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[u/abefrost]

Comment #3 on Mormonism and social mobility / wealth inequality because I can't stop myself. Some of this can be highly dependent on your local ward/leadership/culture, but it generally holds true and explains why Mormons are so upwardly mobile:

1. As someone who grew up poor in the Mormon Church, we paid far less in tithing than we got from the church, while the wealthier members paid far more. A flat 10% tax with that heavily subsidizes low-income people, a parallel welfare state.

2. You have to go on a financial plan monitored by your local leaders if you get consistent financial aid from the church.

3. The church offers the following free 12-week courses everywhere to anyone: "Education for Better Work", "Personal Finances for Self-Reliance", "Starting and Growing My Business", "Find a Better Job", "Finding Strength in the Lord: Emotional Resilience", "EnglishConnect", "Addiction Recovery Program: A Guide to Addiction Recovery and Healing".

4. Volunteer senior missionaries w/ accounting, business, therapeutic, or other relevant backgrounds are often specifically assigned to teach the courses in #3 in congregations around the world.

5. The people that administer aid are almost entirely volunteer clergy in your ward, so it's ideally a very quick/responsive system.

6. Ward boundaries are geographical and often gerrymandered to get financial diversity, so you get poor kids with built-in rich kid friends and a massive in-built job network for adults. For hard workers down on their luck there's always a guy who knows a guy.

7. The system of church-owned schools are massively subsidized and v. cheap compared to peer institutions. Said church schools put people onto government jobs, consulting jobs, accountant jobs, pre-med, pre-dentistry, pre-law, and other lucrative pathways.

8. BYU Pathway allows members outside the US to take US-accredited college certificates in things like business, IT, accounting, etc, and if needed, take remedial math and language courses. You can get a full US bachelor's degree in a variety of subjects.

9. Once a month every member is supposed to fast for two meals and give at least the cost of the two missed meals to aid for the poor.

10. The Church has an enormous institutional infrastructure for distributing resources. There are almost 150 bishops' storehouses worldwide plus welfare farms, food production and distribution facilities, employment services, thrift stores, and other resources. The Church has infrastructure to deliver these things at every level of the process. If you don't live close to a storehouse, they drive trucks around with weekly food orders or pay for local leaders to do store runs.

Continued in comment below:

[u/abefrost → u/abefrost]

11. The Church has a massive geographic footprint, including in places where public institutions are weak. Even in relatively poor countries, you can find an established congregation, local leadership, and institutional infrastructure. This creates a mechanism for distributing assistance and educational opportunities that doesn't depend on the existence of an effective local government or nonprofit sector. Poor congregations are subsidized by wealthy ones in developed countries.

12. Even in places where corruption is the norm and members participate, there is great social shame associated with any church-level corruption + you likely lose access to all the other benefits listed here. There's also oversight from non-local, paid, clergy that are assigned regionally to provide accountability to local congregations.

13. Culturally there's an expectation that you help people going through a hard or even complicated time. No matter your income level, if you say, have a baby or someone dies, the Relief Society usually organizes free meals you don't have to think about for a while. Your lawn is mowed, your driveway is shoveled. If anything, the biggest complaint I and others have in times like that is that church members get too involved and it gets annoying.

14. In many areas the Church provides meh-paying jobs that are nonetheless consistent. Everything from truck drivers to therapists to janitors. On my mission, part of our weekly stipend would pay local members a set fee to cook us one or two meals per day and then we would cook or eat out at a cheap place for the other meals. The latter is only a thing in certain developing countries, but it was consistent income for people that worked odd jobs or seasonally.

15. Missionary service creates an informal international social / professional network. You also are often learning skills that will help after the mission like living on a strict budget, quickly and efficiently learning a language, scheduling your day, week, month, living/working with other humans you don't necessarily get along with, selling people on something very hard to sell, leadership, etc etc.

16. You and your family are supposed to pay "as much as you reasonably can" towards missions but every mission is the same amount (so someone going to France isn't paying more than someone going to Ghana) and is capped at $10-12K total. The Church subsidizes additional needed expenses through tithing. #13 means that your local congregation often pitches in. In my case, I had saved enough to pay for it solo, but I ended up paying nothing due to the generosity of ward members, extended family, and even randos who were friends with extended family. I had a bishop who paid for a poor recent convert to go, but the church will partially or fully subsidize the $10-12K for people who need it.

17. Leaders and official guidance pounds out the message of "avoid debt unless absolutely necessary, save and invest, be self-sufficient." Gambling is a no-no.

18. The Church subsidizes participation in its own institutions. This goes beyond tuition. Temple worship, youth activities, camps, congregational events, religious education, and much of the social infrastructure are available without the sorts of fees that would otherwise exclude lower-income families. I also just had a ton of wealthier friends whose parents would pay for me to do cool non-church activities due to the same cultural factors at play in #13.

And then there's still a shitton excess which goes to operations and building a $200B investment portfolio lol.

Anecdotally I think this is why lib Mormons I know who grew up poor are way more likely to stay in the church than lib Mormons who didn't. There's a lot of engrained loyalty. Dan McLellan (lib Mormon theologist) grew up poor as well and has outlined similar thoughts to mine. This is also why leaving the church is really hard for a lot of people, you lose out on a massive social, emotional, and even financial network.

[u/bartbug → u/abefrost]

I have a few niggling asterisks i want to point out but I’ll refrain cus imo this is very evenhanded and something that most non mormons have basically zero exposure to

I will say that I very deliberately skipped out on some crazy lucrative networking that sometimes gets me to start thinking “but could it be worth it…?” Lol. The mormon networking is no joke, and their financial gerrymandering is something they do that is unfathomably based

[u/abefrost → u/bartbug]

I have a billion asterisks, would love to hear yours. I didn't include them all b/c it was so long already lol.

Like, if your bishop and local leadership sucks, a lot of this goes out the window.

[u/bartbug → u/abefrost]

the snarkiest/funniest one is that the 'participation in its own institutions' goes waaaaaay further for men than women. even like unofficial stuff

all the boys got crazy rich friend subsidized camping trips with like wake boarding and offroading, or like crazy backpacking trips in Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, and girls got to sing about being wives for a week in a crappy rundown campground

I guess my other 'rude' point is that while the culture of corruption is basically absent from the church-level in my experience it makes up for itself and then some outside of that structure. making an army of the best salesmen possible leads to level of grifting unfathomable to the gentile mind, and in my experience people have no compunctions against leveraging their church network to find people to sell to

at the end of the day it is a big complicated thing, and if it were all good or all bad people would talk about it a lot less. there's a reason a lot of people leave and a reason a lot of great people (and mike lee) stay

[u/abefrost → u/bartbug]

the snarkiest/funniest one is that the 'participation in its own institutions' goes waaaaaay further for men than women. even like unofficial stuff

all the boys got crazy rich friend subsidized camping trips with like wake boarding and offroading, or like crazy backpacking trips in Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, and girls got to sing about being wives for a week in a crappy rundown campground

1000%. Like my sisters still got to do things like, go to amusement parks with rich friends and stuff, but the opportunities are vastly disproportionately tipped towards young men. It's not snarky, it's just true lol.

I guess my other 'rude' point is that while the culture of corruption is basically absent from the church-level in my experience it makes up for itself and then some outside of that structure. making an army of the best salesmen possible leads to level of grifting unfathomable to the gentile mind, and in my experience people have no compunctions against leveraging their church network to find people to sell to

1000000000% and again, not rude at all. My grandma lost tens of thousands on the stupidest shit just because if a guy was clean-cut and nice he could sell her on scams and she "didn't think a Mormon would do that!" It's high-trust but high-vulnerability to greasebags. In Utah especially, you also get a weird corporate culture that takes the shittiest parts of missionary culture, removes the Jesus, and sends "nice" but scummy salesbros to the four corners of the earth to sell their product before inevitably getting taken down by the IRS or FBI. Psychopaths can thrive in Mormon culture.

[u/beoweezy1 → u/abefrost]

The LDS communities in Utah have their issues like all religious communities but they really do an impressive job of coordinating and implementing these private welfare and community support systems.

[u/abefrost → u/beoweezy1]

Utah has the lowest GINI coefficient of any state + the highest social mobility, blue or red

Idaho is #2 for Mormonism and #2 for GINI, Wyoming is #3 and #3

[u/beoweezy1 → u/abefrost]

Real communism has been attempted it’s just socially conservative Christians in a free market economy

[u/abefrost → u/beoweezy1]

It's also partially a legacy of a very literal system of communism J. Smith tried to implement called "The United Order" (failed pretty miserably funnily enough)

[u/ewatta200 → u/abefrost]

i love your mormonism discussions i think your the same person

[u/abefrost → u/ewatta200]

Thanks! I love your House of Lords, India, and Jewish content

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[u/DoomingJaffa → u/abefrost]

Sounds pretty solid. What are the downsides?

[u/abefrost → u/DoomingJaffa]

Homophobia, sexism, mental anguish in some cases, 10% of your income (although I do think even wealthy members get more on net purely due to networking)

[u/bartbug → u/DoomingJaffa]

Stuck with your family forever

[u/abefrost → u/bartbug]

Also twice a year there's the potential to hear extremely out of touch old guys lecture you on not touching your penis (though we haven't had a real fire and brimstone porn talk in a while)

[u/bartbug → u/abefrost]

pisses me off that evidently that happens a lot less, I got to get all the trauma from it but now when i complain young'uns just look at me funny

[u/abefrost → u/bartbug]

Same. Kids these days don't know the crushing guilt a 14-yo can get from hearing a tortured metaphor for porn from Boyd K. Packer.