Useful data on the scope of LDS humanitarian efforts

Last updated on: August 28, 2016 at 8:06 pm by Dan Peterson

Useful data on the scope of LDS humanitarian efforts 2016-08-28T20:06:07-06:00 Dan Peterson

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LDS missionaries helping in the wake of a major fire in California, in 2007.
(Public domain photograph from the Federal Emergency Management Agency)

This article should be gratifying to Church members.

LDS Church Spent 1.2 Billion on Welfare and Humanitarian Efforts

A word, though, about the inevitable criticisms:

The recently most fashionable response of Church critics to such numbers is that the Church isn’t doing enough. After all, the Church gives only x percent of its total budget to charity, whereas companies A, B, and C give something on the order of, say, 3x. Or, to put it another way, the Church gives $Z to charitable causes, but Z divided by the number of Church members only comes out to the paltry sum of approximately $Z/15,000,000.

I’ll probably need to compose a relatively extended response to this objection.

In the meantime, though, three quick observations:

The Church is a charity. All of its donated budget goes to support charitable functions.

The correct comparison is not between the Church and some company that does charitable contributions. The correct comparison would be between, for example, the Church and the Sierra Club, or the Church and the Metropolitan Opera Guild, or the Church and the Smithsonian Institution.

What percentage do such organizations give to humanitarian service? I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that they give nothing. It’s not their function, and they understand that people who want to fight hunger in Africa, or eradicate disease in India, or eliminate homelessness in Appalachia, can (and do) give directly to organizations focused entirely on those causes.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sees service to the poor and the needy as among of its principal missions. Still, important as such service is, it’s only one of the Church’s missions. Those functions are commonly explained as 1) Perfecting the Saints, 2) Proclaiming the Gospel, 3) Redeeming the Dead, and 4) Serving the Poor and the Needy.

Of course, some critics of the Church don’t see the building of temples, the production of Church teaching materials, the support of international missionary work, the accumulation of family history records, and similar activities as legitimate objects of charity. But they don’t get to determine for others what is or isn’t a genuinely charitable cause, any more than they have any actual status to decree that, while fighting malnutrition is a bona fide charitable mission, advocating conservation (the Sierra Club), supporting grand opera (the Metropolitan Opera Guild), and building up museum collections and educational services (the Smithsonian Institution) are not.

I would guess that the figures cited in such articles as the one to which I link above are incomplete. They don’t represent, because they can’t represent, all of the hours of volunteer service that are given under the auspices of — often directly organized by, but sometimes merely (!) inspired by — the Church. My own ward, for instance, has done some spectacular service projects; I doubt that they’ve made it into the numbers.

Many if not most charitable organizations are obliged to hire their workers. A very great deal of the service given through the Church is given by volunteers, including full-time missionaries.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many of those who criticize the Church for giving too little give proportionately less, and even perhaps much less, themselves. (See here.)

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