"Brilliant, Clever, Tragic," "Laugh out loud funny," "A Terrifically Insightful Work." Described as The Office meets The Bible, the tale told here is hardly to be believed. The Question: What happens when God and Mammon are made to synergize? In answer, this book opens the doors to Mormon corporate offices, most secret of spaces, and invites you inside. At the Church Office Building (it's actual name) spiritual ambitions speak through HR evaluations, missionary mission statements, digital converts, and scripture marketing campaigns. Hear employees chant "cultural beliefs" and test if a new DVD hits your "spiritual hot buttons." Watch us market food storage "solutions" to religious consumers! Read about the "best practices" of the corporate side, from smuggling underwear into banana republics to Mitt Romney's role in a billion dollar Church Mall. The author, an Ivy League trained cultural anthropologist, "works" (sometimes) as a media evaluator with the Mormon Church's corporate arm. During long lunches he traces the ins and outs of a religion being consumed by corporate culture, and you, Dear Reader, are invited along for the insights, laughs, and revelations. A compelling, light-hearted but serious memoir, sometimes fictional ethnography, and, yes, even apocalypse, this book crosses genres, fact, fancy, and everything between. Not for the faint of heart, dumb persons, or the casual reader.
The Book of Mammon
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About the Author
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Smith writes books that seem confusing initially, but which make sense after the first chapter, or so it is said. Certainly his books do not strive for the Stephen T. Colbert Award For The Literary Excellence.
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More About the Author
After receiving a PhD from UPenn (Anthropology) in 2007, the author has taught at various universities, played softball, started a t-shirt company, and even written a book or two. I suggest you read one. Why? You'll see...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
46 of 52 people found the following review helpful
By R. Poulton
Format:Paperback
This is a very interesting book, written by a believing Mormon, who is also a cultural anthropologist. The book is described by its author as a book of fiction that nevertheless tries to show a hard truth. Those who hope to read another bashing of the Mormon people or their religion will be disappointed--the author is a believer. Those that hold to the adage, "if you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all" and those sated by the usual Deseret Book fluff will likewise be unsatisfied. Perhaps, it is written to those of testimony who attend the LDS Church often to serve and to learn, yet find themselves puzzled by and disconnected from the ever-changing stream of pamphlets, programs, events and activities that consume their time without enlarging their souls. This book addresses this audience and gives an explanation of how this came to be.
The narrative is centered on the author's experiences as an employee in a corporation that runs much of the headquarter activities for the Church. While most Mormons are accustomed to the idea that current Church institutions represent a natural and foreordained unfolding that will usher in the millennial reign, Smith challenges such notion. He argues that much of what is served up to Church members today is the natural outcome of battles fought and lost in the 19th century and the compromises and retrenching done during the 20th century.
The desire of Brigham Young to seek a Mormon refuge in the mountains of Mexico's Alta California failed as a result of the Mexican-American war. The end of that war brought the Mormons back into direct conflict with the U.S. government and the values of the influential in America. The visible damage of that conflict came with the eventual dissolution of the Church and seizure of its property, however, the unseen injury was the recasting of the language of its religion and the markers of faithfulness. Thus, the early 20th century was accompanied by a systematic turning of many the religious practices and doctrines on their heads and Mormons became the new champions of Americanism.
In a dispersed agrarian society most tithing was paid in commodities and therefore remained in a distributed system of local Bishop's storehouses to aid local members. By the end of the 19th century, tithing became monetized and therefore more easily centralized under the direction of a church headquarters. As membership grew and the nation prospered during the 20th century, so did the free will offerings to Church coffers. Money changes people, even corporate persons, especially when they attempt to transubstantiate Federal Reserve Notes into "the sacred funds of the Lord."
This new found wealth needed to be segregated from physical persons in order to eliminate the issues of commingling that troubled the Church after the deaths of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. It needed management. The corporation sole demonstrated the ability to do this for the Mormons, plus its virility could spawn a host of corporate progeny. During the 20th century corporations were endued by statutes and court rulings with fictional legal personhood. Most corporations that become large institutions did in fact begin to act like persons. They developed personality or culture, a preoccupation with self-preservation and self-image, they had aspirations that formed mission statements and strategy, they mastered logistics to accomplish great good and they often behaved amorally.
Mormon corporations charged with implementing the visions of leaders face other distinct challenges. Their corporate revenue stream is wholly disconnected to the merit or value of the corporate product offerings to members of the religion. There is, therefore, no impetus to establish a straight forward system of feedback. Further, a Correlation Department is positioned to digest all offerings created inside the corporation before they are dispensed to the Mormons residing outside. This results in an ever-descending search for doctrinal purity and a lowest common denominator. Smith shows that regrettably, all too often the resulting fare reflects a pervasive under-valuing of real people who practice the religion.
In engaging prose and humor born of irony, Smith gives an inside look at the departmental turf wars, the odd effects of aping secular corporate practices and a host of mundane concerns such as branding, inventory control and return on investment that occupy the time and appetites of employees at the Cob. The driving recipe, though sounding a bit convoluted, is simple: Mix memories of historical persecution with the natural paranoia of fictional personhood, blend a rigid culture of hierarchy with exclusive access to truth, stir in language that prefers the abstract to the concrete and a preference for a virtual world over a real one, fold in a desire to be nice and an aspiration for greatness in heaven and on earth and finally, leaven the whole with frequent references to the Spirit (the author might add, "If the Spirit is not available, then an emotional cherry can be substituted). As Smith shows, noshing on a steady diet of this for fifty years causes things to become more than a little zany on a day-to-day basis on the corporate campus.
The narrative is centered on the author's experiences as an employee in a corporation that runs much of the headquarter activities for the Church. While most Mormons are accustomed to the idea that current Church institutions represent a natural and foreordained unfolding that will usher in the millennial reign, Smith challenges such notion. He argues that much of what is served up to Church members today is the natural outcome of battles fought and lost in the 19th century and the compromises and retrenching done during the 20th century.
The desire of Brigham Young to seek a Mormon refuge in the mountains of Mexico's Alta California failed as a result of the Mexican-American war. The end of that war brought the Mormons back into direct conflict with the U.S. government and the values of the influential in America. The visible damage of that conflict came with the eventual dissolution of the Church and seizure of its property, however, the unseen injury was the recasting of the language of its religion and the markers of faithfulness. Thus, the early 20th century was accompanied by a systematic turning of many the religious practices and doctrines on their heads and Mormons became the new champions of Americanism.
In a dispersed agrarian society most tithing was paid in commodities and therefore remained in a distributed system of local Bishop's storehouses to aid local members. By the end of the 19th century, tithing became monetized and therefore more easily centralized under the direction of a church headquarters. As membership grew and the nation prospered during the 20th century, so did the free will offerings to Church coffers. Money changes people, even corporate persons, especially when they attempt to transubstantiate Federal Reserve Notes into "the sacred funds of the Lord."
This new found wealth needed to be segregated from physical persons in order to eliminate the issues of commingling that troubled the Church after the deaths of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. It needed management. The corporation sole demonstrated the ability to do this for the Mormons, plus its virility could spawn a host of corporate progeny. During the 20th century corporations were endued by statutes and court rulings with fictional legal personhood. Most corporations that become large institutions did in fact begin to act like persons. They developed personality or culture, a preoccupation with self-preservation and self-image, they had aspirations that formed mission statements and strategy, they mastered logistics to accomplish great good and they often behaved amorally.
Mormon corporations charged with implementing the visions of leaders face other distinct challenges. Their corporate revenue stream is wholly disconnected to the merit or value of the corporate product offerings to members of the religion. There is, therefore, no impetus to establish a straight forward system of feedback. Further, a Correlation Department is positioned to digest all offerings created inside the corporation before they are dispensed to the Mormons residing outside. This results in an ever-descending search for doctrinal purity and a lowest common denominator. Smith shows that regrettably, all too often the resulting fare reflects a pervasive under-valuing of real people who practice the religion.
In engaging prose and humor born of irony, Smith gives an inside look at the departmental turf wars, the odd effects of aping secular corporate practices and a host of mundane concerns such as branding, inventory control and return on investment that occupy the time and appetites of employees at the Cob. The driving recipe, though sounding a bit convoluted, is simple: Mix memories of historical persecution with the natural paranoia of fictional personhood, blend a rigid culture of hierarchy with exclusive access to truth, stir in language that prefers the abstract to the concrete and a preference for a virtual world over a real one, fold in a desire to be nice and an aspiration for greatness in heaven and on earth and finally, leaven the whole with frequent references to the Spirit (the author might add, "If the Spirit is not available, then an emotional cherry can be substituted). As Smith shows, noshing on a steady diet of this for fifty years causes things to become more than a little zany on a day-to-day basis on the corporate campus.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
By Carol Hamer
Format:Paperback
<< You mean the Church produced videos, DVDs, plays, digital media, and never actually did audience research, or evaluated their effects? And some stupid five-minute film costs how much!?! [...] after working at the COB I understand why saccharin does not measure the heavy handed artifice dumped upon our films. "Propaganda" is too kind, and ascribes too great an effect. >>
That's from Daymon Smith's new book The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons.
You may not be surprised to learn that "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" is a trademark owned by a "corporation sole", and that the fortune-500-level wealth of the church is owned by a corporation that consists of one man. It doesn't matter how much time and money you donate to this corporation sole (the corporation of the president), he owes you absolutely nothing in return. Notably, he doesn't owe anyone any public accounting for where that money goes and what becomes of it.
To see how that works out in real life, just read Daymon Smith's entertaining memoir of the time he spent working at the Church Office Building (COB). The bottom line is that if God needs flesh-and-blood followers to send money to Him, then it's reasonably to expect He'd need live humans scrutinizing the accounting books as well. You can't just toss (worldly) money into a grand, corporate black hole and trust that God is keeping an eye on how it's spent. If you've been trusting in God's accounting skills, it turns out that He's asleep at the books.
According to Daymon's tale, working at the COB has all of the crazy office politics you'd expect at an ordinary fortune-500 corporation. There's a big difference, though, and it's not just the church devotionals on company time or opening meetings with prayer. The problem is that they have absolutely no motivation to figure out whether their products are useful to their consumers. Mormons pay 10% of their income per year to the corporation (in order to be eligible for the saving ordinances in the temple), and the corporation gives back manuals, magazines, films, scriptures, garments, etc. -- but the direct market feedback that comes from consumers selecting the goods they purchase is completely cut off.
In economics, the private sector and the public sector each have their strengths and weaknesses. It's not a question of choosing which one is "right" and which one is "wrong" -- it's a question of optimizing your strategy by using the best of both. The COB has the worst of both because it has the advantages of neither: there's no market incentive to produce good products, and there's no public oversight either.
(The biggest irony is how ferociously right-wing the Mormons are, yet they give so much money to a corporation that functions just like the very worst stereotypes of the Soviet government economic system.)
One of the most amusing illustrations in Smith's book was how -- instead of doing any kind of reality-based market research -- the Cobbers would waste countless hours of labor creating "personas" -- that is, invented profiles that are meant to represent typical consumers of their products. Unsurprisingly, the "personas" seem to need exactly the sorts of things their COB-authors are poised to produce. The personas even have their creators' racism baked right in, as the Spanish-speaking persona not only wanted printed materials in Spanish, but also wanted them dumbed-down. (Actually, that one is a little surprising since I can hardly imagine these materials could be dumbed-down any further.)
Smith's book gives you the inside story on some products and programs you may remember if you're Mormon. For example, marketing the "quad" from the pulpit at General Conference and moving pallets of piled-up Books of Mormon through a program where Mormons were encouraged to buy copies and paste their pictures and testimonies in them for the missionaries to distribute. Plus he recounts some other episodes that are almost too amazing to be believed, such as getting feedback from members in Africa, Mexico, and the Philippines on an "educational" film for Mormon bishops about the importance of getting (Spanish-speaking) freeloaders off the church welfare rolls.
The whole story is written in the style of an 18th or 19th century expose. It reminded me of some of the French libels described by Robert Darnton, complete with an amusing line-drawing frontispiece illustrating the subject.
Overall, The Book of Mammon is eye-opening and quite entertaining. It's a little dense, but worth the effort.
That's from Daymon Smith's new book The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons.
You may not be surprised to learn that "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" is a trademark owned by a "corporation sole", and that the fortune-500-level wealth of the church is owned by a corporation that consists of one man. It doesn't matter how much time and money you donate to this corporation sole (the corporation of the president), he owes you absolutely nothing in return. Notably, he doesn't owe anyone any public accounting for where that money goes and what becomes of it.
To see how that works out in real life, just read Daymon Smith's entertaining memoir of the time he spent working at the Church Office Building (COB). The bottom line is that if God needs flesh-and-blood followers to send money to Him, then it's reasonably to expect He'd need live humans scrutinizing the accounting books as well. You can't just toss (worldly) money into a grand, corporate black hole and trust that God is keeping an eye on how it's spent. If you've been trusting in God's accounting skills, it turns out that He's asleep at the books.
According to Daymon's tale, working at the COB has all of the crazy office politics you'd expect at an ordinary fortune-500 corporation. There's a big difference, though, and it's not just the church devotionals on company time or opening meetings with prayer. The problem is that they have absolutely no motivation to figure out whether their products are useful to their consumers. Mormons pay 10% of their income per year to the corporation (in order to be eligible for the saving ordinances in the temple), and the corporation gives back manuals, magazines, films, scriptures, garments, etc. -- but the direct market feedback that comes from consumers selecting the goods they purchase is completely cut off.
In economics, the private sector and the public sector each have their strengths and weaknesses. It's not a question of choosing which one is "right" and which one is "wrong" -- it's a question of optimizing your strategy by using the best of both. The COB has the worst of both because it has the advantages of neither: there's no market incentive to produce good products, and there's no public oversight either.
(The biggest irony is how ferociously right-wing the Mormons are, yet they give so much money to a corporation that functions just like the very worst stereotypes of the Soviet government economic system.)
One of the most amusing illustrations in Smith's book was how -- instead of doing any kind of reality-based market research -- the Cobbers would waste countless hours of labor creating "personas" -- that is, invented profiles that are meant to represent typical consumers of their products. Unsurprisingly, the "personas" seem to need exactly the sorts of things their COB-authors are poised to produce. The personas even have their creators' racism baked right in, as the Spanish-speaking persona not only wanted printed materials in Spanish, but also wanted them dumbed-down. (Actually, that one is a little surprising since I can hardly imagine these materials could be dumbed-down any further.)
Smith's book gives you the inside story on some products and programs you may remember if you're Mormon. For example, marketing the "quad" from the pulpit at General Conference and moving pallets of piled-up Books of Mormon through a program where Mormons were encouraged to buy copies and paste their pictures and testimonies in them for the missionaries to distribute. Plus he recounts some other episodes that are almost too amazing to be believed, such as getting feedback from members in Africa, Mexico, and the Philippines on an "educational" film for Mormon bishops about the importance of getting (Spanish-speaking) freeloaders off the church welfare rolls.
The whole story is written in the style of an 18th or 19th century expose. It reminded me of some of the French libels described by Robert Darnton, complete with an amusing line-drawing frontispiece illustrating the subject.
Overall, The Book of Mammon is eye-opening and quite entertaining. It's a little dense, but worth the effort.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Writing style made a good book worthy of eye-rolling every other page
August 9, 2011
By ariel
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The first thing do when I get a book is open to a random page and read it. In this book, the first thing I noticed on my random page was that the margins are essentially nonexistent, the font is tiny, and the paragraphs are by and large realllllyyyyyy long. The lack of paragraph breaks makes it difficult to read compared to an average book. I started reading a paragraph and found it both humorous and very insightful, but the sentences were likewise extremely long. The entire book reads like this. Also, I'm well educated but I needed a dictionary frequently while reading this book. There were a few words in other languages tossed in as well. While reading, I didn't feel like getting up to go use an internet translator, so I missed a bit of the meaning at times. Overall, this book will require commitment if you're going to finish it.
This book begins by explaining that it has been written by the author's evil twin, who has a very verbose and irritating writing style. True to these promises, the book was overly verbose- sometimes to the point of being quite painful- and some sections were difficult to understand due to the writing style. The style for the first several pages, with the computer plot, was so difficult that this section was almost impossible to follow. After that it improved somewhat. I found myself reading like an editor and identifying on nearly every page changes that could have been made that would have preserved the quirky style while making the book much more readable. I think the author would probably say that limited readability was often his intent, however, I got the sense that there were some areas in which there was less readability than he intended.
The content of the book was exceptionally interesting and most sections were quite engaging, however, it is a difficult read. I felt throughout that a good editor could have maintained the quirky style but made this book far more enjoyable. Basic things like margins and paragraph breaks would make a big difference. In areas where the author's point is unclear, some rewriting may have been in order. Overall I'm glad I read this book, and the content deserves five stars, but I'm not sure I'm glad that I purchased it. I'm not sure I'll read it again, and I would be uncomfortable recommending it to friends, especially friends who don't have graduate degrees.
As far as content goes, my favorite sections were his brief tangent onto what the temple means to modern mormons compared to early mormons, and the story about the welfare video being produced at the COB. I would have appreciated more length in the first section, perhaps making it a chapter section of its own as opposed to a tangential few paragraphs. The second section was detailed and mind-blowing. Anyone who wants a glimpse into the inner functions of the CoJCoLDS will be well-served by the contents of this book, though the journey may not be as enjoyable as they had hoped. Some of what happens is really quite saddening and anyone who believes that every decision made by the church is inspired will quickly realize that most decisions are actually made by lower-levels without the "prophetic mantle." Overall, however, this book cannot be called "anti-mormon." It is actually quite pro various church teachings, and the author's bias toward the gnosticism in both the early christian church and the revelations of Joseph Smith is made apparent in several sections.
In summary: beautiful content, presentation needs help.
This book begins by explaining that it has been written by the author's evil twin, who has a very verbose and irritating writing style. True to these promises, the book was overly verbose- sometimes to the point of being quite painful- and some sections were difficult to understand due to the writing style. The style for the first several pages, with the computer plot, was so difficult that this section was almost impossible to follow. After that it improved somewhat. I found myself reading like an editor and identifying on nearly every page changes that could have been made that would have preserved the quirky style while making the book much more readable. I think the author would probably say that limited readability was often his intent, however, I got the sense that there were some areas in which there was less readability than he intended.
The content of the book was exceptionally interesting and most sections were quite engaging, however, it is a difficult read. I felt throughout that a good editor could have maintained the quirky style but made this book far more enjoyable. Basic things like margins and paragraph breaks would make a big difference. In areas where the author's point is unclear, some rewriting may have been in order. Overall I'm glad I read this book, and the content deserves five stars, but I'm not sure I'm glad that I purchased it. I'm not sure I'll read it again, and I would be uncomfortable recommending it to friends, especially friends who don't have graduate degrees.
As far as content goes, my favorite sections were his brief tangent onto what the temple means to modern mormons compared to early mormons, and the story about the welfare video being produced at the COB. I would have appreciated more length in the first section, perhaps making it a chapter section of its own as opposed to a tangential few paragraphs. The second section was detailed and mind-blowing. Anyone who wants a glimpse into the inner functions of the CoJCoLDS will be well-served by the contents of this book, though the journey may not be as enjoyable as they had hoped. Some of what happens is really quite saddening and anyone who believes that every decision made by the church is inspired will quickly realize that most decisions are actually made by lower-levels without the "prophetic mantle." Overall, however, this book cannot be called "anti-mormon." It is actually quite pro various church teachings, and the author's bias toward the gnosticism in both the early christian church and the revelations of Joseph Smith is made apparent in several sections.
In summary: beautiful content, presentation needs help.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Author too full of himself...
The author seemed to get in the way of the story he was telling and made it difficult to get his message. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Paul A. Smith
2.0 out of 5 stars
Loved the podcast but befuddled while reading
Okay, say it's my ADD kicking in, but I was deciding whether Daymon is really this in love with himself and wants everyone to know how intelligent he is, or he really does not know... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Bryan R. Peifer
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but...
This should have been a great book. There is a natural tension between the need for a bureaucracy and the sacred mission of a church. Read more
Published 6 months ago by John Jacob
1.0 out of 5 stars
Total S*#&
Among the worst books I have ever tried to read. The author purposefully used a convoluted nonsensical (combined with sensical) writing style that makes it impossible to tell when... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Timothy Gardner
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant
The book is brilliant, very brilliant. Unfortunately it also lacks from awkward and difficult sentences, bizarre and out-of-place narrative structures, dripping cynicism, and a... Read more
Published 20 months ago by the narrator
3.0 out of 5 stars
For being self-published and an author's first attempt, this book is...
I am surprised this book has all five star reviews. This book is by no means bad and I'm happy I read it, but it is understandable why it was self-published. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Christopher Allman
5.0 out of 5 stars
adding to BGM's words...
I joined the MoChurch in the 1960's, at Duluth, MN...
Before I moved (back) to Seattle, the church there started on a member-built chapel; here's what I remem:... Read more
Before I moved (back) to Seattle, the church there started on a member-built chapel; here's what I remem:... Read more
Published on February 22, 2011 by Anders Tronsen
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like a fine coat of shellac on my sanded-down belief system
An old and trusted friend recommended this book, so I added it to my Kindle list and gave it a go.
As I read, I was elucidated, appalled and amazed. Read more
As I read, I was elucidated, appalled and amazed. Read more
Published on February 5, 2011 by S. L. Patterson
5.0 out of 5 stars
The real story behind the story
I was an extremely active Mormon convert from the late 70s to the mid 80s. While I enjoyed much of my experience, there was a growing perception that troubled me. Read more
Published on November 27, 2010 by B. Griffith
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Book of Mammon
I completely agree with all of the reviews, The Book of Mammon, is very funny to read and very enjoyable. Read more
Published on September 15, 2010 by M. Stiglich
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