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“How the Mormons Make Money” Speaks Volumes About Romney

By Joanna Brooks

…o charitable relief. LDS Church for-profit holdings are run as competitive businesses. According to the Bloomberg report, religious considerations do not drive day-to-day decision-making. I’ve argued frequently here that those who fear Romney’s religion impacting his day-to-day conduct as president purposefully misunderstand his career. The Bloomberg-Businessweek article shows that Mormon institutional culture fully supports Romney’s profit-orient…

Mitt Romney: Wooden Pastor or Real Boy?

By Mary Barker

…2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Our executive meetings followed a business format with charts and graphs that provided attendance statistics. The goal was to increase attendance; to move the line on the graph up. The strategy was to go name by name through the list of inactive members and research their particular interests. Active members would then be assigned to become their “friend,” calling them up and feigning interest in their hobb…

Burning Man: Fear of an Alternative Pagan Social Order

By John W. Morehead

…strong opposition from city leaders out of fear that “the city’s image and business projects would be tainted,” and of course religious groups, including conservative evangelicals, have had their issues as well. Although a few evangelical critics have written positive analyses of Burning Man, including an essay in Christian Research Journal by Steve Rabey, and a recent essay in Christianity Today by Phil Wyman, the gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock…

Romney: Your Data is Mine, But My Tithing is Secret!

By Sarah Posner

…ta-savvy, but Romney’s project appears to take a page from the Fortune 500 business world and dig deeper into available consumer data. . . . Businesses use those kinds of analytics firms to answer key questions for clients, such as where to build a retail store or where to mail pamphlets touting a new product. The analysis doesn’t directly bring in campaign contributions, but it generates the equivalent of sales leads for Romney’s campaign. The pr…

Is the Ryan VP Pick Good for Mormonism?

By Joanna Brooks

…o-connect-with Church—which, by the way is really rich, as the coverage in Businessweek and elsewhere has highlighted. All of this stuff about his business past, his financial dealings, and his Church experience position him as a rich, white, awkward, secretive, paranoid candidate. It all fits. But Ryan doesn’t fit that at all. He’s a game-changer, an ideological figure out of a particular moment in the evolution of American conservatism. He has n…

Christian Publishing v. the Vagina

By Katie Toth

…ar of decline in overall membership. This year, a Gallup Poll has revealed Americans’ confidence in organized religion is at a new low. In 2008, LifeWay cut five percent of its staff—about 100 jobs—because of financial concerns, according to Associated Baptist Press. But unlike secular businesses, which stay relevant in order to make a profit, Christian ventures have a mission that may leave them uninterested in compromise. “Irrelevance is not a n…

Bruni on Bachmann

By Sarah Posner

…ho check ‘None’ for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19%), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press.” One final note: in a democracy, and one in particular that protects religious freedom, it’s a risky business defining who are the “real” Christians, particularly when religion is being politicized. Michele Bachmann is wrong, politically speaking, not because she has a di…

Is Romney Tax Matter a Religion Dog Whistle?

By Joanna Brooks

…article that described the opacity of LDS Church finances and Church-owned business dealings, which have not been available to the public since the 1960s. It’s unfortunate that both stories conjure up one of the most unfriendly characterizations that has followed Mormons in American public life—that of secrecy and duplicity. It was this charge of secrecy and duplicity (and some pretty nasty political cartoons) that followed Senator Reed Smoot, the…

For Douthat, Church Either Uncompromising or a Secular Den of Promiscuity and Irrelevance

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…going to one meeting and hanging streamers. The rest is your own personal business.” Dr. Tinker attends a church that’s easy to get to, full of people she can relate to, where her kids like Sunday school, the music is nice, and the religious beliefs are given a soft sell. By the time Sunday rolls around, Dr. Tinker is exhausted and doesn’t want to be scolded or harangued. These are three really different ways of being religious. Could you raise t…

How Not to Talk to the NAACP

By Joanna Brooks

…k Douglass. What happened to the part about “who I truly am in my heart”? There was no real graciousness today, and there were no risks taken. Except showing up at the NAACP convention, which pretty much every GOP presidential candidate does, and should. After all, there are 37 million African Americans in this country, and the president should show up for them too. But to Mitt Romney, it was more important to score a little footage of booing blac…