In his July 1838 tithing revelation, the Lord both affirmed the law of consecration and modified the ongoing way in which the saints were expected to consecrate of their money and property. Rather than following the 1831 system outlined in D&C 42 of legally deeding all of their property to the bishop and receiving back from him a legal lease of property known as a stewardship, the Lord asked the saints instead to follow a tithing system of paying one tenth of all their interest annually. Only months after this tithing revelation was received, the Saints were violently expelled from Missouri and, just over a year later, found themselves as refugees settling a swampy piece of land in Illinois they would call Nauvoo. In this episode of Church History Matters, we begin by diving into what consecration looked like in Nauvoo and then trace the practice into Utah. And rather than seeing a clean, linear break from the D&C 42 financial consecration system of stewardship to the D&C 119 consecration system of tithing, we instead see in the historical record what appears to be various forms of overlap between and hybridization of these two systems. Today, we’re talking about United Orders and business cooperatives in Brigham City, Orderville, and elsewhere, and how the federal government broke up these cooperatives, and finally how we as a church came to settle more exclusively on the tithing system.
This is the fourth episode of our 8-part podcast series on Consecration and Church Finance. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and additional resources, visit our website at doctrineandcov...
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Originally published February 6, 2024
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