Dallin Overstreet
Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion, vol. 4 (2024): 40-58
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between Mormon temples and county-level poverty rates in the United States. The Mormon church teaches that obedience to the law of tithing, which requires members to donate 10% of their income, can break the cycle of poverty. Using the presence of a temple as a proxy for tithing participation, I test whether counties with temples exhibit lower poverty rates than comparable counties without temples. Employing several difference-in-differences models on county-level data from 2010-2018, this paper finds no statistically significant evidence that temples reduce poverty rates. The results suggest that the presence of a temple has no effect on county-level economic outcomes, contrary to Mormon doctrinal claims about the power of tithing to alleviate poverty. This finding is likely attributable to the way in which the church allocates tithing revenues, a highly centralized and hierarchical affair with no clear mechanism to reduce poverty in the communities from which funds are sourced.
Keywords
tithing, poverty, financial transparency, Mormon, LDS, fiscal centralization
Publication history
Received: 25 November 2023
Accepted: 8 March 2024
First view: 3 April 2024
Published: 18 December 2024
1. Introduction
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon church, has experienced rapid growth in recent decades, reaching over 16 million members worldwide. It is now one of the largest and fastest-growing religions in the United States (Pew Research Center 2021). As part of its doctrine, the LDS church teaches that obedience and sacrifice lead to blessings from God, both spiritual and temporal. This includes the commandment of tithing, which requires members to donate 10% of their income to the church.
Mormon scripture states that people paying their tithing “breaks the bands of poverty” (Doctrine & Covenants 85:3). Church leaders frequently echo this claim, assuring members in stark terms that faithfully donating 10% of their income will help them overcome financial challenges and break cycles of poverty (Robbins 2005). President Russel M. Nelson, whom Mormon church members believe to be God’s chosen prophet on the Earth today, specifically taught members in Africa that “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” (Walch 2018). Essentially, the church espouses a “prosperity gospel” theology, asserting a direct causal relationship between tithing obedience and concrete economic prosperity.
Despite the strong confidence expressed in these doctrinal assertions, scant empirical research has examined whether tithing adherence actually reduces poverty as claimed. Additionally, the church provides no clear causal mechanism for explaining how faithful adherence to this doctrine will produce decreases in poverty. While some studies have shown that higher levels of religiosity lead to higher level of work ethic and thriftiness, which could explain the promised decreases in poverty, less focus has been placed on the use cases of religious funds generated through the practice of tithing. Quantitative data on tithing amounts paid by individual members is closely guarded by the church, with the large majority of financial decisions of the church being controlled by a small group of church leaders. The high degree of centralization in the church’s financial management system has possibly led to a disconnect between stated goals and actual outcomes when it comes to tithing and poverty.
This study provides an initial test of the poverty-alleviating effects of tithing by analyzing the relationship between Mormon temples and county-level poverty rates. Temples serve as an effective proxy for localized Mormon tithing participation and adherence. The LDS church uses reported tithing revenue from regional membership as a factor in determining where to construct new temples (Godfrey 2000). Temples are not ordinary meetinghouses—they are sacred sites reserved for the most important Mormon rituals, like eternal marriage (Kimball 1998). Members must consistently pay full tithe in order to obtain a “temple recommend” from clergy that grants them access to these exclusive rituals. The presence of a temple in a county signals a critical mass of adherents who pay tithing at the full 10% rate. If tithing obedience truly reduces poverty as claimed, we would expect to see lower poverty rates in counties with established temples compared to demographically similar counties lacking temples. The “windows of heaven” should be open wider, with blessings “pour[ed] out” in abundance upon the faithful tithe-paying communities with temples (Malachi 3:10).
To empirically test this hypothesis, I compiled a county-level panel dataset on poverty rates and Mormon temple dedications between 2010-2018. Using the construction of new temples as plausibly exogenous treatment events, several difference-in-differences models are estimated. The regression analysis controls for a range of economic, demographic, and religious confounding factors. The results provide no statistically significant evidence that gaining a temple reduces county poverty rates over either the short- or long run. This finding contradicts the definitive manner in which Mormon leaders preach tithing obedience as a direct causal driver of financial prosperity and a guaranteed means of escaping poverty.
This study makes several important scholarly contributions. First, it adds to the growing literature at the intersection of economics and religion by empirically scrutinizing Mormon doctrinal claims. Second, it builds on the limited but emerging research examining tithing behaviors and economic outcomes. Third, it contributes to studies linking hierarchies and power structures to organizational decision-making processes in a religious context. Treating religious policies and programs administered by faith groups as analogs to public policies administered by governments, this study scrutinizes the mechanisms through which the promised benefits of religious policies should be realized. The null results suggest that the LDS church—contrary to claims—does not efficiently reallocate tithing funds in a manner that reduces poverty.
2. Literature review
A limited economics literature examines the relationship between religious practices such as tithing and economic outcomes such as poverty. Tithing refers to the practice of donating 10% of one’s income to one’s religious institution. As a salient religious norm and marker of devotion, tithing warrants greater scholarly attention to understand its socioeconomic impacts, incentives, and implications (Azzi & Ehrenberg 1975; Iannaccone 1998).
Within contemporary American Christianity, tithing remains an important signal of devotion and religious commitment. An emerging strand of research in economics has begun to investigate the key drivers and determinants of tithing behavior among Christian adherents at the individual level (Brooks 2003; Olson & Perl 2005; Stanley & Markman 1992). Olson and Perl (2005) conducted a large national survey of over 1,500 households in the U.S. and Canada about their tithing practices and attitudes. Their empirical analysis identified income levels, strength of religious belief, and familial tithing history as three of the most important factors predicting tithing participation and commitment levels among respondents. In a separate study, Stanley and Markman (1992) similarly found using multivariate models that higher levels of church attendance served as a strong positive predictor of tithing behavior and participation rates among a sample of over 4,000 individuals. Dahl and Ransom (1999) similarly attempted to understand how self-interest skews personal beliefs on tithing, finding that a person’s financial situation may not be a great indicator of their belief regarding what is a valid tithe. These studies represent important initial steps toward empirically elucidating the individual-level correlates and drivers of tithing behavior among contemporary American faith communities such as Mormons.
A more limited subset of research has started to directly analyze or empirically measure the purported positive economic returns from religious participation via tithing that are strongly emphasized in the prosperity gospel doctrines of many contemporary American faith communities such as Mormonism (Powell & Bromley 2020; Keister 2011). Renneboog and Spaenjers (2012) leverage extensive historical census data on municipalities across the Netherlands to document that those with a greater share of devout Orthodox Protestants exhibited significantly lower historical rates of poverty and unemployment. They use historical evidence to ultimately posit that this relationship is most likely attributable primarily to unique religious cultural norms formed among such groups over time that tended to emphasize thrift, diligent work, community self-insurance, and self-reliance. Mormon religious leaders have similarly preached that obedient and faithful tithing brings direct financial prosperity and positive concrete economic returns for adherents (Hinckley 1982). However, substantially more robust contemporary empirical evidence that directly and rigorously substantiates these strong claims of specific positive economic returns accruing directly from faithful tithing adherence remains notably limited—especially in the economics literature focused on modern Mormon populations.
The logical and theological foundations underlying the strong Mormon prosperity gospel claims that link faithful tithing to direct economic returns have been critiqued by scholars of religion and philosophy (Bowler 2018; Mauss 2003). In a historical analysis focused specifically on Mormonism, Mauss (2003) traces the relatively recent advent and rise of explicit prosperity gospel rhetoric within highest Mormon leadership circles during the mid-late 20th century to argue that this doctrine lacks substantial scriptural justification within the LDS faith tradition. However, no existing studies in economics or other social sciences have yet rigorously and empirically tested these Mormon prosperity gospel claims by credibly estimating the causal effect of tithing adherence on verifiable economic measures or outcomes such as community poverty rates over time. No studies have attempted to explain the mechanisms through which this poverty alleviation would occur in the LDS context, either. The limited existing empirical evidence on connections between tithing and poverty has thus far provided mixed results, with Keister (2011) finding no significant poverty reduction associated with tithing adherence among conservative Protestants, contradicting related prosperity theologies. Overall, empirical evidence remains limited and inconclusive regarding the impact of tithing on poverty at either individual or community levels.
While the behavioral differences inherent in a highly devout church member may explain part of the mechanism through which poverty would be affected by tithing, the hierarchical structure of religious institutions such as the LDS church warrants examination as well due to its potential effect on the allocation and economic impacts of collected tithing funds. Many religious groups concentrate decision-making power and authority over financial matters among a few high-ranking leaders at the top levels of the organization (Iannaccone 1994). This centralization of power leaves spending decisions over large pools of collected donations, including tithes, in the hands of a relatively small number of individuals. Studies have found that such highly centralized and hierarchical organizational structures tend to have less-developed perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional fairness from members and outsiders (Schminke et al. 2000; Schminke et al. 2002). Consequently, the centralized hierarchical governance of religious organizations may be detrimental to an overall sense of fairness and equity regarding church financial decisions and resource allocations.
In the case of the LDS church specifically, the highly centralized and hierarchical leadership structure, along with a lack of financial transparency, may create an “accountability vacuum” that allows for potential misallocation or inefficient usage of billions of dollars in annual tithing revenues. All high-level policies and financial decisions flow from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and First Presidency—an all-male leadership group that is not subjected to any formal system of checks and balances by general church membership (Shepherd & Shepherd 1984). Importantly, faithful Mormons believe their leaders, especially the most senior officials, are led to the correct decisions by revelation directly from God, making dissent a difficult affair. Faithful church members pay their tithing to local leaders, who send these along to the central headquarters of the church in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The church explains that “Tithing funds are always used for the Lord’s purposes—to build and maintain temples and meetinghouses, to sustain missionary work, to educate Church members, and to carry on the work of the Lord throughout the world” (Oaks et al. n.d.). While these use cases are perhaps beneficial to the church as a whole, their linkage back to poverty reduction in the localities from which they are sourced is questionable. Adding to this issue of no direct link between the use of tithing funds and poverty, the LDS church has come under fire in recent years for questionable usage of tithing funds. These include bailing out various for-profit business ventures of the church and concealing an investment fund worth over $100 billion through the usage of various shell companies, activities for which they were later fined by the SEC (Fletcher Stack 2020).
Public finance theory emphasizes efficient allocation of resources to maximize social welfare and address market failures and their symptoms, including poverty (Hill & Hupe 2002; Stiglitz 2015). While governments rely on taxation to generate revenues to achieve these purposes, requiring tithing for full fellowship in the LDS church makes an interesting corollary. While governments generally are hard-pressed to provide transparency concerning where tax revenues are allocated to ensure public support and optimal reallocation of resources, the church’s process for dealing with tithing revenues does not appear to make such an attempt, calling into question the mechanisms through which poverty alleviation would occur.
Estimates suggest that only about 6% of tithing revenue is returned to local congregations for annual budgets (Widow’s Mite Report 2024). One of the smallest expenditure categories included in these estimates is Humanitarian Aid, making up about 2% of tithing expenditures by the church. About 15% of total annual tithing revenues are deemed ‘excess’ and are added to the church’s investment fund at Ensign Peak. At the local level, the church collects about $211,000 in tithing revenue annually on average per congregation. However, just $13,000 is returned after central church officials have reallocated the funds. Of the total $6 billion collected globally by the church annually, about $4.75 billion supports top church functions and administration, building construction and maintenance, the universities owned and operated by the church, and its missionary program.
Public finance scholarship suggests that redistributing funds in a targeted way that alleviates poverty gaps might better align with the church’s espoused aims (Oates 1972). The combination of a rigid hierarchical structure with a severe lack of financial transparency in the LDS church presents a classic principal-agent problem where rank-and-file adherents have no mechanisms to monitor or verify whether religious leaders are allocating collected tithes in accordance with stated doctrinal aims (Hungerman 2011). This governance structure may facilitate the misallocation or inefficient usage of funds in ways that fail to produce the economic outcomes promised to tithe-payers by religious authorities (Iannaccone 1998). Exploring how hierarchies and power structures within religious institutions shape financial decision-making and spending of income sources such as tithing revenues represents an important area for further scholarly inquiry.
3. Theory and hypothesis
Based on the existing literature, the ability of Mormon tithing adherence to reduce poverty appears to be influenced by two counteracting effects. On the one hand, paying tithes is associated with higher religious devotion, which research links to greater thrift, a better work ethic, and self-reliance—all with the potential to lower unemployment and poverty. Thus, concentrated numbers of full-tithe payers may naturally experience less poverty. On the other hand, tithing extracts 10% of income—a substantial portion of a member’s budget—necessitating consideration of how funds are used. The church’s highly centralized and hierarchical financial management presents a potential problem for poverty alleviation claims, enabling an opaque and untransparent decision-making process. Estimates suggest that most of the tithing supports central church operations without targeted local anti-poverty mechanisms in tithing-source communities. While devotion spurred by tithing may reduce poverty, the centralized and non-transparent use of funds likely undercuts localized poverty alleviation. The ability of tithing adherence to reduce poverty thus involves weighing these countervailing organizational and individual factors.
This paper seeks to help fill the notable gap in the scholarly literature on Mormon tithing practices and poverty alleviation by leveraging county-level data and quasi-experimental techniques to examine the impact of Mormon temple locations on county poverty rates over time. Mormon temples, which members must gain special permission to enter by consistently demonstrating full tithing obedience, provide a useful proxy for localized LDS tithing participation rates. This is primarily because the LDS church relies on reported tithing revenue trends from regional membership to determine locations for new temple construction, but also because of this strict requirement to enter temples (Kimball 1998). If tithing adherence truly does lead to reduced poverty among the faithful as claimed by the Mormon prosperity gospel doctrine, then economic theory would reasonably predict significantly lower poverty rates on average in counties with established temples relative to other demographically comparable counties lacking a temple.
More broadly, this paper aims to make scholarly contributions to the expanding public and academic dialogues on appropriate policy treatment of faith groups in society today by rigorously investigating the veracity and real-world socioeconomic consequences of specific religious norms like tithing. Understanding if and how religious practices truly impact community economic outcomes can lead to more-informed policy debates on issues like religious tax exemptions, subsidies, and privileges granted to large tax-exempt faith-based organizations. If the promises of tithing given by the Mormon church are realized, and poverty is thereby reduced, it would provide policymakers with an interesting new tool to address poverty. The mechanisms through which poverty is reduced could be further incentivized through policy, providing greater justification for policies such as tax deductions offered to Mormon tithe payers. However, if the claims of the church are not supported in the data, the church and public policy ought to respond accordingly. More consideration would need to be given to the church’s implementation of tithing as a poverty reduction program. More targeted uses of tithing funds by local church congregations would provide clearer causal mechanisms between tithing and poverty alleviation. Limiting the amount of information asymmetry that exists between churches and their adherents through market-correcting regulations, such as requiring public financial disclosures or some form of monitoring, could result in a more efficient outcome that aligns actual program performance with the promised benefits. My analysis uses the innovative research design of leveraging temple locations as a proxy for tithing behavior, and as such is the first empirical test of Mormon prosperity gospel claims, thus providing valuable, if tentative, new insights into this understudied dimension of contemporary American religious life.
4. Data
To test whether the presence of a Mormon temple reduces county poverty rates, I construct a panel dataset of US counties between 2010-2018. The unit of analysis is county-year, with 829 counties represented over the nine-year period. The dependent variable is the county poverty rate obtained from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program of the U.S. Census Bureau. The key explanatory variable is an indicator for whether the county has a dedicated Mormon temple as of that year. As mentioned before, a dedicated Mormon temple may be used as a valid proxy for ‘adequate’ tithing adherence for two reasons. First, Mormon officials have traditionally used obedience to the law of tithing as a criterion for determining where to build temples. Secondly, obedience to the law of tithing is a requirement for Mormons to have access to these temples. The location of temples thus indicates that a relatively higher percentage of Mormons are paying their tithing. Temple data comes from publicly available church sources.
This analysis incorporates a range of control variables that may also determine cross-county differences in poverty rates. These variables are also sourced from the SAIPE program data of the U.S. Census Bureau. Demographic characteristics are accounted for, given the large impact they can have on poverty rates. Economic controls such as the unemployment rate, civilian labor force size, median household income, and share of single-mother households account for county labor-market conditions and household structures that influence poverty status. Educational attainment variables proxy for human capital, which can have a large impact on poverty. Finally, the Mormon share of the state population is controlled for using membership data published by the church. The number of Mormons in each state serves as a measure of tithing capacity, since more adherents yield more potential tithing revenue. Including this variable isolates the specific effect of gaining a temple rather than just having more Mormons generally. It also helps to account for higher levels of ‘thriftiness’ mentioned in the literature, helping to ensure that the only effect being observed is higher levels of obedience to the law of tithing.
Table 1 provides summary statistics on all relevant variables. The average poverty rate across counties in the sample is about 14.47%. Table 2 shows similar summary statistics, but separated by treatment status. Interestingly, the poverty rate in treated counties is higher than in control counties, although this descriptive evidence is obviously not conclusive. However, the claims of the Mormon church should be considered in this context, with the church using Old Testament scripture to claim that God will “open … the windows of heaven, and pour … out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it” (Malachi 3:10).
Table 2 also shows other interesting differences between the treated and control groups. State membership counts clearly show the church favors constructing temples where there are more members of the church. Additionally, temples appear to be constructed in more populated areas, as the civilian labor force indicator shows. Counties with temples had, on average, lower unemployment rates, higher median household incomes, and higher average levels of education than their counterparts.
| [see PDF version] |
| [see PDF version] |
5. Empirical strategy
To estimate the causal effect of Mormon temples on county poverty rates, I employ several difference-in-differences (DiD) models, intended to complement each other and address shortfalls of each specific model type. The first is a traditional two-way fixed-effects DiD model:
Yit = β0 + β1Templeit + Xit + αi + δt + εit ,
where Yit is the poverty rate in county i and year t, Templeit indicates whether county i has a temple in year t, Xit is the vector of time-varying control variables, αi are county fixed effects, δt are year fixed effects, and εit is the error term. The coefficient of interest is β1, which represents the treatment effect of gaining a temple (used as a proxy for ‘adequate’ tithing payments by church members) on poverty rates. The identifying assumption requires that, conditional on the controls, counties receiving a temple would have parallel poverty trends absent the temple construction.
This strategy exploits the plausibly exogenous timing and location decisions of temple constructions as natural experiments. The church relies primarily on tithing revenue and member demand in an area when determining temple locations. Tithing funds are centralized at church headquarters with little input from local members, while member demand is doctrinally motivated, arising from religious rather than economic factors. Additionally, the planning and construction of temples spans several years, making precise manipulation of opening dates unlikely. This helps mitigate concerns about endogeneity bias driving the estimates.
To implement the DiD model, the sample is limited to 2010-2018. There are 829 counties in the sample, yielding 67 counties in the treatment group, with 12 counties being treated during this timeframe. Standard errors are clustered at the county-level to account for serial correlation. The model is estimated using OLS regression with county- and year fixed effects.
While the traditional DiD model is useful for estimating the average treatment effect, it has some limitations. First, it assumes that all treated units are affected similarly by the treatment. There may, however, be effect heterogeneity across counties receiving temples. Second, the parallel-trends assumption required for identification may not hold perfectly. To address these limitations, I include two additional DiD models to ensure the robustness of the results. These models are particularly well-designed to extract the causal impact of the treatment on poverty rates. Specifically, they are more equipped to take advantage of the counties that were not ‘always treated’, or those that received the treatment from 2011 to 2018.
The first of these additional models is the Sant’Anna-Callaway DiD model (Callaway & Sant’Anna 2021). This flexible DiD approach allows for treatment effect heterogeneity across groups and over time. It estimates group-time average treatment effects, which relaxes the parallel-trends assumption and accounts for differing effects across treated counties. This allows us to examine how the impact of new temples on poverty rates evolves across different periods for particular groups of counties. This illuminates effect dynamics and ensures that estimates are not biased by pooling heterogeneous units.
The second additional model is a Synthetic DiD approach (Arkhangelsky et al. 2021). This method constructs a synthetic control group for each treated unit to ensure more credible counterfactual trends. It summarizes the overall treatment effect while addressing endogeneity concerns about the non-random assignment of temples. The synthetic control group is created by taking a weighted average of potential controls to match pre-treatment covariates and outcomes. This ensures that the synthetic control closely resembles the treated county. By comparing poverty trajectories for the treated county and its synthetic counterpart, the approach provides a robustness check on the parallel-trends assumption underlying the traditional DiD model.
Using both these alternative DiD models addresses potential shortcomings of the standard two-way FE DiD specification. The Sant’Anna-Callaway method allows for treatment heterogeneity across temple counties, while the Synthetic DiD approach ensures the parallel-trends assumption holds through data-driven construction of a comparable synthetic control group. Together, these strategies complement the traditional DiD model and lend credibility to my empirical results.
6. Results
The difference-in-differences models provide estimates of the causal effect of new temple construction on county poverty rates. The regression results offer an empirical test of whether gaining a temple, which proxies for greater tithing participation among local Mormons, reduces community economic hardship (as claimed by church doctrine). Table 3 displays the main DiD regression output.
Model 1 is a baseline specification with only a binary temple indicator as the explanatory variable. The coefficient is positive but statistically insignificant, indicating no pre-treatment differences in poverty rates between future temple and non-temple counties. Adding demographic, economic, and education controls in Model 2 leaves the temple coefficient virtually unchanged. The point estimate suggests a slight 0.055 percentage-point decrease in the poverty rate from gaining a temple, but this result remains far from statistical significance.
Models 3 and 4 sequentially add year- and county fixed effects, helping to address potential omitted-variables bias. However, the results remain robust: the temple variable hovers near zero and lacks significance across all models. Model 4, the preferred specification with county- and year fixed effects, is statistically insignificant, with a coefficient of 0.381.
| [see PDF version] |
The additional DiD approaches in Table 4 corroborate this finding. Neither the flexible Sant’Anna-Callaway method nor the data-driven synthetic control approach produces an estimated temple effect that approaches standard significance levels. As mentioned before, the Sant’Anna-Callaway DiD design is capable of accounting for heterogeneity in treatment effects across treated counties, rather than assuming that the treatment effect size is equal across units. This leads to a less biased and more precise estimate of the true causal effect. Additionally, the Synthetic DiD design helps to account for endogeneity concerns as well as to ensure that the parallel-trends assumption holds. With Model 6, only counties that received a new temple during the timeframe in this analysis are considered, excluding all ‘always-treated’ counties, or counties that had a temple prior to 2010. This ensures a valid quasi-experimental design that can be exploited through the synthetic difference-in-differences design. The estimates from these more complex models are consistent with Model 4’s estimate, while still lacking statistical significance.
| [see PDF version] |
Figure 1 displays the average treatment effect of a county receiving a new dedicated Mormon temple by time period, using the Sant’Anna-Callaway DiD estimator. The blue bars and dots represent differences in pre-treatment trends between treated and control units, with all confidence intervals crossing zero prior to treatment, indicating the parallel-trends assumption holds. Similarly, the red bars and dots represent differences between the two groups post-treatment. All time periods post-treatment fail to achieve statistical significance, and interestingly, are positive in their effect size.
| [see PDF version] |
Figure 2 shows a graphical representation of poverty rates in counties that had a temple dedicated within their jurisdiction from 2012 to 2017, grouped by the year of dedication. It is visibly evident that the parallel-trends assumption holds in this model, with each treatment timing group clearly running parallel to its synthetic control counterpart. Figure 2 shows the constructed synthetic control unit in blue dashed lines compared to the actual poverty rate in these counties in the solid red line. Upon treatment, there is no statistically significant divergence in trends between any of the timing groups and their synthetic counterparts in terms of their poverty rates. Taken together, the suite of complementary DiD models provides no empirical evidence that constructing a new Mormon temple significantly reduces local economic hardship. The precisely estimated null effect persists across both short-run and long-run time horizons.
| [see PDF version] |
7. Limitations
The difference-in-differences models offer a rigorous test of Mormon prosperity gospel assertions by leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in temple construction between 2010-2018. The null effects persist across specifications using both short-run and long-run time horizons. However, the insignificant temple effect warrants careful interpretation, given the aggregate county-level data.
It remains possible that tithing obedience confers financial gains primarily to individual adherents or households who faithfully donate 10% of income, rather than to entire communities more diffusely. The reciprocal exchange with God theorized to underlie prosperity theology may reward tithing sacrifice in narrowly targeted rather than broad-based ways. For example, the analysis controls for overall Mormon membership at the state level, which accounts for some of this compositional effect. But temples could still boost economic outcomes for actively attending members within counties through such pathways as expanded social networks or greater labor market referrals through congregational ties. These individual-level mechanisms are obscured in county data. Nonetheless, if the promised blessings of tithing truly created a financial windfall as definitively claimed, we may reasonably expect some broader spillover effects visible at the county level, where temples concentrate adherents who qualify to enter through demonstrated full tithe payment. The results indicate otherwise, however, thereby casting doubt on the scope and scale of proclaimed benefits.
Several additional limitations warrant consideration. First, the nine-year panel restricts the analysis to identifying relatively short- and medium-run effects from new temple construction. It remains possible that poverty reductions from tithing obedience accrue over longer time horizons not captured in the data. This seems unlikely, however, given the confident rhetoric by church authorities asserting immediate financial returns. Second, the empirical models rely on temple proximity as a proxy for tithing participation rather than actual tithing revenues. Access to the closely guarded financial records of the LDS church would allow incorporating direct tithing data at some geographic aggregation level. This could alleviate concerns about temples imperfectly measuring localized tithing behavior. However, church leaders’ statements clearly indicate temple construction depends heavily on tithing revenue flows, which provides some justification for using temples as a strong proxy. Finally, boosted statistical power from a larger sample could potentially detect smaller poverty effects. The dataset spans an era of relative stagnation in new temple construction, limiting the number of treated units. Future analyses could leverage larger samples over longer time horizons as the church accelerates temple building, which may reveal effects not discernible with the current data.
8. Discussion of findings
Using the presence of Mormon temples as a proxy, this study empirically evaluates the claim of the LDS church that obedience to the law of tithing could reduce poverty in communities with high levels of tithing participation. Applying difference-in-differences models to county-level poverty rates and temple presence data in the U.S. from 2010-2018, the findings revealed no statistically significant impact of temple presence on poverty rates. This outcome provides a critical perspective on the economic implications of the financial practices of the LDS church, particularly regarding the reallocation and distribution of collected tithing funds.
While data limitations currently rule out explicit testing, the stark gap between the promised prosperity gospel benefits of tithing and the actual null results revealed is likely attributable to fundamental flaws in the way in which the senior leadership of the LDS church reallocates tithing revenues. The church’s financial management is highly centralized and lacking in transparency, with key spending decisions made by a small, insulated group claiming divine guidance. This opaque, top-down decision-making structure has no robust system of checks, balances, or accountability to rank-and-file adherents who supply billions in annual tithing revenues. Only a small portion of collected tithes returns to the local congregations from which they originated. Moreover, a mere fraction of the church’s revenues is explicitly directed toward humanitarian aid or charitable initiatives that could meaningfully alleviate poverty. Even for these relatively small outlays, funds are not necessarily deployed in the specific communities where tithes were paid, which undermines any clear causal mechanisms for localized poverty reduction as described.
Instead, institutional priorities and incentives appear to lie with continued expansions in global scale and real estate, with public relations/branding, and perhaps most critically, with consistently growing the church’s recently revealed $100 billion investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors. This rapidly ballooning investment fund may create insular financial incentives and path dependencies that reinforce self-sustaining asset accumulation while neglecting other potential uses of revenues such as localized poverty relief. Sociological factors around authority and obedience that are present in rigidly hierarchical organizations likely play a role as well; routine unquestioning deference to church leaders effectively exacerbates principal-agent monitoring problems, enabling misspending with no repercussions. In sum, severe corporate governance issues, misaligned institutional incentives, lack of financial transparency, and tight consolidation of decision-making power appear to decouple tithing revenue allocation from official doctrinal aims and directives.
This study makes an important contribution to the growing academic literature examining the intersection of economics, religious practices, and institutional decision-making. It builds on limited prior research by empirically scrutinizing the economic outcomes related to Mormon tithing behavior and the church’s prosperity gospel teachings. Although greater religious devotion may be associated with reduced poverty, requiring members to give up substantial income through tithing without receiving (the promised) economic benefits (either directly or indirectly) in return could undermine this positive effect. Given the immense wealth the LDS church has accumulated through collected tithes, including amassing an investment portfolio surpassing elite university endowments, rigorous analysis of how these billions in tithing funds are allocated appears warranted (Voytko 2019). The findings raise critical questions about whether maintaining the church’s tax-exempt and deductible status is justified when its opaque financial practices seem disconnected from stated aims such as poverty alleviation. More localized control over tithing disbursements by local congregations could better align spending with community needs and potentially unlock innovative solutions to address economic hardship in tithing-source areas.
This paper also makes an interesting case study for research linking religious hierarchies and power structures with organizational decision-making. Financial decisions made by the LDS church are a highly centralized process. When organizational decisions are left in the hands of a few individuals who claim to speak for God on all matters, questionable policies and practices may emerge. In this case, the mechanisms through which poverty alleviation would occur through the faithful payment of tithing are not clear. The church’s finances are handled exclusively by senior officials and are not transparent. Additionally, estimates from available sources appear to show a disconnect between the expected uses of tithing funds and their actual uses. Unfortunately, the financial practices of the church do not appear to target poverty in any meaningful way, resulting in the null results found by this study.
References
Arkhangelsky, Dmitry, Susan Athey, David A. Hirshberg, Guido W. Imbens, and Stefan Wager. 2021 “Synthetic difference-in-differences.” American Economic Review 111, no. 12: 4088–118.
Azzi, Corry, and Ronald Ehrenberg. 1975 “Household Allocation of Time and Church Attendance.” Journal of Political Economy 83, no. 1: 27–56.
Bowler, Kate. 2018. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brooks, Arthur C. 2003. “Religious Faith and Charitable Giving.” Policy Review 121: 39-50.
Callaway, Brantly, and Pedro HC Sant’Anna. 2021. “Difference-in-Differences with Multiple Time Periods.” Journal of Econometrics 225, no. 2: 200–30.
Dahl, Gordon B., and Michael R. Ransom. 1999. “Does Where You Stand Depend on Where You Sit? Tithing Donations and Self-serving Beliefs.” American Economic Review 89, no. 4: 703–27.
Fletcher Stack, Peggy. 2020. “LDS Church Kept the Lid on Its $100B Fund for Fear Tithing Receipts Would Fall, Account Boss Tells Wall Street Journal.” The Salt Lake Tribune, February 8. <www.sltrib.com/news/2020/02/08/lds-church-kept-lid-its-b/>.
Godfrey, Kenneth W. 2000. “The Importance of the Temple in Understanding the Latter-Day Saint Nauvoo Experience: Then and Now.” Arrington Annual Lecture. Paper 5.
Hill, Michael, and Peter Hupe. 2002. Implementing Public Policy: Governance in Theory and in Practice. London: Sage.
Hinckley, Gordon B. 1982. “Tithing: An Opportunity to Prove Our Faithfulness.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. <www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1982/04/tithing-an-opportunity-to-prove-our-faithfulness?lang=eng>.
Hungerman, Daniel M. 2011. “Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Competition from the Catholic Sex-Abuse Scandal.” National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper No. w17589.
Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1994. “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 5: 1180–211.
Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1998 “Introduction to the Economics of Religion.” Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 3: 1465–95.
Keister, Lisa A. 2011. Faith and Money: How Religion Contributes to Wealth and Poverty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kimball, Edward L. 1998. “The History of LDS Temple Admission Standards.” Journal of Mormon History 24, no. 1: 135–76.
Mauss, Armand L. 2003. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Oaks, Dallin, James Faust, Earl Tingey, Gordon Hinckley, Robert Hales, and Carl Pratt. n.d. “Tithing.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. <www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/tithing?lang=eng>
Oates, Wallace E. 1972. Fiscal Federalism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Olson, Daniel V., and Paul M. Perl. 2005. “Free and Cheap Riding in Strict, Conservative Churches.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 2: 123–42.
Pew Research Center. 2021. “Mormons in America: Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society.” <www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/01/14/mormons-in-america-certain-in-their-beliefs-uncertain-of-their-place-in-society/>.
Powell, Walter W., and Patricia Bromley, eds. 2020. The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Renneboog, Luc, and Christophe Spaenjers. 2012. “Religion, Economic Attitudes, and Household Finance.” Oxford Economic Papers 64, no. 1: 103–27.
Robbins, Lynn G. 2005. “Tithing—a Commandment Even for the Destitute.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. <www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2005/04/tithing-a-commandment-even-for-the-destitute?lang=eng>.
Schminke, Marshall, Maureen L. Ambrose, and Russell S. Cropanzano. 2000. “The Effect of Organizational Structure on Perceptions of Procedural Fairness.” Journal of Applied Psychology 85, no. 2: 294–304.
Schminke, Marshall, Russell Cropanzano, and Deborah E. Rupp. 2002. “Organization Structure and Fairness Perceptions: The Moderating Effects of Organizational Level.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 89, no. 1: 881–905.
Shepherd, Gordon, and Gary Shepherd. 1984. A Kingdom Transformed: Themes in the Development of Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Stanley, Scott M., and Howard J. Markman. 1992. “Assessing Commitment in Personal Relationships.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39: 595–608.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2015. Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Voytko, Lisette. 2019. “Mormon Church Reportedly Amassed $100 Billion Fund for ‘Second Coming of Christ.’“ Forbes, December 17. <www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/12/17/mormon-church-reportedly-amassed-100-billion-fund-for-second-coming-of-christ/?sh=4d04edd06a7b>.
Walch, Tad. 2018. “‘Dowry Is Not the Lord’s Way’: In Kenya, LDS President Nelson Says Tithing Breaks Poverty Cycle.” Deseret News, April 17. <www.deseret.com/2018/4/16/20643748/dowry-is-not-the-lord-s-way-in-kenya-lds-president-nelson-says-tithing-breaks-poverty-cycle>.
The Widow’s Mite Report. 2024. “2023: Estimated LDS Church Inflows and Outflows.” <widowsmitereport.wordpress.com/2023flow/>.
