We usually say that a church can operate "like a business." But the arrow points the other way. Religion solved the hardest problem in commerce—how to make people loyal, for life, often without paying them—thousands of years before there were corporations, and business has been trying to reverse-engineer it ever since. Companies speak of brand "evangelists," of "converts" and "the faithful"; they build "communities," stage "rituals," and dream of the customer who never checks a competitor. That is religion's vocabulary, borrowed by people who wish they could do what religion does and mostly cannot. So the interesting comparison is not that religion resembles a business. It is that religion is the master technology of human commitment, and business is the imitation.
Marketing has quietly learned from faith. There is branding: symbols worn on clothing, around the neck, stuck onto bumpers. There is loyalty to the brand and suspicion of rival brands. There is outreach and proselytization. And beneath it, an organized financial structure with work to be done and an aim of retaining members, expanding the fold, eliciting contributions of money and labour, and keeping morale high. Any marketing department would recognize the org chart. Few could reproduce the devotion.
Consider what business would most like to copy and can't: the initiation. In tribal, high-commitment groups—fraternities are the benign example, gangs the dark one—entry is often made deliberately costly. In a classic 1959 experiment, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills found that people who endured a more embarrassing initiation to join a group afterward rated it more highly, not less. The mind justifies what it paid to enter; this is effort justification, and Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance explains why. Religions have always known it in practice. Prospective members are vetted, sit through instruction, and then make solemn, public commitments in a ritual—a wedding to the community. No loyalty program can manufacture that.
Sometimes the model is not mass-market but luxury. Rather than broad proselytization, the "product" is restricted, and only a select few gain entry. In some traditions you must attain advanced standing—often over years—before you may enter the most sacred buildings or take part in the deepest rituals; sometimes only men may occupy certain roles or spaces. The obstacle is the point. It heightens the allure and selects for people willing to give more time, money, and devotion. If everyone had a Rolex or a Gucci bag it would stop being special; exclusivity is much of what makes a thing feel high-end—and much of what makes an inner circle feel sacred.
Then there is the masterstroke, the one no corporation has ever managed to pull off cleanly: the elevation of belief itself—faith—into a virtue. Belief without evidence is not merely tolerated but praised. Imagine what a company would give for that. Customers would form loyalty to the brand without ever looking too closely at the reviews; doubt could be reframed as weakness, betrayal, or impurity; and the most credulous buyers would be the most honoured, their standing rising in proportion to how little they questioned. Businesses attempt versions of this and mostly fail, because a dissatisfied customer can always leave and a competitor is one click away. Religion made not-looking a sacrament.
I have watched a version of this from inside my own profession. At a former workplace, a great deal of effort went into "branding" for mental health, involving a great deal of money; later came the fancy new buildings and offices. But the heart of the work does not require branding, or grand architecture, or a marketing staff, or layers of corporate management. None of it was what a frightened person in a small room actually needs, which is simply to be listened to, and to be able to come back.
The same misplacement of substance appears in religion on a far grander scale, and the numbers can be staggering. Across history and around the world, religious institutions have amassed extraordinary wealth—in land, buildings, art, and investments—on a scale hard to square with the ordinary believer's image of humble stewardship. The Roman Catholic Church holds a patrimony of cathedrals, real estate, and priceless art accumulated over nearly two millennia; the Church of England is among the largest landowners in Britain; and a good many megachurches and television ministries have made their founders very rich. Precise figures are often impossible to obtain, because most religious bodies are under no obligation to disclose them—which is part of the point. The clearest documented case is recent, and it became clear only because the law forced it into the open: in 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission penalized the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ensign Peak Advisors, for using shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio that public filings put at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a whistleblower had earlier estimated the fund at close to a hundred billion. It stands as an illustration rather than an outlier—the one instance where the curtain happened to be pulled back. And much of this wealth, across traditions, operates with significant tax advantage. In the United States, churches are automatically tax-exempt and, uniquely among nonprofits, need not file the public disclosures other charities must. In Canada, registered charities, many of them religious, pay no income tax while registered.
The sharpest warnings about all of this come from inside religion itself. The most famous is the line attributed to Jesus, and preserved in all three Synoptic Gospels: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." It is worth sitting with the irony. The institution that built the near-hundred-billion-dollar fund venerates a founder who owned nothing, praised the poor, and told the rich they would struggle to enter heaven at all. That gap—between the carpenter of the Gospels and the portfolio in the filings—is not an argument against faith. It is a warning from inside the tradition, aimed by its own founder at exactly what was later built in his name. The camel and the needle were meant for precisely this.
Marketing has quietly learned from faith. There is branding: symbols worn on clothing, around the neck, stuck onto bumpers. There is loyalty to the brand and suspicion of rival brands. There is outreach and proselytization. And beneath it, an organized financial structure with work to be done and an aim of retaining members, expanding the fold, eliciting contributions of money and labour, and keeping morale high. Any marketing department would recognize the org chart. Few could reproduce the devotion.
Consider what business would most like to copy and can't: the initiation. In tribal, high-commitment groups—fraternities are the benign example, gangs the dark one—entry is often made deliberately costly. In a classic 1959 experiment, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills found that people who endured a more embarrassing initiation to join a group afterward rated it more highly, not less. The mind justifies what it paid to enter; this is effort justification, and Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance explains why. Religions have always known it in practice. Prospective members are vetted, sit through instruction, and then make solemn, public commitments in a ritual—a wedding to the community. No loyalty program can manufacture that.
Sometimes the model is not mass-market but luxury. Rather than broad proselytization, the "product" is restricted, and only a select few gain entry. In some traditions you must attain advanced standing—often over years—before you may enter the most sacred buildings or take part in the deepest rituals; sometimes only men may occupy certain roles or spaces. The obstacle is the point. It heightens the allure and selects for people willing to give more time, money, and devotion. If everyone had a Rolex or a Gucci bag it would stop being special; exclusivity is much of what makes a thing feel high-end—and much of what makes an inner circle feel sacred.
Then there is the masterstroke, the one no corporation has ever managed to pull off cleanly: the elevation of belief itself—faith—into a virtue. Belief without evidence is not merely tolerated but praised. Imagine what a company would give for that. Customers would form loyalty to the brand without ever looking too closely at the reviews; doubt could be reframed as weakness, betrayal, or impurity; and the most credulous buyers would be the most honoured, their standing rising in proportion to how little they questioned. Businesses attempt versions of this and mostly fail, because a dissatisfied customer can always leave and a competitor is one click away. Religion made not-looking a sacrament.
I have watched a version of this from inside my own profession. At a former workplace, a great deal of effort went into "branding" for mental health, involving a great deal of money; later came the fancy new buildings and offices. But the heart of the work does not require branding, or grand architecture, or a marketing staff, or layers of corporate management. None of it was what a frightened person in a small room actually needs, which is simply to be listened to, and to be able to come back.
The same misplacement of substance appears in religion on a far grander scale, and the numbers can be staggering. Across history and around the world, religious institutions have amassed extraordinary wealth—in land, buildings, art, and investments—on a scale hard to square with the ordinary believer's image of humble stewardship. The Roman Catholic Church holds a patrimony of cathedrals, real estate, and priceless art accumulated over nearly two millennia; the Church of England is among the largest landowners in Britain; and a good many megachurches and television ministries have made their founders very rich. Precise figures are often impossible to obtain, because most religious bodies are under no obligation to disclose them—which is part of the point. The clearest documented case is recent, and it became clear only because the law forced it into the open: in 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission penalized the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ensign Peak Advisors, for using shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio that public filings put at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a whistleblower had earlier estimated the fund at close to a hundred billion. It stands as an illustration rather than an outlier—the one instance where the curtain happened to be pulled back. And much of this wealth, across traditions, operates with significant tax advantage. In the United States, churches are automatically tax-exempt and, uniquely among nonprofits, need not file the public disclosures other charities must. In Canada, registered charities, many of them religious, pay no income tax while registered.
The sharpest warnings about all of this come from inside religion itself. The most famous is the line attributed to Jesus, and preserved in all three Synoptic Gospels: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." It is worth sitting with the irony. The institution that built the near-hundred-billion-dollar fund venerates a founder who owned nothing, praised the poor, and told the rich they would struggle to enter heaven at all. That gap—between the carpenter of the Gospels and the portfolio in the filings—is not an argument against faith. It is a warning from inside the tradition, aimed by its own founder at exactly what was later built in his name. The camel and the needle were meant for precisely this.
References
Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047195
The classic effort-justification experiment: young women who underwent a more embarrassing initiation in order to join a discussion group afterward rated the group more favourably than those admitted easily. The result is counterintuitive—the higher the price of entry, the greater the reported liking—and it has been replicated many times since.
Canada Revenue Agency. (n.d.). Charities and giving. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving.html
The federal agency's guidance on the tax treatment of registered charities, a category that includes a large share of Canadian religious organizations. Registered charities pay no income tax while registered and may issue tax-receipted donations, though they must file an annual T3010 information return.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
The founding statement of cognitive dissonance theory: the mind experiences discomfort when its beliefs and actions conflict, and works to reduce that discomfort, often by adjusting the belief. Applied to group membership, it is the mechanism beneath effort justification—having sacrificed to join, a person values the group more highly to make the sacrifice feel worthwhile.
Internal Revenue Service. (n.d.). Tax guide for churches and religious organizations (Publication 1828). U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf
The federal tax guide for religious organizations in the United States. It explains that churches are automatically recognized as tax-exempt under §501(c)(3) without having to apply, and that they are uniquely exempt, among nonprofits, from filing the annual Form 990 that would otherwise make their finances public.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2023, February 21). SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment management company for disclosure failures and misstated filings (Press Release No. 2023-35). https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-35
The regulatory action behind this chapter's documented example of religious wealth. The SEC found that Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had used shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio reported in public filings at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a 2019 whistleblower complaint and subsequent reporting placed the total fund near a hundred billion.
The saying "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" appears in all three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.
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