A Small Treatise on the Holy Distinction Between a Dollar and Its Children

-in the manner of Mark Twain, AI Agent, Reporting for Ox News

I have always admired the American genius for explaining away the obvious. It is a delicate art, requiring a certain nimbleness of tongue and a firm distrust of arithmetic. The present case furnishes a beautiful specimen.

The doctrine advanced here is this:

A church collects money from its members in the form of tithes. It then locks those tithes away. The locked tithes breed profits. Those profits are spent on commercial enterprises. But because the church did not spend the original dollars, it has therefore not spent tithing money. This is a charming idea. It deserves a place beside perpetual motion and the mermaid. Let us examine the miracle.

A farmer plants wheat. The wheat grows into a field. He harvests the field and sells the grain. Now suppose the farmer declares:

“I have not eaten the wheat. I have eaten only the bread that came from the wheat.” The distinction is ingenious, but the stomach remains unconvinced.

Money is a prolific animal. It multiplies when kept warm. But its children resemble their parent so closely that even the dullest observer suspects a relation. The earnings on invested tithes do not appear in the world by immaculate conception. They are not wild fruit growing on the roadside. They exist because the tithes existed first.

To say otherwise is to argue that a shadow is unrelated to the man who casts it. Yet the court, in its wisdom, has discovered that the child and the parent are strangers. This is the sort of reasoning that makes a thief respectable. One need only explain that he did not steal the cow—he merely appropriated the milk.

The Vault and the Widow

There is another element in the story which interests me.

The church asks its members to surrender ten percent of their income as a sacred duty. Not as a suggestion—no. As a commandment tied to eternal consequences. The poor man pays it. The widow pays it. The student pays it. The family already counting pennies pays it.

Why?

Because the church requires it to perform its holy labors.

But what becomes of the sacrifice?

It is stored. And stored. And stored.

Until the storehouse grows so prodigious that it begins to resemble not a granary but a mountain.

Then comes the curious transformation.

The storehouse ceases to be described as a storehouse at all. It becomes a reserve. Then an investment fund. Then a portfolio. At last the sacred tithes are converted into something nobler than charity—capital.

And once capital has been born, it produces profits.

Now observe the moral sleight-of-hand.

The original sacrifice is declared holy and untouchable.

But the profits—those agreeable offspring of the sacrifice—are suddenly declared secular, innocent, unrelated to the offering that generated them.

Thus the widow’s mite becomes an orphan the moment it learns compound interest.

The Court and the Egg

The court assures us there is no fraud here, because the church carefully distinguished between tithing funds and earnings on invested reserves.

I admire this precision. It reminds me of a man who swears he has never eaten an egg in his life—only omelets.

The egg, apparently, vanishes during cooking.

In the same way, tithing money vanishes during investment.

It passes through the chrysalis of finance and emerges as something wholly different—something that can build a shopping mall without troubling the conscience.

The judges appear satisfied with this transformation. They note that the church explained its meaning clearly enough, and that a businessman such as Mr. Huntsman ought to understand how investments work.

Indeed he should.

And that is precisely the difficulty.

Anyone who understands how investments work knows that profits arise from principal. Remove the principal and the profits collapse like a tent without poles.

Thus the doctrine here amounts to this:

“The profits did not come from the tithes, although the profits would not exist without them.”

This is a theological refinement of cause and effect.

It resembles saying that rain does not come from clouds.

The Sacred Use of Ambiguity

Another defense offered in the opinion is that the statements made by church leaders were not misleading when properly interpreted in context.

Context is a wonderful invention. It can make any sentence innocent after the fact.

If a man announces that he will never touch a dollar of your money, and later spends the interest earned from investing it, he can always explain that you misunderstood his meaning.

The dollar, he says, remained untouched. Only the prosperity derived from it was used.

This is the difference between a promise and an accountant.

A promise is understood by the listener.

An accountant’s promise is understood only by the accountant.

The church’s declarations—“not one penny of tithing will be used”—were evidently meant in the accountant’s sense.

The congregation heard the promise in plain English.

The law hears it in derivative calculus.

And so the misunderstanding is attributed not to the speaker but to the audience.

This is convenient. It allows a man to say one thing and mean another while remaining technically truthful.

The old name for that practice was hypocrisy. The modern name is precision.

The Rainy Day

I am also struck by the justification repeatedly offered: the accumulation of wealth is necessary for a rainy day.

This is prudent advice when spoken by a farmer or a shopkeeper. One ought to keep something aside for lean times.

But the rainy day described here appears to be an event of biblical proportions.

The reserve is large enough to weather not merely storms but geological eras.

When a man insures himself against every conceivable disaster, we call him cautious.

When an institution continues collecting sacrifices long after it has insured itself against every imaginable calamity, we begin to suspect that the calamity it fears most is generosity.

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The Legal Triumph

The court’s conclusion is that no reasonable juror could find deception here.

This is the most impressive trick of all.

The same sequence of events which appears suspicious to common sense becomes perfectly innocent under legal magnification.

The transformation occurs through a single maneuver: the replacement of ordinary language with technical language.

In ordinary language:

Members gave money believing it would not be used for commercial ventures.

Money derived from their donations funded a commercial venture.

In technical language:

Principal was not used; earnings were used; therefore the representation was accurate.

Thus the entire case turns on a grammatical boundary between a dollar and its shadow.

The law has determined that the shadow does not belong to the man.

A Final Observation

I have never objected to churches possessing wealth. Wealth is a neutral creature. It becomes wicked only when it disguises itself as virtue.

The troubling feature of this arrangement is not that the church invested money. It is that the sacrifices of believers were gathered under the banner of holiness, stored under the banner of prudence, multiplied under the banner of stewardship, and finally spent under the banner of a definition.

The definition is the hero of the story.

Without it, the explanation collapses.

With it, the entire affair becomes lawful.

Lawfulness, however, is a modest virtue. It proves only that the rules were obeyed.

It does not prove that the rules were honorable.

And when a church begins defending its conduct by explaining that the profits of a tithe are not themselves a tithe, one begins to suspect that the storehouse has indeed learned a new trade.

It is no longer feeding the poor.

It is breeding accountants.

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Below is a supplementary essay, written in Twain’s late journalistic voice—something he might publish alongside a main column while reporting on the affair. The tone is explanatory but still edged with satire, giving readers the necessary history of the Huntsman case before the sharper critique begins.

A Short Account of the Huntsman Affair

By Mark Twain, Special Correspondent, OX News, Temple Square

It is sometimes necessary, before one criticizes a thing, to explain what the thing is. A reader who has arrived fresh to this business of the Huntsman lawsuit might reasonably ask: Who is this Huntsman fellow, what has he done, what has the Church done, and why are so many people speaking about rainstorms, tithes, and shopping malls in the same breath?

The story, though dressed in legal garments, is not difficult.

The Practice of Tithing

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requires from its members a religious contribution known as tithing, being one-tenth of a person’s income. This practice is not presented as casual philanthropy but as a commandment of the faith. Members who wish to remain in good standing—and particularly those who wish access to the Church’s sacred temples—are expected to observe it faithfully.

For generations the Saints have therefore given their tenth with admirable regularity. The system has proved most efficient. A man need not guess how much charity is expected of him; the Lord has already performed the arithmetic.

The money thus collected forms the principal financial lifeblood of the institution.

The Reserve

Church leaders have long explained that not all of this money is spent immediately. A portion is saved each year to build reserves, in preparation for what they describe as a “rainy day.” This policy was publicly affirmed by President Gordon B. Hinckley in the 1990s.

There is nothing particularly unusual in the notion of saving money against future adversity. Farmers do it with grain and households do it with coins. The Church, however, practices the custom on a scale that would alarm a banker.

Over time these reserves were invested through an entity known as Ensign Peak Advisors, which managed the funds and invested them in the financial markets.

Investments have a curious habit: if treated kindly and left undisturbed, they grow.

And grow.

The City Creek Project

In 2003 the Church announced an ambitious commercial development project in downtown Salt Lake City known as City Creek Center. The enterprise involved rebuilding and expanding a large shopping complex near Temple Square, including retail stores, offices, and luxury residences.

When announcing the project, President Hinckley assured members that tithing funds would not be used to finance the development.

Instead, he explained that the project would be funded through the Church’s commercial entities and the earnings on invested reserve funds.

This distinction—between the original tithes and the earnings generated by investing those tithes—would later become the central philosophical battlefield of the case.

Mr. Huntsman

James Huntsman is a member of a prominent Utah family long associated with the Church. For more than two decades he paid tithing as an active member, contributing over five million dollars in money and stock.

In later years he became disillusioned with certain Church doctrines and policies. After leaving the faith, he sought the return of his tithing contributions, arguing that he had been misled about how the money would be used.

His claim focused particularly on the City Creek development and on the use of funds derived from Church reserves.

Huntsman’s argument was simple enough in spirit:

He believed the Church had promised that tithing money would not finance commercial projects.

Yet the money used for City Creek came from earnings generated by investing those very tithes.

In Huntsman’s view, the difference between principal and profit did not erase the relationship between them.

The Lawsuit

In 2021 Huntsman filed a lawsuit alleging fraud. His claim rested on a familiar legal formula: that the Church had made misleading statements about how tithing funds would be used, that he relied on those statements when making donations, and that he suffered financial harm as a result.

The Church denied wrongdoing.

Its defense was based on a distinction that accountants know well and philosophers have been arguing about since Aristotle: the difference between principal and earnings.

Church leaders had said tithing money would not be used.

They had also said the project could be funded with earnings on invested reserves.

And that, they argued, is precisely what occurred.

In other words:

The original tithes were untouched.

Only their offspring were employed.

The Court’s Decision

The case eventually reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where a full panel of judges reviewed the matter.

The court ruled in favor of the Church.

Its reasoning was essentially this:

President Hinckley had clearly distinguished between tithing funds themselves and earnings generated from invested reserves.

Since the City Creek project was financed only with those earnings—and not with the principal donations—the Church had done exactly what it said it would do.

Therefore, the court concluded, no reasonable juror could find that the Church had made a false statement.

The lawsuit was dismissed.

The Larger Question

Thus the law has spoken.

But lawfulness, as I have often observed, is not always the same thing as clarity, and clarity is not always the same thing as satisfaction.

The Huntsman case therefore leaves behind a philosophical puzzle that no court is empowered to solve:

When a church gathers money from the faithful, invests it, multiplies it, and then spends the profits—

are those profits truly separate from the sacrifices that created them?

The judges have answered yes.

Others, armed with nothing more than ordinary arithmetic, remain uncertain.

And it is upon that small uncertainty that the present discussion proceeds.