CULLING THE HERD

CULLING THE HERD

BY DWIGHT REID

Here’s the news: The Mormon Church is moving from fleecing the flock to culling the herd.

How so? Here’s how.

Consider the financial profile of the Church from a deductive perspective.
For the better part of the past decade, the Church has brought in an estimated $6 billion yearly in donations. This number comes from publicly available information in countries where the church is required to report its income, and then extrapolated to apply to the rest of the world, taking into account relative wealth of other countries and their citizens that are likely to be donating. This is the low end of the estimates.

Even though their membership numbers remain stable or even show a slight increase this is not necessarily an indication that donations are keeping pace. The Church’s membership numbers are suspect to say the very least. Their numbers show a two percent growth rate, but real census data reveal that in the areas of highest conversion rates, as many as 75% of new members are inactive after one year. The actual number of butts in the seats is probably in decline, and possibly has been for a few years. The attrition rate has been high for at least that long, but the Internet has wounded the church, badly enough that it is now hemorrhaging members. For an organization which needs to pad it’s numbers to avoid the appearance of being the cult that it is, this loss is bad P.R. To lose those members in areas that were stable, and the donations reliable and plentiful, may prove devastating. Even if the worldwide membership is not in decline, there is another problem.

Church membership is shifting from the rich folk in the states, to the poor and more ignorant third world. Third world countries are poor. The same number of members gained in sub Saharan Africa as are lost in Great Britain, does not equate to the same income from tithing. Revenue has got to be plummeting.

This is certainly consistent with the Church’s increased real estate investments. The church has always owned non-religion related properties. Newspapers come to mind as do many businesses that date back to the early days in Utah when the church owned most everything that was profitable in the state. Now they have added the City Creek Center, a large Philadelphia high rise and an immense cattle ranch in Florida. How immense is an immense cattle ranch? The LDS Divinely Guided Real Estate Conglomerate, or as they are more widely known, the Mormon Church, owns a bit more than 2% of all the land in the state of Florida. Is there money in cattle ranching? Who cares, the church is in it for the long run. (they know that Christ is not coming back) The church has applied for and received permission from the Florida State and County Governments, to construct and sell the largest housing development ever. With a potential value estimated at 1.2 trillion dollars (that is not a typo, it really does say Trillion) Interesting that the church is going to make a ridiculous sum of money selling land that may be underwater in another 100 years. Get rid of it before the rise in the ocean level leaves it submerged. The phrase, “If you believe that, I’ve got some swampland for sale” takes on new meaning.

 Donations will not be the Church’s primary source of revenue a decade from now. Maybe not in half a decade, maybe not even now. The real estate investments and the minuscule amounts given to real charitable causes are an indication that they do not care as much about public opinion as they have in the past. The Church is facing, or expects to be facing, some serious cash flow problems if they rely strictly on tithes and offerings. The Church is not cash poor. It has sizable reserves. They get a good deal on Temple construction but they do pay cash for them so there is money in the vault. But the Church can no longer afford to simply sit on the cash and let donations trickle in. The Divinely Inspired Real Estate Conglomerate, has become seriously proactive with their financial well-being.
There are two areas of recent Church activity that don’t make sense without the perspective above. First, if your eye is on the bottom line, then why build expensive temples; and, second, why chase off tithe paying members with the seer stone announcement which otherwise might never have come to light?

Two speculative hypotheses might explain these glaring anomalies.

First, temples: Why spend millions on buildings that don't produce any revenue? That becomes less of an enigma when you state it correctly.

The temples don’t directly produce revenue.

The temples are open only to those who pay tithing. This is the group that the church cares about most. If there is a temple in your vicinity. it is added incentive to keep current on your tithing. The temple recommend is a badge of prestige that can be worn only by the best. “Best” in this case means highest donors. In addition, maintaining a temple recommend requires a constant supply of busy work, which  keeps the diligent from having time to get into trouble, by, for instance, visiting anti-Mormon websites. It also plays into the control ethos, and the “sunk-cost” fallacy: The more time you invest in the church, the stronger your incentive to believe rather than admit to yourself that you have been conned. I know not whether the percentage of full tithe payers is higher in areas with temples, but in principle this could be confirmed or contradicted.

Second, seer stones. This hypothesis is even more speculative, but it has the advantage of making falsifiable predictions.

Here’s one prophesy: In the next 24 months, you will see a quiet selling off of older buildings and buildings in low-income areas.



Publicizing the seer stones) makes no sense unless the Church is culling the herd. The truest of true-blue Mormons are doing what we have all been scratching our heads at, doubling down. The Mormon rejoinder that "we have always known that" is both false and tiresome. What if the essays and the seer stones and whatever faith-destroying revelations come next, are being revealed not because the Church was losing members and wanted to increase transparency? This has not been their M.O. in the past—ever.

What if instead the de facto admission was instead to the Church’s projection that those least likely to pay a full tithe would also be the first to jump ship? Yes, the Church would lose a few tithe paying families. But if the goal is to rid the rolls of deadwood and to consolidate the remaining cash cows into far fewer buildings, and in doing so, providing a cash influx from property sales and reducing overhead by eliminating maintenance costs on low income ward buildings, then this is a win-win strategy.

The Church already knows that the faithful will believe any numbers they hand out for membership.  Recent articles state that the church has begun downplaying membership growth and totals. (1*) The Church is taking the actions it would take, if the goal is to trade the slow trickle of apostates and continued problems with inactive or less active members, for a wholesale evacuation of undesirables and the resulting financial benefits of selling off the unprofitable Ward houses and lowering the electric bill in one fell swoop.

The actions of the church in the last year are a struggle to understand.  But in light of the above interpretations, they make sense.

Additionally, the church questionnaires that have been circulated probably showed that among full tithe payers, marriage equality, equal rights for LGBTs and gender equality, are not as popular as they are to the general membership.

This whole philosophy can be summed up as maximize profits at the cost of the less financially desirable. That fits their modus operendi , to a tee.

As a supporting argument, consider the Apologists. Anyone following the run-ins with Loran Blood and his minions can see that these people are not the least bit concerned with honesty. Their tactics are so blatantly without even the appearance of integrity, that you wonder, why do they spend the time? What is the motivation behind their character assassination, misrepresentation, blatant dishonesty and worse?

Here’s why. Or so I propose: Many of the internet apologists are on payroll, or at the least, fulfilling a church calling. The church claimed for years that they were financially uninvolved with FARMS or FAIR. I believe it was David Twede who found the paper trail through which the church was financing the even less reputable apologists.

If an apologist prevents a few hundred members from leaving, how much lost income has he prevented over a decade? The answer is millions. If you want to see devotion, check out how the sycophants commenting on his blog treat Greg Trimble as a junior apostle. Even with the church's notorious tightwad nature, doesn't it make sense to fire the janitorial staff and spend the money on a few dozen high profile Internet shills? We know they have already done at least the first part of that.

The church is not in its death throes, not by far. If as an entity you own three universities, a Philadelphia high-rise rental property, $3 billion worth of nearly-new mall space, and 2% of the land in Florida, as well as a few dozen extraneous businesses (like a major newspaper, etc.), then you should be able to weather about any storm. Free money from customers that ask for no return on their investment, and an unpaid sales staff numbering in the tens of thousands, are also enviable business models.

The bastards are going to be around for a while.  But we are seeing the beginning of the transition from a corporation pretending to be a church, to a Real Estate Conglomerate, acting as if it were a Real Estate Conglomerate. And if religion eventually disappears from the planet (hey, I can dream can't I?) We will still be able to buy a nice condo from Mormoncorp.

I wrote this about a month ago. I didn’t post it because it seemed almost too speculative to have explanatory value. I decided to pigeon-hole it until and unless the church took actions that appeared to guarantee an exodus of the less faithful. Then the SLC television station announced that the One True Church Of God On Earth, had just irritated the holy hell out of any member who is LBGT or has family who is. It will drive a wedge between the church and LGBT allies, and it will disgust any member with integrity. At least that last one does not seem to have the potential to claim more than a few dozen. The other groups though, probably were on the precipice and many may have been withholding their tithing as a form of protest. So the church has just done something that defied explanation. They could have gone on without doing this and no one would have cared, it will cost them members, it has the potential to strengthen the base, if you think the base is primarily hard core bigots. The entire action announced on Thursday made no sense whatsoever.
Until you read this.
(1)                                                                                                                                        www.patheos.com/Topics/Future-of-Faith-in-America/Mormonism/Mormonisms-Future-Patrick-Mason-08-05-2015