Escaping poverty through tithing?

(by Dan Peterson sic et non blog)

In the wake of the recent Washington Post “exposé” on the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, some critics have brought up a speech given by President Russell M. Nelson in Nairobi, Kenya, in April 2018 as an illustration of a despicable, deceitful, greedy “Mormon gangster” seeking to hustle, exploit, and prey upon poor Africans.  (It was in response to assumptions that Church leaders are “greedy” and feathering their own nests that I’ve shared photographs of their relatively modest homes and recounted some stories about them in my recent and possibly-concluded series of “LDS Inc.” blog entries.)

In that Kenyan speech, among many other things, President Nelson suggested that faithful tithepaying will end poverty:

We preach tithing to the poor people of the world because the poor people of the world have had cycles of poverty, generation after generation. That same poverty continues from one generation to another, until people pay their tithing.

Another Church leader who has come in for attack is Elder Valeri V. Cordón of the Seventy.  In a speech delivered at the April 2017 General Conference (“The Language of the Gospel”), Elder Cordón, who is a native of Guatemala, told of a powerful lesson about tithing that he learned from his father.  At one point, faced with a personal financial crisis, the senior Brother Cordón chose to pay tithing even when he was unsure how he would feed his family in the near term.  Early the very next morning, an unusual and quite unexpected business event delivered him from the crisis.

The critics summarize the lesson that Elder Cordón was seeking to teach as follows:  The greed of the Church comes first, even if it means that your family starves.  Maybe, they mockingly suggest, starvation can be cured by fasting?

I’ve invited one of the critics of Elder Cordón’s story to supply me with one or two examples of faithful Latter-day Saints whom the Church has knowingly permitted to starve to death.  I’ve yet to hear back from him.

But I now offer a simple story of my own:

I grew up in a part-member family, with a mother who was a rather marginal member of the Church and a non-church-going father who came from a Scandinavian Lutheran background.  I was privileged to baptize him a member of the Restored Church not long before he turned sixty.

One of the matters that concerned him, as he contemplated joining the Church, was the principle of tithing.  He was the owner of a small business, and the thought of shaving ten percent right off the top of his income really worried him.  It was a big chunk.

In later years, however, I heard him more than once express his wonderment at the fact that, even though he faithfully tithed after his baptism (and, for two years, was supporting me on a mission), somehow — for reasons that were opaque to him — his income actually went up after his baptism.  Reflecting upon his own experience, he developed a firm testimony of tithing.

Now, I won’t and wouldn’t promise such a thing to every individual person.  It’s not a cut-and-dried financial principle for every case that you can expect your income to increase if you tithe.  If things were so simple, there would be no faith involved.  No sacrifice.

But I’ve heard more than a few such stories.  Here’s one that I very much like, although it’s not quite as clearly focused on tithing as my Dad’s account is:

A number of years ago, my late friend and colleague Bill Hamblin went with some others (I’m not quite sure with whom) down to Mesoamerica to look at Pre-Columbian ruins there.  At one point, they were staying in a hotel near the site of the ancient Maya city of Copán, in western Honduras.  While there, they noticed that the young man who was serving them in the hotel restaurant was wearing a nametag that identified him as Moroni.

Blessed as they were with powerful deductive skills, they surmised that he might come from a Latter-day Saint background.  So they asked him.

Yes, he was waiting on tables in order to save up money for a mission.  (Over their time in the hotel, accordingly, they gave him exceptionally good tips.)  And he told them something of his family’s backstory.

His father had been the town drunk and wastrel.  His wife had had enough.  He was about to lose his very young children.  (Moroni came a bit later.)  Then he met the missionaries and converted.  Now, he had a solid job.  He was the local Latter-day Saint branch president.  Moroni’s father felt that the Church had saved his life, had given him a life.  It had saved his family.

Finally, there is strong scriptural basis for the (admittedly counterintuitive) idea that a community that lives faithfully, including observance of the principle of the tithe, will, on the whole, prosper.  Here, for example, is very famous passage, commonly quoted among Latter-day Saints, from the third chapter of Malachi.  I quote the translation given in the New King James Version of the Bible:

“Will a man rob God?
Yet you have robbed Me!
But you say,
‘In what way have we robbed You?’
In tithes and offerings.
9 You are cursed with a curse,
For you have robbed Me,
Even this whole nation.
10 Bring all the tithes into the storehouse,
That there may be food in My house,
And try Me now in this,”
Says the Lord of hosts,
“If I will not open for you the windows of heaven
And pour out for you such blessing
That there will not be room enough to receive it.

11 “And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes,
So that he will not destroy the fruit of your ground,
Nor shall the vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field,”
Says the Lord of hosts;
12 “And all nations will call you blessed,
For you will be a delightful land,”
Says the Lord of hosts.

The Book of Mormon itself chronicles numerous economic cycles in which obedience to the commandments leads to prosperity (and, alas, in which prosperity leads to faithless disobedience, followed by a rinse and a repeat).

I’m not surprised that unbelievers regard as ludicrous the idea that tithing might be part of a path to economic flourishing.  They would be hard pressed to justify viewing it otherwise.  However, unbelievers should not be entirely surprised that at least some believers do regard it positively, even in crass financial terms.  Faith is called faith for a reason.