As the somewhat disturbing image above suggests, I am writing this as I am mentally preparing to go to the celebrated Astrid Lindgren’s World in Vimmerby, Sweden, for my holiday. For those unfamiliar, this is a theme park dedicated to the author of Pippi Longstocking and her books, attended primarily by small children and their exhausted parents. Yes, I am going voluntarily. But also - Lord help me.

Nevertheless, the trip has got me thinking about something I have been circling for a while in this series (not least as I covered the business model of festivals):

Or in other words: what can companies learn from pilgrimages? And why are so few companies doing it?

PILGRIMS AND THEIR PARKS 101

First a Pilgrimage 101, to be skipped by anyone who has been on one!

I have personally always found the concept of pilgrimage - making a journey to a place considered sacred - one of the most fascinating aspects of religion, partly because it is one of the most fundamental features of religious life.

The concept probably predates recognizable organized religion entirely, as Stonehenge was almost certainly a Neolithic pilgrimage destination which drew travellers from across Europe, and in ancient Egypt many made the arduous trek down the Nile to Abydos, the sacred city of Osiris, just to give two examples.

Every major existing religion has similarly built pilgrimage into its practice. The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam, meaning it is absolutely essential to the religion: every Muslim is expected to make the journey to Mecca at least once during his or her lifetime. Medieval Christianity built an entire economy around pilgrimage routes, with towns, hospitals, bridges and whole industries existing solely to serve people making their way to Canterbury, Santiago de Compostela or Rome. The Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan has been walked continuously for over a thousand years. Millions of Hindus descend to the Ganges at Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering on earth.

Nobody agrees on exactly why pilgrimage is so persistent. It may be that it provides an authentic and physical connection to an origin that no broadcast or reproduction can replicate. It may create bonds between strangers who share the same journey, or it may simply be an effective mechanism of institutional control, keeping believers tethered to a central authority at regular intervals. Possibly a person who has made the pilgrimage is not the same person who left. Possibly it’s all those.

Importantly, a person who has made the pilgrimage does not have as much money as when they left. For example, the Hajj is a monumental economic event, as the average spending per pilgrim was around 5,400 USD in 2025 and hotels can cost 1,500 USD per night. Needless to say, the Saudi government are looking to squeeze more money out of each visitor going forward, so expect that to increase (it is, after all, the country’s second largest income source after oil). The Shikoku pilgrimage is estimated to be cheaper, at around 400,000 yen, but this is before flights and opportunity cost is taken into account. If you would like a cheaper option, I can recommend the 643 km path that goes along my cottage from Oslo to Trondheim, but you will pay a price in sore feet and expensive Gore-Tex garments!

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THE SECULAR SHRINES

This, of course, points to a rather impressive business opportunity, and I am perennially baffled by how few businesses have taken it up. There are a handful of companies that have worked this out, though, with some great results:

Disneyland is the obvious place to start. Disney’s resort network now spans six parks across three continents and receives around 120 million visitors a year. What is easy to forget is that nobody wanted Walt to build it — not his brother Roy who ran the finances, not the bankers, not his wife. He liquidated his assets, borrowed against his life insurance policy and sold the rights to his own name. He was told it would end in financial ruin. When it opened in Anaheim in 1955, 15,000 guests were expected and 28,000 turned up, the pavement melted in the heat, food and water ran out, and a tiger and panther broke loose from a circus parade and staged what one reporter described as a furious death struggle on Main Street. Walt called it Black Sunday. The curious masses kept coming anyway. (The story that the whole idea came to him sitting on a bench eating peanuts while his daughters rode a merry-go-round is probably apocryphal — studio archives contain Disneyland sketches dated a year before his first daughter was born — but the myth is fitting for a man who understood that the story of a place matters as much as the place itself.)

Legoland in Billund takes the same idea and grounds it in something more specific. Billund is a tiny town of 7,000 people in the middle of Jutland with one of the busiest airports in Denmark. The reason is Lego, founded there in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in a wooden workshop that still exists. People fly from Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Sydney to visit a toy factory in rural Denmark, for the rides and for all the lego bricks but mainly because this is where it started. The origin matters to them in a way that no amount of brand advertising manufactured.

Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany takes the idea even further. Volkswagen built an entire theme park next to the factory, but the masterstroke is that you can take delivery of your new car there rather than from a dealer. People choose to travel to Wolfsburg, stay in the hotel, tour the factory, watch their car emerge from the glass towers where freshly built vehicles are stored, and drive it home. The pilgrimage is built into the purchase itself, which is an entirely different mechanic.

On a slightly smaller scale Cadbury World in Birmingham receives 600,000 visitors a year to the site where John Cadbury first began making chocolate in the 1820s. The Bournville factory village itself, built by the Cadbury family for their workers with houses, parks and a church, is part of the pilgrimage.

It is worth noting that Cadbury World is now operated by Merlin Entertainments, which describes itself as “a high growth, high return family entertainment company” and also operates Legolands. Merlin again is controlled by Kirkbi, the investment vehicle of the Kristiansen family who founded Lego. The family who built the world’s most successful toy pilgrimage destination then went and bought an entire portfolio of other people’s sacred sites. That is not a coincidence.

There are many other well known corporate pilgrimages out there. The Guinness Storehouse in Dublin is consistently one of Ireland’s top paid tourist attractions, receiving well over a million visitors a year at 26 euros a head, for what is essentially a very well designed walk through a factory that ends in a pint. The building itself is shaped like a giant pint glass, seven storeys tall, with the Gravity Bar at the top where you receive your communion pint overlooking the city. That is somebody who understood they were building a cathedral and designed it accordingly. They even serve pints with prints on the foam:

Importantly, you don’t have to be a Disney, or even a Guinness, to do this. For example, the Trangia factory in Trångsviken, Sweden makes camping stoves that have been manufactured essentially unchanged since 1951. They have a factory store-cum-museum, which acts as a sort of low key pilgrimage site for a very specific tribe.

Wilkin and Sons, the British preserve makers from the small Essex village of Tiptree, have found a different answer to the same question. They have been growing fruit and making jam on the same estate since 1885, and rather than building a single destination they have built a small network of tea rooms across the region, each serving their produce, each a physical outpost of the Tiptree origin story. When you sit down for a cream tea at one of their properties you are participating in the mythology of the original farm, even if you are nowhere near Essex. It is the medieval model of pilgrimage staging posts along the Canterbury road: you cannot always make it to the source, but you can stop at an inn that carries the same authority. The tea room is not the pilgrimage. It is the gateway to one.

In Japan there are museums dedicated to single products that would seem absurdly niche anywhere else. The Kikkoman Soy Sauce Museum in Noda sits inside the actual factory, where the smell of fermentation greets you at the gate. The Cupnoodles Museum in Yokohama receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and treats the invention of instant noodles with the seriousness it deserves, which is considerable. The Japanese understood something that most Western companies have not: your origin story is an asset, and the place where the origin happened is a physical manifestation of that asset that people will travel to experience.

As a former consultant, here’s a chart:

THE OPPORTUNITY

As the alert reader will have realized, I think lots of companies are sitting on the ingredients for a pilgrimage without knowing it, which is a horrible waste of business opportunity no religious leader would have permitted.

To take one example, Sriracha has no official pilgrimage site, but it actually has an unofficial one. During chili season, people drive to the Huy Fong Foods factory in Irwindale, California, simply to smell it, parking outside an industrial building in a Los Angeles suburb. The factory has no visitor center or museum, and the gift shop seems closed. The pilgrimage exists anyway, because the demand is there without anyone trying.

I mean, canned meat has its own SPAM® Museum in Austin, Minnesota, so there is absolutely no excuse for more celebrated brands to leave their origin stories on the table.

So let’s make one!

A proper Sriracha destination would lean into the industrial reality, with a factory tour making sure the smell hits you as you approach. It should celebrate the seasonal harvest festival in autumn when the fresh jalapeños arrive from Ventura County, which is when the unofficial pilgrims already come anyway. And something you can only get there would also be a good idea: a limited-edition sauce varying by harvest year, a vintage Sriracha tied to a specific batch. More importantly, a recipe workshop where you sit at a bench, adjust the heat and garlic and vinegar ratio, and leave with a bottle carrying your name. That object then sits on your kitchen shelf and every time you use it you remember being there. The Cupnoodles Museum in Yokohama does exactly this with instant noodles. The relic you made yourself in the sacred place is worth more than anything you could buy.

Victorinox is another obvious missed opportunity. The Swiss Army Knife has been made in Ibach, a small Swiss village, since 1884, and every person on earth has owned one or received one as a gift. There actually used to be a visitor center, not at the factory in Ibach, but in the lakeside town of Brunnen nearby, with multimedia shows, a knife museum and a workshop where you could assemble your own knife for 30 Swiss francs. Visitors loved the assembly, but one TripAdvisor reviewer wrote that Victorinox “could make more of an effort here and make a nice visitor center/museum/experience.” It closed in 2021. The story is there, and the tribe is there. What is missing is the conviction that this deserves a Legoland built around the origin, craft and community of people who already carry their knives everywhere (they are legally allowed to).

WHY ARE YOU LEAVING MECCA MILLIONS ON THE TABLE?

Roald Dahl understood more about chocolate factories than they do themselves. The golden ticket is the insight that access to the place where the thing is made is worth more than the thing itself. And while Cadbury World opened in 1990, most chocolate companies still haven’t worked this out.

All companies have an origin whether it’s a garage, a kitchen table or a small workshop. Most often the founding moment just gets referenced in the About Us page and is promptly forgotten, the origin treated as yesterday’s news rather than as living infrastructure, which is the most avoidable waste in brand management. Religions figured this out several thousand years ago:

Oh and happy holidays to you too! We will be back after lovely Sweden!

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So as promised, after my tour-de-lack-of-sources on religious figures, something rather different and possibly even more foolish: how can Europe become more competitive by learning from religion?

It’s not an entirely different topic, of course. A while back I wrote about how the world’s biggest phone company, which happened to be a European one, died not from stupidity (it possibly had too many smart engineers if anything) but from zip code, as it lived too far from the imperial centre where the future was being built - in its case Silicon Valley. In my book there is also a chapter making essentially the same point: Christianity won the world largely because of imperial gravity, just as Buddhism won via imperial patronage and the Silk Road, and Islam rose on the back of an empire replacing two fallen ones.

But why this topic and why now? Well mainly because it is interesting and there is a serious debate going on. Much has been driven by the Draghi report, which among other obvious things correctly identified that Europe is underperforming in tech, has too high energy costs and too fragmented capital markets, and proposed some sensible fixes. Unfortunately these fixes were suggested alongside other ideas such as a European DARPA and wasting incredible amounts of euros the continent does not have on “investments,” which is public sector-speak for throwing money into the sea, or perhaps a fountain.

Oh well.

At least Paul Krugman thinks Europe is basically fine, because the data doesn’t show what’s important, and partly because Europeans choose leisure over hustle. Tyler Cowen thinks growth is the master variable and everything else follows. The worst thing about the Draghi report is probably that it’s actually pretty good, as the first law of reports states:

But before we learn how we can fix this much better from religion, a minor lament that almost everyone in this debate seem to be looking at the wrong countries. The European growth conversation is dominated by Germany and France, which are, to put it gently, a bit last year. Meanwhile Poland has been one of the fastest growing economies in the developed world for two decades, and I challenge anyone to visit Warsaw and not be a bit impressed, especially if they arrive after visiting the capital of the 1970s or similar. Estonia, Czechia and Romania are doing rather well too, with nobody writing Draghi reports about them:

So now on to how we should actually fix this! The bad thing of course is that I’m not one of those smart economists.

Nonetheless, here are three lessons from religious history that can help European competitiveness:

1. BIG BUSINESSES GROW WITH EMPIRES

We common people and historians alike often think of empires as military projects, with their legions and navies making conquests and planting large flags in foreign soil. But what actually makes an empire last, and makes people want to be inside it, is business. Roman legions obviously did lots of conquering, but what made a Gaul or a Syrian or a Briton Roman was the roads, the markets, the legal system, the currency and the trade routes stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. At its height, the Roman Empire hosted a trade network where goods flowed from Egypt to Britain and even let ordinary people participate in international exchange, and an efficient mail system let figures like Paul plan extensive missionary activities across the empire. You became Roman because it was commercially advantageous. While the army opened the market, business made the empire.

The world’s dominant religions (the world religions) scaled using this exact machinery. Christianity and Paul targeted Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth and Rome, the high-density commercial hubs where people and currency already pooled. Buddhism moved out of India in the saddlebags of merchants along the Silk Road, securing the patronage of the Kushan Empire because it stabilized trade routes. Islam filled the vacuum of two collapsing trade empires and immediately consolidated the markets of the East under a single legal framework. The most successful religions in history grew because they were global businesses, using the dominant empires of their day as distribution engines.

These are the winners of course, but religious history is full of losers Nokias too. Norse mythology, the Greek pantheon, Incan religion, Manichaeism and Mithraism all had sophisticated theologies but never scaled because they weren’t connected to the infrastructure that lets ideas travel. They were competing not just with Christian theology but with the momentum of the Roman, Spanish and British Empires. Or they started in the wrong zip code.

And then there is of course Silicon Valley, capital of the modern software empire that requires almost no military dimension at all (although it was built on decades of Pentagon defence spending). The most talented engineers in the world move there not because anyone is pointing a gun at them but rather because the network effects are irresistible. The businesses that conquer the world aren’t necessarily the best ones built by the best teams. They’re the ones inside the right empire at the right time, with the barriers to their scale removed. Or in other words:

But, isn’t the single market a commercial empire?

Some will object that the EU is a single market and by extension a commercial empire. And there is something to this; it started as one, and for goods it more or less works. A Polish factory can sell into Germany without tariffs and a Romanian truck can drive to Lisbon without border checks. But a Warsaw startup trying to sell software into France hits French language requirements. A Berlin fintech faces 27 different regulatory regimes. A Swedish doctor can’t easily practice in Italy. The single market for goods is real. The single market for services, for digital and for talent - the things that actually drive growth in 2026 - is largely fictional. Europe built the Roman roads for physical goods and forgot to build them for everything else. Which is exactly where the growth is.

Meanwhile Berlin is an example of a place that almost had it. In the early 2010s it had some genuine gravitational pull with its cheap rents and talent flooding in from across Europe. Something was concentrating there, and then it didn’t. The best companies sold early to Americans or moved to access proper markets, because the market underneath it was too fragmented to scale from. A Berlin startup selling into Europe was selling into 27 different legal and commercial environments. A San Francisco startup was selling into one.

The EU single market works well enough for goods. The question is whether Europe is willing to build the same infrastructure for everything else — and protect it. Which takes us to the next point.

2. EMPIRE CANNOT BE OUTSOURCED

What makes an empire is essentially roads, borders and some laws. If these are outsourced to other empires, then it simply isn’t an empire. The Roman limes, the network of frontier fortifications, watchtowers and customs posts stretching thousands of kilometres from Scotland to the Sahara, defined the zone where Roman commercial law applied and where it didn’t. Pompey’s anti-piracy campaigns cleared the Mediterranean because pirates were strangling trade and the empire’s commercial logic was existential. Empires protect their infrastructure because without borders the roads don’t mean anything. Goods crossed at designated points, taxes were collected and legal protection kicked in. Constantinople controlled the Bosphorus for a thousand years, meaning every merchant trading between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean passed through Byzantine customs and Byzantine law. The Great Wall of China was never just a military barrier; it had designated trading gates where commerce was taxed, regulated and controlled. Every great empire understood that you cannot have free movement inside without managed borders outside.

Rome didn’t let Carthaginian merchants run its trade routes or Sassanian mercenaries take tolls on every bridge along its roads. The British Empire didn’t let Dutch companies control Indian commerce. Empires build and protect their own commercial infrastructure because commercial gravity is indivisible. You cannot generate your own gravity while someone else’s gravity is operating at scale inside your borders.

“Rome” of course doesn’t have to be a physical place or a political entity in 2026. Apple’s App Store, Amazon’s Marketplace and Google’s Android are vast digital ecosystems with their own infrastructure, rules of governance and access to billions of users. For a modern app developer, attempting to achieve mass distribution outside these platforms would be as flawed as an early Christian missionary refusing to use the Roman road network.

Facebook and Google are not free market players operating on neutral ground. They are the Roman roads of the digital economy, and they were built in and run from California. European businesses that want to reach European consumers must do so through American infrastructure on American terms, further adding to American commercial gravity. Regulating this through GDPR and the Digital Markets Act is not building an empire, but rather negotiating the terms of your own occupation; very sophisticated, very well-documented and entirely missing the point.

History has already shown how this movie ends. In the eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire grew tired of the hustle of maintaining its own merchant navy and infrastructure. So they cut a deal with Venice, outsourcing their maritime trade and granting the Venetians tax-free trading privileges inside Byzantine waters. The Byzantines got to stay comfortable, sophisticated and rich, while Venice generated massive commercial gravity inside Byzantium’s own borders. The Byzantines thought they were the masters utilizing a useful tool. But a century later, when the legal and economic friction boiled over, the Venetians simply bankrolled a crusade, sailed into Constantinople and sacked the empire. You cannot outsource the roads and expect to keep the keys to the castle.

Of course China has understood much of this and acted on it. WeChat, Alibaba, Tiktok and Baidu are genuinely Chinese commercial infrastructure, generating Chinese commercial gravity, keeping Chinese talent and capital inside the Chinese ecosystem. The method is probably not one Europe should copy; the authoritarianism that comes with it is neither desirable nor necessary. But the strategic logic is correct.

In fact, Christianity is the cleanest historical proof of this. The world’s most successful business scaled across the entire Roman world, through Persia, into India and along the Silk Road, and then largely stopped at China. Nestorian missionaries reached the Tang dynasty court in the 7th century, built churches, even received imperial curiosity. Then the Jesuits tried again in the 16th and 17th centuries, arguably the most brilliant and adaptable missionaries Christianity ever produced. Matteo Ricci learned Mandarin, mastered Confucian classics, dressed as a Chinese scholar and got all the way to the Emperor’s court. He made converts among the intellectual elite. And still it didn’t scale. China was its own empire, with its own roads, its own commercial infrastructure and its own state religion. It had no need of someone else’s gravity.

The Americans of course also understand this full well. When TikTok reached 170 million American users, Washington tried to ban it outright, then forced a divestiture. The argument was national security, but the logic was 100% imperial: you don’t let a foreign power run your infrastructure. The Great Firewall has a very long history, and the Americans have one if not several too; they just don’t call it that.

3. THE EMPIRE’S NEW COUTURE

Faced with this geopolitical reality, the instinct of the Western European elite is predictable: if the Americans and Chinese have state-backed digital empires, we must build one too. A European Google, a European DARPA. State-backed, strategically directed and proudly wearing a funny cap. This is what France has always believed, and what state capitalist China is doing. It is deeply tempting.

It is also, historically, how you kill the thing you’re trying to build. States are generally great killing machines, also for businesses.

And for religions.

The standard story is that making Christianity the Roman state religion was a triumph, and in the short term the numbers agreed. Churches were built, heretics were suppressed and paganism was outlawed.

But look at what happened after Rome fell. The Western empire collapsed in 476 CE and took its bureaucracy with it. The institutional church lost its imperial patron, its guaranteed income and its state enforcement. Then something unexpected happened: Christianity got better. Local bishops had to fund themselves. Monasteries became self-sufficient growth enterprises. Irish missionaries carried the faith back into a barbarised Europe on foot, the old Pauline way. The tentmaker instinct reasserted itself precisely because the state church safety net was gone.

The Eastern church tells the other half of the story. Constantinople survived for another thousand years, and Byzantine Christianity survived with it; theologically sophisticated, institutionally magnificent, and utterly dependent on imperial support. When Constantinople fell in 1453, Eastern Christianity nearly fell with it. Had Rome survived in the West, Western Christianity might have followed the same path. A glorious institution. Empty pews.

The Church of England is the end state of this process. Magnificent buildings, profound theology, centuries of history and a congregation that has largely decided it has better things to do on Sunday morning. Germany is the Church of England of European industry, with its world-class engineering, magnificent institutions and an entire paradigm shifting underneath it toward software, platforms and energy transition while it perfects the combustion engine in Wolfsburg. France is the more centralised version: a dirigiste state church that produces occasional grands projets but not commercial gravity at scale.

China’s state-backed champions similarly look formidable from the outside; Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and BYD are moving at extraordinary speed. But state ownership removes the commercial dynamic that makes businesses genuinely good over time. Soviet industry looked formidable too, from the outside, for a while. Chinese companies will eventually face the same reckoning because SOEs are simply dressed-up fragility.

The Draghi report correctly identifies the disease. But then it reaches for something like the state church solution: a European DARPA, industrial strategy and coordinated investment. It will be discussed, turned into a committee, referenced in future reports and cited in the executive summaries of reports about reports.

Europe’s job is not to out-China China or out-America America. It is to provide the conditions for businesses to reach their natural scale and then get out of the way. Christianity didn’t need a venture fund. It needed Rome.

THE RELIGIOUS QUICK FIX: LEARN FROM THE POPE, NOT CHINA

The EU could save lots of ECUs and standardized report paper by learning a trick from none other than the world’s most successful business: the Catholic Church and how they birthed what is possibly the world’s third most successful institution after religions and states: universities.

The University of Paris is worth understanding in some detail because the model is precise. Before the papal bull of 1215, the university existed informally; scholars gathered, masters taught and students paid. But they were subject to the Bishop of Paris, to the French crown and to local guilds who resented the competition. They could be taxed, arrested and expelled if someone didn’t like them. Learning happened despite the local princes, not because of them. What Pope Innocent III did was simple: he placed the university outside all of that. Scholars could not be tried in local courts; they had their own jurisdiction. They could not be taxed by the city. They could not be interfered with by the bishop. In return they governed themselves, set their own standards and awarded their own degrees. Other cities understood what had happened and Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge and Salamanca all competed to attract scholars with similar protections. The knowledge cluster was liberated.

In fact, the European University Institute in Florence, founded in 1972, operates under a treaty-based charter with its own legal framework, granting staff and scholars privileges and immunities from local interference, in exactly the same way the University of Paris was protected from the French crown eight centuries earlier. Nobody has yet thought to ask why the same model could not work for a tech hub in Warsaw.

It’s not like Europe hasn’t done this before. The Hanseatic League and the old Freistädte (Free Cities) like Hamburg or Lübeck operated on the exact same logic. When the central power of the Holy Roman Empire was too weak or fractured to be useful, these towns simply secured autonomous charters. They answered to the Emperor on paper, but in reality they ran their own courts, set their own merchant laws and ignored the local barons who wanted to tax them. They built a massive commercial network stretching all the way to Tallinn by acting as independent nodes rather than waiting for a grand imperial strategy.

The EU doesn’t have the clout or decision-making authority or a strong enough sense of crisis to change much fundamentally in the European countries, and neither did the Pope. But it easily has clout to act as a protector and a sort of legislator, to protect businesses from states and foreign empires.

The EU doesn’t need to pass a 500-page directive to make late-stage Roman bureaucrats slightly more efficient. It needs autonomous charters to set its builders free to build a new Constantinople.

The EU could create a genuine tech business friendly charter tomorrow and invite cities that want to join. This could encompass a European “Delaware”: .eu domain, EU consumer law, one contract framework, one court system and fast-track company registration. Incorporate once, operate across 450 million people. No French language requirements, no 27 different VAT regimes, no local prince telling you to fill in a form in triplicate. No national exit taxes or the EU will sue your home country for decades. Don’t tell it what to build. Protect it from interference. Let the gravity accumulate. Smarter economists than me are reaching similar conclusions through different routes - the Silicon Continent’s Constitution of Innovation proposes almost exactly this: a pan-European incorporation framework, specialised commercial courts and mutual recognition. (And much could be bought from Estonia).

If Warsaw gets the charter and thrives, Tallinn and Bucharest will demand their own. The Constantinople will find itself.

It always has.

Welcome back!

This week I was thinking of writing something more timely than usual, partly inspired by some discussions about European competitiveness I’ve followed with nerdly amusement.

But! We are two thirds into the mini series about religious figures, and since the next and final figure up is no lesser person than Paul, the go-getter tentmaker who figured out how to scale the Jesus movement across the Roman Empire to take over the world - well, Europe will just have to wait.

I’m not sure how much I should presume readers know about Paul (he’s fascinating so I recommend reading a biography!), but most will probably know the most important bit which is that he was a man of letters. In fact his thirteen letters make up roughly half of the New Testament, with the majority of scholars agreeing he actually wrote seven himself (so six are disputed), probably in the 50s CE. These letters, sometimes called the epistles just to make life hard for people, were famously addressed to the Corinthians, the Romans, the Galatians etc.

If you’ve ever been to a church (of which a large number are dedicated to St. Paul) I think the probability that one of Paul’s letters have been referenced is much higher than the 30+% suggested in this Reddit as he influenced liturgy and theology so much that I think we can safely say every Christian service is Pauline (yes he has an adjective, as every great thinker should). In fact, his status in the world’s biggest religion is so high that the section only about Paul in my local library looks like this:

In fact, his influence is such that there are several serious works that discuss whether he was the actual founder of Christianity.

In addition to his famous letters most will likely have heard about his proverbial “Damascus moment” which is when Paul (known then as Paul or Saul of Tarsus, Tarsus being a town in today’s Turkey) became a Christian. He actually was a Pharisee - part of the educated Jewish elite. He had initially persecuted early Christians, viewing them as a dangerous heretical sect. Then around 33-36 CE, on the road to Damascus, he had a vision of the risen Jesus that completely changed his trajectory. He became a convert to the movement he’d been trying to destroy.

He spent the next 13-15 years traveling across the Roman Empire including modern-day Turkey, Greece, and eventually Rome itself - founding churches, training leaders and writing letters to manage the communities he’d established. He was arrested in around 58 CE, spent years under house arrest and was likely executed in Rome in the mid-60s under Nero.

An important detail people also definitely should know is that Paul was a tentmaker, which again confirms my thesis that:

You had to be to conquer the Roman Empire.

Let’s look at how he did just that!

Independence Days

Paul had credentials as an educated, multi-lingual Pharisee, which meant he was more middle class than the bulk of the Jesus movement (recall that they were fishermen and tax-collectors!) and he also had Roman citizenship. He could easily have operated like other traveling teachers and philosophers of his era and accepted patronage from wealthy supporters and been living off donations from communities he’d established to focus entirely on teaching and organizing. This was the standard model for itinerant teachers and philosophical movements.

He explicitly refused to do this. Instead, he made tents, or more accurately, he worked with leather. In his first letter to the Thessalonians (2:9), he’s quite direct about this choice: “Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.”

The reason for this choice becomes clear when you think about what taking money creates. If wealthy patrons fund your work, they expect influence over your message. If local communities support you, you sort of need to keep them happy. Paul wanted freedom of movement and the freedom to make decisions that might be unpopular, to challenge local leaders and to enforce standards without worrying about losing his funding base.

Tentmaking gave him exactly that. He could show up in a new city, set up shop to support himself, and preach whatever he wanted without needing anyone’s permission or approval. This was a radical departure from how religious movements typically tried to scale in the ancient world, which usually required substantial infrastructure in the form of temples and priests. Paul’s model was portable, self-funded and quite replicable in contrast.

(Curiously, early Pentecostalism tried to apply their own fascinating version of the Pauline missionary mode meaning that missionaries didn’t need funding. Recall that they also didn’t need to learn languages because they had already got this from speaking in tongues! Imagine the utterly lost missionaries sent to faraway countries to unsurprisingly limited success 😬)

The Universalist

Paul is perhaps most famous for a product decision that might be the most consequential in religious history.

Jesus was Jewish, as were all of his earliest followers. The whole movement can be summarized as a Jewish sect arguing about whether Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in Jewish scripture. And there were requirements that came with being part of this Jewish movement: circumcision, kosher laws, Sabbath observance, the entire framework of Jewish religious law.

Paul looked at this and essentially said: what if we remove all of that?

He fought for this change openly and intensely. There’s a famous conflict recorded in his letter to the Galatians where Paul publicly confronts Peter, the lead disciple who actually walked around with Jesus for three years, over whether gentile converts needed to follow Jewish law. Paul’s position was stark: they didn’t:

This was a massive pivot. Take everything that made the movement specifically and distinctively Jewish and remove it to make it accessible to anyone in the Roman Empire. And the controversy this created was, predictably, intense. The Jerusalem church, led by James, who was Jesus’s actual brother and had known Jesus personally his entire life, thought Paul was going way too far. There were meetings, arguments, attempted compromises. Paul’s letters show him constantly on the defensive about this decision, constantly having to justify why he’s removing these requirements.

But from a growth perspective, it made infinite sense. Judaism had maybe 4 million adherents scattered across the Roman Empire. Remove those barriers to entry, and suddenly you’re looking at 60+ million people across the entire Roman world. You’ve gone from a Jewish reform movement to a universal religion.

If you make a tent that works only for ultralight outdoor nerds, you will sell a few hundred. Make one any fool can camp with? Millions.

Letters of Remote Management

Paul planted churches as he traveled the empire as the apostle to the gentiles. The really fascinating thing is that we can actually watch him figure out how to manage this distributed organization through his letters. He’d arrive in a city - Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi, Ephesus - set up his tentmaking operation, gather converts, establish a church community, appoint local leaders, and then move on to the next city. And then, inevitably, problems would arise.

People would misunderstand his teachings, factions would form around different leaders, local leaders would make questionable decisions, visiting teachers would show up with messages that contradicted what Paul had taught, and there would be scandals and disputes over money, arguments about food and sex and power - basically all the normal organizational dysfunctions.

Paul managed all of this by letter. His canonized letters can essentially be thought of as records of remote management, with him running a distributed organization across the Roman Empire without any way to get real-time information or provide real-time guidance. Letters took weeks or months to arrive, so by the time he heard about a problem, it might have escalated significantly, and by the time his response arrived, the whole situation might have changed.

You can watch him develop management techniques in real time through these letters. Take the Corinthian meat scandal in 1 Corinthians 8-10 - the church is split over whether Christians can eat meat that’s been sacrificed to pagan idols (then sold cheap in markets), with some saying “idols aren’t real, the meat is fine” and others saying “eating this compromises our faith.”

His solution in the letter is instructive: both sides are technically right, but you’re asking the wrong question - the real issue isn’t theology, but whether your freedom to eat destroys someone else’s faith. Don’t eat it if it causes division. Prioritize the weaker conscience over being technically correct. This is masterful remote management. He acknowledges both positions, reframes the problem, gives them a principle they can apply to future disputes, and does it all via a letter that takes weeks to arrive.

He also delegated authority - appointing Timothy, Titus and others as his representatives with explicit authority to make decisions on his behalf. He documents everything important in writing so it can be read publicly and preserved, creating institutional memory and preventing disputes about what was actually said or decided. When the Corinthian church has a major scandal, he writes a detailed letter laying out exactly how they should handle it, who should be involved, what process to follow and what outcome he expects.

So What Would Paul Do?

To sum it up:

• Tentmaking for independence. Before bootstrapping became a buzzword, tentmaking (and I suppose sandals) were king. Paul self-funded his mission, which protected his autonomy and kept his message uncompromised.

• The Gentile pivot. Paul looked at a movement restricted to perhaps 4 million Jews and asked which requirements were essential and which were just inherited assumptions. The result was access to 60 million people across the Roman world.

• Targeting the nodes of the Empire. He planted his feet in the vital urban networks of the Roman world like Corinth and Ephesus, realizing that a flame sparked at these commercial hubs would ripple across the global network.

• Build one stitch at a time: While he did speak to crowds and philosophers, his key approach was personal. He built trust through one-to-one dialogue over the smell of leather and the rhythm of his tools during his day (and night) job, and in people’s homes.

• Plant with urgency: Driven by the conviction that time was running out, he didn’t linger to micromanage single locations. He planted autonomous assemblies, leaving them to run on their own while using his letters as a remote lifeline to coach, resolve conflicts and keep his scattered flock united.

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Paul likely died in Rome under Nero (we don’t know for certain), probably in the mid-60s CE, and according to tradition he spent his last years under house arrest, still writing letters, still managing churches across the empire by correspondence - and he never stopped making tents, even while awaiting execution.

So there we have it: three founders, three very different approaches to building something that would outlast them. Jesus gave us operational examples from running a three-year movement: hire the unconventional, fire bad customers, work the margins. Muhammad’s tradition gave us a regulatory framework for commerce: contracts, market rules and employment standards that would govern trade across an empire. And Paul gave us something different again: a scaling playbook written in real time by someone who was solving problems as they happened, funding himself through skilled labour, and building a distributed organization that would outlast the Roman Empire itself by figuring out how to maintain culture and enforce standards across hundreds of miles with nothing but letters that took weeks to arrive.

All three systems are still running, which tells you something about the durability of good organizational design. But only Paul left us the actual strategic documents, written in his own (and his scribe’s) hand, which means we don’t have to guess what Paul would do, we can instead read his letters and watch him do it.

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Next time I suppose we should finally talk about fixing Europe, through religious history! Or something else!

Welcome back!

Last week we looked at no less than Jesus, the tekton who ran a three-year startup movement and left us, among other things, a number of excellent hands-on operational business inspirations: to hire for grit (ie., fishermen), fire bad customers, bet on redeemed failures etc. This week we go some six centuries forward in time to learn from the figure Islam considers the last prophet: Muhammad.

Muhammad is a thoroughly interesting and of course supremely impactful person, with Islam being the world’s second largest religion and having essentially taken that position in an unprecedented short period of time. And it is widely known that he was a trader before he became a prophet, which makes him even more interesting to us. At age 25, he was hired by a wealthy merchant widow, Khadijah, to manage her trading caravans. He was known for being trustworthy, and in fact he did a good enough job that Khadijah proposed marriage to him. They ran the business together for years with major trading expeditions involving camels, goods and workers across significant distances. And then, at age 40, he started receiving revelations, becoming the last prophet.

Now before we get into the meat of it, I have to frontload the usual warnings about interpreting historical figures (yes, even more than with Jesus) and sources:

The work of scholars like Kecia Ali on the historical Muhammad and Tom Holland on the origins of Islam (I have watched his surprisingly sleep-inducing documentary so you don’t have to, superb historian that he is!) highlights how surprisingly little we can say with certainty about what actually happened during Muhammad’s life. The Quran itself was compiled relatively early (within about 20 years of Muhammad’s death) but most of the things we’re discussing come from the hadith collections, which weren’t compiled until 150-200 years later, and other sources have even greater weaknesses. So as ad fontes-obsessed historians we have to admit we know almost nothing with certainty about what Muhammad actually did.

Oh well.

And yet, we will not make a meal about the lack of sources (sorry Tom) but instead interact with what we have. And I think what a tradition produces tells us as much as what a historical figure actually did, if not exactly the same thing. And in Muhammad’s case we are looking at an entire “operating system” which is actually fascinatingly specific on business. Early Islam was clearly shaped by mercantile concerns in a way early Christianity wasn’t. Which brings us to dive into some texts from the Quran and the aforementioned Hadiths:

The Systems Architect

Where the Jesus tradition gave us lots of confusing parables, the Muhammad tradition gave us numerous contract regulations:

Just have a look at this text from the Quran’s longest verse, the Surah Al-Baqarah (2:282):

It clearly isn’t about theology, prayer or cosmology, but a detailed specification for how to document a debt agreement: Write down the terms, get witnesses (traditionally two men or one man and two women, which is its own complicated thing), specify the timeline, and make sure you have both parties agree explicitly. It’s almost as if he had to deal with Danish companies!

The hadith tradition goes even further with detailed rules about product defects and returns. Sahih Bukhari (2079) records how buyers and sellers have the right to cancel a transaction as long as they haven’t separated. And there are multiple hadith about the requirement to disclose defects: Sahih Muslim (1533) explicitly states that concealing defects in goods is forbidden. If you discover a defect after purchase, you have the right to return it, and if you’re selling something broken, you must disclose it. It’s basically a 7th-century consumer protection law.

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Market Regulation: Don’t Corner the Dates

The Quran also addresses merchant fraud directly. Surah Al-Mutaffifin (83:1-6) opens with a warning:

The hadith collections show someone who had deep familiarity with how merchants game systems. There’s a specific prohibition on shill bidding - getting your friend to pretend they want something just to drive up the price. Sahih Bukhari records this as explicitly banned. Same with hoarding essential goods to create artificial scarcity. The classic example would be buying up all the dates before Ramadan and then price-gouging when everyone needs them for breaking their fast.

And yes, for those wondering, Swedish amusement parks hiking prices during school holidays would absolutely count as exploitative under this framework.

(For my sins, I seem to have to pilgrimage to these places, which requires jihad - in the original sense of struggle and perseverance (not necessarily holy war.) Muhammad would not approve of the pricing strategy, though he might appreciate the endurance required..

What’s also interesting about the Islamic approach to markets is that when prices rose sharply in Medina and people asked Muhammad to just set price controls, he actually refused:

Which is interpreted to mean that he thought supply and demand should determine the rate. He wouldn’t interfere with market pricing itself, but he would absolutely ban manipulation that prevented markets from functioning properly.

The Interest Problem: Actually Just Old-School Venture Capital?

Everyone knows Islam prohibits riba - traditionally understood as any interest, though some scholars argue it originally meant specifically exploitative usury. What’s less discussed is that the alternative wasn’t some utopian invention but the way merchants had been doing business for centuries.

Profit-sharing partnerships had existed in various forms across Mediterranean and other regions’ commerce for centuries. You couldn’t exactly send a ship to India with a loan at fixed interest when there was a decent chance it would sink or get raided by pirates. So investors took a share of the profits if the voyage succeeded, and absorbed the loss if it didn’t.

What the Islamic tradition did was codify this as the only acceptable financing model while banning interest-based lending entirely. Mudarabah and musharakah contracts formalized profit-and-loss sharing arrangements that practical merchants already understood.

This is why Islamic finance is now a $3 trillion industry. It’s not an idealistic alternative to “normal” finance but a return to how high-risk commerce functioned before modern banking. In modern terms it’s closer to how venture capital works than to how your mortgage works.

Employment: Pay Before the Sweat Dries

Employment regulations show the same practical specificity as the contract and market rules. Sunan Ibn Majah - another of the major 9th-century hadith collections - records what might be the most famous employment regulation in Islamic tradition:

This sounds almost like poetry, but it’s a regulation grounded in understanding what happens when workers aren’t paid promptly. Delayed payment creates resentment and leads to disputes about what was actually owed, whether the work was completed properly, and a dozen other arguments that waste everyone’s time and money. The solution isn’t just “pay on time” as a moral principle but “pay immediately” as a requirement that prevents the disputes from arising in the first place.

The overall framework is consistent across all these regulations: clear contracts, prompt execution, no ambiguity about terms. Whether you’re documenting a debt, structuring a partnership, or hiring workers, the emphasis is always on reducing friction before it becomes conflict.

The Indonesia Test: Product-Market Fit at Scale

The real proof that this framework worked is geographic. Islam spread to what is now the world’s largest Muslim country through adoption by merchants.

When Muslim traders brought their framework to Indonesia along maritime trade routes, local merchants converted partly because the business framework solved problems they had. If you’re running a trading network across the Indonesian archipelago, you need the type of contracts that work when the parties are separated by weeks of sailing, and partnership structures that let you trust agents in ports you’ll never visit as well as clear dispute resolution when disagreements arise months after a transaction.

The Islamic commercial framework provided all of this in a more detailed, more systematic way than local alternative and ran their businesses better than what they’d been using.

This is subtly different from how Christianity spread. Jesus created something more of a social services movement, while the Islamic tradition (in addition to laying foundations for social justice) created a framework people chose because it made their operations more efficient. Both mechanisms proved remarkably durable - but they scaled through entirely different dynamics.

Back to Al-Amin (The Trustworthy): what would Muhammad do in business?

The question itself forces an important insight: we’re not really asking what Muhammad would do - we’re asking what the framework says you should do. This is fundamentally different from the Jesus piece, which is doubly interesting because Islam has an even stronger tradition for using Muhammad as an exemplar than Christianity does with Jesus.

Muhammad earned the title Al-Amin - The Trustworthy - for reliably delivering goods across hundreds of miles of desert with no way to verify what happened. The tradition attributed to him solved the same problem at civilizational scale: how do you create trust when parties can’t watch each other? The answer wasn’t “be like Muhammad.” It was a detailed operating system - contract requirements, market regulations, partnership structures - specific enough that Indonesian merchants centuries later could implement them without ever meeting the man.

We know almost nothing with certainty about what Muhammad actually did. But we know exactly what his tradition tells you to do: write it down, get witnesses, ban manipulation, share risk, pay immediately.

Jesus gave us a case study. Muhammad gave us a system. Both are still running after over a thousand years (But teaching very different lessons.)

Next time: Paul - the tentmaker who figured out how to scale the Jesus movement across the Roman Empire. And unlike Jesus and Muhammad, we actually have Paul’s own letters to analyze, which means we can see him working in real time. We’ll look at what a first-century scaling playbook can teach us about funding, organizational design and managing remote teams.

Last week I made the somewhat silly promise that we’d get to the rather key figure of Jesus and his views on business next time around. So here we are..!

A quick note given today’s topic: I’m many things but no theologian, so take this as lay analysis from someone looking at the historical record from his own point of view, not deep theological study. Though I suppose that might give you a less weird view anyway, especially as our sources for Jesus are surprisingly few.

The Starting Point

As readers may already know, my starting point with Christianity and Jesus is often the 1990s campaign that I’m sure most of you remember, as I would suggest that if you were anywhere near evangelical Christianity in the 1990s, you couldn’t really escape it:

The “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets were really everywhere - distributed at youth groups like promotional stress balls at a tech conference. The idea was brilliantly simple: when faced with a decision, ask yourself what Jesus would do, and then, I suppose, do that. In a way, it turned Jesus into a decision-making framework, a sort of spiritual consultant you could invoke for everything (a not entirely novel idea in Christianity it should be said!)

There’s even a movie! And a sequel, which has an even better 5.1 IMDB rating and features Lorenzo Lamas meaning it’s probably also very good.

I actually think the whole WWJD campaign was (and is) a superbly concise way to distill a complex religion into one powerful question. Many religious and political leaders would do well to ask themselves that very question - and I certainly don’t think the answers would make the world a worse place (that’s a free 2026 understatement!)

As we will shortly get back to, the problem with WWJD it is of course that it’s shorthand for trying to find answers with one of the more confusing people in human history. But we have an idea to fix that, stay tuned!

The CSR Nonprofit guy?

Now since this blogletter is about religion and business our question is naturally - what exactly would Jesus do in business? Or the slightly less catchy:

Interestingly, if you asked a bunch of regular but also reasonably theologically astute people, I think you could expect pretty consistent answers.

Although his parables were often genuinley confusing (his disciples frequently didn’t understand them), we can surmise that he was probably no Aynrandian profit-maximizing hero. In modern terms he would be more about what modern business thinkers call corporate social responsibility, fair trade and living wages. Potentially there would also be a diversity committee composed of prostitutes, pharisees, tax-collectors and other social outcasts, but I digress.

This view has decent evidence going for it: after all Jesus told a rich man to sell everything and give it to the poor (Matthew 19:20-22) and most famously that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven (Matthew 19:24). He also said “blessed are the poor” and “woe to you who are rich” and constantly talked about caring for the least fortunate among us - the sick, the imprisoned and the hungry.

So he clearly cared about social justice, and spent most of his time with people at the bottom of society. Some have even suggested he was a bit of a socialist in his approach to what we could call political economy. And numerous Biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley have documented how Jesus opposed the exploitative economic systems of Roman Palestine and have made the case that he would likely have critiqued modern corporate exploitation (also an understatement).

This, of course, is tempered/made more confusing by other things he said such as in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30): “you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.”

Anyway! I don’t think we need to go too deep into Jesus’ views on capitalism - I think it’s fair to say that the simplified summary of the standard narrative is not wrong. Jesus absolutely cared about the poor and marginalized and generally challenged wealth and power.

But this is the more important qualifier this week: all these things are things he said. But what did he actually do when running an organization? Or:

Because Jesus clearly didn’t just wander around saying confusingly wise things about helping people. He actually ran a sort of miracle-infused startup movement that went from 12 people in a remote province to eventually taking over the Roman Empire and eventually the world. And to the extent of our limited sources we have quite detailed records of how he operated.

So what happens if we look at Jesus the operator, not Jesus the moral philosopher? What did he do about hiring, pricing, customer selection, competitive strategy-sort-of-things?

It turns out the answers are way weirder than either the rather overly simplistic “Jesus was a socialist” or “Jesus was a capitalist,“ and as always with Jesus - way more interesting!

The Anti-LinkedIn Approach to Hiring

Let’s begin with Jesus’ approach to hiring. But first, let’s recall something we sometimes forget about him.

If you grew up in a country with a state church, you likely received the kind of solid religious instruction that sticks with you for exactly one reason such as a single, specific detail. For me, that detail is the fact that Jesus was a tekton, a builder, just like his earthly father Joseph. (I do also remember that Israelites had flat roofs - which greatly amused me!) We often skip over those first thirty years as a sort of pre-career sequence, as if he were just waiting around to become a prophet. But for decades he was doing honest work like managing a job site, deal with supply chain issues, handle clients who didn’t want to pay, and not least build actual things. When he later started talking about the structural integrity of building on rock versus sand, he wasn’t necessarily not being metaphorical but was also giving a professional critique.

This background as a laborer is the only way I can make sense of his recruitment strategy, which was essentially the first great “Anti-LinkedIn” movement in history.

One of my personal rules of thumb for hiring (and one Jesus may have pioneered!) is that you should always hire farmers. Or in his case, fishermen. This is the surest way to avoid people who care about corporate synergy or prestige, and to get people who understand that if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Fishermen and farmers are also built for the long game, and don’t always panic when a storm hits or a harvest fails, and they understand that things change and you have to adapt.

With three decades of practical work under his belt, Jesus’s approach to assembling his core team was nonetheless insane by modern standards. He picked 12 people, and not one of them had relevant experience for launching a global religious movement.

As suggested most were fishermen, which is fine if you’re starting a fishing company, but he could feed lots of people with not much fish so their core competencies were not really required. One was a tax collector, basically a collaborator with the Roman occupiers and universally despised, and one was a political extremist. Several were hot-headed brothers who kept arguing about who was most important.

And one, as it turned out, was stealing from the organization’s funds and would eventually betray him.

Instead of background checks, skills assessments and interviews, Jesus just walked up to people and said “follow me,” and they dropped everything and did.

The modern equivalent would be hiring your entire founding team from random people you met at the gym. And it somehow worked.

What’s interesting is that while none of them had credentials, they had a very decent mix of both temperaments and skills. Peter was impulsive and charismatic - good for rallying people. Thomas was skeptical and analytical, which is useful for stress-testing ideas. Matthew the tax collector knew how to handle money and keep records. John was the emotional core. Judas managed finances. It was almost like the Beatles.

He probably wanted different people who could handle different aspects of the mission and he accepted that not every hire would work out. Even Jesus had a one-in-twelve failure rate.

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Free Product, Wealthy Patrons

Jesus never charged for his services. Healing? Free. Teaching? Free. Feeding thousands of people? Free. This seems financially self-defeating until you realize how the operation was actually funded.

Luke (8:3) mentions almost in passing that the group was supported by wealthy women who traveled with them, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna (who was married to Herod’s household manager), Susanna and “many others who supported them out of their own means.”

This is a sort of freemium patronage model two thousand years before Patreon existed. The core product is free to everyone, especially to the people who need it most, while the operation gets funded by wealthy believers who can afford it. No formal fundraising, but also no refusing support from people who wanted to give.

Worth noting: one of these wealthy supporters was connected to Herod’s household - meaning Jesus had funding from people close to political power, even while his message often challenged that power.

The modern equivalent is open source software funded by corporate sponsors, or creators who give away content for free while accepting support from fans who can afford it. The key principle: access to the product is never contingent on ability to pay.

Fire Bad Customers

Another interesting part: Jesus regularly walked away from potential “customers” and let people leave.

The most dramatic example is in John 6. Jesus has just done the feeding of the 5 000 - possibly his biggest public miracle. Any normal operator would capitalize on this, and maybe soften the message to retain these new followers. But instead, Jesus gives them a teaching that’s deliberately difficult and offensive (about eating the flesh of the Son of Man). Many disciples say “this is too hard” and leave. Jesus turns to the twelve and asks: “Do you want to leave too?”

In Matthew 10, he explicitly tells his disciples: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that house or town.” In Matthew 7: “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs.”

This was ruthless customer selection. Realizing that some people will waste your resources, demand endless attention, and give nothing back, his idea was clear: identify these people quickly and walk away.

The modern equivalent is rare but powerful. Basecamp famously fires customers who are abusive to their support staff, and some consultants have “minimum viable client” criteria and will turn down work that doesn’t meet it. Given that your time and energy are finite, it has to be prioritized.

Betting on the Failure

When it came time to hand over the entire operation, Jesus picked Peter.

Not John, who was called “the beloved disciple” or James, his own brother. He instead picked Peter, who had just denied knowing him three times during the crucifixion crisis and who had publicly crumpled under pressure at the most critical moment.

After the resurrection, Jesus asked Peter three times: “Do you love me?” Each time Peter said yes, and each time Jesus responded “Feed my sheep.” And then Jesus put him in charge of everything.

This was succession planning to someone who failed catastrophically but learned from it, and betting on someone who knows what failure feels like and came back anyway.

There’s something almost ruthlessly practical about this. Peter had been humbled, and knew his own weaknesses. He wasn’t going to be overconfident or assume he was invincible, and he had something to prove. That’s possibly more valuable than never having failed in the first place.

There are modern companies that occasionally do this - Pixar famously promotes directors who failed on previous projects. But it’s rare, because the instinct is to reward success, not redeemed failure. (Except in politics of course, but this is a blogletter about business thankfully!)

Don’t Be Diplomatic

Jesus was in almost constant conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious establishment, and his approach to competing with them was not diplomatic.

He called them hypocrites publicly and said they were like whitewashed tombs - beautiful outside, but dead inside (Matthew 23:27-28). He accused them of loading people down with religious burdens they themselves wouldn’t lift a finger to help with, and performed healings on the Sabbath specifically because it would provoke them and drove money changers out of the temple with a whip.

The modern equivalent to this is probably startups that don’t just build alternatives to incumbents but actively point out why the old system is failing. Coinbase published manifestos about why traditional finance was broken and Tesla called out traditional automakers as backwards.

This strategy could work when you’re right about the incumbents being broken and when you have something genuinely better to offer. Jesus apparently felt confident enough in his message that he didn’t bother being polite about the establishment he was disrupting.

So - What Would Jesus Actually Do?

To round off: the standard Jesus narratives are either “Jesus would be a socialist because he told rich people to give their money to the poor” or “Jesus would love capitalism because of the parable of the talents.”

But if you look at what he actually did, you get something much stranger. He hired people with no credentials, gave away his product for free, fired customers who didn’t value it, handed the whole operation to someone who’d just failed catastrophically and picked fights with powerful incumbents (who killed him).

This isn’t a standard business playbook, but it’s not random either. Some modern organizations stumble into pieces of it - open source projects with patron funding, consultancies that fire bad clients, companies that promote people who failed on previous projects. But I can’t think of anyone who’s put all of these together deliberately.

Maybe that’s because Jesus wasn’t trying to build a sustainable organization in the conventional sense. He was starting a movement that would outlast him, and probably being a bit creative about it too. And on that metric? Two thousand years later, we’re still talking about what he did.

PS! Historians often go on about how challenging it can be to interpret things from days gone by, and there’s even a word for it. So bear this in mind when approaching ancient texts. Or not. And the usual caveats about biases and ignorance apply too! (Not saying this book will have any of that but just saying)

Next time: Muhammad was literally a merchant before becoming a prophet. His business operations are even better documented than Jesus’, and he left extremely specific instructions about contracts, pricing and business ethics. We’ll look at what a 7th-century Arabian trade network can teach us about modern business.

It’s great to be back, not just from the extraordinary programming of my undercover book launch, but also from a lovely Easter break and even a trip on the infamous Danish Boat.

For those who have not yet had the pleasure, the Danish Boat is a festival-on-the-waves-slash-lorry ferry between Oslo and Copenhagen, a completely Starlink-free territory which gives ample time to revel in thoughts and beers and waves. Think Love Boat but with a cast of lorry drivers, drunk makeup bloggers and boy racers (not normally sophisticated men of blogletters!)

If you’re feeling curious, there is even a TV series:

Anyway - I had initially thought of writing something about Jesus and his views on business this time, but I must admit the book I brought aboard on the topic was not the easiest of reads on the jolly waves. I promise I will come back to him in a sort of mini series on key religious figures and their views on business.

And perhaps the blatantly piracious rates of Starlink’s Norwegian SOE competitor Telenor Maritime inspired me to think more about treasures and hoards of gold than Jesus? Or perhaps it was the behaviour of my spirited neighbours keeping me awake in the Kattegat? Oh well.

Nonetheless, today’s topic is something much more akin to the Danish Boat and, I suppose, also the Tivoli-town-of-Copenhagen itself:

The alert reader will no doubt protest that we have looked at some temple business models already - but that business model was a tad more of a novelty.

The central key to hoarding treasures after all, is not selling lucky charms, but taking other people’s money:

Now, I have had a hard time explaining to my 5-year-old that a pirate is a criminal, but thankfully temples are much more honest and legitimate businesses: people mostly hand their money over to them quite voluntarily, in exchange for blessings or to support those who give blessings. Temples are, in short, mainly in the business of donations.

This means..

..that temples actually operate on one of the most difficult business models imaginable: voluntary contributions with no guaranteed return. Unlike a shop where you pay for goods or a subscription service where you pay for ad-free access to weird podcasts about Kaiser Wilhelm and things, donations are discretionary. The devotees decide if they want to give, how much or little to give, and when to give it. The temple provides prayers, rituals and blessings and can only hope people value these enough to contribute financially.

This creates some interesting challenges. First, there’s the free-rider problem the world’s silly economists love to obsess over. In short, why would anyone donate if they can access the temple’s services for free anyway?

Second, there’s an unpredictability which makes it hard to sustain a predictably expensive operation as donations can vary wildly from day to day. And there’s also the delicate balance of inspiring generosity without creating a transactional relationship that undermines the whole enterprise. You can’t exactly send invoices for blessings or threaten to revoke someone’s karma credits (I mean you can but..)

And yet - as the title alludes to - temples not only survive on this model but some actually become absurdly wealthy. Just take these two, some of my favourites:

The Tirupati Balaji Temple in Andhra Pradesh, India, is quite possibly the richest standalone religious institution on the planet (which means we elegantly exclude the Vatican as it is more of an HQ).

It generates somewhere between $2-3 billion in annual revenue, almost entirely from donations. On a normal day, Tirupati receives 50,000-100,000 pilgrims. But during the nine-day Brahmotsavam festival that number can hit 500,000 in a single day.

The temple sits on top of a hill, requiring pilgrims to either climb thousands of steps or take a bus up a winding mountain road. This journey is itself part of the festival experience — people save for months or even years to make this trip, and when they finally arrive, they donate accordingly. Tirupati employs over 20,000 people and runs its own university, hospitals, and even a dairy farm, all funded by donations.

The Padmanabhaswamy Temple - as covered in my book! - in Kerala is possibly the richest place on earth. It made international headlines in 2011 when they opened some of its vaults to see what was actually in there. They found an estimated $20+ billion worth of gold, jewels and artifacts, just sitting in vaults. Centuries of donations, royal endowments and the compounding effect of people giving their most valuable possessions during the most auspicious times. Vault B remains sealed because, according to tradition, opening it without the proper rituals will bring calamity upon Kerala.

So how do some end up with billions in treasure on the donation business model??

The answer, it turns out, is festivals:

The Festival Effect

People generally don’t wake up on random Tuesdays thinking “today’s the day I should donate lots to the temple!” Which makes donations sporadic, mood-dependent and a bit unpredictable. Unless, of course, you figure out how to create specific moments when people absolutely want to donate, when they’ve been saving up specifically to donate, when donating feels like the most natural and important thing they could possibly do with their money.

And festivals do exactly this.

During a major temple festival, donation rates explode. We’re talking 10x, 20x and sometimes even higher compared to regular days. Pilgrims and patrons who might drop a few coins on a normal visit will bring gold jewelry, significant cash donations, or sponsor entire festival events during the big celebrations. The temple goes from a quiet place of worship generating modest daily donations to an economic engine processing millions over just a few days.

Now, most temples don’t grow insanely rich just from hosting festivals. Local Japanese Shinto shrines seem almost forgotten most of the year, but during matsuri (festivals)? Completely different energy. New Year’s, cherry blossom season, the annual shrine festival — suddenly the place is packed. So the festivals sustain interest in them.

Even in Norway you can see echoes of this. The Church of Norway is famously terrible at getting people to show up on regular Sundays, but Christmas Eve services are packed, as are Easter services. The Norwegian SOE Church accidentally stumbled into the festival model, but just didn’t embrace it properly because, well, they don’t have to.

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The Donation Optimization Engine

But back to festivals.

To maximize donations then, temples have decided to arrange numerous festivals throughout the year — and I mean numerous.

There’s an old saying in India that

which vastly understates the reality. Tirupati celebrates over 450 festivals and observances annually including daily rituals, weekly sevas, fortnightly Ekadashis, monthly full-moon celebrations and grand multi-day spectacles. Some are intimate temple rituals, while others, like the 9-day Brahmotsavam in September, draw half a million pilgrims in a single day.

The pattern is consistent across Asia: temples that thrive on donations have engineered their religious calendars to create constant rhythmic peaks of varying intensities. Every celebration, from the grandest to the most modest, is an opportunity for devotees to participate, celebrate, and contribute beyond what they’d give on an ordinary Tuesday.

Why Festivals Actually Work

So why do festivals turn temples into donation-generating machines? A few things working together. People save for festivals, not in a high-yield savings account way, but in a “I’ve been setting cash aside for a couple of months because Diwali is coming” way. The festival creates its own demand cycle. You’re not convincing someone to donate in March; they’ve possibly been planning their festival donation since last year’s festival, and set aside time in their calendars etc.

Festivals also give people permission to be extravagant in ways they wouldn’t normally allow themselves. Throughout the year, there’s some social pressure to be sensible with money. But during a festival? Spending lavishly on temple donations is pious, prestigious and appropriate. The festival transforms the psychology of giving from “probably should but” to “absolutely.”

What This Could Mean for Businesses

Now this is where this gets interesting.

Some businesses have accidentally stumbled into the festival model. Retailers have their horrific Black Friday-Week-Month, “friends and family weekend” and weekly and monthly promotion cycles. And don’t forget:

So there have been some successes, but these are rather primitive ones, and a bit awful. Possibly that’s because they’re doing it badly: manufactured urgency, discount codes, no actual celebration, mainly just extracting value. If you’re going to do festivals, stop being half-hearted about it and make it an actual event people look forward to, not just a sales spike with countdown timers.

But most industries haven’t even gotten this far. Tech companies, B2B services, professional services - they’re mainly obsessed with “always-on” engagement: keep people constantly engaged or you’ll lose them.

The temple model suggests you might not need this at all.

What if instead of trying to create constant, low-level engagement, you created rhythmic moments of genuine participation and celebration? What if your business had an actual festival (please not a “team building event” or “annual conference” with sad sandwiches) which felt part of something larger than a transaction?

Salesforce’s Dreamforce probably comes close (I’ve never been so) with 170,000 people descending on San Francisco, and the company shuts down normal operations to participate. Customers become evangelists, massive deals get signed in collective, possibly weird, excitement.

The temple model suggeststhis can work. Maybe you don’t need constant engagement but better festivals.

The Downsides

Of course, festivals aren’t easy. Managing 500,000 pilgrims in a single day requires logistics that would make a quartermaster weep. Tirupati has had crowd control disasters. Revenue volatility creates cash flow nightmares. And when you concentrate that many people and that much money in one place, scandals become national news stories instead of quiet Tuesday problems.

But temples have decided the concentrated impact outweighs the operational headaches. Otherwise they’d have abandoned festivals centuries ago.

So What?

Should your company have a festival? I genuinely don’t know. (Remember: those who have absolutely no clue mostly write books or have conference calls!)

But most businesses haven’t even considered the festival model, and I do think it’s worthwhile to think about ways of being successful.

You can build around rhythmic celebration and moments people save up specifically to participate. And you can become absurdly wealthy in the process, whether measured in gold hoards or in loyalty that makes people travel thousands of miles.

Maybe the question is simpler: when was the last time your business felt like something more?

Next time: I promise we’ll get to Jesus and his views on business. Unless I get distracted by something else on another Danish Boat journey!

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This possibly is a minor surprise to some. And to the author as well in some ways! I wasn't entirely sure it would ever get finished, and after spending something like twelve years on a part-time pet project, you develop a certain appropriate reluctance to talk about it before it's real. (Some friends even suggest I talked about the idea 20+ years ago but I did have lots of ideas back then so who knows!)

But it's real now! It’s (self-)published on Amazon as of today, and it's called Religious About Success: What Companies Can Learn From the World's Most Successful Organizations. You can find it here:

If you've been reading this blogletter, the premise of the book will sound entirely familiar — it's basically the theme I'm writing about here, except with about 200 pages more detail, better structure (hopefully!) and more history - so even more interesting I would say. And perhaps less interesting for some. Which is fine.

For better or worse there’s minimal AI involvement in writing this because I started writing it in 2014 when we were all still worried about different things like skinny jeans or skyrocketing property prices or how streaming would kill music. How time flies and yet everything stays the same!

Twelve Years is a Long Time..

I started this book when I was significantly younger and arguably more naive about how long it takes to actually complete a book. My original plan was "maybe two years, tops" — after all, how hard could it be? Turns out:

The original draft was not exactly terrible, but also rather all over the place with digressions creeping in everywhere (surprise!) so I rewrote it and then put it aside and then I came back to it and realized entire sections needed to be scrapped. Then I actually hired a brilliant guy called Jonas to help do research but then he was so smart that the scope was expanded and then he got a lucrative PhD scholarship in Florence etc. so he unfortunately had to move there. But I didn’t give the project up, partly out of stubbornness, partly because the more I researched, the more convinced I became that there was something genuinely interesting here. The Catholic Church, the Buddhist Sangha, the early Islamic Caliphate and the Protestant missions figured out things about scaling, motivation, organizational design and long-term strategy that most modern companies are still struggling with.

(And yes, I realize the irony of spending twelve years writing about organizational efficiency, so I will stress the organizations’ longevity instead!)

Also - do bear in mind that 2014 was when my band released this CD! Which still holds its own, if I may opine! (This link says 2015 of course, but to that I say Ad Fontes!)

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So What's Actually In It?

First of all it's not very big! Just look:

It has ten not too long chapters that cover everything from how religions achieved universal appeal while adapting locally, to organizational design that lasts millennia, to communication strategies that fueled explosive growth, to talent management lessons from the Jesuits, to how religious organizations developed lots of revenue models to become the wealthiest and most successful institutions in history.

There are also data visualizations and historical analysis and case studies ranging from how Buddhism traveled the Silk Road to how the Knights Templar set up their banking organization. And even a practical guide/case study on how some ideas from the book could be applied in actual businesses.

Why This, Why Now?

If you've been reading this substack, you might be wondering why I'm bothering with a book when I can just publish everything here. Fair question!

The answer is that I started the book long before this existed. The blogletter grew out of the research for the book, as I found lots of fascinating examples and ideas that didn't quite fit into the manuscript, and I needed somewhere to explore them. So in a way, this newsletter is a twelve-year-long footnote to the book.

But also: some ideas need the space a book provides. The substack lets me be more digressive and exploratory (as you may have noticed!). The book is a bit more systematic, historical and comprehensive. If you've ever read something here and thought "this is interesting but I wish there was more," well, there's now some more.

What Happens Now?

The book comes out today or March 31st or something very soon (publishing is surprisingly complicated and I’m still learning but it should be out). It's available in Kindle and paperback format.

If you do read it, I'd genuinely love to hear what you think what worked, what didn't, what made you think differently about things etc.

And for those of you wondering: yes, I will keep writing this blogletter! The book is done (thank god), but there are many more examples to explore, connections to make and digressions to pursue. The Papal infallibility post I've been promising? Still coming. The deep dive into Indonesian syncretism? On the list. The discussion of why capitalism is almost completely Catholic? Eventually!

The Link

Here it is: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQV9MTM5

202 pages. 12 years in the making. Possibly useful for your business, definitely useful if you're curious about why the Catholic Church ran hotels or how the Templars did banking.

Thanks for reading this newsletter, and for indulging this one-off self-promotion. Back to regular programming next time! (Hopefully with less talk about me and more about medieval monastery economics, which is obviously what you're here for.)

And if they are reading my random musings - please stop! Or something like that.

No I’m not talking about AI - I’m clearly much too old to wear skinny jeans so it follows that I will not write about neither AI nor blockchain (Ok so kids don’t seem to be wearing skinny jeans anymore either but you know)

(Digression alert: I just realized they have now invented a medical condition to keep oldies from wearing them, a great idea! )

Now instead, what keeps an old head like me up at night is this: while skinny jeans are out, conglomerates seem to be back in.

And not just back but in winning form. In fact, the most valuable companies in the world are all conglomerates now, sprawling empires that do everything. And investors seem to be absolutely loving it.

This is sort of weird, because for most of my lifetime, “conglomerate” was basically a dirty word in business. (For those of you who did not attend business school in the 90s, conglomerates are large parent companies with smaller independent entities that operate across multiple industries. ) The 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s were all about breaking them up; the core idea being that businesses should focus on “core competencies” and let the market allocate capital, because they could do it more efficiently than a corporate headquarters could. This was sort of how the evil private equity firms came about - they made their first fortunes from buying conglomerates and selling off the pieces.

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These conglomerates actually traded at a “conglomerate discount” because the sum of the parts was worth more than the whole. Or in other words conglomerates destroyed value compared to the focused core business. “Stick to your knitting” became gospel, or “focusing on core competencies” or similar in business-speak.

And yet here we are in 2026, with the most successful companies on earth doing exactly the opposite — and it’s clearly time we had a look at why this is.

And as readers of this newsletter know, I’ve spent quite a bit of ink arguing there’s actually a very old model for why this works: no surprise, it’s the Roman Catholic Church!

Which is to say, if you’ve been wondering why this Substack keeps telling you to study the Vatican instead of Silicon Valley, well, Silicon Valley has apparently been reading the same playbook.

Or to quote Ecclesiastes:

But let’s look at the original conglomerate and see what we can learn!

The Catholic Conglomerate

I will not bore you with the historical development of the organization of the Roman Catholic Church this time (another time, it’s supremely interesting!) but it’s vital to realize that the medieval church was not only involved in giving sunday services and building cathedrals and running convents while the world sort of did their own thing.

Instead the Church was really involved in everything, and can possibly be described as the most comprehensive service provider in human history. For instance they ran almost all of the schools and universities, staffed the hospitals through their religious orders, and administered the entire social welfare system. If you were sick, poor, or seeking an education, you wouldn’t be looking for a government agency (as they were probably doing their warfare thing) but a priest or monk or nun. To do this they often also collected taxes and fees and similar.

But the Church’s activities went deeper into the physical economy than we often realize. Benedictine monks developed and scaled the wine production that still defines French (viti)culture and in more northern climes, they became the masters of beer brewing. Beyond the cellar, the Cistercian order essentially built the English wool industry from the ground up through large-scale sheep farming. These religious houses even acted as high-end hardware hub - the legendary Ulfberht swords of the Viking Age were almost certainly forged by skilled smiths in abbeys. They even spread aquaculture across Europe to ensure protein for fasting days.

Every piece of this operation connected in a sort of self-reinforcing flywheel. The schools and universities trained the priests who then administered the hospitals and managed the massive real estate portfolios. You couldn’t exactly “opt out” because there was no “out” to opt into. If you wanted to get married, settle a property dispute, or die with dignity, you were using Church infrastructure (graveyards and Canon law). This total integration made the Church the most durable institution in Western history, outlasting the Roman Empire and surviving the collapse of civilization precisely because it had made itself the indispensable landlord and utility provider for every soul in Europe.

This total utility was also monetized by a diversified revenue engine. I have myself identified at least 27 distinct business models that funded this operation, many of which look suspiciously like modern tech strategies. Some examples:
They perfected history’s most effective subscription model via the tithe, a 10% income levy that functioned as a form of “SaaS” (Salvation-as-a-Service). They even pioneered “freemium” pricing through pew rentals. This monetization extended into the legal and financial spheres as well. Their control of the “legal stack” through Canon Law allowed them to charge high-margin professional service fees for marriage dispensations and annulments. In 1480, the Duke of Austria paid 2,250 ducats for a dispensation, a massive fee for a specialized legal “unlock” that only one firm on earth could provide. Meanwhile, the Knights Templar leveraged the Church’s pan-European footprint to create a “fintech” arm, inventing letters of credit that allowed travelers to deposit gold in one city and withdraw it in another for a service fee, solving the medieval “cross-border payment” problem. https://religionandbusiness.substack.com/p/money-for-nothing

Finally, they mastered the “experience economy” centuries before Disney. The pilgrimage was a comprehensive tourism product, bundled with guidebooks, specialized lodging, and a booming market for holy relic merchandise as physical tokens of an intangible experience. By the time they were done, the Church had built the ultimate interlocking business ecosystem—a model that modern tech giants like Google and Amazon have spent the last decade painstakingly trying to replicate.

The overarching lesson is how a diversified portfolio of interlocking revenue streams provides a compounding advantage — it builds resilience, allows for cross-subsidization, and embeds the organization so deeply into the lives of its customers that it becomes less like a business and more like a permanent feature of reality.

Why Conglomerates Became Toxic

So if the Church model worked so well, why did 20th century businesses fail so spectacularly when they tried to copy it?

The post-war conglomerate boom of the 1960s and 1970s saw companies like ITT, Gulf+Western, and Textron buying everything in sight. The theory was that professional (especially American male) managers could run anything better, and diversification would also smooth out business cycles. It worked for a while and then spectacularly didn’t.

The problem was that these conglomerates were doing diversification rather than integration. They’d buy a hotel chain, a rental car company and a defense contractor, stick them under one corporate umbrella, and call it synergy. But there was no flywheel, no infrastructure control, really no reason why these businesses were better off together than apart.

Wall Street of course noticed this after a short while and the “conglomerate discount” became a real, measurable thing — investors would value the whole company at less than the sum of its parts, because the corporate overhead destroyed value. By the 1980s, the consensus was clear: conglomerates were bad business. Even GE, which Jack Welch had turned into the most successful conglomerate in history, eventually got broken up because the conglomerate structure itself was seen as a liability.

And for three decades, that wisdom held.

Then Tech Killed Everthing Great about the 80s

With the advance of the tech giants, it’s quite clear that they are not building 1970s-style conglomerates but instead something much closer to the Church model, with integration and flywheels.

Google isn’t a search company anymore if it ever was — it’s a search engine (obviously), an email provider (Gmail), a cloud infrastructure platform (Google Cloud), a phone maker (Pixel), a browser (Chrome), a video platform (YouTube), a mapping service (Maps), operating systems with marketplaces (including Android, on 71% of smartphones globally), an AI lab (DeepMind), office suites, advertising, and increasingly, the infrastructure and surveillance/data layer for lots of others’ AI.

These pieces generally connect. Chrome drives search usage. Search drives ad revenue. Ad revenue funds YouTube. YouTube keeps people in the Google ecosystem. The ecosystem generates data. The data trains the AI. The AI makes everything else better. It’s the medieval Church playbook, except with browsers and operating systems.

Microsoft? Same deal — gaming (Xbox), professional networking (LinkedIn), cloud (Azure), productivity (Office, which 1.2 billion people use), search (Bing, and yes I know nobody uses it, but stick with me), hardware (Surface), and through their OpenAI investment, basically the landlord for half of the world’s AI. And again, these pieces reinforce each other in ways that a 1970s conglomerate’s more random collection of businesses never could.

The AI companies themselves are even more ambitious, not just building models, they’re building the chips to run them (see: Google’s TPUs, Microsoft’s custom silicon), the cloud services to deploy them, the applications to use them, the powerplants to run them and the “safety frameworks” to govern them. Vertical integration from silicon to UI.

And the market? The market is rewarding this. No conglomerate discount here — these companies trade at premium valuations because they’re integrated, not despite it.

They’ve figured out what the Church knew and what 1970s conglomerates missed: the prize isn’t diversification for its own sake, it’s becoming the infrastructure that makes all other activities possible. Or to quote a pretty great bunch of songwriters:

Why This Time Is Different (Maybe)

So what changed? Why are Church-style conglomerates suddenly good business again after forty years of being considered value destroyers?

The answer has to do with what these companies are actually integrating, and that integration is much cheaper using silicon and modern surveillance tech. The 1970s conglomerates were buying unrelated businesses and hoping for financial synergies while probably not having the tech behind this to make it go very smoothly at all (excluding fax machines of course, which were awesome). The tech conglomerates are building Catholic infrastructure, and once you control that, everything else makes sense to own. The pieces are cheap to fit together in ways that create value.

But here’s what makes this interesting: It could be argued that the Church model worked too well. It worked so well that the Church became essentially impossible to compete with, and once it controlled the infrastructure of daily life, people couldn’t opt out even if they wanted to. Leaving the Church meant leaving society.

The Church, for all its many, many flaws, at least claimed to serve a higher power and greater good — its ultimate metric was never quarterly earnings, but something more like souls saved. It could afford to play a truly long game because it believed in eternity. (Whether they actually did serve that higher power is debatable, but the point is they at least had to claim it!)

Tech conglomerates also play the long game, but their god is growth — they’ll subsidize one division with profits from another (see: Amazon using AWS profits to fund their retail price wars), they’ll bundle services until switching becomes functionally impossible (try using a Google phone without a Google account), and they’ll build moats so wide that regulation becomes the only theoretical hope for competition.

And what happens when they become too powerful? The Church faced schisms and reformations and we had possibly the very first world war as a result.

These companies face... what, exactly? Antitrust suits that take 15 years? Fines that amount to six minutes of revenue? Regulations written by politicians sponsored by themselves?

The Infrastructure Question

The interesting parallel here is this: the Church model worked because once you controlled the infrastructure of daily life, people had no choice but to participate. We’re possibly building something similar now, except it’s digital and it’s happening at about 1000x the speed.

Try using the internet without Google — I mean really try. You could use DuckDuckGo for search (built on Bing, which is Microsoft), but the first video result will be YouTube, and you could avoid Gmail, but good luck coordinating a meeting without Google Calendar, and you could skip Google Maps, but then you’re using Apple Maps (which is... not great, and also just as monopolistic, just smaller).

Try doing business without Microsoft — okay, you can use Google Workspace instead of Office, except your clients all use Office, and half your suppliers, and the format compatibility is just bad enough to be annoying, so you end up with both! (See what they did there?)

The uncomfortable truth about the Church model is that it works. Integration creates durable competitive advantages, and controlling multiple layers of the stack makes you nearly impossible to displace.

But “works” isn’t the same as “good.”

The medieval Church’s success came at an enormous cost — it stifled innovation (ask Galileo), crushed dissent (ask Jan Huus — oh wait, they burned him), extracted wealth from the poor (indulgences, anyone?), and used its power quite often to protect itself rather than serve its stated mission.

The Protestant Reformation was a revolt against an institution that had become too powerful, too corrupt, too convinced of its own indispensability. Luther’s 95 Theses were basically a product complaint that went viral.

It’s an interesting question whether we’re building the basis for our own version of this, a technological reformation — though hopefully it won’t take 500 years of accumulated grievances to sort out.

The Renaissance Nobody Predicted

The really remarkable thing about all this is that almost nobody saw it coming. Twenty years ago, if you’d predicted that the most valuable companies in the world would be sprawling conglomerates that do everything from chips to cloud services to consumer hardware, you would have been laughed out of every business school and boardroom in the country.

The conglomerate renaissance is here, and it’s not the random grab-bag 1970s version — it’s the integrated, infrastructure-controlling medieval version.

This newsletter has spent quite a bit of time arguing that companies should learn from the Catholic Church.

Turns out they have been — and I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with it or that they have learned the right lessons.

(Hopefully not the ones about burning heretics.)

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Last time we left 644 million Charismatics at something of a crossroads. Their movement had conquered roughly a quarter of global Christianity, only to watch its most celebrated institutions implode in real time: Hillsong. Mars Hill. IHOP. Ravi Zacharias. Gateway. Bethel. The list reads a bit like a corporate bankruptcy filing.

A number of recent documentaries have covered these falls from grace — I firmly recommend The Secrets of Hillsong, and The Religion Business is interesting too.

In fact, some commentators have declared this the beginning of the end, publishing podcasts with ominous titles like “The Fall of the Charismatic Movement.” and so forth.

So is this their Roman moment? Or something else entirely?

Anti at Scale

Before we answer that, we need to have a quick beer. (No, not actually, some of you might recall I’m allergic to the stuff and exclusively sustain myself on organic cider, but I digress!) Because only yesterday I read about this rather famous small Scottish brewery in an article which almost made me spit my flat white out, Shaq style, because, well we’ll see:

BrewDog was founded in 2007 and can probably be well described as selling IPA as an identity, which sounds horrible to me, but this is almost 20 years ago so we'll bear with them. They were the punks of the beer world, driving a tank down Camden High Street and mocking the “cozy cartel” of corporate lagers. They built their business on the support of Equity Punks, shareholders who were both customers and true believers in cool craft beer, and people bought into BrewDog both as a beer, but equally importantly as a declaration that you were not a Carling person.

Then in 2021, a group of former employees published a letter titled “Punks With Purpose,” accusing founder James Watt (!) of fostering a culture of fear and a cult of personality, which seemed a catastrophic gap between the values BrewDog loudly preached and the reality inside the company. It also emerged that Watt secretly held £500k in (evil) Heineken shares, while BrewDog had already sold 22% of itself to a San Francisco private equity firm (very evil). The most anti-corporate beer company in the world had very much been in bed with the corporations all along.

Why does this sound so familiar?

Maybe because the equally famous Charismatic church of Hillsong followed this precise playbook with eerie precision. Like BrewDog, Hillsong was a challenger brand to the bland pilsner of traditional Christianity. It was authentic, high-energy, and genuinely countercultural at the start. Then they blitzscaled across 30 countries, prioritizing footprint over faithfulness and celebrity endorsements over character. Remember Justin Bieber? He was a hillsonger. Remember Kourtney Kardashian? Hillsonger. It’s a long list!

Just as BrewDog’s Equity Punks were eventually sidelined by corporate interests, Hillsong’s thousands of volunteers and donors found themselves feeding a machine that prioritized the lifestyles of its key men (who were getting similarly involved in me too-allegations and worse..!) and the expansion of its real estate portfolio, making very similar and fatal mistakes at their attempt at mass-producing authenticity.

It is not that authenticity cannot be scaled, because I think it can. But it probably has to be either real in the first place, or to change significantly with the growth journey. What cannot survive scale is performed authenticity. The BrewDog punk ethos turned out to be all about marketing, just as the Hillsong “Spirit-filled community” was pure production. When you build on a real foundation with genuine values embedded in genuine structures, I think scale can carry it forward, but when you build on a fake vibe, scale tends to expose it.

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The DNA of Pentecostalism?

Some may insist this is a recent corruption, but it definitely is not recent, and perhaps it is no corruption either?

Aimee Semple McPherson personified celebrity risk and the notion of religion as performance already in the 1920s. Long before Netflix, she was a media juggernaut who built the 5,000-seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, considered the first megachurch in the US, and owned her own televangelist radio station. She disrupted staid denominations with Hollywood spectacle, and her services were essentially full theatre productions.

The Pentecostals and Charismatics have always been drawn to big crowds, big miracles and big personalities. In the modern era, growth obsession has simply industrialized that old celebrity risk into something capable of failing at a greater scale.

Key-Man Risk: Ferguson and Mike Bickle

In the business world, this is often called Key-Man Risk which describes the danger that an organization’s value is so tied to one individual that their departure or disgrace could be terminal. Think of Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, who for 26 years was the system, the culture and the recruitment strategy of the club. When he retired, the spirit of the club evaporated and seven managers in a decade with zero league titles stress how the magic wasn’t institutionalised but left with him:

The International House of Prayer in Kansas City was a more extreme version of the same problem. Mike Bickle built something genuinely extraordinary: 24/7 prayer meetings running without interruption for twenty years, over a thousand full-time missionaries on-site and six-hour prayer shifts, round the clock, for two decades. But Bickle was IHOP, and IHOP was Bickle. There was no board with independent power, meaning every decision flowed through him. The culture treated him as a prophet — so to question him was not organizational dissent but spiritual rebellion. When abuse allegations emerged in late 2023, there was no mechanism to absorb the blow and by mid-2024, the 24/7 prayer room that had run without interruption for twenty years went silent, and the property went on the market. Institutional value? Zero.

The Governance Desert

If Key-Man Risk is the fuel, absent governance is the missing brakes. The parallell to charismatic failure here is WeWork.

Adam Neumann was a prophet of the “We Generation” who wanted to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” Because the company was growing so fast, investors allowed him to strip away all traditional governance. Super-voting shares, sitting on his own board, leasing his own buildings back to the company: A governance desert.

This is the principal-agent problem that plagues the modern megachurch. To move at the “speed of vision,” these churches ditched what they called the bureaucratic red tape of denominations, including the boards — the synods, the bishops, the boring people who occasionally say no. This created the conditions for pastors to go for all the fun bits: fame, wealth and private jets, rather than working for the congregation.

Why Weber Was A Bit Right, And Adam Smith Might Be Too

Max Weber famously argued that charismatic movements must either institutionalize — become a boring bureaucracy with rules and hierarchies and oversight — or die. He called this the routinization of charisma. Looking at the wreckage of Hillsong or WeWork, you might conclude Weber was right.

But Weber didn’t account for the radically competitive marketplace of modern global Christianity. There are approximately 47,000 Christian denominations globally — and the vast majority of growth in that number has come from the Pentecostal and Charismatic world. Which means when Hillsong fails in Sydney, the members can instead walk down the road to the next church. In that sense, Hillsong’s collapse is actually evidence that the market can correct these failures.

But markets correct slowly. And they have their own logics that allow fairy-tale companies to thrive well beyond any reasonable timeframe. WeWork burned through billions and spent a decade “elevating the world’s consciousness” before anyone seriously called time. Theranos operated for years on pure vibe and the social capital of its board. The correction mechanism existed but it was sluggish, easily confused and repeatedly outwitted by people who were good at performing authenticity.

And as Aimee Semple McPherson reminds us, the Charismatic celebrity problem has been latent in the movement since 1906. The fire that produces explosive growth is the same fire that produces the conditions for collapse. That’s not a bug the market hasn’t gotten around to fixing yet. It may be a feature — structural, persistent, and reproduced by each new generation of charismatic founders precisely because charismatic authority selects for compelling performers rather than careful institution-builders.

Meanwhile, In The Places Nobody Is Looking

While we watch documentaries about disgraced pastors in Sydney and Seattle, the actual numbers tell a rather interesting and different story:

Africa has undergone a transformation almost without parallel in religious history, growing from fewer than 10 million Christians at the turn of the 20th century to over 734 million today, at an annual growth rate of 2.64% — faster than Africa’s already rapid overall population growth. Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for approximately 44% of the world’s Pentecostals. And Latin America has followed a comparable trajectory: the Protestant — overwhelmingly Pentecostal — share of Brazil’s population grew from 2.6% in 1940 to over 21% today.

The dynamic driving this is neatly captured by a single observation from Pew researchers: in the Global North, dissatisfied Catholics become secular. In the Global South, they become Pentecostal.

The religious market in Lagos or Nairobi or São Paulo is intensely competitive, local, and decentralized — the opposite of the megachurch model. That competition disciplines bad actors and rewards churches that actually deliver.

In this sense, Hillsong may have had a bad decade, but the movement does not really care.

However, we should be careful not to reach too quickly for the Global South as a triumphant counterexample. Whether those churches represent a genuinely different kind of Charismatic Christianity or simply an earlier chapter of the same story, is a question only time will answer. They may be the correction, but they may also be Hillsong circa 1995.

That said, there is at least one structural reason for cautious optimism that rarely gets mentioned. A significant strand of Charismatic Christianity in the south carries a congregationalist inheritance from Scandinavian Pentecostal missionaries active in these regions from the early on. Scandinavian Pentecostalism, shaped by figures like Thomas Ball Barratt and Lewi Pethrus, developed a strongly congregationalist ecclesiology that was partly a rejection of where American Pentecostalism was heading. Barratt was not polite about the celebrity-driven model exemplified by figures like Aimee Semple McPherson.

Where the American tradition moved towards megachurches and personalities, the Scandinavian tradition insisted on each local church remaining autonomous and accountable to its own congregation, with no hierarchy above it and no celebrity at its center.

This is not a guarantee against growth disasters — South Africa and Nigeria have produced numerous prosperity gospel empires — but it suggests the Americanized failures may not reproduce as automatically as history might otherwise predict. The dominant form of Charismatic Christianity in the Global South is not the megachurch but the local congregation, accountable to itself.

The Verdict?

The Charismatics that have failed have failed at what many other high-growth companies fail: trading soul for scale, forgetting what made them countercultural, and building taller houses of cards on foundations of personal charisma with little or no accountability underneath.

What is less clear is whether this is a problem the movement will solve or one it will keep reproducing.

The honest position is probably somewhere between Weber and Smith. The market corrects — Hillsong is evidence of that. But the structural weakness is old enough that the real question isn’t whether correction happens. It’s whether it happens faster than the next generation of charismatic founders can replicate the failure. And on that question, a hundred years of history counsels genuine humility.

Weber and Smith were both pretty smart. The Charismatics may yet prove one of them more right than the other.

We will see - in the Global South.

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In my previous two posts, I may perhaps have bored you with musings on state churches, possibly unintentionally underscoring the point that no one cares about state churches. So this time, let’s talk about their polar opposite: the very private sector and aptly named Charismatics, a movement that went from ridiculed outsiders to almost half a billion believers, not to mention the political influence they’ve had and are still having.

The twist? Some commentators are now suggesting the Charismatics are currently experiencing their “Roman moment” and that the cause of this is all rooted in their success. So we’ll ask whether it is that simple? (Hint: It clearly isn’t but then again!)

But first we must do some quick and vastly simplified religious history, to make sure we’re reasonably informed about these entrepreneurially minded original incumbents! Oh and I fear this will be a two-part affair, so this will be part one.

Let’s begin by quickly answering the simplest - but never actually simple - of questions:

And we’re already in trouble. Because this is (un) surprisingly complex. But to simplify, the story begins in 1906 in Los Angeles when Pentecostalism was born according to the standard story (I do in fact agree with the standard story here, believe it or not!).

The first Pentecostals were often Methodists or Baptists or Pietists or similar, people who were perhaps slightly more interested in religion than the common man, and who sought more intense spiritual experiences than mainstream protestant dominations could offer. Some blogger may or may not have said once that early Pentecostalism = Methodism + speaking in tongues. But don’t quote me on that. Nonetheless, Pentecostalism became all the rage in Christianity in the early 20th century, and it grew like wildfire despite/because of quite significant and competent opposition from the establishment, the press and the established denominations (hat tip: I have written a thesis on this very subject!)

One reason for the Pentecostals’ early success, in addition to the enormous free marketing from the press ridiculing glossololia - speaking in tongues - was these churches being a bit more like this guy than other churches:

Ok so he’s more commonly depicted like an ancient hippie/70s rock star of course (and yes I have never understood why people criticized the Beatles for their “long” hair):

For example, in the early days the Pentecostals seemed to take little issue with things like women or people of colour having key roles in their churches, and they also had little love for hierarchy and wealth. And they were a bit strange, but they were certainly not boring. And all of that sounds like how you could describe Jesus, but not any Church around 1906, and this gave the Pentecostals some well earned credibility in their novel approach to Christianity, and this again brought massive success.

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Now let’s fast forward to the 1960s. After half a century of ridicule and opposition, the Pentecostals had achieved quite impressive numbers and become almost respected and established in most places. They sent missionaries, built churches, held meetings and spoke in tongues, and by the 1960s they weren’t really that strange or novel anymore so the press had stopped writing about them a long time ago. They were reaching a state of normalcy, and probably even plateaued. But there can be little doubt that they had proven their worth and their winning formula over five decades, they were simply more successful than other churches at this point.

And that’s when the interesting (or the unthinkable? Or inevitable or even predestined? You decide!) happened: the established less-Jesus-like denominations (so the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, the Baptists etc.) finally realized what so many have had to realize before:

This was when the Christian world moved beyond the original Pentecostalism to create the Charismatic movement. A number of established denominations finally realized that Pentecostalism had won, with their better way of reaching people, their more appealing music, in fact their better Christianity.

But the interesting thing is that unlike the original Pentecostal founders, who were largely kicked out of their churches and forced to build their own “garage startups,” the Charismatics largely managed to stay on to reform their existing denominations instead of having to make new ones. They imported the Pentecostal toolkit: speaking in tongues, prophecy, modern (even rock!) music instead of organs - some even decided to bring back healing - into their traditional liturgical structures. Suddenly, you had Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans who still wore the robes and followed their old prayer and psalm books, but who were for all practical purposes Pentecostals.

Still they didn’t call themselves that because they were still notionally Catholic or similar, so that would have been awkward. And another reason they called themselves something different is that the Charismatics were a different demographic from the original Pentecostals. (It also has to do with charisma being the Greek word for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and coincidentally these churches DID also have charismatic leaders, hence the Weberian portrait earlier!) The 1906 movement was a mix of blue-collar and marginalised groups that was often a racially integrated phenomenon that grew in fast growing and socially alienating cities. The Charismatic surge of the 1960s was thoroughly middle-class. These were doctors, lawyers and suburban professionals who decided that their churches were simply too, well:

They introduced informal dress, guitars and spontaneous prayer into the rigid world of 1960s ritual. It was probably the first time in centuries that the consumers of the mainline churches began to demand that the service be an interactive event where they were the center of the story.

Up until the point that these denominations embraced Pentecostalism, the “spirit” was something managed by the hierarchy through rituals you observed from a distance. In the Charismatic model, the “spirit” was something every middle-class accountant in the suburbs could access personally. As such one can think of the movement as the completion of Luther’s democratization of the miraculous, or the priesthood of all believers if you will.

An example: The Dennis Bennett Moment

A famous example of what happened, sometimes touted as the key breakthrough moment for the movement happened in 1960, again in California. Episcopal pastor Dennis Bennett lead a reasonably successful congregation there, but according to himself he felt spiritually empty. What saved him from darkness was of course:

And after his personal baptism of fire, he stood before his congregation on Sunday, April 3, 1960, and announced he had been baptized in the Spirit and spoken in tongues. In short he had become a Pentecostal!

This was something of an earthquake. One of his curates apparently stripped off his vestments and walked out of church in protest. Bennett eventually resigned to avoid a civil war erupting in his church, but he moved to a small mission in Seattle that became a global hub for this new “hybrid” faith. His book, Nine O’Clock in the Morning, became the guidebook for many charismatics, proving you could have the “Spirit” without losing your heritage.

The reason we bother with these weird people and denominational divides is that the result was absolutely spectacular.

Let’s just look at the numbers: in 2024, over 644 million people identified as Pentecostal or Charismatic, or nearly 1 in 4 Christians globally. This movement achieved a global scale that would make any modern founder weep with envy:

And this may actually under-represent their success, because the Charismatic movement has jumped religious boundaries entirely. There are now Charismatic Jews— Messianic congregations like Tiferet Yeshua in Tel Aviv where worship includes Hebrew prayers, Torah readings, and speaking in tongues and prophetic declarations. And even Charismatic Muslims, particularly in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia, where Islamic worship has adopted healing services, ecstatic praise, and Spirit-filled experiences that look remarkably Pentecostal (minus the Jesus part, obviously). When your product-market fit is so good that even other religions start copying your features, you know you've built something remarkable.

The Decline and Fall?

This should sort of end here, as a triumphant story about God’s glory and how the most successful form of Christianity came about, through established churches stopping fighting the sort of radical upstart and embracing its success formula.

But that, of course, would be too simple, in a sort of “Facebook stealing Snapchat’s features and sort of winning” or “Microsoft pivoting to the cloud and it sort of works” type of story. And simple isn’t our way.

Rather, what many are suggesting today is that the Charismatics are currently experiencing a Roman moment - a fall from grace unto decline and their eventual fall. And the last five years, the megachurches that defined modern Charismatic Christianity have actually been collapsing at an alarming rate. One of the best known is Hillsong, and their global empire is in ruins. IHOP was another famous one that went silent after its founder’s fall. Bethel faces mounting credibility crises. Ravi Zacharias’s ministry dissolved after his death revealed decades of abuse. Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill imploded. The list goes on.

So there could be something in this.

Or is it simply a case of:

We will see next time! In Part 2 We’ll examine whether this is really a fall—or just the painful maturation every movement faces. Can you institutionalize charisma without killing it? Can 644 million believers survive the collapse of their celebrity leaders?

After all the future of 644 million believers hangs in the balance. Coming to an internet near you soon!

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Friday is here again and it's freezing outside, so what better time to fix our failing state churches!

In my previous post I relayed how some religion-thinkers have tried to explain why these churches suck (even if they are great for concerts!) We didn’t quite get to the bottom of it, so this is a part two, sort of.

To briefly recap, the two theories were:

1. They are, or have for most of their existence been, monopolies, so of course they suck

2. For multiple reasons, such as socialist politicians wanting to encourage religion’s natural death, they tend to not require, inspire or induce any commitment among members, a rather vital thing for religious vitality

This is all fine. I think these theories make some sense, and I also don’t subscribe to the McKinsey infatuation with 3 point lists, so we’ll use those 2 points as a starting point. But this blogletter is of course about religion and business, and there isn’t really that much business in these perspectives (apart from maybe the whole monopoly angle feeling businessy) So let us look closer into our favourite CON, and see if we can get some insights by comparing it to something similar but more secular, or businessy.

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Now, this is where it gets more interesting. After all, when Norwegian politicians decided that calling a state church a state church felt a bit too 1537 in 2017, they unwittingly turned it into something much more modern and businessy: a nebulous state-owned enterprise. At last, the CON had become an SOE!

This is fascinating because the SOE is precisely the type of company that seems to be taking over the modern business world. As you can see below, at the turn of the millennium, the Fortune Global 500 list (of the biggest companies in the world) included 34 SOEs. By 2025, that number had surged to 130, a quadrupling:

If you think about it, if the quadrupling continues, we’ll be on our path to communist nirvana in a couple of decades!

In terms of revenue, the trend is the same but just more pronounced, with SOEs accounting for nearly 30% of the Global 500’s total turnover compared to 7% in 2000:

To noone’s surprise, this increase is driven by our Chinese friends. And they make sure the SOE growth is felt in the real world too: on the streets of Oslo, Chinese electric vehicles are everywhere, reflecting how China has recently overtaken Japan as the world’s largest car exporter.

But wait - if our religious SOEs are just half-empty organ concerts (sorry), why are these other SOEs outmuscling their Western competition? Maybe there is something revolutionary going on?

The (Myth of the) Chinese Miracle

This is where me currently reading Frank Dikötter’s China After Mao comes in, as I mentioned last time.

Dikötter’s book is a well documented dismantling of the view that China has genuinely opened up its economy as well as the idea that trade would encourage a development towards democracy (as if that theory had much going for it whatsoever). He instead characterizes the SOE-driven “economic miracle” as a system built on shadow banking, massive debts and state-sanctioned intellectual property theft rather than true innovation or efficiency.

More interesting, he also suggests that to the extent China has achieved real economic growth, it has happened despite the state, not because of it, with rural peasants and black markets often initiating economic shifts long before Beijing sanctioned them. In fact, if we stick to our coveted EVs as a case, much of the modern Chinese EV revolution isn’t being led by the state-owned churches so much as by high-commitment, private-sector firms, with BYD and Xiaomi prominent examples in the EV and electronics industries. And this isn’t an isolated example:

• In competitive sectors, private firms in China consistently generate higher return on equity than state-owned equivalents.

• A significant percentage of SOEs are technically zombies. They do not earn enough to cover their interest payments and stay alive only because state banks provide evergreening loans. They are the industrial equivalent of the state funding a church roof for a congregation that now lives in the retirement home.

• Most of the innovation in battery tech and software comes from the private side of the economy. These are the free churches of the business world. They have skin in the game, they have to compete for customers, and they have to deliver value or they die.

So Dikötter pours some pretty cold ice on the notion that making a nebulous SOE will get anyone out of any trouble!

But Wait - What About?

If we go back to our state churches, some have indeed suggested the problem isn't state ownership itself — it's the monopoly structure.

Fortunately China gives us a case study of what happens when you have competition but still state ownership, as this is how communists have tried to get their cake (or their borsch, or perhaps their sorghum liquor)

and eat it too for many years. The Soviet Union famously set up duplicate producers in many sectors to ensure manufacturers stayed on the front foot (think MiG and Sukhoi fighter jets for instance). In this spirit, China split up the the China State Shipbuilding Corporation in two in 1999, as part of a reform to break up monopolies and inject a “limited amount of free-market competition” into the country’s bloated state sector.

This sort of worked, as they took over much of the world’s shipbuilding market, but it created new problems. Both entities built nearly identical research institutes and sales teams, wasting billions in state funds. And they ended up bidding against each other for the same contracts and inputs, lowering profit margins as a whole. So in 2025, the state decided enough was enough and the two became one giant “New CSSC” again. Now guess what happened to its stockprice and that of its Korean competitors after this?

The lesson? Competition under state ownership doesn't produce the benefits of real competition, it mainly produces more waste.

But enough business, let’s go back to our state church!

Back to The CON

When I started writing this piece, my initial thinking was that the state church could possibly be fixed by breaking its problematic monopoly (as it is point 1 on the extensive list above). Putting on my freethinking communist administrator hat my idea was “why not split the CoN into three or four independent organizations with slightly different approaches and see what transpired - maybe it could even raise commitment?”

However, my thinking-as-writing process has made me skeptical of my initial idea. As the case of Chinese shipbuilding and many others show, competition under state ownership simply doesn’t seem to work.

In fact, both of the two theories I mentioned seem to hark back to the same primus motor: state ownership.

So in the spirit of a Keynesianism, I have changed my mind:

The Original CON/Industrial Policy

An interesting thing about state churches is how we often talk about industrial policy as a modern invention with the state picking winners in green tech, steel production or semiconductors, but the CON was industrial policy already in the early 16th century. By funding a spiritual monopoly, the state was attempting to ensure social stability and cohesion, or to manufacture a uniform “citizen-product” if you will.

It was a grand and expensive project of the soul, and like all industrial policies, it eventually fell victim to the real law of unintended consequences industrial policy: when you protect an industry from the market, you don’t make it strong, you just make it fat.

The Fix

So what should instead happen, if we accept that the current model is a multi-billion kroner case for slow death? What is the fix?

Here are some freethinking ideas I think range from reasonably good to great (sorry): (And especially if they hire a consultant to implement them, hint hint)

• Set the Church Free! This might sound like privatization but I would propose no such thing. Instead, hand the CON keys over from the administrators to the local would be preacher-entreprenurs in the spirit of management handouts. It also makes sense to divest a number of churches to more succesful denominations. If say a pentecostal denomination can demonstrate a real spiritual ROE (return on engagement), why shouldn’t they be allowed to take over?

  (Oh - important - do not hire an economist if you want to go down this road!)

• Go Full Soviet.We could also do the reverse. If we’re going to have a state church, we could learn from the state shipbuilding strategy of China and make it actually serve state functions. Hand half of the properties to local municipalities to be used as community centers, concert halls, kindergartens or sport halls. Many are acoustically great and already paid for, so let them serve the 98% who love the music but hate the sermon. Churches also make for great pubs and food courts!

• Go Full Netflix. We could also work within the state church to save it, and this would mean to stop pretending that unpaid memberships mean anything. We could implement a “freemium” model with free access to concerts and cultural events, but if you want the full package (weddings, baptisms, funerals, pastoral care), you pay a monthly subscription. The way to appreciate spiritual services is after all to put a price on them.

• The Hagia Sophia Way. Norway really isn’t that protestant anymore, so why don’t we learn from the pretend-Romans (sorry) and convert our underutilized legacy assets into mosques?

• The Pentecostal Takeover. We could of course admit defeat, and run a literal RFP for church properties. Any religious organization that can demonstrate 25%+ weekly attendance rates gets to bid on church properties. Pentecostals get Frogner Church, some Muslim association might get Paulus in Grünerløkka. May the best win.

• Reverse the Reformation. We could also give the Vatican first right of refusal. Let the Catholics bid to take over the entire operation. With their proven track record of running a global religious enterprise they could offer a semi-functioning monopoly instead of a dying one.

• The Chinese Model. We could actually copy what works in China’s religious sector and create strict separation between state funding and religious practice. You want state money? You become a community center. You want to preach? You fundraise like everyone else. (Of course, we should not copy what does not work!)

• The Prosperity Gospel Experiment. Norwegian politicians actually hate the idea of Norwegians owning anything, so we could do what numerous Norwegian entrepreneurs are more or less forced to do: sell to a PE fund or to an American (or Nigerian or Korean if we’re afraid of the whole MAGA thing) megachurch. If we’re going to test whether spiritual capitalism works, let’s do it properly.

• The Student Housing Conversion. Oslo and other cities has a massive student housing shortage. Churches have unused space, kitchens, meeting rooms, and are usually near transit. Convert the upper floors and side buildings into student housing, keep the main hall for refectories or similar. Literally put young people back in the pews, even if they're just sleeping there. (This may not work in smaller places, but as we are treating the churches as useful real estate I’m sure someone will consider it!)

That’s enough SOEs for one day, but if you have any more ideas, do email your local church board (or me)!

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Happy New Year to all readers! I hope it’s been a somewhat better start to the new year than mine has been, as my bike has been stolen, my winter coat has decided to become useless and lots of other stuff I won’t bore you with. Fortunately “it’s uphill it’s going uphill” as the saying goes!

Anyway - the other day I found myself bored in my home office, and, having noticed a poster outside the Scientologists’ local competitors (that is, the local branch of the Church of Norway) advertising that every Tuesday there is a lunchtime concert, I ventured out in the snow to enjoy a bit of Händel.

Readers may not know this, but in my wild adolescence I used to sing in choirs, and I occasionally still enjoy some classical music when noone’s listening. (I may or may not admit I did start singing in a choir because I wanted to improve my singing in order to impress girls with renditions of the Beach Boys, but it will probably surprise noone to learn that, following the law of unintended consequences, I ending up trying to chat them up with accomplished comparisons between Brahms and Dream Theater instead!) But I digress!

One might imagine that my classical background and a curated experience of Händel’s Messiah would make for an ideal immersive lunchtime musical experience, but of course I ended up thinking about something. This time it was, perhaps unsympathetically, how useless the Norwegian State Church is - and in extension - how useless state churches are in general. (Yes I know the CoN formally separated from the state in 2017, but it is as of course as independent as the Federal Reserve is in Trump’s mind)

Now, before we theorize why state churches suck, let’s make sure they actually do! Two points should be enough really:

• Roughly 61% of the Norwegian population are registered members of the Church of Norway. This looks like a dominant position, but it is a vanity metric. For context, in 1970, this figure was 94%. These are almost all legacy members - even I was simply born into the CoN.

• Only about 2% of members attend services on a regular Sunday. This is what we might have called a “zombie” user base at a software company — registered users who never log in. In contrast the “Free churches” like the Pentecostals (Pinsebevegelsen) frequently see weekly attendance rates of 50% to 70% of their registered membership.

Needless to say, it’s superbly expensive setup too…!

But back to the question: why are state churches so useless? Let’s look at a couple of theories.

1. The Economics Explanation: Monopoly and Supply-Side Stagnation

For decades, the dominant academic view of religion was the sociological secularization thesis— the idea that as societies modernize, the demand for religion naturally withers away. Economists flipped this on its head, arguing that religious decline in places like Norway isn’t a demand-side issue at all but a supply-side failure.

According to this theory, when the state designates a “National Church,” it creates a spiritual monopoly, which has catastrophic effects on the religious supply. Decoupling revenues from customer satisfaction and attendance, the result is predictable monopoly-induced apathy, the clergy becoming bureaucrats managing a legacy asset rather than being spiritual entrepreneurs.

In this framework, the CoN is Spiritual Televerket. Before the privatization of Norway’s state telco - Televerket - you couldn’t choose your service, and in return they really didn’t provide any. It could take years to get a phone or phone number in the 80s, with a waiting list of over 100,000 customers in 1981 (!) Of course, this was the rule everywhere with state telcos - imagine my surprise at discovering that British Telecom also had enormous waiting lists in the 80s that magically disappeared with privatization?

A state church operates with the same functional, twenty-years-behind-the-curve energy.

2. The Sociology Explanation: The Value of Commitment

If the supply-side model feels a bit too economicsy, Dean Kelley’s 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, has a non-econ 101 explanation. In this book he argued that religious vitality is a function of commitment. To feel that a community is valuable, humans require skin in the game. Successful religious organizations offer meaning partly by demanding high community commitment— whether social, financial or behavioral.

Think free churches again: they generally require you to show up regularly and to contribute, whether with money or volunteer work or similar. The CoN, of course, has done the opposite. It has lowered its threshold for membership to the ground to remain inclusive (partly because parliament has forced it to, but still!). And when an organization demands nothing, potential members rightly conclude it has nothing of value to offer. So why would anyone show up?

This means people may stay on the membership rolls because it’s free (and until recently it was quite difficult to formally leave) and they might want a nice building for a wedding one day, but they invest zero emotional, spiritual or other capital into the institution - it becomes a zombie.

The Verdict

State churches make for great concert halls. As churches, meanwhile, they are utter failures because they destroy the very thing that makes religion (or any community) vital: commitment and competition. And yes I do think the economics guys are onto something, probably through luck given their track record. And Brekke is probably right - if anyone wants to save religion, we must stop subsidizing its stagnation.

Of course, this paves the way for another problem:

When the monopoly is broken, the organ concerts might stop!

Now, my post has surprisingly become longish, but I was thinking of connecting state churches to business more clearly - and that means we will now we have to do that next time! And as I’ve been enjoying Frank Dikötter’s China After Mao, I’ve been struck by how much State Capitalism and our Spiritual SOEs (State-Owned Enterprise) suffer from the exact same structural rot.

So stay tuned!

As Christmas is nearing, and the days are very much becoming shorter (and properly dark!) here in the post-pagan north, I thought we would do something a little different. After all, the birthday of Jesus, whether correctly dated or not, is a rather momentous event.

Now, 25 December probably wasn’t Jesus’s actual birthday. Augustine suggested the date was based on the popular theory that Christ was conceived on March 25th (the same date he died) and was born exactly nine months later. Even consultants would blush at such exemplary guesswork and mark them with “internal estimates” or worse on their slides, but we can fortunately quote St. Augustine rather than suffer such embarrassment. But I digress!

The date isn’t really that important, because as any child will testify to, the main point of having a birthday is the celebration (and the cake.) And what a birthday it is. The celebration of Christmas marks nothing less than the beginning of the most successful, world-changing venture in human history. And that means this should be an excellent occasion to look into how religions are started, and, given this is a religion and business blogletter, what that could mean for starting businesses.

What I find most interesting about how most religions have started is that there’s such a recurring pattern that you might almost call it a playbook. However, no bipedals with brains evolved weak jaw muscles would use that word, so instead we’ll narrow this pattern down to 5 key rules for starting a new religion.

(I already realize I cannot really write too much about each as this might become longish, but feel free to send me a message if you want anything expanded on, embellished or extinguished!)

Enough about that, here are the rules for starting a religion!

1. The First Rule of Starting a New Religion is That You Should Never Start a New Religion.

If religious history has provided us with one overarching rule it is that new religions are never new.

Let us look at birthday celebrant Jesus first. He was clearly instrumental in starting a new religion, which would even bear his name. However, he never himself claimed to start a new religion, rather insisting that he was part of a very old one. In fact, in his own words he came “..not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” (Matthew 5:17) or for us regular folks: that he had come to earth as the fulfillment of prophecies of the old religion of Judaism.

Much can be said about precisely when Christianity actually became its own religion instead of a Jewish sect, and Paul is as instrumental here as another Paul would later be in the Beatles, but that will be for another post about the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. For now, we can simply revel in the fact that the founder of Christianity was clearly a Jew.

Let us jump six centuries forward to another businessman-cum-religious founder, namely Muhammad. Some, including many muslims, think of him as a prophet of a “new path” which would replace Judaism and Christianity, but that is quite clearly not what he intended if we look at his holy texts. According to the Quran, he actually said that “I am no bringer of newfangled doctrine among the apostles, nor do I know what will be done with me or with you.” Surat-ul Ahqaf (46):9

Or in other words, Muhammad did not claim to start a new religion, but instead brought the restoration of the old faith of Abraham (so sort of Judaism mainly but also a bit of Christianity, although they needed correction and revival) The founder of Islam was neither Jew nor Christian, but he could be possibly and awkwardly be described as an Abrahamic.

No blogletter is complete without mentioning Luther, but we’ll keep it brief and simply agree that he definitely did not intend to start a new religion in 1517. After all, he was a Catholic monk, priest and professor, and what he wanted was to return the Church to its true Biblical basis, or reform it, ideally without the devilish Pope as an unnecessary middle-man. In many ways, the term Protestantism is sort of wrong and misleading - you could just as well have called it “originalism” or “fundamentalism” or “bibleism” or something. In short, the founder of Protestantism was very much a Catholic.

Finally, let’s look at Pentecostalism. A few years ago I actually wrote a dissertation about “the Apostle of pentecostalism to Europe” a rather impressive British-Norwegian called Thomas Ball Barratt. Now, pentecostalism sort of begun in the US in 1906, but it wasn’t really clear exactly what it was, so his role as apostle was not simply about bringing the good news to Europe from the US, he rather had to make it up himself.

Being a Methodist pastor in Norway, a lot of Barratt’s pentecostalism unsurprisingly ended up looking quite a bit like a Scandi Methodism, with some glossololia added into the mix. Once again, he didn’t really want to start a new church or denomination, he rather wanted to improve and revitalise Methodism and Christianity in general. But as with Luther, his superiors did not agree with his approach, and he had to go solo. (In fact, this was a key pattern in Pentecostalism, their founders were often Methodists (or Baptists).)

Barratt’s motto in many ways sums up his whole approach to the new theology and church movement he was (reluctantly!) constructing, but it also sums up a key part of the religious startup playbook:

which unfortunately doesn’t translate too well, indicating he was thinking in Norwegian in 1907 despite his being born in Cornwall. Nevertheless, it has been translated into both “Forward to ancient Christianity” or “Back to primitive Christianity” - the latter clearly being a bit wrong - but still it sums up our whole principle well: don’t start a new religion, start an old one.

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2. Beg, Steal and Borrow

Now, begging is probably a self-explanatory thing for religions, but stealing might need some context. The important thing is that once you start a new religion, you have a unique opportunity to find best practices and steal borrow them from other religions, in order to create a super-religion if you will.

This rule is clearly connected to the first rule as you would probably be wise to steal and borrow mainly from the old religion you are notionally still part of, because it will probably fit well into your overall cosmology and theology and other aspects. So stealing from the mothership is ideal.

Islam is a superb example of such a super-religion, as it has borrowed most of its religious practices from Judaism (aka main mothership) and Christianity (aka step-mothership). Here’s a few examples I found on the internet but it is a recurring theme so you can find lots:

• Washing before prayer

• The call to prayer

• Removal of shoes in God’s presence

• Animal sacrifices

• Pilgrimage

• Head covering for women

• Circumcision

• Offering of sacrifice at birth of a child

• Prolonged fasting

• Modesty and silence of women

• Abstinence from pork

Of course, if you want to steal borrow the very best practices you see, and not least if you want to also grow, it is wise not to limit yourself to the default source. This leads to what religious scholars call syncretism, which is when practices from different religions meeting or being reinterpreted.

Since we are close to Xmas, the Christmas tree is actually an example of a rebranding of ancient pagan habits. Northern tribes used evergreen branches for centuries to symbolize life amidst the winter solstice. The Church then borrowed it, and instead of banning this innocent greenery, redirected it to point toward Christ.

So the idea is to learn from the best and be a bit pragmatic about how you do it!

Rule 3: The Sword is Mightier than the Pen

We often fall into the trap of believing that “the best idea wins.” History suggests that while the pen is necessary to convert the soul, the sword is what eventually converts the civilization.

Friend of the blogletter Martin Luther succeeded not simply because he had the best ideas (after all they were the old ideas of his old competitor, see Rule 1) but because he had the protection of prince Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Without that “Sword,” he likely would have shared the fate of Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake for rather similar ideas a century earlier.

Both Christianity, Islam and Buddhism grew significantly because of becoming embedded in the power structures in their respective empires. However, it is not obvious that this means it is necessary to embrace state power - Pentecostalism is the world’s fastest growing religion despite not having much state support, and both Christianity and Buddhism were intermittently repressed by the Roman and Chinese emperors before gaining such support. However, as a rule, working against the power of the sword certainly seems to be less than ideal!

4: All Roads Lead From Rome

A religion needs infrastructure as much as it needs inspiration. We often romanticize the lone prophet in the desert, but the early Church really did not spread that much in the desert, as that is where ideas go to die. It spread by capturing the existing roads of the world, which incidentally led to Rome and outwards in the ancient world.

We actually don’t have to say too much about this as we have already written a little about it in a previous post! https://religionandbusiness.substack.com/p/its-the-zip-code-stupid

5: Make The Gates Narrow (At First)

In the world of business, we are generally obsessed with achieving “frictionless onboarding” and stuff like that. We want users to join with a single click. Meanwhile, religions know that friction is actually a feature of commitment. To build a tribe of disciples, you must make it difficult to join.

The early Church utilized the Catechumenate, a rigorous period of study and testing that could last a signifiant period before a person was permitted to be baptized. (In fact, this is still the rule in Judaism.) This high barrier to entry ensured that the early adopters weren’t just casual observers, but people whose entire identity was forged through trial. Once that core of disciples is solidified, the gate can be widened for the masses, but the foundation must be built on some sacrifice.

The good thing is that any new religion might just be too weird to draw in anyone but the most committed. Joining Barratt’s Pentecostal movement in 1907 wasn’t just socially awkward but directly disadvantageous. You were often ridiculed by the establishment, mocked in the press for speaking in tongues, and potentially becoming an outcast of your community (in fact you might struggle to get a job as the state was confessional back then). Because the social cost was so high, only those who were truly committed stayed. This “Narrow Gate” of social persecution created a pretty unbreakable core that would eventually allow the movement to explode globally.

Human beings value what they sacrifice for. If membership is free and instant, it is viewed as worthless. But if the gate is narrow, being inside becomes a core part of a person’s identity. This principle explains why exclusive communities thrive. They start with a high barrier to ensure the core is unbreakable. By adding friction early, you create a sunk cost that can turn converts into disciples.

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What Does All This Mean for Business?

Now, starting a religion isn’t entirely like starting a business, which is something entrepreneurs should generally be glad for. The Pope will likely not care too much about what you write about him if you feel the need to criticize him on a chapel door. (Then again, some might care about other things, depending on where you live of course!)

Still, let’s try and look look at what the implications for starting businesses can be from these rules:

The Business Implications: From Product to Prophet

1. Don’t Be New. I don't have any stats at hand to back this up, but I would suggest that almost all successful new products are old products with the tinyest of twists. And almost all successful founders take the business of their old place of work, and give it the minutest of reforms.

If you want people to follow you, offer them a way forward to a better version of the past.

2. Steal Like Noone Sees you. Why invent something new when you can baptize what already works? Instagram didn’t reinvent social sharing — it stole Snapchat’s Stories feature so brazenly that users barely noticed the theft. The best companies are syncretistic super-religions, borrowing the liturgy that converts and abandoning the rest.

3. Secure a Sword. Luther needed Frederick’s sword just like Muhammad needed Medina’s alliances. Your startup needs its own “sword” such as regulatory capture, network effects, partnerships or institutional capital that competitors can’t easily dislodge. Uber fought multi-year regulatory battles in hundreds of cities. Tesla isn’t just an electric car company but a subsidy arbitrage machine that made governments complicit in its success.

4. Start In the Right Place. Building a fintech in Des Moines or is admirable but foolish. London and New York are still where capital and regulation meet (although that might change) and San Francisco is where AI engineers and venture dollars collide.

5. High-Friction Disciples. Abandon “frictionless” growth for your core community. If your brand has zero friction, you don’t get disciples. Bitcoin thrives because the “gate is narrow” — the steep learning curve and the social cost of being an early adopter create a community of fanatics that no marketing budget could ever buy. Build a wall, make your first 1,000 members climb it, and you will have a foundation that can survive anything.

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Thanks for reading the Religion and Business substack in 2025!

Enjoy the holidays, light a candle, and enjoy going forward through the narrow gates!

In my last post, I promised you a minor deep dive into Apple as a quintessentially Protestant business. And, as a former member of a Lutheran State Church, and unlike a certain Cupertino company with their release dates, I’ve intended to keep that promise. So here we go!

This time we’ll look at something quite different from models, friars or lucky charms, as I’m dragging you into church - but it’s all related, I promise! And bear with me, because I do think that if you want to understand the most valuable company on earth (yes it could be some chip company at the moment of reading this but for the last 5 years it’s been the fruit guys) you can’t just look at their technology or gaze at their rather spectacularly unaffordable gadgets.

You have to look at their theology.

And my argument is quite simple: the theology of Apple and Steve Jobs is Protestantism. In fact, it is so protestant that you could argue that it is BOTH lutheran and calvinist, which is impressive if you’ve witnessed any debates between those two camps (most of them would have taken place some 4-500 years ago so I guess not but you get the idea).

Now, I can hear you both thinking “this is nerdy stuff” as well as shouting at your screens:

After all “Steve Jobs was a famous Zen Buddhist!”

And you will be right in saying and thinking that. And although I still haven’t read the brick of a biography someone gave me for Christmas many years ago, mainly because I don’t care too much for biographies but here I digress again, I will not even argue against that. Because he was, according to the internet:

Jobs took an interest in eastern spiritualism already in the 70s, and in 1974 he took a spiritual voyage to India (this is right before he founded Apple) to study under a Hindu guru. Pivoting to Buddhism after that, he studied under Zen master Otogawa Kobun. He taught Jobs that the highest spiritual practice could be found in the “mud” of commerce and creation, and this is said to be why Jobs famously rejected market research (although, did he really?). In Zen, truth is not found in data or consensus but through intuitive wisdom accessed via meditation. Apparently Jobs didn’t ask customers what they wanted because he was able to look past their current desires to their fundamental needs. Like a ghost in a machine, his meditation solved real business problems.

Many people - including some biographers - have connected the two data points of Jobs and Zen, and concluded that the iPhone, iOS, and the Mac are really Zen artifacts. They point to the radical simplicity of design, the obsession with removing buttons, and the soothing white packaging and the meditative stores (sorry, bad joke) as proof that Apple is a Zen company. And they aren’t exactly wrong. After all, Zen philosophy IS built on the principle of Kanso, or the rigorous stripping away of clutter to reveal some thing’s essence.

But here’s the thing. You could just as easily argue that these aesthetics are purely Protestant.

After all, the Shakers, the Lutheran Scandinavians and the Calvinists arrived at this exact same minimalism centuries ago, and for the same reason as well: to eliminate distraction. (There are also historical-economic similarities between Japan and Northern Europe but that’s for another day!)

And no wonder many people struggle to make a distinction here, just look at this article from the Independent about kanso and what they used as their illustration:

Jobs The Lutheran Reformer

Here's what I think. To understand Apple, you have to stop looking at Jobs as a guru and start looking at him as a Protestant reformer.

I realize now I should have written a post about Luther or Calvin, the two key reformers, before I came up with claims like this, and we won’t be able to do Luther and the Reformation any justice here. But suffice to say that he was the most important individual in the history of the Church after Paul, and also a rather fascinating character. He is obviously most famous for tearing what we now call the Catholic Church in two with 95 theses, as he thought they were an unnecessary intermediary between God and man (and a creation by the devil it should be said).

Luther attacked the papacy with everything he had, risking his life in the process. He translated the Bible into the vernacular so common people could read the “source code” themselves. In short he believed in the Priesthood of All Believers—the idea that every individual should have a direct relationship with God, without a priest standing in the middle.

Now consider some of the things “early Apple” did:

1. They attacked the Centralized Authority: Apple’s most famous ad was a woman smashing the face of “Big Brother” (IBM) with a sledgehammer:

   

2. They translated the “Latin”: Before Apple, computers spoke Command Line, a language only the priesthood understood. Apple translated it into the “vernacular” (using a GUI/Mouse) so the masses could understand and use it.

3. They armed the Laity: The goal wasn’t to make a better mainframe; it was to put a “personal” computer on every desk, removing the need for the IT priest entirely.

In short, early Apple and the young Jobs wasn’t trying to build a Zen garden; he was trying to arm the congregation.

Jobs The Calvinist Ruler

As Jobs matured, and as he returned to Apple to save it in the 1990s, he shifted gears. He stopped being the radical revolutionary (Luther) and became the strict system-builder, or in our terms: a Jean Calvin.

While Luther was the revolutionary who broke down the walls of the Papacy and founded Protestantism, Calvin was a builder. Again we will not do him much justice here, but he is most famous for turning Geneva into a “City of God”— a strictly regulated society where moral order, hard work and correct behavior were enforced for the good of the soul. While Luther had some traits we might describe as fundamentalist today (he was a monk, priest and theology professor so don’t look so surprised), Calvin really had them all. His big idea, if you will, was that of the rigorous enforcement of purity through a system. (You can read more about Calvinism here!)

And voila: we have come to the Apple Ecosystem.

The “Walled Garden” of the App Store is pure Calvinist Geneva.

• Total Depravity: Calvinists believe humans are naturally sinful and prone to error. Apple believes users are naturally prone to downloading malware and breaking their file systems.

• The Elect: Therefore, Apple removes your ability to “sin.” You cannot sideload apps. You cannot open the file system. You cannot customize the hardware.

• Order and Sanctification: In exchange for your freedom, Apple gives you a perfect, harmonious, and safe world. “It just works”—but only if you follow their strict rules.

We tend to confuse this with Zen minimalism. But Zen is actually about non-attachment, while Calvinism is about efficiency and order. Apple’s minimalism isn’t about emptiness; it’s about removing the clutter that distracts you from your purpose.

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The Architecture of Reform

And now to the church, or if you will, the meeting house that is the Apple Store. Is the Apple store Lutheran or Calvinist? Or perhaps Zen?

Luther was in fact something of a moderate in terms of architecture, meaning that Lutheran churches removed some Catholic features including most of what reminded people about the saints when they were reformed, but they kept most things like the stained glass, the altars and the statues. They also added things, most importantly music and organs. Calvin on the other hand was a radical iconoclast. He believed that any image was an idol that distracted from the Word. He ordered the churches of Switzerland to be whitewashed, the statues smashed, and the gold removed. They even often destroyed organs.

So what about Zen? I think there is at least some Zen on display. The indoor groves found in modern flagship stores are not very Protestant so the inclusion of living, breathing plants is a concession to the Eastern philosophy that nature and structure should be one.

But: A true Zen temple embraces wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection, age and decay. An Apple Store is terrified of decay, and strives for a state of eternal, factory-sealed perfection.

So an Apple store is exacly what you would think it would be had Calvin himself designed it. There are no “lifestyle posters” (idols). There is no “point of sale clutter” (distraction). There are only whitewashed walls, stone floors, and light. And isles of course. It is a severe, sanctified space designed for one thing only: The direct interaction between the believer and the Word.

In conclusion: an Apple Store is a Reformed Meeting House.

Now, I was thinking about writing something about the protestant work ethic and Silicon Valley and the necessary veneer of cool orientalism combined with Calvinism’s insistence on the predestination of machines taking over the world, but I have written too much again, so we’ll have to come back to that another time!

Let’s instead round off by saying that Steve Jobs was a complicated figure. He may have sat in meditation like a monk, but when he stood up, he went to work with a Protestant intensity.

And this calls for one last interesting biographical fact about Jobs: he was raised in a Lutheran household. He attended church every Sunday until he was 13, when he confronted his pastor with a magazine photo of starving children in Biafra. When the pastor couldn’t give him a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil, he apparently walked out and never went back.

This might have meant that all Lutheran teaching and influence left Jobs for ever, but I have a feeling some of it actually stuck. And perhaps if you combine Lutheranism with Zen, you get (in addition to supreme design!) some sort of Calvinism??

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Let me apologize in advance for one more “the Catholics did it first!” story, but my unhealthy obsession with the medieval Catholic Church is a key reason for having this blogletter, so you’ll have to endure I’m afraid!

My main excuse for writing once more about the Catholics, or the Church as it was called back then, is that I wasn’t actually planning on doing it this time: I was really thinking about spelling out my view on Apple as a quintessentially Protestant business, but that will have to be next time instead. Stuff happens, and what happened this time was that I came across the religious orders in a book I was reading (incidentally a historical crime drama about a priest/professor/detective who is both protestant and catholic, if that is your cup of tea you can find it here)

Now, the thing that struck me as I was reading this book is how interesting the religious orders really are. And one especially interesting thing is how well they fit into the theory of disruptive innovation. So this post is about that and how they solved a specific strategic problem that can, in theory but I suppose also in practice, destroy companies: or the Incumbent’s Dilemma.

Let’s briefly tackle the theory of disruptive innovation. The original theory, postulated by Harvard man Clayton Christensen in the 90s, goes something like this: established companies, or as he called them, incumbents, are (rightly) focused on their most profitable customers’ needs, and in doing everything right and serving them well, they unwittingly leave the door open for low-end disruptors to enter their industry. These disruptors (often startups) are companies that develop cheaper and worse products than the incumbent, often using new and cheap technology to make this inferior stuff, and generally targets lower paying segments the incumbents don’t care much for. However, once they have success in these low end segments, the disruptors go upmarket and - voila! - before the incumbents have realized and had time to turn their slower supertanker organizations around, market expectations have changed and the disruptors have taken over much of the market. A case that sort of fits this although Christensen did not personally agree is Uber who have disrupted the taxi market.

This theory and its associated buzzword has been the mothership of all business terminology the last two decades. Originally it was a nerdy tech-theory, but with nerdy tech and Silicon Valley taking over the world since the 90s, it is fair to say that the business world has been somewhat utterly obsessed with disruption, sometimes even understanding the theory. I’m sure you’ve all seen the Silicon Valley series where it all happens at Silicon Valley’s biggest event which is called, yup, Disrupt:

It’s a real thing btw! And apparently still going on. And important business institutions like IMD and McKinsey still have disruption on top of their agendas so it’s certainly not a dead theory yet. Which is quite fascinating as I found a draft article I wrote a decade ago titled “The Innovator’s Fallacy” describing Christensen’s theory as a bit of a hack but I digress.

But here is the thing. While we look to Silicon Valley for disruption and case studies, the best case examples are always medieval. And here’s what happened in the 13th century:

The Ultimate Monopoly

In the Middle Ages, the Church wasn’t just a religious institution but the ultimate monopoly. It was Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, the Post Office and the IRS rolled into one (and more but you get the idea).

Like many monopolies, it faced a conundrum of complacency. Successful beyond belief, it had evolved over the centuries into a massive institution with expensive infrastructure (think beautiful cathedrals like the Duomo below and lots of churches), a huge payroll of highly educated churchmen (the clergy), and a quite rigid territory system (the parishes and dioceses).

From a strategic perspective, its success had made it vulnerable. It had focused so heavily on its established market which was the rural population and the wealthy nobility, that it was losing touch with a rapidly growing demographic: the urban poor in Europe’s exploding cities.

The Lean Startup Monks

In the early 1200s, figures like St. Francis of Assisi launched a radical new kind of religious venture. At the time, the religious orders were monastic, like the Benedictines. These operated like massive corporations and lived in, for its time, wealthy, secluded monasteries in splendid isolation and contemplation from the daily grind of the populace.

The new orders, however, and specifically the Franciscans and Dominicans, were “mendicant,” which is a polite way of saying they begged for a living.

From a business perspective, this was a game-changer. By embracing voluntary poverty and relying on charitable donations, they operated with a radically low cost-base. They owned no property, had no expensive cathedrals to maintain and operated without the heavy administrative staff of the traditional church.

Crucially, they weren’t bound by the territorial restrictions of the local parish. While the established hierarchy waited for people to come to them, the Mendicants went where the market was. They focused their ministry on the exploding urban centers, preaching on street corners to populations that had been largely underserved by the existing parish system.

To my eyes, they look exactly like a modern lean startup looking to disrupt an incumbent. They identified an underserved market (the urban poor), stripped away the high overhead of the incumbents (cathedrals and estates), and used their agility to introduce a new form of competition into the religious marketplace.

Managing the “Mendicant Problem”

This created massive internal friction. The local bishops and established clergy viewed these new orders as a direct threat who were stealing parishioners and challenging the established way of doing things, not at least their business models.

This is the critical moment where most modern organizations fail. When an internal innovation threatens the core business or the status quo, the “corporate immune system” usually attacks it. A typical CEO might have crushed the Mendicants to preserve harmony and protect the existing hierarchy.

But the Papacy did something remarkable.

Instead of suppressing these upstarts, the Church leadership protected them. They recognized a strategic truth: it is better to disrupt yourself than to be disrupted by an outsider.

The Pope realized that, however irritating to his middle management, these radical orders were vital for the organization’s continued relevance. So, the Church sanctioned them, granting them official status and providing what we’d now call ‘top cover’ to protect their autonomy against the local bishops who wanted them gone. (Also he did have a dream of St. Francis holding up the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which helped!)

The Church effectively used the Mendicants to spur internal competition. The “Mendicant Problem” wasn’t a nuisance to be solved but instead a mechanism to force the sluggish hierarchy to improve its service quality.

The Takeaway

I’ve now written too much so let’s round this up!

We see companies today spending millions on innovation labs, trying to replicate this dynamic. They try to spin off internal ventures to avoid “Kodak moments.” But often, these initiatives wither because leadership fails to protect them from the rest of the organization.

The medieval Church succeeded because it reluctantly accepted that for an institution to be successful for centuries, it cannot demand uniformity. It must be willing to back the guys in the rough robes in their challenge of the guys in the silk vestments.

In my work as a consultant, one question comes up from almost every client: “How can we price better?”

It’s quite a key conundrum in business, so it makes good sense to ask the question. After all, if you price too high, you leave customers on the sidelines, price too low, and you leave money on the table. In fact, pricing is so central that even economists have noticed it, but I digress already in the intro.

Now, in reality finding a right price really depends on lots of things like:

• How the industry you're in works (maybe there is a standard you’re expected to follow?)

• What the competitors do (maybe there is one dominant player you simply have to take into account)

• What consumer expectations are (maybe they expect special offers?) etc.

And there are also lots of different pricing models out there, especially in the digital domain: freemium, subscription tiers, usage-based fees or similar. So noone says it is meant to be easy!

Sometimes when you face an uneasy conundrum a useful heuristic is to ask yourself what some proper successful person or organization would have done:

Or for our homeschooled American readers:

(Some probably recall the WWJD campaign which was actually a big thing a few years back, doing exactly this, but with a slightly more amiable individual in focus!)

Of course, you could also do the opposite and ask what a somewhat useless organization or person does - along the lines of:

(Or you could pick another American, just saying) but do remember to change the sign and it often yields better insights than you might have expected!

In business instances, though, asking the inverted question gives us such an ample sample space that finding useless organizations is less helpful. Alas, I think the right question surprisingly often is: “What would the medieval Church do?” (It's maybe not that surprising I suppose, after all, occasionally looking to history’s most successful organization for inspiration could be a good idea! But you get the drift!)

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The Most Intangible Product?

In the late Middle Ages, the Church - largely in the business of intangibles - had developed an even for them uniquely intangible product they wanted to market to finance some pet projects of theirs: the indulgence.

An indulgence is certainly not simple as a concept, but in the simplest of terms, an indulgence is a way to reduce the amount of punishment for sins. A buyer would get peace of mind and the hope of less time in Purgatory:

This was especially useful if you were prone to sin, or was planning to sin (just ask the German knight Hans von Hake).

From a business perspective, selling an intangible product with an infinite supply sounds pretty great. But one challenge is pricing it. How much is less time in Purgatory worth? Maybe a gold coin? Maybe a part of this year's harvest?

The answer, as the Church rightly understood, was: “It depends.”

Instead of setting a price, they deployed what we now would call a sophisticated price discrimination:

The Sliding Scale of Salvation

The most common form of indulgence was offered on a sliding scale. Acknowledging that a king’s ransom payment should be greater than a peasant’s, the Church’s pardoners were skilled at assessing a buyer’s ability to pay. The price of absolution for the same sin could vary dramatically based on social status and wealth. This was indeed the oldest trick in the book of value-based pricing: don’t price the product, price the customer.

When the infamous pardoner Johann Tetzel was raising funds through these indulgences, his agents used a specific, tiered price list for the same indulgence, based entirely on social status and income:

• Royalty, High Nobility & High Clergy (Kings, Queens, Archbishops, Dukes, etc.) Price: 25 Gold Florins

• Lower Nobility & High-Status Clergy (Counts, Barons, Abbots, etc.) Price: 10 Gold Florins

• Merchants & Gentry (Those with an annual income of 500 florins) Price: 6 Gold Florins

• Merchants, Artisans & Citizens (Those with an annual income of 200 florins) Price: 1 Gold Florin

• Artisans & Others with savings Price: 1/2 Gold Florin

• The Poor Price: 1/4 Gold Florin

Bear in mind that this was an internal guide - if the indulgence vendor thought a king could pay more, he’d pay more. And for those with no money, the price could be prayers and fasting, ensuring 100% market penetration. It was the ultimate “pay what you can” model.

The Basic vs. The Premium Plan

The Church also offered different “tiers” of its product. You could acquire a simple indulgence for minor, everyday sins, but for those with greater sins or deeper pockets, there was the plenary indulgence — a complete remission of all temporal punishment due to sin. This was the Premium Plan: an all-access package that offered total peace of mind for a much higher price. If you made a pilgrimage like the Camino in Spain to Santiago de Compostella, you might get a plenary indulgence.

This allowed the Church to capture value from the entire market, from the casual sinner to the deeply devout nobleman.

The Big Campaign

Finally, these sales were often tied to specific, ambitious projects. When Pope Leo X needed to fund the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, he launched one of the most famous indulgence campaigns in history. This framed the purchase not just as a personal benefit, but as a contribution to a grand, inspiring vision. It’s the medieval equivalent of a modern startup raising a funding round or a university launching a capital campaign — tying a transaction to a larger, motivating story.

This campaign also had a brutally effective marketing slogan expressing the “value for money” in an indulgence, famously attributed to Tetzel (but probably actually from a French rhyme):

“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.”

The Modern Pardoner: HubSpot

So why are we indulging (sorry) in the indulgence as if we were Luther himself? Because this three-part strategy isn’t just a historical curiosity; It’s becoming the standard playbook. You can find all three strategies rolled into one in today’s most successful software companies.

One example is HubSpot and their pricing:

1. The Premium Plan: Go to their pricing page. They have a perfect ladder of “Basic” vs. “Premium” tiers: Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. This is the modern indulgence, a ladder designed to upsell you by offering more “absolution” (more contacts, no “HubSpot” branding, better automation) for a higher price at each level.

2. The Sliding Scale: Their “Enterprise” tier is the modern “King’s price.” It’s not a fixed cost; it’s a high starting price ($150/user/month or more) that requires you to “Contact Sales.” This is the modern “pardoners’ price list”—a private negotiation based exactly on your company’s size and what you can be made to pay.

3. The Big Campaign: They don’t just sell CRM software. They sell a grand, inspiring vision of “Inbound Marketing.” Their massive annual event, “Inbound,” is the modern equivalent of a pilgrimage — a quasi-religious conference designed to get everyone bought into the larger mission, just like funding St. Peter’s Basilica.

Salesforce does the same, but given their famously complex pricing structure, their pricing page doesn’t even show Enterprise costs — you must ‘Contact Sales,’ just like negotiating with a pardoner based on your corporate wealth.

The Price Is Never Just a Number

The sale of indulgences is, of course, one of the most controversial chapters in Christian history — as alluded to it famously triggered Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

But the strategy itself is undeniable. The medieval Church understood a core business truth that modern companies from Salesforce to Tesla still use today: value is often subjective. By creating a flexible, multi-layered pricing structure, they became masters at capturing the maximum possible value from every segment of their market.

The next time you’re agonizing over a single price point, ask yourself: are you selling a one-size-fits-all product? Or could you learn from Luther’s famous villain Tetzel, and find a more creative way to price its value?

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I still remember my Nokia 3210 with fondness. The virtually indestructible little green brick could survive a fall from a building, the battery lasted for days, and Snake was pretty addictive. Everyone had one. Nokia wasn’t just a phone company at the turn of the millennium — it was the phone company.

7 years later, in 2007, it was still the number one phone company, worth north of $150 billion and with 49% of the global mobile phone market. Walk through any city in the world and half the people you passed were texting with a Nokia. Their headquarters in Espoo, Finland, was a monument to total market dominance.

Six years later, Microsoft bought what was left of Nokia’s phone business for $7.2 billion. Not $70 billion. Seven.

What happened?

The Story You’ve Heard

The standard explanation goes like this: Nokia was a bit arrogant and possibly a bit more than a bit complacent. They clung to their clunky Symbian operating system while Apple reinvented the smartphone in 2007 - it became a small computer, and mobile phones became as software centric as the personal computer had become. Nokia were slow, bureaucratic, and too focused on things like cheap phones, hardware manufacturing and logistics to really compete.

It’s sort of a satisfying narrative. But there is a missing piece.

Nokia’s employees weren’t idiots. They saw the iPhone. They knew software was becoming critical. The problem wasn’t stupidity or blindness, or lack of investments, or even necessarily strategy. The problem was that they were trying to build the future in a place where the future wasn’t quite happening:

Ok so maybe not in an old-school sauna, but then again..?

I’m Gonna Be (5,000 Miles)

While Nokia were perfecting the tiny phone and its hardware and manufacturing — the entire game was changing in Silicon Valley.

And here’s the thing: you cannot absorb paradigm shifts from 5,000 miles away. You can read about paradigm shifts, send spies, get lots of SMSes about it and talk about it in the sauna. But when you’re in the epicenter of an industry, you sort of absorb “the next big thing” through osmosis: you overhear engineers from competing companies arguing at the coffee shop. Your best people leave for startups and come back six months later with completely different ideas. You feel the urgency that comes from watching everyone around you ship products while you’re still in planning meetings. And your engineers with good ideas get really angry and quit, because you’re not the only company in town, and then you hire other companies’ angry engineers and learn from them etc.

Nokia had none of that. They actually had a small research center in Palo Alto. But the company wasn’t really in it and breathing the silicon air. Even more importantly: by not being in this ecosystem, they were trying to compete with it from the other side of the world.

It didn’t matter how smart they were. And worse: it didn’t really matter what they did.

The Religious Pattern

Now, here’s why Nokia’s Kodak moment features in this blog about religion and business: Nokia’s fate is not some novel business problem, it demonstrates a key pattern of religious history.

One key question that puzzled historians for centuries has been this:

Why did Christianity, Islam and Buddhism become the world religions while hundreds of other belief systems never made it past their borders?

Was it the message? The deities? The charisma of their founders? Was it Constantine?

Just consider their growth stories:

Christianity, the world’s biggest and most successful religion, emerged in the Roman Empire — the dominant ecosystem of its time, with roads, trade routes, administrative infrastructure, and a (well two really but still) common language stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. When Paul took his message on the road, he wasn’t hacking through wilderness. He was walking on Roman roads, staying in Roman cities, protected by Roman law, speaking to people who could understand him.

You could argue that also Islam is a child of Rome, in its Eastern incarnation, and of Persia. When those two superpowers exhausted themselves in a catastrophic war in the 7th century, the Arabic empire took over a ready-made network of trade routes, administrative systems, and cosmopolitan cities and became an impressive growth engine for its religion.

Buddhism, meanwhile, also enjoyed royal support, but even more importantly it traveled via the Silk Road to China (and onwards to Japan) — the ancient world’s superhighway of commerce and ideas:

It’s not that these did not have competition. Countless other religions and prophets emerged in other places. Think only of Norse mythology, Native American spiritual traditions, Incan or Egyptian religion. These all had followers, sophisticated theologies, rites and compelling visions. But their ideas never traveled because they weren’t connected to the infrastructure and networks that would let them scale. It wasn’t that they were idiots, or that their religious ideas were worse.

The Companies That Figured It Out

What makes the Nokia story really interesting isn’t just their failure, but that other companies faced the exact same problem and solved it:

Spotify started in neighboring Sweden, but Daniel Ek quickly realized you can’t dominate global music from Stockholm. The music industry’s “Rome” was the United States, where the labels, artists, and capital lived. So Spotify moved, culturally and operationally, embedding themselves in the American ecosystem.

If they’d stayed in Sweden and tried to manage everything remotely? They’d be a Swedish Nokia.

BioNTech understood this too. The German company behind the first mRNA COVID vaccine had world-class science, but they immediately partnered with Pfizer — not just for money, but for proximity to the US healthcare ecosystem.

Even Facebook understood this. It was born in the US, but in Boston, and Mark Zuckerberg moved the fledgling company to Palo Alto. He knew that to build a world-changing tech company, he had to be in the epicenter — Silicon Valley. That’s where the venture capital, the network effects, and the specialized engineering talent lived.

All three companies asked themselves a question Nokia apparently never seriously considered: Are we in the right place?

The Strategy of Location

The really dangerous thing about location is that it doesn’t feel like a strategic variable. Your headquarters is just... where you are. Moving is expensive, disruptive, politically fraught, and not often considered in strategy reviews. So most organizations never seriously question it, which means it could be a powerful advantage for those who do.

Four questions to ask:

Where is the center of gravity for talent in your industry right now? Not where it was five years ago. Where are the best people actually choosing to live and work today?

Where is innovation and capital flowing? Which cities are seeing the most new companies, the most investment, the most energy? That’s where the future is being built.

Are you close enough to your most important partners and customers? “Close enough” doesn’t mean “we can fly there for meetings.” It means “we run into them at lunch.” It means “our people move in the same circles.”

Is your location a strategic advantage or just inertia? Be honest. Are you where you are because it’s the best place to execute your strategy? Or just because it’s where you’ve always been?

And an Uncomfortable Truth

A half-decent one from the right place and time? Killer.

The hardest part isn’t understanding this intellectually. It’s accepting that sometimes the best decision means leaving the place you love. Finland was rightfully proud of Nokia — it was a national champion. But that pride became an anchor. In Nokia’s defence, Stephen Elop, tasked with saving it, was rumoured to want to move the company to Silicon Valley. But he was probably too late.

A company’s location isn’t a fixed constraint. It’s a strategic choice that needs repeated re-evaluation. Christianity didn’t become a world religion (only) because Jesus had a better message than other prophets. It scaled because Paul had Roman roads to walk on. And remember that Christianity, born in Judea, moved its HQ to Rome.

And as they say: the rest is history.

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In Part 1 of our quest to find the most religious business, we explored businesses that behave a lot like religions — with devoted followers, guru-like founders, sacred texts, and manifest missions. But there’s one final, fascinating category we need to examine: businesses that don’t just act religious, but actually claim to be religions.

This is where our quest could become somewhat philosophical, because it touches on what a religion actually is. To continue on the practical road we began last time however, let's keep it simple and say that the defining characteristic of a religion is a religious value proposition — providing meaning and access to a higher power. (We’ll dig deeper into religious value propositions another time!) Now, successful religions have actually always offered many other services, be it care for the sick, education, money-lending or political legitimization, but these are not really exclusive to religious organizations so let’s stick with that for now.

Our quest is also intriguing because I’m really only aware of one obvious example of a business fully adopting this approach. And what makes it even more interesting for me: I just discovered a brand new sign advertising their services just a stone’s throw from where I live, which means I now live right between a Jehovah’s Witnesses Hall and a new franchise from these remarkable hommes d’affaires:

Meet the Quite Obviously Most Religious Business

The winner of our quest is, probably to noone’s surprise, the Church of Scientology!

Now, what makes Tom Cruise and John Travolta’s chosen faith different both to other religions and other businesses, and also the clear winner in our quest, is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a business pretending to be a religion. While some critics will complain that many modern megachurches or preachers have turned their churches into businesses, those organizations will at least claim to be religious authorities who just happen to earn money (because God is good, or because money is a sign of how anointed you are or something). Scientology doesn't bother with such pretense. In fact, Scientology’s founder, science fiction and fantasy author Lafayette Ron Hubbard, is quoted as saying this just a few years before launching his religion:

“You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion”

Now if that isn’t a prophecy who knows?

And Scientology’s story didn’t begin with a virgin birth or prophetic revelation or anything remotely as mystical. Instead, it started with the most business-like thing imaginable: a product launch:

In 1950, Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. This Bible of Scientology (or “Book One” in their terminology) wasn’t originally marketed as scripture, but as a form of psychotherapy or self-help system, promising to cure neuroses and unlock human potential. In post WWII America this was probably not the worst book idea you could have, so it became a bestseller. Some have claimed this had something to do with Hubbard’s publisher having groups of Scientologists purchase lots of copies of Hubbard’s books, but it could also have to do with all the publicity gained from negative reviews, including one saying it

“probably contains more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing”

How times have changed!

Hubbard claimed to have written Dianetics in three weeks, and he used a special typewriter with paper on a continuous roll and had dedicated keys for common words like the or but. Whatever he was, he was no slouch.

The Business Model: E-Metered Salvation

Scientology’s commercial framework was clear from day one:

The Core Product: “Auditing” was established as a straightforward fee-for-service offering. Members pay for sessions where they’re questioned while connected to an “E-meter”, with clearly defined price points for each session.

The Product Ladder: “The Bridge to Total Freedom” is a tiered system. Members advance through escalating levels of courses and counseling sessions, each with increasing costs. The highest levels, such as Operating Thetan Level III, reportedly cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — a pricing strategy any SaaS company would admire.

A Franchise Model: To scale operations, Hubbard established Dianetics foundations across the country, operating on a classic franchise model. Local organizations paid fees and followed standardized procedures while central authority maintained brand consistency. (This of course mirrors the most successful organization in the world, the Catholic Church, which we will come back to at some point!)

An entire structure is built around protecting Hubbard’s intellectual property and Scientology aggressively defends its copyrights and trademarks, treating sacred texts as corporate assets.

Anyway, Hubbard’s most inspired move came in 1953. Faced with legal and financial challenges, the Dianetics enterprise was finally incorporated as the “Church of Scientology.” By rebranding as a religion, the organization gained two critical advantages:

A Divine Tax Shelter: After a legendary decades-long battle with the IRS — involving thousands of lawsuits — Scientology secured tax-exempt status in 1993. This victory has been worth billions of dollars. The organization pays no federal income tax, no property tax on its extensive real estate holdings, and accepts tax-deductible donations. For comparison, if Scientology operated as the therapy business it originally resembled, it would face corporate tax rates plus state and local taxes.

A Sacred Legal Shield: By framing its practices as “sacred scripture” and “religious counseling,” Scientology gained First Amendment protections in its homeland. This insulates the organization from regulatory oversight that would apply to other therapy businesses — licensing requirements, ethical standards, consumer protection laws. When former members allege abuse or seek refunds, Scientology invokes religious freedom, claiming these are internal ecclesiastical matters.

Why Scientology Is Different

It’s probably clear by now why Scientology is a quite different company to the ones we looked at in Part 1: Apple, Tesla and Harley-Davidson with their cult-like followings, Bridgewater and IKEA with guru-led cultures and sacred texts, and mission-driven businesses like Patagonia and The Body Shop. While Apple does have “evangelists” and a prophet-founder, it still pays corporate taxes and faces consumer protection laws. IKEA lives its foundational scripture, but it’s structured as a traditional company operating within standard business regulations. And so on. And importantly, none of these offer salvation on a tiered pricing structure.

The Blurred Line

Now, we don’t think there is anything wrong about Scientology, and you should feel as free to become a scientologist as you are to become rich through the lottery. There is a chance. And in fact, there is something refreshingly honest about the business.

In fact, what Scientology reveals is somewhat thought-provoking: the line between a successful business and an organized religion is very, very thin — often a matter of legal classification rather than fundamental operational differences. Had Lafayette Ron Hubbard felt like it, he could probably have been less open about his intentions, spoken a little in tongues, and sold his indulgence certificates audits in a less conspicuous manner. I think it would then have been a completely acceptable new religion.

But Lafayette simply didn’t feel like pretending. And perhaps in his own way he has given the world both a pretty interesting case study - and a bit of a joke on the other religions and businesses?

Have we missed other examples? Let us know!

Coming up:

• The oldest profession in the world

• More religious value propositions and business models

• The roots of sophisticated organization

As a rule, I’m mostly interested in the business of religions — how they make money, how they compete with other religions, and what their growth strategies are, for example. But for a change, let’s look at it from the other direction. Let’s look for religion in business and ask an interesting question to give us some food for thought on a Friday:

Which modern businesses are the most religious?

Asking a question like that raises a number of almost philosophical questions, such as what is actually a religion and what precisely separates the spheres of business and religion, but we’ll try to stay practical this time and jump straight in!

To begin, some of the most immediate candidates for the most religious businesses are brands with fanatical followings. We speak of the “cult of Apple” or “Tesla fanatics” whose devotees line up for new product launches or conventions with a fervor once reserved for miraculous relics - and are led by charismatic founder-prophets like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

A non-tech example of such a brand following is Harley-Davidson, whose members literally brand themselves with the company’s logo, and form a global community with a strong shared identity and common rituals. The company has played on this in their marketing too, with some striking images:

What these brands have in common with religions are powerful creation myths, passionate evangelists, and devoted followers - in addition to the associated imagery and visual profile (someone must surely have written about how Apple stores are the quintessential protestant meeting houses, but I digress).

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Some people like the Danish author Jesper Kunde would say these companies represent a Corporate Religion in his book of the same name. He also pointed to Virgin, which according to him cultivated a rebellious, entrepreneurial religion around Richard Branson’s charismatic leadership. For Kunde, a “Corporate Religion” is a set of shared values and a strong mission that gives employees and customers a sense of belonging to something bigger than a simple commercial entity.

That points us neatly to another type of candidate for the most religious business: the ones with the internal culture and workings of a religion. These Gurus of Method are often built around a founder’s system — a “sacred text” or methodology that followers must study and live by. A good example is the hedge fund company Bridgewater Associates. Founder Ray Dalio’s book, Principles, is not just a management guide; it is the foundational text of the organization. Employees are required to internalize its vocabulary and worldview, operating according to a codified belief system of “radical transparency” where nearly all meetings are recorded and subject to critique. It has a scripture, a prophet, and a clear set of doctrines and rituals.

A more mainstream example of such a culture is IKEA. Its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, wrote The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, a scripture of frugality and simplicity that underpins the company’s culture:

It’s easy to think that these books are just the musings of old men that are put in a cheap bookcase in a corner to be forgotten and ignored, but trust me: IKEA employees definitely work by these values - and the company even reports on this.

Yet another type of candidate is the mission-driven company. Patagonia is quite well known for this, essentially asking its followers not just to buy a product, but to subscribe to an ethical code — a type of environmentalism (sometimes confusing but still). Their famous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign can be thought of as a form of commercial penance, asking followers to buy into a higher cause:

The Body Shop was probably the pioneer of this approach, building its brand on a natural products, animal rights and fair trade.

But - oops - I now realize this post has become a bit long and is still not close to concluding meaningfully - so we’ll continue on our quest in a follow-up! In the meantime, don’t forget to like and share etc.!

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In the previous post I began looking at my favourite type of models, however I may have digressed and ended up looking at a fatally flawed and fruitful one instead of a good one. So let’s look at a successful business model this time instead!

When companies search for new ways of making money, they often look to the latest SaaS company or perhaps a fancy new app. But one of the best business models isn't digital or new at all but a thousand year old one from shinto shrines in Japan:

If you find yourself in Japan and venture to visit such a shrine or a Buddhist temple (they have adopted them as well), chances are you will find a small kiosk or shop selling omamori. These are lucky charms or talismans, often in small, decorated pouches containing sacred inscriptions blessed by priests. You can find them for almost any purpose:

• Success in exams

• IT problems

• Traffic safety

• Love

• Business deals

• Protection against bears

• etc.

On the surface, an omamori is a simple product, but there’s a bit of business genius going on too: importantly, an omamori generally has a limited lifespan, typically of one year. After this, it's customary not to simply throw it away, but to return the old charm to a temple or shrine for proper ritual disposal, often by burning. Of course, upon returning the old one, you are encouraged to purchase a new one for the coming year.

This creates a great (non-digital) subscription or recurring revenue model which:

• Has an annual renewal cycle. The built-in obsolescence nudges a customer towards becoming a repeat customer.

• Creates foot traffic. The need to return the old charm brings customers back to the "store" every single year, creating another opportunity for them to make donations or purchase other goods.

• Deepens the customer relationship. The ritual of returning the old and acquiring the new reinforces the connection to the institution.

Many shrines even create a sense of scarcity by releasing unique or limited-edition charms that are only available at certain times or locations, driving further demand.

Impossible to do in other businesses you say? Well, let me counter with having a lovely Nespresso! (Just kidding, I'll have a real coffee please)

Of course, by creating a closed ecosystem where their machines only work with their proprietary coffee pods, Nespresso ingeniously turned a one-time appliance sale into a continuous, high-margin revenue stream.

The real genius, however, is their recycling program. By encouraging customers to collect used pods and return them to a Nespresso boutique, they are not just being somewhat environmentally responsible; they are replicating the omamori model. The return ritual guarantees regular visits to their retail locations, deepens the customer's loyalty, and ensures they remain locked into the ecosystem for their next purchase. Cynical? Maybe a tad. But it’s for the environment so..

The omamori is just one small example of the many sophisticated business models that have allowed religious organizations to thrive for centuries. We’ll look at more ways religions became the masters of business models going forward!

Meanwhile, this small Japanese charm offers an elegant lesson and prompts a question for modern businesses: How can you turn a single transaction into an enduring customer tradition? Sometimes, inspiration is found in innovative ideas that have been working for a thousand years.