Church Incorporation
When the Church was founded in 1830, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery followed revelation as well as several norms for starting an organization. While state law allowed them to organize a church as an incorporated “religious society,” Joseph and Oliver evidently started the Church as an unincorporated society. This had implications for how the Church managed and transferred properties and entered into contracts during its early years. As president of an unincorporated religious society, Joseph assumed a greater degree of personal liability for the Church’s properties and finances. After 1841, he transacted Church business as the sole trustee-in-trust. Religious corporations, on the other hand, generally operated with a group of trustees who could perpetuate the organization beyond any one individual. Following Joseph’s death in 1844, creditors, government officials, and some members of the Church contended over which parts of the Smith family estate, local civic institutions, and the Church belonged to individuals and to the Church itself.
In 1851, Church leaders in Utah Territory pursued legal incorporation for the Church. Whether a commercial or religious enterprise, incorporated agencies at the time needed to provide some benefit to the common good to secure a charter from the government. The territorial legislature passed an ordinance that year (which became codified as a law in 1855) that incorporated the Church based on its service of providing “houses for public worship, and instruction.” As a religious corporation, the Church invested in public works programs, joint-stock companies, and business enterprises to strengthen the regional economy and support the ever-growing immigrant population of Latter-day Saints gathering to the North American West.
Antipolygamy laws enacted by the United States federal government in the 1870s and 1880s targeted Church-sponsored enterprises and the Church as a corporation and eventually threatened to disenfranchise the Church and confiscate its properties. President Wilford Woodruff worked with lawmakers and court officials to comply with new laws, discontinue the practice of plural marriage, and transition Church-affiliated enterprises into private business entities, a process his successors continued.
Between 1918 and 1923, President Heber J. Grant and Bishop Charles W. Nibley arranged for three separate corporations to administer Church operations that the trustee-in-trust (which, since Joseph Smith, had been the president of the Church) had previously managed: the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop to manage charities and buildings; the Zion Securities Corporation to manage taxable and nonecclesiastical entities and properties; and the Corporation of the President to oversee all Church assets used for religious purposes. For the rest of the 20th century, many administrative changes in the Church were modifications of these corporate entities and their regular operations.
This corporate arrangement managed an increasing array of programs to meet the needs of a rapidly growing international institution. Radio and television broadcasting, printing, and other enterprises had multiplied, leading the First Presidency to consolidate all Church-owned business and media holdings under the Deseret Management Corporation and then bring this and the Zion Securities Corporation directly under the Corporation of the President in 1966. Following the advice of professional consultants, the First Presidency began to delegate more administrative functions to full-time managers and staff. The Corporation of the President and the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop continued in their primary administrative roles.
In the 1990s, President Gordon B. Hinckley spearheaded various rearrangements of the Church’s operations and management, including general authorities’ participation in business and other corporate entities. Most subsidiaries of Deseret Management Corporation remained ultimately under the oversight of the Corporation of the President. The First Presidency requested all general authorities to withdraw from public and private corporate boards, including Church-owned corporations except the Deseret Management Corporation. In 2019, President Russell M. Nelson directed the merger of the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop and the Corporation of the President into a legal corporation named after the full title of the Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This new arrangement reemphasized the centrality of Jesus Christ and religious purposes in all operations of the Church and helped to streamline programs and projects that interface with other organizations.
Related Topics: American Legal and Political Institutions, Church Finances, First Presidency, Bishop, Common Consent