by David K. Holmes, Chief Financial Officer • 4 minutes
Imagine you are on a train. You look far ahead, way down the tracks. The weather is clearing around you after a 4-year storm, and life feels pretty good in America in 2025. There’s been a watershed election, the economy is picking up, the border feels safer, the Iranian nuclear threat is severely degraded, and conservative principles, including religious liberty, seem to rule the day. And First Liberty has won 9 Supreme Court cases in 10 years! But far ahead, maybe 25 years from now in the year 2050, down the tracks on the horizon, you see dark storm clouds, even lightning. It looks ominous. What’s going on?
Fighting for religious liberty is like the changing weather. It’s great to win victories now, but the adversaries to religious freedom will never rest, and the future will be full of cultural, courtroom, and media turmoil. Hate-filled groups like to chant refrains reminiscent of the “Double, double, toil and trouble” oblation captured in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As the witches stir their brew around the caldron, they hope an ill wind will soon be unleashed upon a believing nation, and they’ll take back that which they think they have lost: An anti-God America.
Twenty-five years from now promises to be as different then as today is from 25 years ago. Progressive liberalism and Marxist socialism have made alarming headway in America over the past 10 years. Hardcore leftist activists and the anti-religion mob will continue to savagely attack religious faith and quarantine believers because they know religious liberty is the foundation of this great land. Can you believe Anti-Semitism is still a problem and on the rise in America today? Disgusting and a threat to us all.
The blackening clouds on the horizon, in my mind, represent social revolution and an all-out assault upon our religious rights. Is First Liberty equipped to defeat the enemies of the Constitution and our 1st Amendment religious liberty then?
The way I see it, the tracks on the railroad represent a dual, parallel path forward on a believer’s religious liberty journey. One track represents efforts over the years to secure your families’ financial future, and the other represents efforts to preserve a legacy of religious expression for them as you go about the Lord’s work. If you look far enough into the future, out there on the horizon under the darkening sky, the tracks seem to merge. By optimizing how your assets are invested now and in what structure, you can satisfy both your intent to provide financial security and religious liberty for you and your family, and for your heirs, way down yonder under the storm clouds. They go hand-in-hand.
One way you can help us stay in the fight now and in 2050 is to look at your assets instead of just available cash.
At First Liberty, the predominant donation type is cash – I call it “here-and-now” money. But many of our cases are long-lasting – some for 10 years or more. That’s way down the railroad track. This asset-versus-liability mismatch is what keeps Chief Financial Officers up at night. Think about large life insurance underwriters. They have many distant obligations to fulfill when insured policyholders die at some point in the future – company actuaries must plan investments far into the future to pay off those contingent liabilities when they eventually occur. That’s close to what we experience here, as we have long-dated case obligations with commitments to present, and future clients who need funding now and then. What we don’t have – as a separate portfolio – are long-dated assets structured to fund those long-term future cases and client commitments.
Don’t get me wrong. We need cash now to ensure the lights stay on – and we are in excellent financial shape. We are so appreciative of the many donors who support us each year, and we believe in sound stewardship of the resources given to us. You might be asking, “Then why not just set aside some of the funds we receive now for the future?” We do precisely that to the extent that we can. But the pressure is intense to fight today’s fight with nearly all of “today’s funds.” When we have excess funds in a given year, we aim to expand our team with additional highly qualified lawyers and key support staff, enabling us to take on even more legal cases. Still, each year we turn away cases because we don’t have enough capacity to take them.
There is a solution to the dilemma. If you have unneeded life insurance policies and retirement assets, low-cost basis single stock concentrations, real estate, certain collectibles, and other alternative assets, they are all good examples of assets that have a long-term investment orientation, and they can simultaneously provide those much-needed “future funds” for First Liberty to continue the fight against religious discrimination. There are even tax advantages for doing so! And they can easily be included in your will.
In that regard, will you help us by including us in your will? We launched a $3 million “Will Challenge” two weeks ago that, if just a few hundred of you name us as a beneficiary, will significantly contribute to our ability to fight for religious battles in the future. Visit our “Leave a Legacy” page to discover how easy it is to do this. If so inclined, drop me an email at wills@firstliberty.org and give me a non-binding indication of what that future amount might be. It will help us plan for the asset-liability mismatch discussed above.
In summary, it’s a fundamental business finance principle: align assets to match the timing of future liabilities. All this is to say, we must have sufficient liquidity now and have enough assets in the outyears to satisfy future obligations. Will you help us meet the future?
Will you prayerfully consider a conversation with us to help fund the long-term? After all, it’s the country’s religious liberty that we are all fighting for—way down the railroad track where the storm clouds are boiling.
May God Bless You and Yours.
DISCLAIMER: This article does not provide individualized tax or legal advice. This article is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon, for tax or legal advice. You should consult your own tax and legal advisors before engaging in estate planning.
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