What about Mormons?
In the mid-1950's, L. Ron Hubbard candidly admitted that he founded Scientology because it was the best way that he could figure to make a lot of money.
A decade earlier, in her definitive biography of Joseph Smith, Fawn Brodie convincingly argued that Mormonism was founded by Smith for the same reason.
Since its founding, Mormonism has become the primary source of sustenance for Smith's family and their descendents, and many of the early Mormon families and their descendents. The well managed religious faith has thus grown into a vast international conglomerate.
Successful businesses adapt to their changing markets and conditions that drive them. For Mormonism, the main engine that propels them is their vast network of members who have been convinced of the need to purchase eternal rewards by making donations to the corporate entity. This must be preserved at all cost. Thus Mormonism has changed over the years as needs arose, often profoundly. For example:
- Polygamy was once deemed essential for salvation, "if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory." But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, faced with government seizure of their corporate assets including their huge perpetual immigration fund, the everlasting covenant was abandoned, at least for the present time in the present life.
- The Mormon Church once proudly declared that they were the only true religion because all Christian denominations had become corrupt, an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, and were in a state of apostasy. Yet, in the early 1960s, when Mormon leaders discovered fertile recruiting territory among the very Christian groups they once condemned, the Church radically changed its message to a more inviting and acceptable one (to potential new recruits) of, "We're Christians just like you."
- The supremacy of white and delightsome Caucasians over dark and loathsome Lamanites (i.e. American Indians) and Negros was a key teaching until the 1970's. Then, faced with adverse publicity, boycotts, loss of membership, and forfeiture of the Church's tax exempt status, Mormon leadership capitulated and almost 150 years of doctrine was duly discarded.
- After nearly a century, Mormonism's sacred temple ceremony was revealed to be steeped in occult rituals, blood oaths, condemnation of pastors as dimwitted hirelings of Satan, the anointing and touching of private body parts, and other practices highly offensive to non-Mormons. Faced with unwanted criticism and more adverse publicity, the Church changed its sacred rites, supposedly handed directly from Mormonism's god to Joseph Smith, and thus unchangeable, twice, once in the 1930's and again in the 1990's.
- Given numerous discrepancies and contradictions in their holy writings, Mormons have been forced to alter major portions of all of their sacred scripture on many occasions, making thousands of changes in the process. The problems associated with Smith's supposedly inspired more than 4,000 corrections to the Holy Bible were so profound that the Utah Sect (but not the Missouri Sect) went so far as to abandon Smith's holy rewrite altogether.