The Church's businesses, from a pioneer co-op to a $32 billion portfolio

The sale that explains the rest came in the autumn of 1999. Weeks after Church president Gordon B. Hinckley told a general conference that the Church would shed operations begun in pioneer times that were no longer "central to its mission", ZCMI, the department store Brigham Young had organized 131 years earlier, was sold to May Department Stores of St. Louis. The agreement was announced on October 15, 1999, the store's anniversary. Fourteen stores changed hands: the downtown Salt Lake flagship, eleven others in Utah and two in Idaho. All of them stayed closed on Sundays through a two-year transition, and the downtown store stayed closed on Sundays for good. The name lasted until April 2001, when the stores became Meier & Frank; they became Macy's in September 2006, and the flagship was demolished in 2007 to make way for City Creek Center. Hinckley's explanation for why the Church had owned a department store at all is the one to keep in mind for everything below: the businesses were started, he said, when the Church was the only organization in a remote territory that could supply the capital.

The Deseret News printed its first issue on June 15, 1850, three years after the wagons arrived, and it was the first newspaper in Utah. ZCMI followed on October 15, 1868, as a cooperative meant to undercut merchants who were not members and whom Young accused of gouging. His instruction was to bring goods in and "sell them as low as they can possibly be sold", and by 1870 about 150 co-op branches were trading across Utah and the neighboring territories. The chain later called itself America's first department store, a slogan nobody has independently verified.

The twentieth century added the kind of companies a growing city needs. Beneficial Life was founded in 1905. KSL radio went on the air in 1922, and KSL-TV was bought in 1949. Deseret Book was formed in 1919 from the merger of two church bookstores, though it traces its roots to an 1866 magazine. In 1950 the Church bought a 45,000-acre tract in central Florida that became Deseret Ranches. The Polynesian Cultural Center opened in Laie, Hawaii, on October 12, 1963, to give Brigham Young University's Hawaii students jobs. Bonneville International was incorporated on September 4, 1964, to hold the broadcasting. Then, in 1966, the Church put the commercial pieces under one roof, Deseret Management Corporation, a for-profit holding company headquartered in Salt Lake City. Ensign Peak Advisors, which manages the investment reserves, was incorporated on September 29, 1997.

Two things stand out in that table. One is how many rows end in a sale, a closure or a retreat: the department store, the insurer's new business, the daily newspaper, a whole radio market. The other is that the Church did not stop buying. In 2013 AgReserves paid $565 million for 382,834 acres of Florida Panhandle timberland from the St. Joe Company, which by 2014 made the Church the largest private landowner in Florida. Farmland Reserve's Nebraska holdings grew from 228,000 acres in 2004 to 370,000 in 2023. Land, not retail, is where the money went.

The distinction that matters to a business reader is structural. The Church itself is a tax-exempt religious organization, and its donated funds are exempt. Deseret Management Corporation and its subsidiaries are for-profit companies; AgReserves describes itself as a for-profit agriculture company with operations in more than 30 states and six other countries. These pay taxes as any company does. Deseret Industries, the Polynesian Cultural Center and Ensign Peak Advisors are nonprofits. Nobody outside the Church knows the whole picture, because the Church does not publish consolidated accounts in the United States. The Salt Lake Tribune's 2012 accounting put Deseret Management's revenue at about $1.2 billion a year, a figure the Church called vastly overstated, and Reuters estimated the same year that the Church collected up to $8 billion a year in tithing.

Ensign Peak is where the numbers got tested. A former portfolio manager, David Nielsen, filed a complaint with the IRS in 2019 saying the fund held about $100 billion. On February 21, 2023, the SEC charged Ensign Peak and the Church with failing to file the required Forms 13F from 1997 to 2019 and instead filing them through 13 shell limited liability companies around the country, which hid the size of a portfolio the SEC put at about $32 billion by 2018. Ensign Peak paid $4 million and the Church $1 million. The Church's own account of the reserves came in a First Presidency statement on December 17, 2019: most donations are spent at once on meetinghouses, temples, education, humanitarian work and missionaries, and "a portion is methodically safeguarded through wise financial management and the building of a prudent reserve for the future." Hinckley had said something plainer about the Florida ranch years earlier.

"A safe investment where the assets of the Church may be preserved and enhanced." Gordon B. Hinckley

The Church's companies are run as companies, which means they hire executives, fire staff and close divisions, and the people who run them move between corporate and ecclesiastical roles in a way that has no parallel in most American religions. Sheri Dew joined Deseret Book as an associate editor in 1988, served in the Church's Relief Society general presidency from 1997 to 2002, and in March 2002 became the publisher's first female president and chief executive at a moment when the company was losing money. She took it into the black, launched the Time Out for Women events in 2002, bought Excel Entertainment in 2004 and the Seagull bookstore chain with Covenant Communications in 2006, and served as executive vice president of Deseret Management Corporation.

Clark Gilbert went the other direction. A Harvard Business School professor, he became chief executive of Deseret Digital Media in 2009 and president of the Deseret News in May 2010; that August the paper laid off 85 people, 43 percent of the newsroom, and shifted toward digital. He left in 2015 to run Brigham Young University-Idaho, then BYU-Pathway Worldwide from 2017, was called as a General Authority in April 2021, and was ordained an apostle on February 12, 2026. Keith McMullin, who headed Deseret Management when City Creek opened, told the Tribune that the mall would return so little that no investor would have built it. That is the pattern: the businesses exist to serve the Church's purposes, they are staffed by people the Church trusts, and when they stop serving those purposes they get sold. A department store in 1999, a newspaper's presses in 2021, a radio cluster in 2025. You can read the table as a balance sheet, but it is also a record of what the Church decided it no longer needed to own.