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The spokesperson also said that conversations about welfare are between individuals like Bellamy and others whose stories also appear in this article and their bishop, and that the church would not break what it regards as a sacred confidentiality. Bellamy cooperated at first with what was being asked of her. She felt she'd go along "if that's what I needed to do for some type of goodness to come to my family," she said, adding that she knew that many in her community had benefited greatly from church welfare and their LDS faith.

Yet she ultimately balked, especially at the thought of being baptized in front of strangers. And it's important what I believe in.

For her refusal, she says, she and her family were denied welfare by the church, just as they had been by the state.

ProPublica is investigating the state of welfare across the Southwest , where the skyrocketing cost of living has made cash assistance for struggling families — an issue that has been brought to the fore again amid debate over President Joe Biden's child tax credit — more desperately needed than ever.

What the welfare reform law did, in essence, was dramatically shrink the safety net for the poorest Americans while leaving what aid remained in the hands of individual states, issuing each a "block grant" of federal welfare funding and significant discretion over how to spend, or not spend, the cash. There's perhaps no better place to examine the past and future of public assistance than Utah, the only state with a private welfare system to rival the government's.

After all, the welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as a model for the welfare reform movement of the s and '90s, when it was spotlighted by then-President Ronald Reagan during a visit to LDS welfare facilities and in the writings of a young conservative named Tucker Carlson.

Latter-day Saints, today considered among the nation's most conservative demographic groups, started out two centuries ago experimenting with an economic order that was borderline communist. Responding to the financial precarity of the early s, some of the first church members to settle Utah built a town called Orderville, which banned private property while establishing communal living arrangements and sharing food.

Fearing government incursion into the LDS sphere of influence in Utah and government dependency among the faithful, church President Heber J. Grant announced in that the church would establish its own welfare plan, opposed in principle to the government dole though structurally similar. The church constructed Welfare Square, complete with a foot-tall grain silo and a dairy processing plant, cannery and bakery.

It would be funded largely by "fast offerings" that Latter-day Saints donate one Sunday a month by forgoing food for the day and paying the church what they would've spent on those meals. The church's welfare system caught the attention of the new conservative movement of the s, '40s and '50s.

Here was a way out of an economic downturn born of classic Western ideals of personal and neighborly responsibility. President Ronald Reagan came out of this movement, and after visiting Utah in , he began pushing for what would become welfare reform. The first thing Utah did under the law was to become increasingly closefisted about helping poor people, creating a labyrinthine system of employment and self-improvement programs that applicants must partake in — including resume-writing seminars, screenings for drug use, counseling sessions and continual paperwork — as well as strict income limits they must not surpass.

Utah denied welfare applications, on average, more than 1, times every month last year, including during the pandemic. Utah doesn't do more for those in need in part because a contingent of its lawmakers, the overwhelming majority of whom are Latter-day Saints themselves , assume the church is handling the poverty issue; they also are loath to raise taxes to do the state's share, a review of Utah's legislative history demonstrates.

Thanks to "the LDS Church's welfare system, literally millions, tens of millions and maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars are saved by the state," former state Sen. Stuart Reid said in , when the Legislature passed a resolution honoring church welfare on its 75th anniversary. Indeed, Utah has been counting millions in church welfare work every year as part of the state's own welfare budget, as a way of meeting the minimum level of effort the state is required to put into addressing poverty so it can collect on federal dollars from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF.

According to the memorandum of understanding between the church and the state, Utah takes credit for a percentage of the hours that church volunteers spend producing and packaging food and clothing for the poor at Welfare Square and similar facilities. It also claims as state welfare a percentage of the church's efforts to produce and ship out humanitarian aid in the wake of disasters — aid that may not even help Utahns. Officials at Utah's public assistance agency, which after welfare reform was named the Department of Workforce Services, said they do not know how long they've had this "third-party" understanding with the church.

But they emphasized that it's legal under the law and subsequent federal regulations, and that other states engage in the same practice. That law was the first federal legislation to allow and encourage religious groups to be involved in the provision of government-funded social services, a policy championed by then-Sen. John Ashcroft and later by President George W. ProPublica found that the deal with the church was brokered in during the Great Recession, when Utah hired a for-profit company called Public Consulting Group Inc.

When the state denies help to low-income Utahns, state caseworkers sometimes, though not always, suggest that they seek welfare from the church instead, according to interviews with more than three dozen former caseworkers and applicants.

Martinez said he always gave applicants other nongovernmental options to consider, and there was no coercion to go the religious route. Still, he emphasized to them, the church has a lot more money to offer than the minimal aid dispensed by the state.

Liz Carver, director of workforce development at the Department of Workforce Services and the lead TANF official at the agency, acknowledged in multiple interviews that caseworkers might in some instances propose church welfare to customers, which is what the department calls citizens who apply for public assistance.

But, she said, welfare caseworkers not just in Utah but nationwide refer applicants to a range of community organizations, faith-based or not, all the time. It's part of a larger conversation with these individuals about what brought them to ask for help that day, she said, and about which needs the government can assist with under the federal regulations and which it can't.

Utah, Carver noted, is one of the most charitable states in the nation , characterized by a strong ethic of neighbors helping neighbors, which makes the agency's public-private offerings stronger. Regarding the state's fiscal arrangement with the church, Carver said, "We'd have to ask the state Legislature for more money if we couldn't count this partnership" toward state welfare.

Christina Davis, communication director for the department, added in an emailed statement that the fact that caseworkers may refer Utahns to the church and other private groups is a separate and unrelated issue from the state's budgetary agreement with the church welfare program.

She also stressed that tens of thousands of low-income households in Utah receive other forms of help from the state, including food stamps and Medicaid. Finally, Davis pointed out that the number of poor people who are provided direct assistance has been significantly scaled back not just in Utah but across the country.

The problem with Utah's dependence on church aid to pick up that slack, civil rights advocates say, is that although the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, once instructed his membership to clothe the naked and feed the hungry whether they are" in this church, or in any other, or in no church at all ," the thousands of individual bishops who today run point for LDS welfare services may have different views.

Most are continually generous with aid. Smurthwaite said that church leadership did equip him with a slate of questions to ask low-income people who came to his office asking for help.

But, he said, bishops are "not professional welfare providers, not professional therapists, yet we get put in the hot seat for these kinds of experiences. Bishops are called to their lay role on a temporary basis, typically for around five years.

Unlike most clergy in other faiths, they often have day jobs. And like with anyone else, their politics can infuse their religion. There's also much less accountability than there would be for a government program. Welfare decisions by bishops are subject mainly to the broad tenets of the church's " General Handbook ," usually with counsel from other church leaders but without oversight from the public.

Paul Reeve, chair of Mormon studies at the University of Utah, "what does that mean if you're not one? The very first words of the First Amendment are not about freedom of speech or the right to protest, but rather a warning against government establishment of religion.

That is why the state of Utah's welfare-provision system being intertwined with the LDS Church is "troubling," said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia and a leading expert on the separation of church and state. Laycock noted, though, that if Utah's granting and denying of welfare applications isn't itself religious in nature, it may not matter legally that the state then tells some applicants deemed ineligible about a private source of aid — even one, like the church, that may judge them based on religion.

Nathan S. Chapman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Georgia, said a key question is whether Utah has "partnered" with the LDS Church to enough of an extent that the overall system for providing welfare in the state is "insufficiently religiously neutral" and thus denies vulnerable people "true private choice" as to whether to partake in religion so they can receive assistance.

But he also said the state could argue that it is not constitutionally obligated to provide welfare to citizens, and that there is a marketplace of private aid providers including not just the LDS Church but also others that are less publicized in Utah, like Catholic Community Services. ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen low-income Salt Lake City-area residents about their experiences with Utah's safety net.

Almost all who weren't active church members — and even many who were — felt that welfare in Utah is religiously prejudicial, at least in practical terms, because the state has left a vacuum of social services that's filled by individual bishops and their potential biases. Candice Simpkins, who grew up in the church, says she struggled to pay her bills and afford groceries after the birth of her daughter but knew from reading a state website that her income was slightly too high for her to qualify for public assistance.

When she went to a bishop for help instead, she says, she was told that she wouldn't be in her situation if she hadn't had sex out of wedlock, and that she would have to start attending church services.

Feminist Mormons say that women especially are affected by the capriciousness of welfare in Utah. Bishops are all men, and some view both premarital sex and divorce, each of which can lead to precarious financial situations, as the fault of women, critics say.

A close friend of Simpkins', whom she called in tears after her interaction with the bishop, corroborated her description of what happened. In another case, Jo Alexander, who is lesbian, says she was desperate for a hotel room during a period of homelessness. But she knew she couldn't get public assistance from the state because she had received it around two decades ago as a young woman and therefore had exceeded her lifetime limit under another of the rules implemented under welfare reform.

As a result, she went to a bishop. Despite being raised as a member of the church, she was denied. She says it is known in the community that she is gay and she believes that was the reason for her rejection. A friend confirmed her account, though there are no public records of these private conversations with bishops. And Miranda Twitchell, who is currently homeless, says the rules and procedures for obtaining state aid are so convoluted and seemingly endless that she had nowhere to turn except the church for immediate help when she needed food and a bed — and that's when she decided to follow a piece of advice shared on the streets: "Get baptized, get help.

Some low-income people in Salt Lake City say they have gotten baptized just to obtain welfare, even though they don't believe in the ritual. Most who had done so were afraid to speak on the record for this story, believing the church would learn that their conversion stories were inauthentic and retaliate by not helping them in the future. The LDS spokesperson defended the church's approach to welfare in part by emphasizing that the church should not be confused with a government agency or considered a replacement for the government in the provision of public assistance.

Indeed, the LDS "General Handbook" clearly states that church members should turn to the government first for financial help, before going to their bishop. The church does look after its own membership, the spokesperson said, given that it is a religious institution. If a nonmember seeks help, there's less of a preexisting relationship with that person, and a bishop may ask the individual to come to services to see firsthand what his or her needs are.

There, relationships are established with church members, who then extend a hand of fellowship. Finally, he said, one of the church's larger goals is for people who are struggling financially to learn self-reliance and industriousness, not dependency.

This may be one reason that some felt rejected when they asked for ongoing assistance. Experts on charitable giving note that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members arguably do more than any other religious community to help people in poverty. In Utah, the church has given tens of millions to fight homelessness. Several active Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake City area said that when faced with financial hardship, they may actually have a better safety net than anyone in any state, because they can count on the church for help with food, clothes, furniture, rent, utilities, car payments and repairs, tanks of gas, medical bills, moving expenses, job searches and general life problems.

Benjamin Sessions, executive director of Circles Salt Lake, an anti-poverty community organization, said that a struggling family he works with recently called him in the middle of the night while huddling in their car with nowhere to go. Sessions called up a local LDS leader he knows personally, who simply said, "What do you need? Get me a list. Help from the church is "dramatic and it's quick," Sessions said. The city asserts it was never meant to be a permanent prohibition, but that city code updates need to be made regarding the shelters.

KUER SLC Councilmember Alejandro Puy reminded elected officials and attendees at the county council's mask debate that many of his constituents miss these kinds of gatherings due to shift-work schedules, and that minorities like those he represents are disproportionately affected by COVID compared to the rest of the population.

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