Bibles in the nightstand and Sundays off: how members set an example in the field, and what it costs

Marriott has placed a Book of Mormon beside the Gideon Bible in its rooms since its first hotel, the Twin Bridges motor hotel in Arlington, Virginia, opened in 1957. By 1997 the Deseret News reported the company was distributing 50,000 copies a year. The policy became news again on August 25, 2018, when Fox News and others reported that Marriott, having absorbed roughly 1,300 former Starwood properties in its 2016 acquisition, would extend the requirement across them: 300,000 additional rooms by the end of that year, across a system of about 6,500 properties. The requirement is written into franchise and licensing agreements, which is what makes it unusual. Most hotel Bibles arrive because a local Gideons chapter asks; Marriott's arrive because the contract says so.

The cost is split and modest. The Gideons supply Bibles free. The Book of Mormon, according to the 2018 reports, is paid for jointly by the Marriott Foundation and the Church. The exemptions tell you where the company thought the price was too high: W Hotels, Edition, Moxy and Design Hotels, about 140 properties aimed at guests who would not want scripture in the drawer, were left out. The company's stated reason for keeping the books everywhere else was practical rather than devotional: "There are many guests who are not digitally connected who appreciate having one or both of these books available."

The industry was moving the other way. STR, the hotel data firm, found that the share of American hotels offering religious materials fell from 95 percent in 2006 to 79 percent in 2016, and to 51 percent among luxury properties. Marriott's policy, in other words, went from ordinary to distinctive without changing at all.

Scale matters for judging the gesture. Wikipedia's 2025 figures give Marriott 41 brands, 9,361 properties and 1,706,331 rooms in 144 countries, with 418,000 employees in 2024 and revenue of $26.2 billion in 2025. A 300,000-room extension of the nightstand rule was therefore not a founder's whim applied to a family chain; it was a decision by a public company, run since 2012 by chief executives from outside the family, to keep a religious practice in a sixth of its inventory. The board could have let it lapse with the Starwood deal. It did not.

On January 28, 2011, Marriott said it would stop offering in-room adult movies: existing supplier contracts would run out and not be renewed, and new hotels would not carry them. The company gave economic reasons, falling revenue and guests who could get the same content on their own devices, and said the practice kept adult material away from children. The timing was noticed. NBC News pointed out that the announcement came two weeks after Mitt Romney left the Marriott board ahead of his presidential run, and that in 2008 family-values groups had criticised him for not pressing the company on exactly this.

Here the cost has a number attached, at least from the industry's side. One expert quoted by NBC estimated that adult titles still made up 85 percent of what hotels collected from in-room entertainment, at $12.95 a film. LodgeNet, the main supplier, had seen revenue fall 19 percent between 2008 and 2009, which supports Marriott's economic explanation. Whether the decision was faith or arithmetic, the two pointed the same way, and the company chose the moment when they did. Romney, for what it is worth, rejoined the Marriott board in December 2012 for a third stint as a director, after the election and after the channel had gone dark.

Set the cases side by side and the pattern is that visible policies are cheap when the founder's family owns the company and expensive when a market or a legislature has to be persuaded.

Two rows deserve a second look. City Creek is the Church's own development, built through its real estate arm, so the Sunday closure there is corporate policy rather than one member's example. And the Megaplex row is the only one where the person responsible later said he had been wrong.

The teaching behind the closures is short. The Church's Gospel Topics entry on the Sabbath quotes a revelation to Joseph Smith that asks members to keep themselves "unspotted from the world" by going to the house of prayer on the Lord's day, and the practical guidance that follows is to attend sacrament meeting, spend the day with family and stay away from work and shopping. Members apply it to themselves first. The interesting cases are the ones where an owner applied it to a payroll, or a legislature.

The clearest case of a member's conduct becoming everyone's rule is the Utah statute, passed in 2000, that bars car dealerships from opening on both weekend days. Nearly all of them take Sunday. Larry H. Miller, who by 2007 was the tenth-largest auto dealer in the United States with 42 dealerships, championed the law; KSL's 2025 account describes him as its strongest backer, arguing for a six-day cycle on the ground that seven days was hard on employees and their families. Miller himself was an eccentric owner in other respects. He had his own locker at the Delta Center, wore a uniform to games and greeted players on the court, and he stayed home whenever the Jazz played on a Sunday, which for an NBA owner is a lot of Sundays over 24 years. The law outlived him. In January 2025 Senator Stephanie Pitcher, a Democrat from Millcreek, filed SB136 to let dealers open all weekend; her argument, to KSL, was that "I don't think that the government needs to be telling private businesses how to do things." It met heavy opposition, dealers included, and she withdrew the bill on January 24, 2025, a quarter century after the law passed. The economics cut in a direction outsiders miss. A single dealer closing on Sunday loses customers to the competitor down the road; a statute closing every dealer costs none of them a sale relative to each other, and saves all of them a day's wages. That is why the dealers, not the churchgoers, killed the repeal. City Creek Center, the Church-owned mall across from Temple Square that opened on March 22, 2012 at a reported cost of $1.5 billion to $2 billion, closes on Sunday too, but there the calculation is different: the owner absorbs the lost trading day itself, and Wikipedia records the criticism that a church spending that much on a shopping centre had other priorities to answer for. The Miller dealerships were sold to Asbury Automotive in 2021 for $3.2 billion, and the family sold the Jazz to Ryan Smith in October 2020 for $1.66 billion, about 70 times what Miller paid. The Sunday rule, whatever it cost, did not stop the numbers compounding.

The visible rules are the cheap ones. Alcohol is where the ledger turns.

The Word of Wisdom, the Church's health code, forbids alcohol to members, and the Marriott founder observed it. His hotels sell it. Bill Marriott told the Deseret News in 1997 how that happened: the first three hotels were in dry states, the fourth was in Philadelphia and needed a bar, and the family settled on a formula, that they could be "in the world but not of the world" and run their bars in good taste. Members repeat a story that J. Willard consulted the Church president before deciding; it appears on devotional sites and in retellings of Bill Marriott's 2013 memoir, and we have not been able to verify it against a primary source, so it stays out of this essay. The policy is what matters. A company that requires scripture in every nightstand also requires a liquor licence in every full-service hotel, and it has done both for sixty years without apparent damage to either.

The Megaplex decision is the other bend. In January 2006 Miller's cinema chain cancelled its showings of Brokeback Mountain, a film about two men in love. Utah's gay and lesbian community centre urged a boycott of his businesses; Miller later noted that some customers bought cars in support. On February 8, 2007, the day after former Jazz centre John Amaechi came out, Miller conceded he had made a bad decision, called it a "knee-jerk reaction," and said he would probably let the film run if faced with the choice again. It is the only case in this essay where the example was withdrawn by the man who set it, and it is worth noting that the withdrawal, too, happened in public.

On no-alcohol policies at member-owned companies more generally, the record is thin. Plenty of Utah businesses do not serve liquor; few say why, and we could not find a fetched, dated source in which an executive in our profiles attributes a company-wide alcohol ban to his faith. The examples that can be documented run the other way, toward Marriott's bar in Philadelphia. That is not a criticism. It is the finding.