This has been on my mind lately:
Here in Southern CA, there are a TON of members involved in the Senior Care/Elder Care/Managed Care businesses. Facilities mostly, but everything in-between home healthcare and acute managed care. And these members almost all seem to have the following three characteristics:
1. Incredibly wealthy and successful in their businesses. They all live in multi-million dollar homes, drive $100k plus cars, and have all of the toys associated with extreme wealth.
2. All of them seem to be Bishops, Stake Presidents, Mission Presidents, High Council Members, Stake Leadership, General Authorities, etc. It's an old-boys'club, and they all feel inspired to call their buddies into positions of leadership. In recent times, there were 4 bishops, two members of the Stake Presidency, and 5 members of the High Council in our Stake, and very similar in the Stake next to us, who were owners/leaders in these types of companies. I mean, come on, does the Lord only call owners of Senior care companies and attorneys to run TSCC?
3. Almost all of their businesses have been sued multiple times by disgruntled patrons, and especially the Federal Government, for things like Medicare fraud, billing fraud, etc.

This to me is the clincher. I don't fault them for being successful and wealthy, but when they do it by defrauding people and the government, that's where I have a problem. So many of them have settled, etc., so it makes very little news.

Why aren't more people talking about this? Is this a secret? You could literally make a list of these companies in Southern CA and see how many of their company leadership also corresponds to Church leadership positions. And then see how many of them have had legal issues with their companies.

I brought this up once to two of them, who were both bishops, and they laughed and blamed it on the government. They said that if you aren't pushing the envelope, there's no way to make money and survive.

Back when I was an active card-carrying member, I thought of the temple recommend interview question, "are you honest in all of your dealings with your fellow-man?"

How much hypocrisy is there in that statement by the two bishops? It makes me sick.

Its just not California, it is everywhere. Take a sample from every ward across the Globe and you will find that most likely over 98% (yes this is a guess) or better of all leadership positions from Bishop and higher will be Managers, Business Owners, and Lawyers.

The term Corporation of the President fits the narrative of the leadership. Religious applications are just a side hustle for the minions of the Corporation.

Makes me wonder how many stay in the church because of the business contacts it gives them, and they stay because the money is good.

Utah has had 3 consecutive attorneys general who have either left office under a legal cloud, or for the current one, has had some pretty serious ethical charges leveled for pursuing q-anon type investigations outside the state.

That seems odd. You'd think the job of top cop in the state would generally tend to be someone squeaky-clean.

And Utah is famous for ponzi schemes, or ponzi-adjacent businesses (MLMs), health supplement companies making unverified claims, and all the rest. We may are relatively low on street crime, but we are real good at white-collar crime. I guess Mormons own a lot of white collars thanks to the missionary program. The same program creates a lot of salesmen well trained in how to lie with a straight face.

I lurk on a nurse's forum, and the overwhelming feeling there is that for-profit health care/elder care is a huge red flag for poor quality of service for patients, and poor quality of employment for staff. It's not universally true, but it does serve as a red flag.

It apparently is true even more so for hospice care. If I were selecting hospice care for a loved one, I would not go with a for-profit provider if I could possibly help it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/27/2022 07:51AM by summer.

Have you figured out that the church is more concerned about members who pay menial tithing, but openly question church doctrine on Tik Tok than a full tithe payer who engages in corporate embezzlement?

And the church requires its leaders to have some kind of profession where they can slip out of work to do unannounced church leadership duties.

From what I have seen, it is not just the Mormons... basically if there is a Christian business listing, stay the hell away from those people.

Had some Mormon bosses that listed their business on a local Christian listing and found out shortly after that, these guys were shysters. The plus side is that once you know that the listing is to be avoided, a certain number of bad business people take themselves out of the running for your business.

Bishop made a plea that a family in the ward needed all the help they could get. He had lost his job, but could do small jobs like handy man and car repairs.

Normally, my Dad would do all of his repairs as a professionally trained mechanic. But his health was failing and he needed another person, especially when bleeding the car brakes line. I wasn't around so he regretfully dropped off the car. Took the guy the entire week to install new brake pads.

So my parents went to retrieve the car. My Mom wanted to drive her car, but Dad insisted that he test it. On the downhill, the car's brakes failed. He used the parking brake to get it stopped. So the car got towed to a repair shop where the place took 2 hours to repair correctly- of course the repair was paid TWICE!

My Mom took upon the bad repair job as her duty and called up other families in the ward to avoid Brother X. My Dad was upset as well but let it go.

My Mom got called into the Bishop's office. She was told to stifle herself and even apologize if Brother X felt offended by her back-biting and nay-saying.

Don't do business with people you may have to work with or socialize with.

unravelingthefaith wrote in part:

"It's an old-boys'club, and they all feel inspired to call their buddies into positions of leadership."

Yes. In many cases, both inside and outside of Mormonism, your trail to business success depends much more on who you know than what you know. This has always been the case with the media industries where talent would be a dime a dozen, were it not for the unions. The only areas where what you know is more important than who you know are industries where special expertise is required and that expertise is hard to obtain. some areas of medicine and engineering fall in to this category.

Racking my brain I can only come up with a handfull of honest LDS businessmen I've known.

This doesn't count the ranchers and farmers my family did business with when I was young, I'm talking brick and motar stores.

Then add in the diamond con, silver con, amway et al and the mass of side hustle schemes I can understand the being honest question getting changed in the temple recommend interview.

Years ago we were involved with a joint venture led by a Mormon guy. A short time in we realized that this guy had no morals whatsoever and we quickly got ourselves out of this mess. The guy was incredulous that we even considered ourselves he was shocked we would even consider leaving, he was such a disgusting narcissist. His wife even said that "No one likes us because we are so honest!", while her husband was sticking his hands in our pockets.

This is what touched off my fascination with Mormon society, I never was one nor wanted to be one, but if they could behave like this I wanted to know what made them tick. All these years later the behavior of believing Mormons still intrigues me.

Regarding the fundamentalist Christians who use their religion in their business, I have known exactly one who has been the real deal, the rest were just using it to make people think they were ethical. I consider myself a mainline Protestant, but no one I ever did business with would have any way of knowing that, it was personal and not something to exploit for money.

Your Title says it all, OP;

wealthy Mormons are highly regarded and carry the title 'faithful' members with little or no regard as to how they 'earned' their wealth.


Take my former wife for instance...

It is so ingrained in mormonism that wealth equals righteousness that reversing the equation was a total piece of cake.

+ Yep.

Yep, Cache Valley big meat packer was StPrez - and when owned an S&L in Ogden are he would follow the women into the bathroom and force attentions on them.
Why didn't they complain? One told a Fed investigating "I didn't want to get him in trouble with the church". Another said "Complain, my husband would find out and then be in prison for murder".

Mormons in financial industry are slimy types way too often.

Personally, I've worked for several church members and have been keenly aware of the business practices of others. "Questionable" is generous. The universal common threads were greed and taking advantage of others. Everything from underpaying employees to insurance fraud to going after people who stole from them (instead of turning them over to the law) to wringing money out of people already in dire financial straits... truly no depths they won't plumb.

The church is a greedy, narcissistic organization; that breeds greed and narcissism in its members.

Yes, my brother is one of those. “Questionable” is too generous. Corrupt is more accurate. My aunt and uncle were the same.

On the plus side, their corruption on the one hand and their rise in the church on the other hand helped me figure it all out and leave.

So I should be grateful to have such good examples of corruption that helped me to see the light.

Only people with money can afford the time to serve in these callings. A poor person can’t run a mission for three years without pay. A person working two jobs doesn’t have the free time to be a bishop.

So yeah, the rich run the church. The rich wards are like country clubs and the poor wards struggle.

The church really isn’t going to help you if you are struggling. They expect 10z and your time and help is hoping to be the bishop’s storehouse and maybe rent paid for a month or two. In reality the church’s donations are public relations. What the bishop’s help people with are fast offerings and those come from the ward members and not Salt Lake.

It's shocking to me when I see this in practice, though.
Back when I was active, I was on a High Council and one of the extremely rich guys (who's company had been sued for Insurance Fraud) was spouting off about how blessed he was in his business and money dealings, because he followed the Lord.

Amazingly, the SP stepped in and said we do not preach a gospel of prosperity, and there are some good people who aren't rich, and some bad people who are rich. That doesn't matter to the Lord.

One of the few times I was impressed that a Church Leader squashed this line of reasoning that I'm prosperous and wealthy because I follow the commandments.

Unfortunately that opinion is neither preached nor practiced much in TSCC.

I've noticed that LDS members read or follow certain Christian writers; C.S. Lewis is quite popular with them. What about pseudo-Christians, like Joel Osteen? I wouldn't be surprised if they found his blatant prosperity gospel compatible with their quasi-prosperity beliefs and practice.

Anybody have any insights on this?

On a lighter note, I came across this Osteen piece in the Babylon Bee:

https://babylonbee.com/news/joel-osteen-releases-new-brand-of-table-salt-that-has-completely-lost-its-saltiness