I need you to sit with some numbers for a second.
Not because I'm trying to win an argument. I'm tired of arguments. I'm tired of watching people I used to sit next to in Sunday School post about the sanctity of life while an institution we both tithed to sits on a pile of money so large it had to hide it in a shell company to avoid questions.
The company is called Ensign Peak Advisors. It's in Salt Lake City. At last credible estimate, it held around $298 billion in assets. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accumulated this through decades of member tithes, and for years, they didn't tell anyone it existed.
I'm not here to litigate. I'm here to do math.
There are roughly 600,000 abortions performed in the United States each year. If you're pro-life, that number represents 600,000 deaths. A yearly tragedy on a scale that justifies, in the eyes of many believers, political action, legislative battles, clinic protests, and half a century of culture war.
I'm not going to argue about when life begins. That's not what this is about.
Globally, about 4.8 million children under five die every year. Not fetuses. Children. Kids with names who were wanted by their families and died anyway—from malaria, from diarrhea, from pneumonia, from being born in a place without a clean hospital or a trained midwife or a $0.50 vaccine.
Most of these deaths are preventable. We know what stops them: vaccines, antibiotics, clean water, nutrition programs, skilled birth attendants, mosquito nets. This is the most well-documented cause-and-effect relationship in global health.
The cost to save a child's life in a low-income country is estimated between $500 and $5,000. Let's hedge toward the higher end. Let's assume inefficiency, overhead, corruption, logistics. $3,000 per child, to be safe.
Now let's tithe the church as they tithe their members. We only want 10%. That's $29.8 billion.
$29.8 billion ÷ $3,000 = ~10 million children.
That's what you could do with a tithe of what's sitting in Ensign Peak right now.
If you spent it on systems—not charity, but infrastructure—you wouldn't just save ten million kids once. You'd permanently lower the child mortality rate in entire countries. You'd build clinics that stay. Train nurses who teach others. Install water systems that outlive you.
You could, conservatively, save more children every single year than the number of abortions performed in the United States. Not for one year. Forever.
Here's where someone objects: "You can't compare those. Abortion is a unique moral category. It's not about numbers. It's about the nature of the act."
But if the church believes every life is sacred—if that's the theology—then why does the institution behave as though some lives are more symbolically valuable than others?
A child who dies of malaria in Niger is just as dead as a pregnancy terminated in Nevada. If you believe in the soul, both have one. If you believe life is sacred, both are losses. So why does one justify a fifty-year political crusade and the other justify nothing?
The answer isn't theological. It's institutional.
Abortion is a boundary issue. It's a loyalty test. It tells you who's in and who's out. It mobilizes. It fundraises. It creates identity. Child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa does none of those things. Saving kids in Malawi doesn't reinforce the authority of Salt Lake City. It doesn't require obedience. It doesn't produce visible moral compliance. It just saves kids. Quietly. Far away. Without a logo.
And so it doesn't happen.
This is the part I can't get past.
Once you see the math, every day of inaction becomes a choice. Not a policy debate. A choice. A specific number of children who die today, who didn't have to, because an institution that claims to speak for Christ decided that preserving capital was more important than preserving life.
I keep thinking about the rich young ruler. He comes to Jesus, asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus says: sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and follow me.
The man walks away sad, because he had great wealth.
And Jesus doesn't chase him. Doesn't negotiate. Doesn't set up a foundation or a DAF or a shell company in Salt Lake. He just lets the man walk away, and then turns to his disciples and says: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
I don't think Jesus was being hyperbolic. I think he knew that wealth, at a certain scale, becomes its own theology. It stops being a tool and starts being an identity. And once that happens, you'll build entire doctrines to justify keeping it.
You'll say it's about stewardship. Prudence. Future generations.
You'll say the real issue is abortion, not malaria. Personal responsibility, not systemic intervention.
You'll say anything except the truth: you had the money, you had the means, children were dying, and you chose to keep it.
I'm not writing this to dunk on Mormons. I was one. Some of my favorite people still are.
I'm writing this because I grieve the church that could have existed.
The one that looked at $298 billion and said: What would Jesus do with this? Actually. Not symbolically. Not eventually. Right now.
The one that built hospitals instead of temples. That measured faithfulness in lives saved, not ordinances performed. The one that took "pro-life" seriously enough to apply it to children who were already born, already dying, already within reach.
That church doesn't exist. Maybe it never did.
But the Christ I read about in the New Testament—the one who healed first and taught second, who fed the crowd before he preached to them, who touched lepers and wept at graves—
That Christ wouldn't build a shell company.
He wouldn't sit on 30 billion dollars, a tenth of a hoard of wealth, while children die of preventable disease in the name of a "rainy-day fund."
He wouldn't argue about the qualitative difference between an abortion and a dead toddler while the toddlers keep dying.
He'd flip the tables. He'd say: Why are you still talking?
And he'd be right.
I'm not saying abortion is good or bad. I'm not saying it's irrelevant. I'm not saying the moral concerns aren't real on either side.
I'm saying: if you have the resources to save more children than the number of abortions performed each year, and you choose not to, then your concern was never about children.
It was about control. About identity. About the performance of righteousness rather than its practice.
Priorities are theology.
What you do with what you have—while the least of these are dying—that's the creed.
