My father is an artist. When I was younger I would sit on the floor in his studio while he painted. In my teenage years he shifted his attention toward sculpture, and I would borrow or steal his clay, tools, and other supplies to make art of my own. Often I would do so while surrounded by works of his in various stages of completion. Growing up I dedicated almost as much time to art as I did to soccer. I think I wanted to see myself as an artist because I wanted to be like my dad.
Artists are typically unique characters, and, while he’s always been soft spoken and unassuming, my dad has his own quirks. One of those is the fact that he never wore a suit or tie, not even to church. He wore a collarless button-down shirt and modest, thrifted slacks. Then one day he was asked to serve as a leader of our local church community.
The Mormon church does not have paid clergy at the congregational level. Your bishop, the Mormon equivalent of a minister or Catholic priest, is a normal person from the neighborhood who’ll have a job and a family like anyone else. He’ll also have counsellors and others around him to help administer the affairs of the church community they oversee. All of these individuals volunteer the time they give.
However, even though these positions are voluntary, that does not mean there are no expectations for how the job will be done. As a church representative, the more responsibility an individual has, the more they will be expected to present themselves professionally while going about their service. For example, they’re expected to wear a conservative suit, be clean shaven, and keep a traditional, short haircut. This is also the uniform I wore as a Mormon missionary.
When my father was asked to be a counsellor for our bishop my mother took it as permission to go on a shopping spree and purchase the professional attire he’d never had. He was pessimistic and resistant to the change in his wardrobe, a fact which surprised me. It was the first time I became consciously aware of the perceptions people brought to the clothing choices my father made relative to other men at church.
I asked him why he didn’t want to wear a suit since I saw nothing in it. From his response I took away the impression that he saw suits as the uniform of crooks, referring to businessmen and lawyers. My mother’s excitement over my dad’s new collection of formal wear prevented me from internalizing the idea that suits themselves were evil. But I knew I didn’t want to be a crook, which my dad had just clearly defined. He probably doesn’t remember giving me that response, and perhaps I remember it wrong, but the impression went on to shape my view of the world.
From an early age I had convinced myself I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, so avoiding business or law in my own life was not much of a sacrifice. I told myself that engineering was good, honest work, which it is. I also had a knack for it and a natural interest. Proficiency in high school drafting courses paved the way for me to secure a position as an intern at an engineering firm the summer before I started college. It was an interesting job that paid well for a recent high school graduate, and I didn’t have to wear a suit.
A month or two into my first work experience though, my entire department was let go, excepting a few engineers who had been there for some time. The company had lost a major client, and the budget that secured my employment went out the door with them. The businessmen who hired me did not lose their jobs.
I will say they weren’t crooks, they made the right decision at the time for the health of the company. But it occurred to me then that someone had to make the decisions. Why not me? Why should I defer the responsibility to the crooks? Overnight, business became much, much more interesting than it had ever been before. In a few short years, through my own pursuit of wealth and success, I became the character I once despised.
Acquiring wealth is not a simple task, and the incoherent distribution of wealth in society today makes a person wonder, what is it that some people know and others don’t? The prevalence of rich people who live in an all-consuming whirlwind of false friends and pretense causes others still to question why bother finding out?
Individuals who are both wealthy and religious seem like a paradox. Jesus was poor and homeless and Christians are supposed to follow him, right? Most of them are pretty bad at embracing homelessness, at least the Buddhist monks give it a good faith effort. In all fairness to the Christians, it’s hard to blame them. Homelessness is usually a shitty experience.
After realizing that the life of an employee is often also a life of false security and disempowerment, I started looking around for other options. Anxiety caused by the looming threat of job termination did not seem like the life God intended for man, however poor Jesus was. Not all of us can pull bread and fish out of thin air.
Determining myself to be wholly inexperienced, I began looking around for the people who seemed to be authentically good humans and who were also genuinely happy with the way their lives had played out. I figured that if I could find and ask them what they’d done I’d have a better idea of what to do myself.
In that search I used the church’s hierarchy as a shortcut. While I understood that the individuals I’d like to emulate could certainly be found outside of church leadership, there was a decent likelihood that I could spend less time searching by limiting the scope.
Among the leaders who presided over me I found many charitable, loving, kind-hearted souls. When they interacted with me I had the sense that they genuinely cared about me, and that they were truly happy themselves. In a paradigm-shifting turn of events, most of them were also obscenely rich.
I’m not talking about your uncle who makes six figures and drives a Ford mustang. He makes pennies. Pocket change. Breadcrumbs. Not enough for these people to bother worrying about his annual salary, even if it came in cash, packaged in a duffle bag, ready for pick up in five minutes. That was only barely an exaggeration.
I had one mission president who’d been in the C-suite of a global American airline, and another who’d been the an influential state politician and a business owner. Mormon congregations are grouped into stakes, and I had a stake president who was the CEO of a large multinational corporation. At least one of the people I met was a billionaire. When I first entered their homes, the expanse and expense of these structures masquerading as houses made me question whether or not I could really trust the people inside them. That changed over time as I realized that, despite having truly nothing to give them myself, they were generous with the time and attention they gave me.
Men and women who had amassed fortunes well beyond what any person could spend in a lifetime were volunteering themselves to help young students like me, which caused me to completely rethink the world. These people were not the Christians I was looking for, but somehow they were the Christians I found.