Court states billionaire who left the LDS Church is not entitled to receive his donations back.
by Massimo Introvigne
Last March, Bitter Winter covered the sensational lawsuit launched by billionaire businessman James Huntsman against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church. A former Mormon turned angry ex-Mormon, Huntsman sought to recover the donations he had made to the Church while he was a devout member. He claimed that he had naively believed that donations were used only for building temples and support missionaries, until he read in the Washington Post that roughly 14.3% of the donations received were set aside and invested in various businesses.
We commented that as a businessman Huntsman should have known and understood that churches invest their reserves rather than keeping them idle in their bank accounts, and that allowing devotees to second-guess how their donations are used would be detrimental to religious liberty in general.
As we predicted, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on September 10 rejected Huntsman’s claims. The court stated that the First Amendment did not prevent examining the case, or a large part of it, on the merits, since Huntsman’s arguments, or most of them, were inherently secular. Huntsman’s main claim was that the LDS Church had lied on stating how the tithing money would be spent. An ancillary claim that investments were contrary to LDS doctrine and theology was rejected as it would have involvement an interpretation of LDS beliefs by the court, which is indeed prohibited by the First Amendment.
However, Huntsman’s claims were summarily dismissed on factual grounds. The court found that, contrary to what Huntsman had asserted, in speeches delivered at General Conferences and other LDS events, the then President of the Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, never stated that money obtained through donations and tithing would not be invested. Actually, by reading carefully his statements, President Hinckley said just the opposite, with the result that nobody, including Huntsman, was lied to or deceived.
Huntsman had mostly focused on the City Creek project, i.e., a plan for redeveloping a shopping mall and other commercial buildings in downtown Salt Lake City. The court found that President Hinckley had clearly stated that earnings of invested tithing funds (as opposite to tithing funds directly) would be invested in this project. As a skilled businessman, there are little chances that Huntsman did not understand what Hinckley was saying, hence his lawsuit was frivolous and filed with the intent to harass the Church. Summary judgement was granted against him.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
