Ex-Mormons urge court to focus on facts, not faith, seeking third RICO suit against church leaders

(CN) — A group of ex-members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said they don’t want the courts to litigate religious doctrine, but whether church leadership intentionally misrepresented facts about its history and how it uses donation money to deceive its flock.

So argued the plaintiffs at the 10th Circuit Monday, seeking a third chance at filing racketeering claims against the Mormon church.

Church leaders have hidden artifacts, stones, documents and other primary sources about the church’s history for over 100 years, plaintiff attorney Kay Burningham told the court’s three-judge panel, highlighting in particular information about how the church’s founder Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon.

The church teaches that an angel guided Smith to buried gold plates near his home in upstate New York in the 19th century. Smith is said to have collected the plates, which were inscribed in reformed Egyptian by ancient Americans with Hebrew DNA, and translated them into the church’s signature text, the Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830.

Recently though, church leaders have partially revealed that Smith did not directly use gold plates to create the Book of Mormon, but instead used what Burningham described as a “brownstone” to dictate the faith’s religious text.

“That’s an [admission] as far as we believe that what they had taught for decades was not true, and that they didn’t believe it because they had the stone in their vault since 1907,” the attorney said Monday.

Church leadership concealing those records amounted not to a disagreement about religious doctrine, but to misrepresentation of facts by the church — or in other words, fraud, Burningham said.

“There would have had to be a line drawn between fact and belief,” she argued.

When judges asked if it matters whether church leadership believed its doctrine, Burningham responded that church leadership told her clients many times during religious conferences that they would not lead the group astray. Church members were also admonished for going on the internet and reading “outside sources.”

If the church leaders did believe the representations they made, Burningham conceded before the panel that the plaintiffs would lose their suit. But she said that wasn’t church leadership’s true state of mind.

“They did not believe what they represented,” she said. “Misrepresenting one’s state of mind is a misrepresentation of fact. If we say that these are the correlated true facts about the church and the history, and they’re not, that’s fraud.”

David Jordan, an attorney for the church, said the plaintiffs were asking the court to let a jury litigate the details of Smith’s divine experiences over 200 years ago.

“She’s asking the court to intrude on the miraculous. On matters of faith,” Jordan said.

“In effect, what they’re asking for is a heresy trial,” he said — or at least one to determine the parameters of church orthodoxy. “Churches have the right to define, develop and evolve their own history.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Phillips, a Barack Obama appointee, pushed back. “Is there any limit to what a church can conceal and not be limited to civil RICO?” he asked.

Jordan said there was no limit to what a church can or cannot teach, nor what it chooses to emphasize, and finding otherwise — even as it relates to how a church uses its members’ donations — would be an intrusion of religious rights.

The plaintiffs say they wouldn’t have donated or given as much as they did, or perhaps would have left the church altogether, had they known it spent donations as principal on the church’s investments in commercial activity. They also claim statements about how the church invested in certain projects were vague, and made only in priesthood meetings which only men were allowed to attend.

Jordan argued that tithings weren’t actually used as principal funds. He said the church relies on revenue from its commercial enterprises and earnings on invested reserve funds.

The argument, Jordan said, comes down to the “deeply religious matter” of how tithing is defined.

In 2019 Laura Gaddy filed a 75-page class action in Utah federal court that claimed the church twisted “the foundational history of Mormonism” in a “fraudulent scheme perpetrated for generations,” driving worshipers into existential crises, suicide, anxiety and depression by peddling a “scheme of lies” centered on the  religion’s creation and its scriptures.

The plaintiffs seek punitive damages on seven counts, including racketeering, fraud, breach of fiduciary duties and emotional distress.

In 2020, the suit was dismissed with a judge ruling that the court could not decide the validity of a religion’s beliefs.

The group now appeals a previous order dismissing their second amendment complaint and ordering them not to file a third amendment complaint.

U.S. Circuit Judge Harris Hartz, a George W Bush appointee and U.S. Circuit Judge Allison H. Eid, a Donald Trump appointee, rounded out the three-judge panel.