LDS Artificial Growth Constraints

  

LDS Artificial Growth Constraints

(See graph at the end)

Summarizing and quantifying the effects of priestcraft on limiting church growth

For 60 years of my 80 years, I have asked myself why the church was so small and growing so slowly. I finally have an answer. The church is not growing because the leaders don't want it to grow. And why don't they want it to grow? Because they would lose personal power and importance and income and fear they would have more problems to solve and so would lead a less comfortable and more chaotic life.

Over the last century, millions of people have probably asked themselves "if the gospel is so great, as the Scriptures tell us, then why hasn't it achieved a much more powerful influence in the world, perhaps creating a Zion or a Millennium?" Well, the answer is that the gospel is indeed that remarkable, and should be that successful, except for the fact that the gospel itself, plus the process of spreading it, have been sabotaged for the last 120 years by the church itself. It is a commonly heard observation that many bureaucracies are eventually taken over by the enemies of the original purpose of that bureaucracy, and we have a perfect and most serious example of that hostile takeover in the governance of the LDS church. At the moment, it seems almost impossible that this hostile takeover of the LDS church could be reversed while keeping the whole organization intact, but that probably should be the first action attempted.

If the benefits of the true gospel were allowed to be too obvious, "by their fruits ye shall know them," then the church leaders would lose control and the gospel would explode across the world, leaving them in the dust.

The gospel is indeed itself such a powerful force that in order to keep it from growing in size and influence, there must be enormous brakes placed on it, and our leaders have gladly supplied those brakes for their own personal purposes. In other words, the church is relatively small and noninfluential because that is the desire of the church leaders.

 Considerations and techniques for the “right-sizing” of the LDS church

If one can correctly postulate the general values and intentions of the LDS church leaders, then one should be able to roughly quantify the sizing parameters for the personnel count of the church membership and of the related headquarters offices. There is a management algorithm operating here and we just need to figure it out.

The overriding concern is that the convenience and entertainment and opportunities and feeling of wealth and importance for church leadership and staff is to be optimized, since that is the point of having an independent and autonomous church headquarters unit in the first place. These choices that always favor church leaders are never intended to benefit the membership or to benefit anyone else in the world, except perhaps by accident or except in cases where benefits to church members and other people are unavoidable because of some unique circumstance.

Here are some of the rules that appear to be operating:

1. The church needs to be large enough to produce enough tithing revenue to be able to send church leaders and staff around the world to visit interesting places while traveling in relative luxury to and from those places, and residing there, and along the way.

2. The church must be small enough so that it is of little interest to all the other competing layers of government in the world extracting taxes and commanding loyalty and obedience, so that the church is not considered to be a threat to be watched and suppressed.

3. The church must explicitly avoid influencing any social changes in host countries such as allowing its members to press for freedom or having the church leaders themselves press for greater freedom.

4. The church must do the absolute minimum amount of charity work, preferably keeping it all unobservable, in countries where it wishes to have a presence, so that it does not in any way appear to compete with existing governments for the hearts and minds (and money) of the citizens there. If the church feels driven to do any large amount of charity work which could have an actual noticeable effect on the world society, it must be done either in places that do not matter to anyone, and where the recipients will never object about the church presence there, or, even better, charity offerings should be limited to places where the church has little interest in having a presence there for the sake of interesting travel or recreation or collecting much tithing money. Haiti, and its extensive 2016 hurricane damage, might be a good example.

5. There is great peril to leadership interests in letting the church get beyond a certain size, perhaps an active and effective membership of 1% of the general population (even less in less free and more jealous places), because otherwise the church becomes too visible, and all the competing governmental forces in the world will become jealous and strike at it. Perhaps we could have a membership of 3 million to 6 million in the US, assuming many are inactive in the case of the larger total number. One of the problems with that extra size is that people become a great deal more curious, and the pressure to reveal what is actually going on inside the church administration will be much larger, and then some secrets will finally be discovered, and that information getting out will itself help to expand this spiraling exposure process, and all this activity will eventually act as a depressing factor on the potential optimum and sustainable size of the church.

In other words, the church has found, through a long process of trial and error, where that sweet spot is between centralizing the most money and power, while avoiding any serious conflict with any other political, tax-collecting organizations in the world. It is a constant juggling act to stay in that sweet spot.

Apparently, the right size for the church in the United States is probably about 1 million fully active families, making up about 3 million people. If each family unit contributes $10,000 a year, that would provide a church income of $10 billion. If all the world membership together is twice that effective size, then the church could have a $20 billion income, which is obviously about twice too big for long-term uncontested operation. Taking in an extra $10 billion each year for 10 years is presumably why the leaders now have $100 billion in the bank. In other words, the church is about twice too big in its operational, effective size, and the leaders are probably feeling pressures to shrink the size and influence of the church in half if they wish to live a calm and peaceful life (and also keep their convenient nest egg).

6. If the church stays small enough, with as little influence as possible, it can maintain a high level of secrecy from its own membership and from the world. So there is this exponential danger of getting a little bit larger and letting out a little bit more information because of the many outside pressures, so that an increase in size and an increase in information and an increase in notoriety will all act in concert, multiplying each other, to depress the size and winnings of the church below the optimum point which it has reached through decades of experimentation.

For example, if the members knew more about the internal workings of the church, they might be less likely to contribute to the church, so they must be kept in the dark, however unfair, deceptive, and unChristian that may be. In a similar way, the church must remain small enough and bland enough to be considered of no importance by the competing political entities, else these external entities would work to push the church size and income down below its current optimum point, as seen through the eyes of the extremely self-centered church leadership and staff.

Putting this another way, if the church were to make declarations to the world of its intent to change the world for the better, as Joseph Smith tried to do and as the 12 actually did after his death, then that would raise the visibility of the church and at the same time increase the outside criticism and pushback. So the situation of being noticed by the world by its sheer size or by its effect on changing society, must be carefully limited.

As an example, if there are missions in the world, as there have been in the past, where a missionary might spend his entire two years and never baptize a soul, then it would seem extremely counterproductive and a waste of resources to keep missionaries in that country. On the other hand, if one of the goals of the missionary system is to keep down the number of converts so that the church remains invisible, then one might need to keep in mind some countries to send missionaries to where the leaders can be assured that very few people will join, so the church will not be noticed and the equilibrium disturbed. It is good to keep the church members desiring to do missionary work, so there needs to be a place to send out a certain number of these young people, but, at the same time, they cannot be allowed to have overall worldwide baptisms that exceed a certain number.

Perhaps one of the intentional reasons for constantly maintaining such seeming randomness in the assignment of missionaries, is that, otherwise, if missionaries could plan ahead and were fully prepared with good language skills and good teaching skills and good social skills, before their mission even started, then they might be too successful, and again disturb the balance between providing missionary opportunities for a large number of young people, while constraining their actual success to protect church headquarters interests.

Of course, another issue concerning a beautiful place like France is that the leaders and staff would like to keep a presence there, however small, so that they can justify making numerous official visits there to enjoy the scenery and ambience.

However, again, part of the calculation must be that the church can only allow itself to invite in a certain number of people worldwide because if its serious growth is noticed in one place, then whoever the reigning political entities are there, and everywhere else in the world, they will notice the church and create some kind of pushback situation and cause a loss of money and power to church leaders.

However, observing the enormously expensive temple complex established in Rome, one might suspect another long-term goal kept in the back of leaders’ minds. If they could gradually and eventually take over the Catholic Church in France and other such places, the Anglican church in England, the Lutheran church in Germany, etc., they could gain a large extension to their desired earthly empire

Leaders might be especially wary of going into Africa, or even Russia or China, where there are people who have studied the gospel who are asking for missionaries to come there to create religious organizations. This offers the opportunity for extremely fast growth, but that also becomes an immediate danger to the church's cushy and untroubled lifestyle because if there is a large growth in church members, and the necessarily large change in the social functioning in that country or those countries, almost certainly competing with local religions and governments, then that makes the LDS church HQ uncomfortably publicly visible and it will likely experience pushback and resistance everywhere, not just in the places where it is growing the fastest. In other words, it has to carefully regulate the growth of the church and the influence of the church lest the inherent power of the gospel to change lives and change societies might thus work against the income and ease and convenience of the church leaders who only seek power, adulation, and wealth and convenience, not improvements to the world.

Using this line of logic, the church appears to have made an enormous strategic error by allowing itself to become too successful so that it now has more than $100 billion in liquid assets, plus an unknown number of increments of $100 billion held in real estate assets, all centrally held. This $100 billion in cash demonstrates the inherent selfishness and greed that drives the church leadership, and, at the same time, shows the risks it is taking in allowing itself to grow in size and riches. It cannot spend those resources, especially not to improve society, else it would further make itself visible and cause itself many more problems as an organization. Right now, it is probably feeling an enormous pressure to simply separate from the membership of the church, abandon them, and "take its money and run." Otherwise, it is in grave danger of losing all of that money through any number of processes, whether from the members themselves, or from external competing organizations. It could take decades to further constrain the church enough to prevent any more growth and actually see a significant shrinkage. And what to do with all that unspent money seems unsolvable as things stand.

It may have gotten itself into a cul-de-sac where its size and riches can become its undoing. It appears that it now has about twice the number of active and wealthy members that it is safe for the church to have, and can expect a large number problems to be experienced in the future if it cannot make the necessary adjustments. The actual New Testament gospel is intended to grow at a very fast pace and to cause no problems whatsoever because of that fast growth, because the tendency of the church members to gather to places where they are welcome, and to stay away from places where they are not welcome, should take care of most of the transient political problems that might arise. This political balancing is done almost automatically and requires no expensive and complicated central command and control system to regulate it.

The problem with the current church's situation is that if it cannot suppress the growth and influence of the church, through fairly simple means, then it needs to accelerate or escalate its means of depressing the size and influence and income of the church. One way that can be done is by simply treating members badly and broadcasting scorn toward members and ignoring their complaints. Probably at this stage of the game, it is very beneficial to the church leaders to have church members leaving in large numbers.

Actually, that rate of leaving is probably not large enough still. Perhaps that is one explanation for why the church felt perfectly unconcerned about closing the temples for two years. The relatively minor social difficulties of the Covid pandemic were a very poor explanation for why the church left so many of its young engaged couples high and dry concerning getting married. They have been told all their lives they should be married in the temple, with their salvation depending on it, and suddenly when the time came, it was not possible to do that. Surely that would put off some of these eager young members, which apparently was one of the results intended. We already have too many successful families who are too devoted to the church and who support it too vigorously. (It would be interesting to find out if one of the reasons the church leaders are reaching out to and tolerating gay members so much is because they pay more tithing.)

If its big problem today is to get rid of the too many members who are too faithful who are sending in too much money, to buy and assure their salvation, because it is those members who are "blowing its cover" in the larger world, then we might see more of these strange policies and activities that we have seen during the last two years. As an example, ending or weakening the missionary program would be one solution to excess size, allowing the church to shrink by normal death rates and other attrition. But then it would probably have the membership rising up against it, and questioning it, and so on. The Covid pandemic offered an opportunity to greatly limit the effects of the missionary system, which the church leaders would probably see as a great benefit. The church appears to have actually shrunk in 2020. That would probably be counted as a plus to church leaders.

One might reasonably wonder if the old "raising the bar" missionary initiative was really just a way to cut down on the number of missionaries, squashing their enthusiasm, and cutting down on the number of converts because the church was growing too fast, and having too much good influence for the leaders’ greatest benefits to appear and remain.

Turning a New Testament church into an Old Testament church was an interesting move because it maximized the amount of income to the church, but, just as importantly, it made the gospel less attractive and less successful, so it would not grow too fast and cause the leaders the many problems they wanted to avoid, including loss of control over growth. Still, with all these intentional impediments, the church is still growing too much and having too much good influence.

It may be that the old home teaching program, for all its faults, was still too successful so it had to be downgraded to the much weaker ministering program, and the old youth program, incorporating vigorous scouting programs, used to work quite well, so it had to be shrunk to be almost meaningless, as in the new content-free and expectations-free and guidance-free youth program.

In other words, one way to help keep the church small is by polluting it and weakening it. it looks like the church leaders reached their main goals in about 1960, finally demanding a full tithing from everyone before they could attend the temple, and that year became an inflection point; everything went downhill from there.  The church is too big today, which causes the leaders problems.

A quick review of the graph entitled "LDS Artificial Growth Constraints:"

The main message of the graph is that "It appears that the church is not growing because the leaders don't want it to grow, not because the world is too wicked." In fact, if the church were to be untethered from the constraining leaders, it would have unlimited potential to grow worldwide.

The leaders themselves are the biggest constraint on church growth. It is true that competing political organizations would be upset by a quickly growing Christian influence, but there is not really much that they could do about it. The church leaders have found that by suppressing the church's growth, they can maximize their own income and feeling of importance. That is really the main operating consideration here. If the leaders would get out of the way, the church could explode across the earth and do a great deal of good.

As the leaders see it, the church needs to be big enough to provide the life-style they prefer, and the church leaders want to stay in control of everything and benefit from everything related to the church. But if the church gets very large, then the pushback from contrary worldly elements will fall heavily on the church leaders, and they don't want to be part of that. If these leaders were out of the way, what little pushback there would be would fall on the millions of members, instead of being concentrated at the leadership level, and those members could easily take care of those problems as they arose.

Many members actually believe in the gospel and want the church to act as their agent in spreading it throughout the world. Those members also want to live the Commandments of the gospel, and enjoy the social blessings associated with living those commandments, and not have the gospel diluted and distorted by a large influx of pagans. In contrast, church headquarters wants to stay synchronized with all worldly governments, to the extent they dare, so that they can lower the apparent contrast and make "friends of Mammon."

Explaining the options explored there:

1. Church leaders 'take the money and run."

With at least $100 billion in the bank, and other hundreds of billions of dollars centrally held in real estate, there is probably an enormous pressure to simply have the church leaders cash in on their high-stakes hedge-fund business venture, "take the money and run," and leave the church members to fend for themselves. In spite of the great loss, this would be a good thing, because it would wake up the membership, and help them realize that they have been hornswoggled for the last century and need to do better in the future.

2. Church members abandon headquarters.

This would require the members to wake up on their own and leave behind the thoroughly corrupt church headquarters which has been exploiting them for the last century. It is hard to imagine the level of shock it would take to do that "waking up," but a few articles on the topic might help.

3. Church follows members' initiative.

If the members left the headquarters behind, the headquarters could exist forever in its current form simply by living on the interest income of its many investments. However, some of the people at the headquarters unit might finally end their self-centered, cynical view of religion and decide they want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

4. Church goes full pagan – makes more money.

The church headquarters unit cannot seem to decide whether they should shut out all the new pagans before they completely corrupt the church, or to fully embrace those pagans as a new source of members and money, with the extra political benefit of having a highly politicized group who will fight for their rights to be pagans and can fend off other pagans.

Maybe, concerning the gays, the church will decide it is better to join them than to fight them. Maybe a 100% gay Mormon church would be the most lucrative of all religious businesses. There seems to be room for a large number of professional counselors who could meet with so many gays and trans-people who are mentally ill and who seem to constantly need counseling to deal with their feelings of guilt and their urges to kill themselves. The church would then also be capturing and co-opting this most vocal of political groups. They always seem to have political influence far beyond their numbers. It might be an interesting way to protect the LDS church from incursions by other kinds of crazy greedy people in various governments such as the Marxists.

The pagan priests of old did very well financially. Maybe it would work again in our time. Making the transition from a straight church to a gay church could be rocky, but profitable. Maybe the two could operate separately, in parallel; that would be an interesting arrangement.