[rdxm]

tax law is tax law, it's that simple. if the hedge fund did what the whistleblower alleges, then bye-bye tax exempt status.

also since when is a rainy day / reserve fund unique to a particular religion? it's been common sense financial practice for longer than your particular religion has been in existence.

[Game_Ender]

Mormons have a “history of calamity” so to speak where they found themselves having to move or hit by various disasters. This is very recently in religious terms, last 200 years or so. So this is reflected in much more focus on having a financial cushion as well as other disaster preparedness things like a few months of food saved up at home.

Think of it as the religious version of your great grandmother who lived through that depression always saving odd things and being extra thrifty. Some scars run very deep and have long term behavioral changes.

[tomrod]

That's a hagiographic way of viewing Mormon (specifically, Brighamite) history, given they brought the vast majority of their calamities upon themselves (especially in the early days). Be it from a womanizing, ephebophilic founder who speculated with the financial fortunes of early members in Ohio, to disregarding pluralism on the frontier in their establishment of hegemony, to declaring himself a God after being a priest and a king with the second anointing, to the establishment of a theocracy in Utah and partial theocracy in Illinois, to the usurping of civil law for ecclesiastical law up into the 1900s, to the exercise of polygamy, to the persecution and targeting of established religions, to ongoing racist and sexist cultural philosophies and doctrines, to the hoarding of wealth, to paying tens of thousands of dollars for rugs, to the economic favoring of corporate leaders (e.g multiple homes for their leaders) and family (ever wonder who puts in the curtain dividers) there have been many, shall we say, missteps.

Fortunately for Mormons who remain in the Brighamite branch, there are several counterfactual examples of where their religion can go, not the least of which is the branch housed in the Community of Christ, which has followed a much more ecumenical path and openly confronted the history that was hidden for a long time.