the 2021 amazon prime seriesLuLaRich (reviewed in this volume) chronicled the meteoric rise and fall of LuLaRoe, a billion-dollar multi-level marketing (MLM) company founded in 2013 by DeAnne and Mark Stidham that specializes in women's clothing. The series explored the company's founding, growth, corporate culture, and recruitment and marketing strategies, as well as the particular appeal of the garments themselves. LuLaRoe's success in the 2010s can be attributed to the convergence of several factors: the growth of social media, the rise of athleisure wear, the economic impact of the 2008 recession, the company's ability to tap into a large pool of educated stay-at-home mothers eager for supplemental income, and the aspirational vision of White womanhood that LuLaRoe deployed and cultivated. The series also raises questions about the broader relationship between Mormonism and MLMs; specifically, this essay focuses on the connections between MLMs, entrepreneurship or startup culture, and the theological concept of self-reliance.The Federal Trade Commission defines multi-level marketing, also known as “direct selling,” “social selling,” and “network marketing,” as “businesses that involve selling products to family and friends and recruiting other people to do the same.”1 MLMs promise income in two ways: through person-to-person sales of a product to consumers (“retail sales”), and through recruiting new distributors to join one's “downline” and receiving commissions on their sales. Utah is the “unofficial world capital of multi-level marketing and direct sales companies,” according to one journalist, with more MLMs per capita than any other US state.2 Network marketing is the second-biggest state industry (behind tourism), generating $8.5 billion in annual revenue. MLM executives credit their success in the state to the close linkages between Utah, Mormonism, and MLMs: the CEO of lipstick company Perfectly Posh surmises that “it must have something to do with the way LDS culture works in the [Salt Lake] valley.”3 But there are as many (or more) stories of failure as success: as a 2012 Mother Jones article noted, “The notion of selling to one's friends and neighbors is so intertwined with the culture” that “Utahns have a joke about multi-level marketing companies: MLM really stands for ‘Mormons Losing Money.’”4What is it about Latter-day Saint “culture” that might help to explain the disproportionately high concentration of both MLM companies in Utah and LDS members who work for them? One theory is that the connections fostered in tight-knit LDS communities and the language skills gained through serving missions around the world translate well into direct sales. For example, doTERRA, an essential oils company, has leveraged its employees’ language skills “to run a global office out of Utah, with 1,900 employees communicating in, literally, more than 100 languages.”5 Similarly, the Perfectly Posh CEO explains that in the Salt Lake City area, “You get a lot of return[ed] missionaries who speak every language on the planet, then all of a sudden you have a sales force that's very well connected.”6Missionary training may also translate well to direct sales; after all, knocking on doors and using social media to spread the gospel is not so different from direct selling the “good news” about a particular product. Missions experience also generates resiliency in the face of repeated rejection. In a 2020 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Guy Raz, host of the NPR podcast How I Built This, noted that what all successful entrepreneurs have in common is “the ability to withstand rejection.”7 Raz references David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways, who says that missions experience instills both a sense of discipline and a “fearless” attitude toward door-to-door sales.8 Or, as one Latter-day Saint CEO and co-founder of a wildly successful Utah-based startup puts it, “Every single one of us can sell the crap out of anything.”9The LDS Church's generally positive conception of social media may be another factor. Church leaders have long encouraged members to view social media as a divinely inspired advanced communications technology that can “hasten” the work of redemption in the last days and to use it to “sweep the earth with [gospel] messages filled with righteousness and truth.”10 Mormons have harnessed the power of social media to share personal religious testimonies with large global audiences. The “Bloggernacle” and the “I'm a Mormon” campaign are well-known examples.11 In the Latter-day Saint tradition, a testimony is defined as “a spiritual witness given by the Holy Ghost” that includes all principles of the gospel. Members are expected to obtain and cultivate their own unique testimonies, and to share them with others.12 Developing and sharing a religious testimony is similar in several respects to cultivating a marketing testimonial about a particular product's life-changing capabilities; in both cases, the narratives must appear simultaneously personally authentic and consistently on-brand in order to be effective. When it comes to selling products, because “Latter-Day Saints consider it a joy and privilege to share their religion with others,” selling can be easily reframed as “sharing.” As Alice Hines puts it, “They're not selling anything . . . but rather sharing things they love.”13 Hines further argues that the MLM business model capitalizes on this “innate desire to share” in the Latter-day Saint tradition. In today's personalized economy, such synergies between religion and marketing abound. On the one hand, as Mara Einstein argues, religion has become a “commodity product,” necessitating the adoption of marketing strategies such as the creation of brand identities to compete with other products for consumers’ attention; on the other hand, religious or quasi-religious language can be mobilized to “retool” “the material aims of capitalism . . . as somehow not only about capital accumulation,” but rather about higher-order goods such as personal transformation.14The particular product being sold also helps to explain the appeal of MLMs to LDS Church members. Many MLMs sell products primarily marketed to women, such as cosmetics, clothing, dietary supplements, and other products geared toward health or “wellness.” In the US, 76 percent of all direct sellers are women, who are often attracted to work for these companies by the promise of receiving discounts on products they wish to buy for themselves; 83 percent are White and half are between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four.15 Additionally, a tradition of open-mindedness to natural or alternative medicine within Mormon communities may help to explain the success of the many Utah MLMs that specialize in dietary supplements and other “wellness products.”LuLaRich sheds light on several broader connections between Mormonism and MLMs, although the Stidhams and LuLaRoe are based in California, not Utah. The Stidhams place particular emphasis on the linkages between their religious beliefs and their entrepreneurial aims. After identifying themselves as members of the LDS Church, Mark Stidham explains that this means that “we believe in self-reliance, and that the universe is ultimately fair.”16 Self-reliance is a central Latter-day Saint concept defined as the belief that “through the power of Christ, and through our own effort, we can work for the spiritual and practical needs of life” and become more self-sufficient.17 The church provides extensive self-reliance services blending practical advice with religious principles for its members, including study groups, videos, and manuals with titles like “Starting and Growing My Business for Self-Reliance.”18The Stidhams have deep roots in the faith: DeAnne is a direct descendent of Hyrum Smith, and both she and Mark come from large Mormon families with pioneer roots.19 Entrepreneurship has equally deep roots in their family histories: DeAnne's maiden name was Startup, and her father's family founded the Startup Candy Company in Utah in 1868 and ran it for several generations, while her grandparents owned a Hollywood-based “wedding catering business to the stars and gown shop” in the 1950s and her mother had a part-time catering business.20 The Stidhams associate entrepreneurship not only with family businesses and the Latter-day Saint doctrine of self-reliance but also with the dream of unlimited wealth and freedom. “I seriously never even considered having a job,” Mark says. “That wasn't for me, to work for somebody else and to answer to a boss and to have somebody else defining what my product was going to look like. . . . When you're an entrepreneur, there's no upper limit. Nobody's gonna tell you you can only make this much. It's entirely up to you.”21LuLaRoe's website positions the company as the culmination of “100 years of entrepreneurship.”22 For DeAnne, entrepreneurship begins at home: she relates a story from her childhood when her mother told DeAnne and her ten siblings to gather downstairs, cover their eyes, and count to three. When DeAnne opened her eyes, her mother was throwing handfuls of five-dollar bills, the sum of the three-thousand-dollar catering contract she had just landed, over the banister. DeAnne recalls, “She goes, ‘Pick it all up! It's all yours, whatever you can get, it's all yours! Mom did this for you!’ It was her way of teaching us to visualize that if we work hard, we're gonna see the benefit.”23This anecdote also reveals how DeAnne connects entrepreneurship and motherhood: “Mom did this for you!” is one way of justifying a mother's absence from her children while working outside the home. DeAnne's story of the founding of LuLaRoe relies on the same justification. As a stay-at-home mom in search of supplemental income, she began buying girls’ party dresses at swap meets and reselling them to friends and family members at “dress parties” she threw after school and on weekends. In 2012, she began sewing and selling women's maxi skirts alongside the dresses; these soon proved more popular than the dresses. She recruited other women to buy the skirts from her and sell them at profit, ultimately resulting in the start of LuLaRoe in 2013.24DeAnne's path to starting her own business reflects the economic and religious bind many Latter-day Saint women feel. Because the church discourages women from working outside the home, they are “caught between economic pressures and the Word of God,” as one author puts it.25 Church teachings present motherhood as a “sacred privilege” and holy obligation, and warn that “the family will suffer” if women work outside the home.26 Even if economic necessity mandates that Latter-day Saint women work outside the home, they still feel an “impulse to present themselves as wives and mothers first.”27 These cultural pressures are particularly strong in Utah, where “the male-dominated nature of Mormon culture has kept nonemployment rates for prime-age women extremely high—as high, in some areas, as they were for American women in the 1950s,” according to a 2015 New York Times study.28 At the same time, high levels of “social capital” in heavily Mormon areas may generate networks of stay-at-home moms that both expose and attract Latter-day Saint women to MLM sales in greater numbers.Given these constraints, MLMs constitute one of the few acceptable forms of supplementary income and entrepreneurship for women in conservative religious cultures that emphasize traditional gender roles and divisions of labor. Even for women who do not have the same cultural and religious pressures, companies like LuLaRoe trade on the aspirational desires of women who are drawn to the opportunity of work that is lucrative, remote, and flexible. The dream of being able to do “part-time work for full-time pay” and to leverage already existing networks into a steady income while also running a successful business out of one's home is a compelling product itself, one that relies on consumer and class aspirations as well as ideals of the perfect stay-at-home mom and the pop-feminist “boss babe” icon.29 MLMs like LuLaRoe both cultivate and capitalize on these desires.LuLaRoe has been intentional about targeting stay-at-home moms with its messaging and recruiting. Commenting on the secret to the company's success, Mark Stidham remarked: If you want to create incredible wealth, identify an underutilized resource. And . . . there is an underutilized resource of stay-at-home moms [who] have chosen to be a mother. And if you make that choice, you pay a price career-wise in our country right now. We have a lot of people of faith that have been attracted to this business [and] we've got this army of women who are smart, passionate, beautiful, funny, educated, and want to do things, and we want to give them . . . all of that.30In corporate and social media messaging like this, LuLaRoe seems to value not only the work of mothering but also women's ambitions, capabilities, and labor in a way that feels all too rare.31 Videos produced as part of their “We Are LuLaRoe” advertising campaign deliver messages such as “You are beautiful, amazing. You are smart, compassionate, confident, free. We are mothers building a community, making a difference through social retail.”32 In these messages one can see the characteristic themes of “empowerment, confidence, capacity, and competence” that Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued are constitutive of corporate feminism, which relies on neoliberal notions of individual capacity and choice to drive consumption.33 LuLaRoe encouraged its retailers to use social media to drive sales of the clothing by promising women that it would make them feel beautiful, sexy, and confident, while simultaneously instructing them to use social media to drive recruitment by creating fear of missing out on the opportunity to be a full-time stay-at-home mom who owned her own business.LuLaRoe's corporate messaging also relies on a religious vocabulary to intensify its appeal and its claims: it pitches itself not as a company focused on profit but as a community with a “mission” to “create freedom, serve others, and strengthen families through fashion,” and a place “where lives are being improved through love, purpose, confidence, trust and growth.”34 What these messages convey is that, ultimately, LuLaRoe is about sharing a dream and the opportunity to obtain goods of a higher-order nature than its clothing. As Mark Stidham puts it, “We're not in the clothing business, we're in the people business.”35 The clothing is a (necessary) means to the values and greater goods that the company articulates as part of its mission. By positioning itself as part of an “ultimately fair” universe and defining success in direct sales as a matter of individual competence, moral character, and desire, LuLaRoe's messaging fuses the logic of neoliberalism with the theological concept of self-reliance. In so doing it has also attempted to immunize itself against structural criticisms by presenting individual character and work ethic as both the key to success and the reason for failure.36 The reality, of course, is that according to a 2017 Consumer Awareness Institute study, approximately 99 percent of MLM distributors will end up losing, not making, money.37 Since 2017, LuLaRoe has been the target of multiple lawsuits alleging that it made false promises to consultants and operated as a pyramid scheme; in its current fine print and disclosure statements, LuLaRoe is careful to promise “equal opportunity,” not “equal outcome,” to its retailers.38President Dallin Oaks has suggested that “Latter-day Saints are particularly susceptible to the gospel of success and the theology of prosperity,” both of which understand “success in the world—particularly entrepreneurial success—[as] an essential element of progress toward the celestial kingdom.” This susceptibility is rooted in the fact that “materialism is a seductive distortion of self-reliance,” a “virtue in which Latter-day Saints take special pride.”39 Oaks's critique, which affirms the powerful links between self-reliance and entrepreneurship while cautioning against their materialist “distortions,” seems a good illustration of Kathryn Lofton's observation that “religious critiques of the market” have often “struggled to exceed the market.”40 In today's religious marketplace, spiritual and material understandings of success are not so easily disentangled. The broader dynamics and affinities underlying the appeal of MLMs to LDS Church members suggest that despite such critiques, many will continue to join MLMs in search of both.