LDS Church can’t hide behind religion in Huntsman’s tithing lawsuit, lawyers argue

The Church Administration Building is photographed in downtown Salt Lake City in 2023. New filings have appeared in the James Huntsman tithing case.Invoking church autonomy to let the global religion avoid a reckoning in court over Huntsman’s assertions he was misled by its top leaders aboutwould jeopardize other religions and threatens the idea that faith groups are equally subject to civil law, warn the latest briefs at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Murder would still be murder if committed by a group that deems it a sacrament,” says one of the latest friend-of-the-court briefs filed Friday in support of Huntsman’s lawsuit. “And fraud is still fraud if clothed in religious vestments.”a variety of third-party advocacy groups, faith traditions, schools and nonprofits City Creek Center in Salt Lake City is shown in 2021. Funding for the mall is at the center of James Huntsman's tithing lawsuit.then-President Gordon B.

With the case now on appeal, lawyers for the church and supporters have pressed the view that interpreting key pieces of Huntsman’s fraud allegations — including what motivated him to donate and what Hinckley may have meant when he spoke about tithing from the pulpit — would illegally and unconstitutionally put courts in charge of deciding internal questions of faith.

“If the church’s legal theory were correct,” their lawyers, based in Durham, N.C., argue, “religious organizations could insist that they were free from all possible liability, as long as there was some religious component or label to their conduct.”

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