Thank you for joining us today at Mormon Stories, a few quick reminders. If you value what we're doing here at Mormon Stories and want to keep this program alive past July 2010,

please consider signing up today to become a monthly paid subscriber to Mormon Stories.

All donations are tax deductible. They will go directly to the time and materials used to produce the show.

And you can sign up for as little as $5 a month at MormonStories.org. Thank you for listening and please enjoy the show.

So we've provided two or three examples here about some of the sort of funny dynamics when you inject a corporate model into the operation of a spiritual church.

Why don't we turn now to the issue of money? And just sort of the question of whether the money that the church has ultimately gets spent in ways that reflect our highest spiritual values, which is an issue you raise in the book.

You explain in your book how at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, that tithing requirement was monetized, meaning that tithing needed to be paid in the form of money rather than labor or livestock or eggs, some other donation of value.

And you discuss how this monetization of tithing was a major change that had a tremendous impact on shaping the modern church. Why don't you tell us about that?

So the, you know, as you mentioned, you know, again with with snow or sort of understanding of that is that he got the church out of debt by by instituting a new kind of tithe.

And of course promise that the windows of heaven would open. That's probably the phrase that the most Mormons would would understand sort of a historical vignette.

But there's much more going on than just opening up the windows of heaven here. When you monetize tithing and you make it 10% of your income, you change the dynamics dramatically.

So the sort of easy way to think of this is that you can't really put a bunch of chicken eggs into a truck, ship them all down to Salt Lake City and put them into a bank and to crew interest on the chicken eggs.

And then move those chicken eggs out to Guatemala. You can do that when you're just dealing with capital. So what you have here is a kind of at the turn of the century, move from a sort of spiritual economy of tithing and fast offerings, which was very minimal in terms of what they could actually bring in.

But there was also clearly tied to our physical bodies and to the sort of the natural cycles of the earth. So if you could pay tithing in milk, you couldn't hold on to that milk forever.

You had to do something with it and that something had to be more or less given it to people who needed milk. Same thing with chicken eggs or wheat.

You distributed these things as a bishop to people who needed wheat and chicken eggs.

So tithing really gets spent largely in the form of assistance to the needy.

That's right. It goes right back out to the people in the local community. Whereas by the time you monetize it and the main real impulse to monetize it was that Lorenzo Snow tried to pass bonds to Eastern bankers in order to get the church out of its debt.

It had created with the Salt Lake Temple, literally sell the church into bondage.

This strategy wasn't terribly successful. But what they could get done was that they could get the members to sort of pour in liquid capital.

And that's exactly what they did is they changed what tithing was and said, well, it's got to be money.

This is what we need in order to pay off our debts. And the windows have been indeed opened and massive amounts of capital poured in so that the church was out of debt very quickly.

...