Tithing lawsuits and tithing as a temple requirement

Every tithing-fraud suit against the Church has failed in the federal appeals courts (2025-2026); the courtroom record nonetheless documents how reserves built from tithing funded City Creek.

What the Church claims

Tithing is the Lord's law, administered by revelation through the Council on the Disposition of the Tithes; the Church has been truthful with members about how tithing is used.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Holds up. Every fraud suit has failed, unanimously on the merits in the Ninth Circuit and on threshold grounds in the Tenth, so the claim survives the test that was actually brought against it. The truthfulness half is weaker than that outcome suggests, because the courts decided questions of standing and religious autonomy rather than whether members were told the truth.

The record

James Huntsman, who tithed from 1993 to 2015, sued in 2021 alleging fraud over City Creek and a Beneficial Life 'bail out'. A Ninth Circuit panel partly revived the suit on 2023-08-07; the court took the case en banc and on 2025-01-31 all eleven judges affirmed summary judgment for the Church.
The en banc majority (Friedland, J.) held no reasonable juror could find the Church misrepresented City Creek's funding, because it had 'long explained' that reserve funds include tithing and that earnings on those reserves would be used; the Beneficial Life claim failed because Huntsman identified no specific statement. The majority said the church autonomy doctrine 'had no bearing'; Judges Bress (with three others) and Bumatay would have relied on it.
Gaddy v. Corporation of the President (10th Cir. No. 23-4110, filed 2025-08-26): the court affirmed dismissal of a putative class action begun in 2019. It held the church autonomy doctrine bars a RICO theory premised on allegedly false teachings about the First Vision, Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham translation, and Church history, because that would require adjudicating the truth of religious beliefs; the tithing-use theory failed for not adequately pleading reliance/causation.
On 2026-08-31 a Tenth Circuit panel (Hartz, Phillips, Moritz) unanimously affirmed dismissal of the consolidated Chappell/Oaks/Christensen class actions (nine plaintiffs, four suits filed from October 2023 after the SEC order) as time-barred under a three-year limitations period; Deseret News reported no further tithing appeals pending.
Being a full-tithe payer is a condition of a temple recommend, so access to temple marriage, to seeing a child's temple wedding, and (doctrinally) to exaltation is tied to paying 10 percent. The annual bishop's interview was renamed 'tithing declaration' in 2022.

The moving target

2003-04: Tithing funds will not be used for the mall; earnings of invested reserve funds and commercial entities will pay.
2022-08-11: Tithing declaration emphasizes covenant and 'the divine commandment of tithing'; interviews may begin 1 September.
2025-2026: The rulings vindicate the Church; the claims were baseless.

The exchange

Church counsel; Becket; FAIR blog on Huntsman (2025-02-08)

Three federal appellate courts, twenty-plus judges, zero votes for the plaintiffs: the 'tithing fraud' narrative has been tested and rejected, in Huntsman on the actual evidence.

The answer: Accurate, and the site should say so plainly. But note what each court decided: Huntsman turned on the literal truth of a carefully worded distinction (tithing principal vs earnings on invested tithing); Gaddy held that courts may not examine whether the Church's historical claims are true at all; Chappell was a limitations dismissal. None found the Church was transparent; they found it was not legally liable.

What they get right: Critics who still say 'the Church was caught spending tithing on a mall' are contradicted by an 11-0 ruling on the record evidence.

General Handbook / Church teaching

Tithing is a freely chosen act of faith; temple worthiness standards are for God to set, not critics.

The answer: Voluntariness is real but thin when family weddings and promised eternal family relationships are gated on payment and the institution discloses nothing about its finances. That is an ethical and credibility criticism, not a legal one.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The legal avenue is closed and the site should not pretend otherwise. What the litigation did produce is a sworn evidentiary record: Ensign Peak earned about $3.9 billion in 2003 alone, earmarked $1.2 billion for City Creek in 2004, and spent roughly $1.4 billion on the mall between 2007 and 2012 out of reserves that originate in surplus tithing. The Church won because Hinckley's wording was precise, not because donors were told the scale of what was happening. Gaddy matters for a different reason: the Tenth Circuit held that civil courts cannot test whether the Church's account of its own origins is true, which means the question is left entirely to the kind of historical evidence this site collects.

The apologetic case

The Church said earnings on reserves, not tithing, would fund City Creek; sworn Ensign Peak records showed exactly that; eleven judges agreed unanimously. Plaintiffs in Gaddy and Chappell asked secular courts to declare a religion false and to refund voluntary offerings, which the First Amendment and limitations law forbid. The Church's record in these cases is a clean sweep.

What would change this

A court or regulator finding that specific statements to donors were false; internal documents showing tithing principal, not earnings, funded commercial projects.

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.