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Cracks in the 'sin screen': the link between Mormon tithes and nuclear weapons
Our latest dive into the nuclear weapons economy in Utah – an exposé on how Mormon church tithes end up in Northrop Grumman. Check it out in the Salt Lake City Weekly!
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Hi,
When I was last in Utah – for a hearing about economic development records I’m trying to get from the state government about how many jobs have been created by Northrop Grumman manufacturing a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the state – I met with a local investigative journalist, Emma Penrod. She had shared tips with me about how to pursue public records in the state. I told her that Northrop Grumman and Utah were big deals for nuclear weapons-watchers. She went back home and pinged me later: She’d dug into SEC filings she was familiar with, and flagged something remarkable: that the Mormon Church holds millions of dollars worth of Northrop Grumman stock.
This blew my mind a little. A few years prior, I’d been on a panel with a colleague who does research for faith-based investors, and I recalled him sharing that nuclear weapons had been a no-go for quite some time for that crowd. I also knew that the Mormon church was no stranger to both the moral and parochial reasons to oppose nuclear weapons facilities in and around Utah, having wired a remarkable statement of dissent directly to the Reagan administration in opposition to a Cold War-era nuclear weapon, the MX missile, that would have been based in Utah and Nevada.
Our deep dive into how Northrop Grumman is receiving funds from Mormon tithes — via an until-recently secret church investment manager called Ensign Peak — is being published this week on the cover of the Salt Lake City Weekly. Read on to hear more about dissenting voices within the church and the very small number of faith-based investors who still hold Northrop Grumman stock, something that is at odds with the many mainline Western Christian churches that have official policy against doing so.
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In 1981, when the Mormon church’s top three leaders wired that anti-MX missile statement to the Reagan administration, they wrote:
“We may predict that with so many billions of dollars at stake we will hear much talk designed to minimize the problems that might be expected and to maximize the economic benefits that might accrue. The reasons for such portrayals will be obvious. Our fathers came to this western area to establish a base from which to carry the gospel of peace to the peoples of the earth. It is ironic, and a denial of the very essence of that gospel, that in this same general area there should be constructed a mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization.”
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Northrop Grumman’s ICBM plant in Corinne, Utah
It’s more than four decades later and billions of dollars are again at stake in the ICBM contract — and those economic development records that the state government and Northrop Grumman are fighting me over spell out what Utahns get in exchange for a mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization. Our next hearing is in August.
You can read the story on Inkstick here, and if you’re in Utah, please pick up a copy of the Salt Lake City Weekly.
Thank you for reading!
Thoughts, comments, story suggestions? Send them my way at [email protected]. We may publish them in a future newsletter.
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