for basic, mundane, lifesaving things to people I don't know and will never meet. The money I give as tithes and offerings to the Church overwhelmingly pays for back to school clothes, puts food on tables and in pantries, gets medicine and wheelchairs to people in developing countries. I'm paying for youth camps in Brazil, temples in Africa, chapels in the Philippines, and for all the infrastructure in the lives of those Saints that come with them that wouldn't be there without my contribution, small as it is. 

My tithing is never going to be some life-changing amount of money, in terms of total monetary value. But Christ himself taught in the lesson of the widow's mites that it's faith and generosity, not money, that matters most to him. (See Mark 12:41-44) Jesus, who taught his people to "render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s" and pulled a coin from the mouth of a fish doesn't need money. (Mark 12:14-17, Matt. 17:24-27) Rather, he needs to know whether I will place the lives of others above and beyond the value of money. I pay my tithing to demonstrate to God that there are more important things to me in this world than money.

I don't take criticism on this aspect of my faith from folks who have never heard of D. Michael Quinn, let alone the work he did to privately verify that church finances are largely boring and unremarkable.

And to show, in good faith, that I'm not some rube who truly believes no tithing dollars are ever wasted, here are some of the things I would never spend another dollar on if it were up to me. 

1. BYU and CES 
2. Kirton McConkie 
3. LDS Family Services

The Church isn't perfect. But to sit here and say that the Church hasn't done any good at all with the money in its possession, that the ownership of those wrongs belongs to the members who gave that money in good faith, is totally asinine and disingenuous.

 

If the people making these assertions were purely interested in ethical consumption, rather than setting up others to fail moral standards they themselves could never meet, I'd take their criticism more seriously. But given that people complaining about tithing on Twitter from their iPhone, in line to buy coffee from the Starbucks inside of a Target before taking their Amazon return to the UPS store have no sense of themselves as they're going through space. They can take an entire stadium of seats.