When 33-year-old accountant Linda Carver got her paycheck and noticed that, once again, nearly a third had vanished into the vortex of taxes, she assumed it was going toward boring stuff like roads, public schools, and the occasional morally ambiguous drone strike. What she didn’t expect? That she was personally subsidizing geriatric villains dressed as pious religious leaders, a $250 billion dollar private church investment portfolio, and an army of well-groomed 18-year-olds on bicycles good-naturedly ruining the whole operation.
That’s right, the LDS Church is using one weird trick to make YOU support Mormonism: not paying taxes.
“I don’t even get a Book of Mormon with my W-2,” Carver said, furiously refreshing TurboTax and wondering how her local school’s budget got cut again while the LDS Church is out here casually building a few temples with the extra gold bars Holland found in-between the couch cushions.
Unlike your Etsy side hustle, which will get audited into oblivion if you forget to report the $38 you made selling homemade cat bowties, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enjoys a magical IRS designation called “religion,” which in America is shorthand for “money laundering but with more neckties.”
Through the power of divine accounting, every dollar of tithing income — 10% of each faithful member’s earnings — gets funneled, tax-free, into a sprawling global empire that owns malls, insurance companies, and probably your grandma’s favorite apartment complex. All while smiling politely and claiming it’s all about stewardship and spreading the gospel and definitely not cornering the Utah commercial real estate market.
Here’s how it works:
- Collect tithing. Lots of it. Like, a billion each month.
- Claim tax-exempt religious status. Because God, or whatever.
- Invest that sweet tax-free revenue into stocks, bonds, real estate, agriculture, tech firms, and more through a web of shell companies.
- Reinvest the profits back into the investment scheme paying out dividends to top “shareholders,” because you can’t pay them when they’re called “clergy.”
- Use America’s infrastructure to support your operations. (You know, the stuff funded by your taxes.)
“It’s not a church, it’s Berkshire Hathaway with pews,” said religious finance watchdog Karen Walsh. “They hold weekly services, yes, but only between trading hours.”
Meanwhile, your local public school can’t afford paper, but LDS Inc. is out here buying up farmland like they’re planning to resurrect Brigham Young to become CEO of Tyson.
Even other billionaires are impressed. “I wish I’d thought of pretending to be a religion,” said Elon Musk, only to realize that he basically had.
In the tabloids:
Brigham Young’s Ghost Jealously “Reveals” Elon Musk is a “Polygamist Wannabe”
And let’s not forget that the church’s economic influence reaches far beyond Utah. They are America’s largest land owners. With shell companies masquerading as humble nonprofit arms, the LDS Church’s reach extends into luxury condos in Florida, agriculture in Nebraska, warehouse complexes in Arizona and tech investments from Silicon Valley to Silicon Slopes.
All of it built on your roads. Your law enforcement. Your tax-funded courts. Your public utilities. But don’t worry — if you ever find yourself homeless because housing prices got outbid by a megachurch pretending to be a monastery with a Fidelity account, at least you’ll have the spiritual comfort of knowing that they are using the spare change to build great and spacious nightmare fuel for Lehi.
Get our sacred insights hot off the press.
We'll never sell your information or ask for 10% of your income. Privacy Policy
