In the world, not of it: wealth, consecration and the fund nobody could see

The doctrine is older than the money. On February 9, 1831, Joseph Smith announced a revelation setting out the law of consecration: members deeded their property to the Church, received back a stewardship sized to their household, and the surplus went to those without enough. The stated aim was that members be equal according to their circumstances, wants and needs. It did not survive contact with Missouri or Illinois, and by 1857 the Church had set the full practice aside under federal pressure and kept tithing instead. Tithing has its own revelation, dated July 8, 1838 at Far West, Missouri, requiring one tenth of all their interest annually, which the Church today reads as ten percent of income, with the member deciding what income means.

The two laws sit in different places. Consecration is a covenant made in the temple endowment; leaders have said members are not now required to live it, and the Church teaches that the full practice returns in the millennium. Tithing is the operating rule. A full tithe is a condition of a temple recommend regardless of the member's finances, and each year the bishop holds a tithing declaration in which the member states whether the tithe is full. Pew's survey of 1,019 American members, taken in late 2011 and published January 12, 2012, found 79 percent saying they give ten percent of their earnings to the Church and 77 percent attending weekly. Add the monthly fast offering and the unpaid hours in a calling and you have what the Church describes as consecration in practice: a tenth that is checked, and a whole that is promised.

Jon Huntsman Sr. is the clearest case because the figures are large and dated. Born June 21, 1937, he founded Huntsman Container in 1970, where the company pioneered the clamshell box for the McDonald's Big Mac, and Huntsman Chemical in 1982; the successor, Huntsman Corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 2005 and reported revenue of $6.111 billion in 2023 with about 7,000 employees under his son Peter as chief executive. He served as a mission president in Washington, D.C. from 1980 to 1983. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, when Wikipedia's table lists his net worth at $1.5 billion, and by his death on February 2, 2018, at 80, CBS put his lifetime giving at more than $1.4 billion, including more than $400 million to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and its foundation and more than $50 million to Armenia after the 1988 earthquake. The institute opened in 1999 on an initial pledge of $100 million; a further $50 million followed in November 2013 for a children's cancer research building, and Wikipedia's page on the institute puts the family's gifts to it at more than $250 million, a lower figure than the CBS one, which includes the foundation.

The pattern repeats at smaller scale. Larry H. Miller, who opened his first Toyota dealership in Murray on May 1, 1979 and by 2007 ran the tenth-largest dealer group in the country with 42 dealerships, gave $50 million for a Salt Lake Community College campus, $21 million for a law-enforcement training center and $10 million to the Joseph Smith Papers before his death on February 20, 2009. Alan Ashton, who with Bruce Bastian received about $700 million each in Novell stock when WordPerfect sold in 1994, built Thanksgiving Point and then spent 2004 to 2007 as a mission president in Toronto and 2013 to 2016 as president of the Provo Temple. Robert C. Gay spent sixteen years as a managing director at Bain Capital, co-founded Huntsman Gay Global Capital with Huntsman, co-founded the microcredit company Unitus in 2001, and took a series of full-time Church assignments: mission president in Ghana from 2004 to 2007, a general authority on March 31, 2012, the Presidency of the Seventy on March 31, 2018. None of these men described their giving as consecration in a source I could find. The behaviour fits the covenant anyway, and the reader can decide whether that is cause or coincidence.

The institution keeps the same discipline it asks of members, and it has been better at accumulating than at explaining. Ensign Peak Advisors was founded on September 29, 1997 as the investment manager for Church reserves, grew from an operation of three employees in the late 1970s to about 70 in February 2020, all required to be members in good standing, and is run by Roger Clarke. In December 2019 a former employee, David Nielsen, filed a whistleblower complaint saying the fund held about $100 billion; Wikipedia's infobox gives $124 billion for February 2020. Estimates for the whole Church are larger and less firm: $265 billion in net worth for 2023 and $293 billion for 2024, with $206 billion of that in investments and a real-estate portfolio put at a minimum of $15.7 billion in 2022. Tithing receipts were estimated at $7 billion in 2012 and at $5.5 to $6.5 billion for 2024. None of these figures is audited in public. The one number it does publish each year is spending on care: $1.45 billion in 2024 across 3,836 humanitarian projects in 192 countries and territories, with 6.6 million volunteer hours, in a report released March 25, 2025. Set that against a $293 billion estimate and the ratio is about half of one percent a year.

The SEC order is the one place where the fund's history is written down by someone other than the Church, so it is worth reading slowly, in one piece. Any manager of more than $100 million in listed stocks must file a quarterly Form 13F listing its holdings, and Ensign Peak was required to do so from 1997. Instead, beginning in 2001, it created limited liability companies with addresses around the United States and filed under their names; the first 13F under a shell name went in during 2003, and further companies were added in 2005, 2011 and 2015, thirteen in all. The reason, in the language the SEC quoted from the Church's own account, was that disclosure in Ensign Peak's name would lead to negative consequences in light of the size of the portfolio. By 2018 the holdings that were not disclosed under the true name came to about $32 billion. The SEC first raised the matter in June 2019; Ensign Peak then filed a single consolidated report for the first time in 2020. On February 21, 2023 the Commission announced a settled order under which Ensign Peak paid a $4 million penalty and the Church $1 million, for conduct running from 1997 through 2019. Gurbir S. Grewal, the enforcement director, said the 13F requirement "applies to all institutional investment managers, including non-profit and charitable organizations". The Church's statement the same day said Ensign Peak had relied on legal counsel since 2000 while trying to keep the portfolio private, that the $5 million came from investment returns, and that the Church would "affirm our commitment to comply with the law, regret mistakes made, and now consider this matter closed". Nobody was accused of losing money or of trading badly. The offence was concealment, and the motive the Church gave for it was the size of the number. That is the tension of this essay in a regulatory filing: an institution that teaches its members to give a tenth openly spent 22 years arranging not to be seen holding the rest.

The tenth is compulsory for a temple recommend. The rest is a covenant nobody audits.

The phrase in the title comes from the Gospel of John and gets used by members to mean that one may build, earn and own so long as the owning does not own you. In practice it produces some visible habits, and the sources above document a few of them.

• A tenth off the top, declared annually to a bishop, on a scale Pew measured at 79 percent of American members in 2011.
• Foundations funded during life rather than at death: Huntsman's first $100 million pledge came in 1999, nineteen years before he died.
• A stretch of full-time, unpaid Church assignment in mid-career or after, as for Huntsman (1980), Ashton (2004) and Gay (2004), each in his forties or later.
• A preference, at the institutional level, for reserves over disclosure, which the SEC priced at $5 million in 2023.

The open question is the one the whistleblower raised and the SEC did not address: what a fund of $100 billion or more is for. The Church's 2023 statement spoke only of the privacy of the portfolio, and the membership it serves stood at 17.9 million at the end of 2025. Members who have promised everything they own to the same kingdom are entitled to ask, and most, on the evidence of the tithing figures, keep paying while they wait for the answer.