What the Financial Times and the rest of the British press have made of Latter-day Saints in business

The Financial Times piece was written by James Crabtree and ran in July 2010 under the title "The Rise of a new generation of Mormons". I could not read it at the paper's own site, which is paywalled and closed to the tools used for this essay, so what follows rests on two contemporary summaries: a July 18, 2010 post at the Volokh Conspiracy by law professor Kenneth Anderson, who had read it, and a June 2011 Deseret News report that compared it with the Businessweek article of that month.

Crabtree's frame was global rather than Utahn. He treated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a religion that had outgrown its Salt Lake City base, with a majority of members outside the United States but a hierarchy still run from one city, and asked two questions at once: why its members were turning up in business, finance and government elites in many countries, and why the religion itself kept growing. He brought in the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, mentioned Mike Huckabee and John F. Kennedy in the context of religion and presidential politics, and used the JPMorgan interview as his opening scene. The recruiter's line, "What the hell? BYU?", is the one quotation from the piece that survives in the summaries.

The Deseret News, reading the FT beside Businessweek a year later, said both had reached the same conclusion: that missionary training and service were the catalysts, with foreign postings and language learning producing adaptable, cross-cultural managers, companionships producing interpersonal skills, and the combination of hardship and self-improvement producing a work ethic. That is a fair summary of an argument the American press would repeat for two years, and Crabtree had it first.

The second British piece is the one everybody cites, and it gets its own essay on this site. The Economist's "The Mormon way of business", dated May 5, 2012, compressed the argument into a single mechanism: two years spent selling a faith for which there is almost no demand makes every later sale easy. It leaned, as the Deseret News noted, on Jeff Benedict's 2007 book, and it listed the habits that outsiders find striking: no alcohol, large families, stable marriages, three months of food in the larder. The Deseret News columnist Lane Williams answered it on May 21 with a head count of the Fortune 500 that found one Latter-day Saint chief executive, Nolan Archibald, against ten expected from a 2 percent share.

Two things distinguish the British pieces from the American ones of the same years. Neither the FT nor The Economist was writing for readers who would vote on Mitt Romney, so neither treated the subject as a campaign story. And both were written by people for whom the group was exotic. The American coverage assumed familiarity and argued about fairness; the British coverage assumed strangeness and tried to explain.

The third verified piece is television. "The Mormons Are Coming", a BBC documentary, went out on BBC Two on February 28, 2023 and on BBC Three the next day, then sat on iPlayer. It followed missionaries of the England Manchester Mission and young adults in Britain and the United States, and it had extensive access to the England Missionary Training Centre in Chorley, Lancashire, which is one of the Church's eleven such centres worldwide (the others are in Provo, São Paulo, Mexico City, Lima, Manila, Accra, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Auckland and Bangkok). The Church's British newsroom described the programme as positive and balanced overall, in the words of Elder Martin J. Turvey, an Area Seventy, and LDS Living warned readers in March 2023 that it contained one instance of strong language.

It is not a business film. But it is the only British production to show the mechanism the FT and The Economist wrote about, day by day: the training centre, the companionships, the doors, the use of social media to reach people who will not open them. Anyone who wants to test the sales-apprenticeship thesis against footage rather than argument should start there, in Chorley, with missionaries who wake at 6:30 am and proselytise until 9 pm.

None of the three pieces printed the numbers that would let a reader judge the claim. They exist, and most of them existed at the time. The table gathers the ones that matter, with sources.

The last two rows are the ones a sceptical editor would have circled. The Goldman figure supports the FT's picture of a labour pool that banks have learned to draw on. The Fortune 500 figure undercuts the picture of a business elite. Both were available in 2012 and neither British piece used them.

The difference is not accuracy, since the FT and The Economist were no less careful than their American counterparts and in some ways more so; the difference is the question each side was trying to answer, and that was set by the readership. An American business editor in 2011 or 2012 had a candidate in the race whose wealth came from Bain Capital, and a second candidate, Jon Huntsman Jr., whose family firm was a chemical company, and every story about the group's way of business was read as a story about Romney's biography, which is why the Businessweek cover of July 2012 about church finances drew a formal statement from the Church and why the Christian Science Monitor put Romney in the headline of its May 14 piece on lay leadership. A British editor had none of that. Crabtree's readers were fund managers who had noticed BYU graduates on the trading floor and wanted an anthropology; The Economist's readers wanted the joke and the mechanism; the BBC's viewers, a decade later, wanted to know why two young Americans in white shirts had knocked on their door in Salford. The British pieces are therefore better on the mission and worse on the money. None of them mentioned Deseret Management Corporation, the for-profit holding company founded in 1966, or the tithing estimate of $7 billion a year that Reuters printed in August 2012, or the investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, which the Wall Street Journal reported in February 2020 held about $100 billion and which settled with the SEC on February 21, 2023 for $5 million over undisclosed shareholdings, a story that broke in the same week the BBC film aired and which the film did not touch. The FT is a financial newspaper and I could find no verifiable FT piece on that fund at all, though it may exist behind the paywall. That is the gap in the British record: the mission has been explained three times, and the balance sheet not once. The material for a fourth piece, one about Chorley and Salt Lake City and the $56.8 billion in listed stocks the church disclosed in 2024, is sitting in public filings.

The mission has been explained three times in Britain; the balance sheet not once.

• The full text of Crabtree's FT piece: the date within July 2010 and its exact wording beyond the JPMorgan line rest on the Volokh and Deseret News summaries.
• Any FT article after 2012 on the Church's finances, Utah's tech corridor or the SEC settlement; searches returned nothing at ft.com that could be fetched.
• A Guardian review of the BBC film, which secondhand accounts describe as warm about the missionaries and cool about the Church's motives; I could not fetch it and have left it out.
• Coverage in the Telegraph or the Times; none surfaced that could be read.
• The MSB Real Estate reprint of the Economist piece, which exists as a PDF but would not load.

That leaves three British items in fifteen years that meet the standard of this site: a newspaper profile, a magazine column and a television film. Set against the American output of the same period it is a thin file, and it is thinner still on the subject the FT exists to cover. Whether that is because British editors find the money less interesting than the missionaries, or because the group is simply too small in Britain to sustain a beat, the record does not say.