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What is the cost of megachurches’ “clever” marketing?
Megachurches remove traditional Christian symbols from their unique brand identities to appeal to a mass audience, while failing to show people their true convictions.
Few conversation topics right now seem to set more fire to the group chat than cults—our fascination with them being targeted in recent documentary series like HBO Max’s The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, examining the life and problematic ministry of Remnant Fellowship Church founder Gwen Shamblin, and Amazon Prime’s LuLaRich, which tells about the meteoric growth and even faster plummet of multi-level marketing retail company LuLaRoe.
In both docuseries, most prominently in The Way Down and surprisingly so in LuLaRich, religion plays a role in creating the environments that allow the documentaries’ focal communities to be thought of as cults. Raised in a Church of Christ family, Gwen Shamblin developed her popular Weigh Down Workshop, which gave way to her establishing Remnant Fellowship Church, based on a literal, evangelical interpretation of the Bible. In LuLaRich, we learn that LuLaRoe’s founders DeAnne and Mark Stidham are Latter-Day Saints—and Mark Stidham was even noted as proclaiming passages from the Book of Mormon during…
