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Why the Church’s twice-yearly broadcast feels so much like an Amway \u2767 \u2726 \u2767<\/span><\/p>\n Somewhere in a hotel ballroom in the American Midwest, a man in a well-pressed suit is walking to a lectern. The lights soften. The music swells, then hushes. He smiles the smile of someone who has given this talk before and will give it again, and he begins to tell twenty thousand people that the life they want is within reach, if they will only trust the system, stay faithful to the plan, and keep buying the product.<\/p>\n Now shift the scene two thousand miles west. A man in a well-pressed suit is walking to a pulpit in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City. The lights are soft. The choir has just finished. He smiles at someone who has given this talk before and will give it again, and he begins to tell millions of viewers that the life they want is within reach, if they will only trust the Lord, stay on the covenant path, and keep paying a full tithe.<\/p>\n The resemblance is not perfect, and it would be unfair to pretend it is. But it is close enough that people on both sides of the comparison keep noticing it. Former Amway distributors who drift into ex-Mormon forums say the language feels familiar. Former Latter-day Saints who stumble into an Amway function say the same thing in reverse. And even faithful members, the people who actually love General Conference, have been heard to describe it as part worship service and part sales meeting.<\/p>\n This essay takes that comparison and runs with it, for a while, with a grin. Twice a year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds what its own publications describe as an opportunity to receive direction from God through a living prophet and apostles. Twice a year, a great many people, including a surprising number of the faithful, quietly reach for the coffee they are not supposed to drink. Something about that gap between billing and experience is worth examining.<\/p>\n But a fair warning before we begin. The comparison to a sales convention is fun, and most of this essay will treat it that way. At a certain point, though, the jokes stop, because underneath the polish there is a real theological question: what happens when an institution learns to sound almost exactly like historic Christianity while quietly meaning something quite different by the same words? When we get there, I will say so plainly.<\/p>\n For now, find a comfortable chair, a plate of cinnamon rolls, and a bingo card. The choir will now favor us with a selection.<\/p>\n \u2767 \u2726 \u2767<\/span><\/p>\n Amway, founded in 1959 by Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel in Ada, Michigan, built its culture around two things: products and meetings. The products were soap, vitamins, and cosmetics. The meetings were where people learned to believe in the products, the business, and, above all, the people on stage who had already made it.<\/p>\n A former distributor described those meetings on Reddit’s ex-Mormon forum, where she had been lurking because the posts “resonate deeply”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> with her experience:<\/p>\n Meetings were constant. At least every other week for a couple hours, plus these absolutely soul-crushing four-day weekends that ran from 9 a.m. to midnight. You’d be stuck in an overcrowded ballroom or stadium with 200+ people, blasting music, screaming about how jobs are terrible.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 u\/flckeringfirefly, “Parallels with Amway,” r\/exmormon, https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/exmormon\/comments\/1jqzeea\/parallels_with_amway\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n General Conference does not run until midnight, and nobody screams about anything. That is part of the joke, which we will come to. But the architecture is recognizable. There is a stage. There is a fixed hierarchy of people entitled to stand on it. There is a top tier whose words carry the most weight (in Amway, the Diamonds and Crown Ambassadors; in the Church, the fifteen men sustained as “prophets, seers, and revelators”<\/strong><\/em><\/span>). There is a middle tier auditioning for promotion. One Reddit wag summed up the purpose of conference for the Seventies in five words: “Tryouts to see which 70 is getting promoted.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The October 2026 conference, the 196th Semiannual General Conference, held October 3 and 4, featured thirty-seven talks across four general sessions. Of the speakers, the overwhelming majority were male General Authorities; a handful were women leading the Church’s auxiliary organizations. The Salt Lake Tribune’s David Noyce describes the speakers in his explainer on why the paper covers the event:<\/p>\n The speakers include members of the governing First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, along with other male general authorities and a few churchwide women’s leaders.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 David Noyce, “What is LDS General Conference? And why does The Tribune cover it?” The Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 10, 2023, https:\/\/www.sltrib.com\/religion\/2023\/10\/10\/what-is-lds-general-conference-why\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n An Amway veteran would feel right at home with the seating chart.<\/p>\n Every Amway distributor learns the phrase early: be a product of the product. You use the soap, the vitamins, and the toothpaste, not necessarily because they are the best on the market, but because loyalty to the product line is a sign of loyalty to the business. The same former distributor recalled:<\/p>\n I was expected to use their everything: deodorant, hair products, cosmetics, laundry soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, cleaners, energy drinks, bars, vitamins\u2014all of it. Even though their vitamins wrecked my stomach. But hey, “be a product of the product,” right?<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 u\/flckeringfirefly, “Parallels with Amway,” r\/exmormon, https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/exmormon\/comments\/1jqzeea\/parallels_with_amway\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n General Conference has no laundry soap. But it does have an unmistakable emphasis on the one product that keeps the organization running. In October 2026, two separate talks were devoted to tithing: Elder Patricio M. Giuffra’s “Trusting the Lord Through Tithes and Offerings”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> and Elder Mois\u00e9s Villanueva’s “Prove Me Now Herewith,”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>the latter title borrowed from Malachi 3:10. Elder Giuffra put the principle plainly:<\/p>\n The law of tithing is a law of faith. … the windows of heaven are opened according to our obedience.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Elder Patricio M. Giuffra, “Trusting the Lord Through Tithes and Offerings,” October 2026 General Conference, https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/general-conference\/2026\/10\/24giuffra?lang=eng<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n He also quoted President Nelson’s claim that “tithing can break cycles of poverty in poor nations and families.”<\/strong><\/span> In fairness, many Christian traditions teach tithing, and the Malachi text is shared Scripture. The difference, and the reason the Amway comparison bites, is that in the Church payment of a full tithe is a condition of temple worthiness, and temple worthiness is a condition of the highest blessings the faith offers. A commenter in r\/mormon put it bluntly: if you stop paying, “you are declared ‘unworthy’ of going to God’s house.”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>The product is not optional if you want to stay in the business.<\/p>\n The heart of Amway’s model is recruitment. A distributor who sells soap makes a little money; a distributor who recruits other distributors makes a lot more. Rockwell Porter Johnson, a former member writing for the Medium publication Recovering Mormon, drew the parallel directly:<\/p>\n It’s logically impossible for Mormons to see you as anything other than a potential convert.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Rockwell Porter Johnson, “Amway and the Mormon Church: You Might Be Surprised At the Similarities,” Recovering Mormon (Medium), https:\/\/medium.com\/recovering-mormon\/amway-and-the-mormon-church-5ba7b444ed0<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is a strong claim, and a great many Latter-day Saints who are genuinely good friends to their non-member neighbors would rightly push back on it. But Johnson’s broader observations are harder to dismiss. He notes the Church’s longstanding motto, “Every Member a Missionary,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>and compares it to Amway’s expectation that every distributor recruit. He even observes that Amway’s famous recruiting pitch, “Drawing Circles,”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> bears an uncanny resemblance to the circles missionaries draw when they teach the Plan of Salvation.<\/p>\n The October 2026 conference season fit the pattern. In the week before conference, the Church News promoted a new set of “Love, Share, Invite”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>videos in which three General Authorities told how a simple invitation from a sister, a friend, or a cousin led to their conversion. During the conference itself, Bishop Sean Douglas spoke on “The Hour of Your Mission Is Come,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>reminding young men of their priesthood responsibility to serve. None of this is sinister. Evangelism is a Christian duty, and Jesus told His followers to go and make disciples. But the format, the slogans, and the success stories told from the stage will feel very familiar to anyone who has sat through an Amway “open meeting.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Before going further, two caveats are in order, because the evidence rules for this essay matter.<\/p>\n First, Amway itself is a lawful business. In 1979, the Federal Trade Commission concluded that Amway’s model was not an illegal pyramid scheme, though it did require changes to the company’s earnings claims. Comparing the Church to Amway is a comment on style and structure, not an accusation of fraud.<\/p>\n Second, the people in the seats are not the joke. An atheist YouTuber who attended General Conference and later published a critical video made a point that one Reddit commenter paraphrased this way: he kept meeting nice, earnest believers, and he could not quite work out how the institution was producing that kind of person. Another commenter in the same thread observed that the change in ordinary Latter-day Saints “clearly … does not come from the charismatic leadership.”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>Whatever one concludes about the institution, the sincerity of millions of members deserves respect. This essay is about the messaging, not the messengers’ hearts.<\/p>\n \u2767 \u2726 \u2767<\/span><\/p>\n If you have watched more than one session of General Conference, you know the voice. It is unhurried. It drops at the end of sentences. It pauses where a lesser speaker would plow ahead. It sounds, in a word, reassuring, and it sounds remarkably similar whether the speaker grew up in Utah, Brazil, Ghana, or Tonga.<\/p>\n In an earlier essay on these pages, I described the phenomenon this way:<\/p>\n The cadence itself becomes evidence of spiritual authority.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 The Righteous Cause, “The ‘Stepford Prophets’ Speak: Analysis of LDS General Authority Speech Patterns,” March 23, 2026, https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/03\/23\/the-stepford-prophets-speak-analysis-of-lds-general-authority-speech-patterns\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That essay also acknowledged that “this is not necessarily cynical manipulation.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Most of the speakers sincerely mean what they say, and nobody needs a manual to absorb a style after forty years of hearing it.<\/p>\n The academic literature supports the existence of the style, if not every theory about its purpose. In a 2019 master’s thesis in linguistics at Brigham Young University, Stephen Thomas Betts analyzed roughly ten thousand conference texts and identified a cluster of syntactic features characteristic of “General Conference talk.”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>He found that the strongest predictor of the style was the speaker’s birth decade, and he described conference talk as:<\/p>\n A ‘high performance event’ in which speakers converge stylistically.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Stephen Thomas Betts, “‘General Conference talk’: Style Variation and the Styling of Identity in Latter-day Saint General Conference Oratory,” M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 2019, https:\/\/scholarsarchive.byu.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=8519&context=etd<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, people who speak at conferences learn to sound like people who speak at conferences. President Gordon B. Hinckley, reflecting on the event in October 1995, put a happier spin on the same observation, as the Deseret News later recalled: “The personalities are different. But the spirit is the same.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Anyone who has watched new Amway recruits pick up the cadence of their upline will recognize the process.<\/p>\n On Quora, someone asked why General Authorities speak “in soothing soft-spoken words instead of using a little hell-fire and damnation.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> The faithful answers were thoughtful. One member explained that the still, small voice of the Spirit is easier to hear when nobody is yelling. Another noted that Latter-day Saint theology does not really have a hell in the traditional sense, since outer darkness is reserved for very few.<\/p>\n One answer, though, came from a respondent who said they had studied voice and diction at BYU:<\/p>\n We laughed about their Conference Voices CONSTANTLY in my Voice & Diction course at Brigham Young University. It is utterly contrived and meant to put the listener either straight to sleep, or straight into a happy, trancelike state.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Anonymous respondent, “Why do general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all speak in general conference in soothing soft-spoken words…?” Quora, https:\/\/www.quora.com\/Why-do-general-authorities-of-the-Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-day-Saints-all-speak-in-general-conference-in-soothing-soft-spoken-words-instead-of-using-a-little-hell-fire-and-damnation-in-their-talks<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That respondent went on to claim, on the authority of a professor, that General Authorities are coached in how to sound like General Authorities. I cannot verify that claim, and readers should treat it as one person’s recollection rather than fact. What can be said is that the faithful Quora answers actually agree on the basic observation: the style is soft by design, because the speakers believe softness invites the Spirit. Critics and believers disagree about why the voice exists. Hardly anyone disagrees that it exists.<\/p>\n And here is where the Amway comparison flips on its head. Amway rallies are loud. The music blares, the crowd cheers, and the speakers shout. General Conference is the opposite: the energy level of a library during finals week. If Amway is a rock concert, conference is a string quartet playing in the lobby of a very nice bank. Both, however, are performances designed to produce a feeling, and both rely heavily on the feeling to carry the message.<\/p>\n \u2767 \u2726 \u2767<\/span><\/p>\n One of the most charming moments in recent conference history came when Elder Jeffrey R. Holland read aloud a letter from a child. Religion columnist Jana Riess, a practicing Latter-day Saint, quoted it with evident delight:<\/p>\n General Conference was Boring why Do we half to Do it? tell me why.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 quoted by Jana Riess, “Ah, General Conference \u2014 Remind me why we do this?” The Salt Lake Tribune \/ Religion News Service, April 4, 2022, https:\/\/www.sltrib.com\/religion\/2022\/04\/04\/jana-riess-ah-general\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Riess then made the case that the child had a point. She described conference as a blend of worship, a corporate sales meeting, and a fan convention. She praised families who make the weekend bearable by baptizing it “in a cascade of sugar,”<\/strong><\/span> and she offered the immortal judgment that conference cinnamon rolls “are fully canonical,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>provided they are iced. She also mentioned the popular game of marking a bingo card every time a speaker says “covenant path,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>and she observed that the annual reading of the Church audit report “conveys no real information whatsoever.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n That last observation deserves a footnote of its own. The Church audit report, read aloud every April, assures the membership that finances were handled in accordance with Church policy. Amway distributors would recognize the genre: the assurance that the numbers are fine, delivered without the numbers. On r\/mormon, in a thread titled “It’s the hypocrisy for me,”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> one commenter reduced the whole matter to seven words: “The church wouldn’t qualify for a temple recommend.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n It is no secret, even among believers, that conference can be hard to sit through. Gabriella Loosle, writing for the faith-friendly site Add Faith<\/em>, admitted that she had used the talks as a sleep aid, comparing the cadence to white noise, and offered strategies to stay awake. Her advice was earnest and kind: listen while doing chores, pick a word to track, and do not feel guilty. Her title asked the question everyone was thinking:<\/p>\n Trouble focusing during General Conference doesn’t mean you’re a bad Mormon.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Gabriella Loosle, “Why Is General Conference So Boring?” Add Faith, Sept. 29, 2017, https:\/\/addfaith.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/why-is-general-conference-so-boring\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Alan Rock Waterman, a believing but heterodox member writing on his Pure Mormonism<\/em> blog in 2010, went further. He reported that many fellow members privately agreed with him that conference had lost its spark, and he suggested a reason:<\/p>\n It’s not easy to feel the spirit from a talk that in all likelihood was ghostwritten by a staff member.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Alan Rock Waterman, “Why General Conference Is So Dang Boring,” Pure Mormonism, March 30, 2010, https:\/\/puremormonism.blogspot.com\/2010\/03\/why-general-conference-is-so-dang.html<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Whether conference talks are in fact ghostwritten is something Waterman asserts rather than proves, and readers should weigh it accordingly. His milder claim, that talks are “vetted by committee and approved beforehand,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>is consistent with the fixed timetables and prepared texts that have characterized conference since radio and television broadcasts began in 1923 and 1949, as the Deseret News has documented.<\/p>\n At the blog Wheat & Tares<\/em>, the writer known as Dave B. argued that the Church should simply abolish General Conference in its present form, calling it a “marathon of four or five two-hour sessions in two days.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> He also offered the most memorable line in this whole genre:<\/p>\n Two speakers could drop dead with heart attacks and it would still be pronounced a wonderful Conference.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Dave B., “Let’s Just Abolish General Conference,” Wheat & Tares, Oct. 11, 2022, https:\/\/wheatandtares.org\/2022\/10\/11\/lets-just-abolish-general-conference\/<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And on Reddit, a former true-believing member offered perhaps the most honest self-assessment: “As a TBM, boredom was my number one complaint. The talks were usually terrible. I was trained in Toastmasters, so I always got lots of compliments on my talks. It’s not that I’m great; the bar is just so low.”<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Not everyone thinks the problem lies with conference. Writing at Times & Seasons<\/em>, Stephen C. argued that declining conference viewership probably reflects our shrinking attention spans, not a decline in the Church. Modern entertainment competes with “everything that was ever made,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>he wrote, and “General Conference will always be less immediately appealing.”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>That is a reasonable point, and it is worth keeping in view. A two-hour sermon block was never going to beat a streaming series for excitement.<\/p>\n Still, the counterpoint concedes the central observation. Even the defenders agree that conference is, by modern standards, slow. The question is whether the slowness carries enough substance to justify itself. That brings us to the content.<\/p>\n \u2767 \u2726 \u2767<\/span><\/p>\n In the 1930s, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis<\/em> popularized a list of seven common persuasion devices. One of them was the “glittering generality”:<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n A glittering generality or glowing generality is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 “Glittering generality,” Wikipedia, https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Glittering_generality<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Classic examples include “freedom,” “family values,” and “hardworking families.”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>Nobody is against any of them, which is precisely why they work. A glittering generality does not argue; it glows.<\/p>\n Reading through the talk summaries and texts from October 2026, one finds no shortage of glow. A sampling of lines that circulated after conference:<\/p>\n Each of these is pleasant, quotable, and suitable for a cutesy font on a kitchen wall, which one Reddit commenter suggested is exactly the point: conference gives leaders “that witty word or phrase that members will print out in cutesy fonts and hang in important places as a reminder.”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>Amway veterans will recall the equivalent: “attitude of gratitude,” “fake it till you make it,”<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>and
\ndistributor rally and what its polished vocabulary leaves unsaid<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIntroduction: Welcome to the Rally<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n
Two Conventions, One Playbook<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Stage, the Lineup, and the Upline<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
“Be a Product of the Product”<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Every Member a Distributor<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
In Fairness to the Distributors<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
The Voice: Soft, Slow, and Strangely Soothing<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Conference Voice<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Why No Hellfire?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Even the Faithful Are Nodding Off<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Child Who Said It Out Loud<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
The Quiet Confession<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
A Fair Counterpoint<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Glittering Generalities: Can It Reasonably Be Concluded?<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
What the Term Means<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
The October 2026 Collection<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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