Mormons and spiritual business

This week a controversial article (with an even more controversial cover) on “How Mormons Make Money” broke at Businessweek. Two Mormon media voices provided measured responses, spotlighting the tension between Mormon scriptural injunctions and Mormon business practices, but showcasing important subtler nuances.
First Joanna Brooks takes a look at “What’s Wrong with the Controversial Businessweek ‘Mormon Money’ Cover?” She explains “Trying to sell a few magazines, Businessweek destroyed an opportunity for a serious discussion. That’s not what any of the sources consulted for the article would have wanted.
Another lost opportunity was Winter’s failure to pursue with any insight or curiosity the question of what motivates Mormon enterprise. It’s not that Mormonism is just another form of prosperity gospel. The faith has a 170-year-long history of seeking economic self-sufficiency, motivated at first by Mormons’ desire for autonomy from a hostile mainstream and by necessity engendered by their western isolation. Today, that drive is motivated—as I’ve heard discussed among leading figures in Mormon Studies this week and as was hinted at in the Church’s own statement and a Deseret News editorial today—by the need to create an endowment capable of sustaining the global physical infrastructure of Mormonism (temples, churches, universities) even as the bulk of the Church’s population shifts to the global south and tithing revenues flatline or even drop.
This is no simple Creflo Dollar morality tale. This is story about history and global patterns of wealth distribution, as well as about the way a financially successful American-based Church takes what it needs from the market to realize its own countercultural priorities. A story maybe too big for Businessweek to grasp, and certainly too big for its juvenile cover.”
Then in “Everything is Spiritual” Patheos blogger Alan Hurst takes this idea further: “Where previous articles asked, “Why does the Church own businesses?” Businessweek’s Caroline Winter has an answer: “Because to Mormons, making money is spiritual.”She’s right. But she entirely misses the point….Winter’s Mormonism would claim that wealth actually merits God’s approval, that winning fortunes wins salvation. It would be hard to imagine a belief more at odds with Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament: ‘Blessed are you who are poor.’ (Luke 6:20, NIV)
Fortunately, Mormons’ denial of a distinction between spiritual and temporal is a subtler thing than Winter describes, and a holier one. It rests ultimately on our understanding of heaven.
To Mormons, heaven is not merely a state of mind. It is also not, as Dante imagined it, a host of souls sitting still, gazing eternally at God. To us, heaven is active and communal. God has work for us there, not merely for each of us individually but for all of us, together, as his children and heirs. The joy of heaven comes from communion with God, but also from our participation in God’s work and our communion with each other in a perfect community. Heaven is other people.”