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By Kent Larsen
Fears Over Commercialization Of Religon Led Church To Make Mstar Non-profit
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH -- The proliferation of websites on religion has
led to a similar proliferation of sites seeking to make a buck from
those looking for spirituality on-line. And this commercialization
led the LDS Church to change the development of Mstar, the company
that manages its internet presence.
Set up in 1999 following the purchase of LDS book publisher Bookcraft
and its sibling Infobases, Mstar was originally launched as a for
profit business. But Church officials soon worried that a for profit
business would commercialize the spiritual material they sought to
provide. "[The commercialization of religion] is always a huge
concern for us," said Franklin Lewis, Mstar's president.
Just a few months later, the Church changed Mstar from a for-profit
business to a not-for-profit business, and since then it has tried to
separate the company's for-profit activities from its spiritual
activities. The for-profit activities include activities purchased
from Infobases, such as the LDSWorld website. That website offers
LDS-related materials for sale, and includes web versions of material
sold elsewhere.
But Mstar also builds and maintains the LDS Church's main website,
lds.org. The material on that site includes Conference talks, the
text of the Church magazines and background information about the
Church, all for free. In one case, the company even brought some of
the previously commercial material from the LDSWorld site and made it
part of the LDS.org website, eliminating the advertising on that
material.
These articles also look at how other religions are struggling with
the same issue of how to put spiritual material on the Internet
without over-commercializing it. And the LDS Church is only one of
many churches that have made major commitments to the Internet.
And many Internet users are looking for exactly that. The research
company Barna Research Group estimates that 25 million people
currently use the Internet to get religious information and
expression, and a study by the Pew Internet &American Life Project
indicates that 22% regularly get spiritual information from the Internet.
Sources:
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