Where do LDS adjacent groups like FAIR, Saints Unscripted, and the More Good Foundation get their money? Scott Vance recently presented his findings at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and gives more answers. Check out our conversation….
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Partner Organizations
GT 00:31 Well, let’s talk about that. Because I know another thing that you said was, the Church wants these to be independent, but you talked about the guy with the card to get into the Church [Office] Building. So there’s some…
Scott 00:46 Fuzziness.
GT 00:46 …coordination there or something.
Scott 00:48 Sure.
GT 00:49 Talk more about that.
Scott 00:51 About why the Church wants them to be independent or–
GT 00:52 Well, that as well as, is there funding going on with the Church?
Scott 00:53 Sure. In terms of funding, the easiest way to see the funding is to pull the 990 forms that are available, and those are available from 2005 to 2018 for the More Good Foundation. They’re all public. They’re all online. You can read them just like I did, and you can scrape the data off of that. You can see that on any given year, the Church, the Foundation, the LDS Foundation, I believe it’s called…
GT 00:58 Okay.
Scott 00:58 …which is one of the organizations that the Church owns; I believe it’s where they keep the money from their private businesses.
GT 01:32 Okay.
Scott 01:33 They gave, I hate to give the wrong number. But it’s approximately $140,000 to the More Good Foundation. That figure has varied year to year, and it started at a lower number of 2005 and then crept up over time. It was basically flat after that. But yeah, I mean, so the money is there.
GT 01:53 So they’re getting $150,000 a year, roughly?
Scott 01:57 Sure. And then you can look at the private donors, and you can calculate it out, and it comes out to about 20% of the total donations that they get.
GT 02:05 Just from Mom and Pop, whatever.
Scott 02:10 Kind of.
GT 02:10 Rich mom and pop.
Scott 02:11 Very rich mom and pop that just happened to give $100,000 here or a million here, whatever.
GT 02:17 Oh, so these are Mitt Romney type people?
Scott 02:20 I mean, Mitt Romney is not on the list.
GT 02:22 Okay.
Scott 02:23 But some other people are. There’s people from WordPerfect. Let me see if I can bring up the list here. Extra Space Storage, there’s Spencer Kirk and Ken Woolley who have combined donations of almost $5 million to the More Good Foundation.
GT 02:22 Just the More Good Foundation?
Scott 02:48 Yes. And one of these guys, I believe, was the founder of the Foundation. So, he’s personally invested. And he’s been on the board of the Foundation since it started. So, I mean, he’s part of the Foundation. So, he’s giving his own money, which makes sense.
GT 03:01 Okay.
Scott 03:04 And then you have the LDS Church, and then Ashton Family Foundation, which is essentially the founder of WordPerfect, gave $1.8 million over the years. You’ve got some people from Nu Skin. You’ve got the One Foundation, Stephen Lind and Blake Rooney, combined donations of approximately $1.5 million.
GT 03:23 Wow. So pretty rich Mormons.
Scott 03:29 Yeah. I mean, there are the people down that are giving…
GT 03:32 These aren’t $10 and $20 donations?
Scott 03:34 No, no. And in fact, they probably receive $10.00 to $20.00 donations, but they don’t put those on the tax form, so you wouldn’t see those anyway. You only see figures that are above $5,000.
GT 03:42 Five thousand, you said?
Scott 03:43 Yes.
GT 03:44 Okay. Interesting. And so the Church, even though they do contribute to some of these organizations, the percentage is relatively small, because these rich donors are doing a lot more.
Scott 03:58 Correct. Yes, there was one year, 2018, which was special and weird in terms of the finances. Because that year, Spencer Kirk gave, I believe, $3 million to the More Good Foundation and the LDS Church gave, I forget if it was $1 or $2 million, but it was it was a big chunk of change that year.
GT 04:20 Oh.
Scott 04:21 And then, also, that year, you had the More Good Foundation giving money to Book of Mormon Central, and to FAIR and to the Interpreter Foundation. So, the Church didn’t give money to FAIR, the Interpreter Foundation and Book of Mormon Central, but they gave it to the More Good Foundation and the More Good Foundation happened in the same year to just happen to give money to these organizations.
GT 04:43 This sounds like money laundering.
Scott 04:44 It really does sound like money laundering. And, in fact, it’s so obvious that FAIR went on their website, and they had an official denial of, ‘just because we got money from them and they got money from the Church does not mean that the Church is funding us.’ {Rick chuckling}. They have a nice blog post to clarify that in case you were curious.
GT 05:01 Okay, I’ll have to get that link from you.
Scott 05:04 Yeah.
GT 05:05 You’re way more interested in this than me. But this is interesting. {Rick chuckling}
Scott 05:10 I find it interesting.
GT 05:12 Well, where else do we go from here? What else can you tell us about this?
Scott 05:17 In terms of finances, there’s not a lot left to say. FAIR tries to be financially independent, but they were just running short of funds in 2018, and they needed a cash infusion, and they got it from the Church. But it’s largely a voluntary organization. All of these organizations are largely volunteer based.
Scott 05:42 That’s where I came up with my model at the end of the presentation in terms of, what these organizations look like, from an organizational perspective. I compared them to, essentially, concerned citizens and private groups helping the government during a war. I use the example from the Second World War. I can go through that if you want.
GT 06:04 Yeah, go ahead.
Scott 06:05 Sure. So there’s a lot of people that are familiar with the Enigma code. But it turns out, the Germans had multiple codes, and one of them was based on a telegraph machine. It was incredibly complex. And it was very hard to break, obviously. But they had some great theoretical mathematicians who figured out a way to essentially break it, but it required a ton of computing power. At this time, computers didn’t exist as we know them. There was the Bombe, which was used to break the Enigma, which consisted of a bunch of essentially rotary switches. And that was basically the first computer.
GT 06:49 And that was the British that broke that one. Right?
Scott 06:52 Yes and no. It was the British, but they only could break it because the Poles gave them all the answers they needed.
GT 06:58 Oh.
Scott 06:59 There were three Polish mathematicians who’d been working on it since the early 1930s, who had managed to break the previous generations. So, they gave all that information to the Brits. And then the Brits built on that, and were able to [break it.] The Brits were brilliant, but they cheated.
GT 07:11 They had help.
Scott 07:13 They did. Anyway, you do that in war time. Anyhow, so the first real computer, I’m calling real computer, that used valves or vacuum tubes, which were the precursor of transistors, was built by Tommy Flowers. Tommy Flowers was not part of the official organization. He was not part of the government. He was not working for the War Department. But he knew some people and they were impressed with what he could do. And so, he went back to his lab and with a group of people, he built the first computer, which was called Colossus. He got it to work with 1000 valves, which was unheard of at that time, to have 1000 vacuum tubes operating at the same time and keep them operating for weeks and months on end.
GT 07:13 Because they get hot.
Scott 07:13 They do get hot. But he had some clever techniques of keeping the voltage low, and always keeping them on and never turning them on and off. He managed to make everything work. Anyway, so I use this analogy, because Tommy Flowers is not part of the official organization. But, if you need some cash, maybe the official organization is going to give him some cash because they need what he can provide. He’s highly motivated. At the end of the war, the government hadn’t paid him back. So, he was in debt for all these vacuum tubes that he had purchased with his own funds to build the first computer, which helped the British win the Second World War. It was incredibly successful, to the point that this computer they kept running for the next 12 years till 1959, because it worked. So, a decade after the transistor was invented, they were still using this computer.
GT 08:48 So that’s what the More Good Foundation is.
Scott 08:50 Yeah, it is concerned individuals. It’s people who really are devoted to the overall movement, who take some initiative, but have some inside connections, and via these inside connections, they can get direction from the organization. They can see what the organization wants. The organization can tell them ,”Hey, can you fix this?” And then they can go off and fix it. That’s the model that I’m proposing. I don’t know if it’s a good model or a bad model. But that’s the analogy that makes sense to me.
GT 09:16 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Heartland/Meso Confusion
GT 09:20 Is there anything else that we need to cover from your presentation?
Scott 09:22 On the presentation? [There’s] only one thing I’d like to throw out, which, this causes a little bit of confusion for believers, because believers don’t know that these organizations are supported by the Church. So, when the believers are looking for official messages, they don’t know if they can trust these organizations or other organizations online, which look very similar. There’s Book of Mormon Central, and there’s Book of Mormon Evidence. And if you’re a lay member, just Googling things, you could come to either site and not understand which has the Church’s message and which has a different message, which is not what the Church wants you to hear. So, that’s the risk I see with using these organizations is, a messaging risk.
GT 09:26 What is Book of Mormon Evidence?
Scott 09:31 Book of Mormon Evidence is described as a Heartland organization. They talk about, for instance, the Urim and Thummim glasses as being the actual and only method that Joseph used to translate the Book of Mormon. They are seer-stone deniers, that sort of thing. They talk about the giant race that existed and that’s why the Urim and Thummim were large, which actually is quoting Joseph Smith, Sr. So, they’re not incorrect in terms of their history there. But it’s not something that the Church currently espouses that there was this race of giants and that that’s why the Urim and Thummim were large, etc. {Rick chuckling} You can kind of get it from the Book of Mormon, but you have to know where to look for it.
Scott 09:31 Yeah, so Book of Mormon Evidences is, I believe that’s run by Rod Meldrum. Right?
Scott 10:15 It’s quite possible. I’m sorry, I don’t know.
GT 10:18 I think it is, or I believe that’s right. So, that’s not to be confused with Book of Mormon Central? Well, Book of Mormon Central has changed their name. Now they’re just Scripture Central. Right?
Scott 11:12 Correct. Yeah.
GT 11:12 And I know Casey Griffiths is highly involved in Scripture Central.
Scott 11:17 Yeah.
GT 11:18 Because they used to have Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and…
Scott 11:22 Pearl of Great Price.
GT 11:23 Yeah. Then they were like, let’s just combine these.
Scott 11:25 Yes, that’s right.
GT 11:26 So now they’re Scripture Central.
Scott 11:27 Yes.
GT 11:30 Well, and I think, if I remember right, Jonathan Neville, who’s a Heartlander, really doesn’t like Book of Mormon Central because they’re more Meso (America).
Scott 11:41 They are, as is FAIR. That’s the official line that the people who are aligned with the LDS Church are going with.
GT 11:49 Because the official line for the LDS Church is, we are agnostic as to where the Book of Mormon took place.
Scott 11:56 Yes, that is the new official line. Right? {Rick laughing} But, if you go back to the 1990s, when I was a student at BYU, we were taught the Mesoamerican theory is the most likely theory. That used to be the, roughly official Church line.
GT 12:11 It’s still pretty semi-official I would say.
Scott 12:13 I think so. Yeah. But when the Church gets concerned about a topic, they make it unofficial, and they stop talking about it. You see that with Noah and the flood, right?.A worldwide flood? There’s not a lot of physical evidence for that. So maybe let’s not talk about that.
GT 12:30 Mm Hmm. Except for they still talk about it in Sunday school.
Scott 12:35 I haven’t seen a lot in General Conference. I think it’s pretty much disappeared from General Conference. I don’t know about Sunday School. But I did a search on that a while back and after 1980 It just kind of drops off.[1]
GT 12:45 Okay.
Scott 12:45 Anyway.
GT 12:46 Yeah, I don’t know that they talk about the flood in conference.
Scott 12:50 And, in fact, in some of the more recent– I did look through the Old Testament manual, and they hint in some of the lessons now that this could be allegorical, in some of the creation stories and the flood stories and things like that. So, they’re allowing for different interpretations there.
GT 13:08 Okay. Cool. Anything else you have?
Scott 13:14 Nothing important on this topic. I go through a little bit about how the different demographics, different groups are aimed for different demographics. FAIR Mormon, I believe, is more aimed for the middle-aged crowd, maybe the more educated crowd. Book of Mormon Central, I think, is aimed towards teenagers, primarily, and young people. And I see that, as well, with the Saints Unscripted videos and the new channels being offered through the More Good Foundation. They’re primarily concerned with people between the ages of 12 and 25, as far as I can tell.
GT 13:42 Okay.
{End of Part 3}
[1] Scott mentions a clarification: “At 12:40 I say that the church stopped talking about Noah and the Flood in General conference after about 1980. This is inaccurate. There are regular mentions of the flood in General Conference until at least 2011 (Monson: “While this generation will be comparable in wickedness to the days of Noah, when the Lord cleansed the earth by flood”). In 2005 Hinckley spoke of the Arc and in 2009 Nelson also mentions this. I have not seen specific mentions in General Conference after 2011.”
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