By Jerald and Sandra Tanner
The August 4, 1997, issue of Time magazine devoted 10 pages to an examination of the Mormon Church. The outside cover of the magazine shows a beautiful picture of the Salt Lake City Temple and carries this intriguing headline: MORMONS, INC. The Secrets of America’s Most Prosperous Religion.
Because of the interest that many had in the subject, copies of Time were very hard to obtain in Salt Lake City. Some Mormons who were fortunate enough to find copies were distressed with some of the observations found in the magazine. On the other hand, however, many Mormons were happy that the church received so much publicity.
The portion of the magazine relating to financial matters was upsetting to many Mormons. The following appeared in Time:
The church’s material triumphs rival even its evangelical advances. With unusual cooperation from the Latter-day Saints hierarchy (which provided some financial figures and a rare look at church businesses), Time has been able to quantify the church’s extraordinary financial vibrancy. Its current assets total a minimum of $30 billion. If it were a corporation, its estimated $5.9 billion in annual gross income would place it midway through the FORTUNE 500, a little below Union Carbide and the Paine Webber Group but bigger than Nike and the Gap. And as long as corporate rankings are being bandied about, the church would make any list of the most admired: for straight dealing, company spirit, contributions to charity (even the non-Mormon kind) and a fiscal probity among its powerful leaders that would satisfy any shareholder group, if there were one.
Yet the Latter-day Saints remain sensitive about their “otherness” — more so, in fact, than most outsiders can imagine. . . .
THE TOP BEEF RANCH IN THE WORLD IS NOT the King Ranch in Texas. It is the Deseret Cattle & Citrus Ranch outside Ireland, Fla. It covers 312,000 acres; its value as real estate alone is estimated at $858 million. It is owned entirely by the Mormons. The largest producer of nuts in America, AgReserves, Inc., in Salt Lake City, is Mormon-owned. So are the Bonneville International Corp., the country’s 14th largest radio chain, and the Beneficial Life Insurance Co., with assets of $1.6 billion. There are richer churches than the one based in Salt Lake City:
Roman Catholic holdings dwarf Mormon wealth. But the Catholic Church has 45 times as many members. There is no major church in the U.S. as active as the Latter-day Saints in economic life, nor, per capita, as successful at it. . . . Last year 5.2 billion in tithes flowed into Salt Lake City, $4.9 billion of which came from American Mormons. . . .
The Mormons are stewards of a different stripe. Their charitable spending and temple buildings are prodigious. But where other churches spend most of what they receive in a given year, the Latter-day Saints employ vast amounts of money in investments that TIME estimates to be at least $6 billion strong. Even more unusual, most of this money is not in bonds or stock in other peoples’ companies but is invested directly in church-owned, for-profit concerns, the largest of which are agribusiness, media, insurance, travel and real estate. Deseret Management Corp., the company through which the church holds almost all its commercial assets, is one of the largest owners of farm- and ranchland in the country, including 49 for-profit parcels in addition to the Deseret Ranch. Besides the Bonneville International chain and Beneficial Life, the church owns a 52% holding in ZCMI, Utah’s largest department-store chain. . . . All told, TIME estimates that the Latter-day Saints farmland and financial investments total some $11 billion, and that the church’s nontithe income from its investments exceeds $600 million. (Time, pages 52-53)
On page 54 of the Time article, we find the following:
The Hotel Temple Square Co. owns much of the real estate around the headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City. Their Polynesian Cultural Center is Hawaii’s No. 1 paid visitor attraction, with annual revenues of at least $40 million. Other holdings include 11,571 meetinghouses and 50 temples around the world.
On the same page we read:
The church owns 16 radio stations and one TV station. 1996 sales: $172 million. Deseret News circulation: 65,000. Deseret Book Co. owns a chain of about 30 bookstores in Utah.
The article also notes that the church has colleges: “B.Y.U. in Provo, Hawaii and Jerusalem, L.D.S. Business and Ricks in Idaho.”
The Mormon Church claimed that Time magazine exaggerated its financial worth. Not surprisingly, however, the church did not divulge what its assets really amount to. Unlike many other churches, the LDS Church refuses to give a financial statement to its members.
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