The Mormon Business Empire

Chris Lehmann at Harper's:

The vast majority of rank-and-file Mormons are not, of course, scions of wealth. Demographic research indicates that the Saints are no more affluent than the members of mainline Protestant denominations. However, the business outlook of the faith is deeply corporatist, reflecting a vision of central economic organization that is again unique among American Protestant sects. This, too, is largely a legacy of the church’s search for a stable outpost on the American frontier.

During the church’s initial forays in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, it was in fact a socialist enterprise. All property was held in common and managed by Smith and his senior lieutenants—one of whom, Sidney Rigdon, was an evangelical socialist.

However, the post-Smith church evolved into a virtual corporation, with elders assembling a number of joint-stock proposals, administered by the Perpetual Emigration Fund, to stake immigrant converts to land holdings in Utah. Under the authoritarian hand of Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, the trademark Mormon rage for order gathered decisive force. In Utah, Young oversaw the creation of a vast business cooperative, known as Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, which was meant to prevent Eastern enterprises operated by gentiles (as Mormons called all non-Mormons) from gaining a foothold in the territory. The cooperative is said to have dispatched spies to report on Mormon settlers caught trading with outsiders. It also spawned successful livestock, textile, and banking concerns.

This top-down model of economic organization remains firmly in place. The church has its own welfare system, which distributes its own line of food and consumer products under the proprietary Deseret brand. It also holds extensive corporate investments, which are not fully disclosed—but in a 2007 study called Mormon America, Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling fix the church’s total assets at somewhere between $25 billion and $30 billion. (For the sake of comparison, the Ostlings note that a similarly sized U.S. denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, possesses $152 million in stock holdings, mainly to secure its employees’ pension plans.) The Mormon church owns a $16-billion insurance company, at least $6 billion in stocks, and a $172-million chain of radio stations, as well as more than 150 farms and ranches, which easily places the church among the largest landowners in the nation.

Their agribusiness empire is massive.  More at Time:

The top beef ranch in the world is not the King Ranch in Texas. It is the Deseret Cattle & Citrus Ranch outside Orlando, Fla. It covers 312,000 acres; its value as real estate alone is estimated at $858 million. It is owned entirely by the Mormons. The largest producer of nuts in America, AgReserves, Inc., in Salt Lake City, is Mormon-owned. So are the Bonneville International Corp., the country's 14th largest radio chain, and the Beneficial Life Insurance Co., with assets of $1.6 billion. There are richer churches than the one based in Salt Lake City: Roman Catholic holdings dwarf Mormon wealth. But the Catholic Church has 45 times as many members. There is no major church in the U.S. as active as the Latter-day Saints in economic life, nor, per capita, as successful at it.

312,000 acres outside Orlando?  Damn.