One of the main messages from the church is that IF you feel a warm positive emotion, or feeling THEN you know what is being taught or said is true and from God. As long as the questions you ask align with the questions they want you to ask and your emotional response is what they hope you feel, this experience is propped up as a true conversion moment. Huge life decisions are made using this line of thinking. Decisions such as joining a church, where to go to college, whether to serve a mission, who to marry and when, and when to have kids and how many, etc, etc.
Warm Fuzzies from The Holy Ghost
Terms like “warm fuzzy feeling” are often used to describe this positive emotional state, characterized by feelings of contentment, satisfaction, and well-being. The church teaches that these feelings are thanks to the witness of the Holy Ghost. It’s a subjective experience that varies from person to person and can be influenced by many factors such as personality, mood, and life circumstances. Overall, the message to investigators is clear: study the gospel (materials the missionaries present) pray about it, and if you feel “good” about it, act! The missionaries are taught a whole sales tactic called “the commitment pattern” to get people to do what they want. What these proselytizing missionaries want, is what they’re told to want: to baptize people into the church. Then once individuals, or preferably families, are baptized, this same pattern continues to get them to commit to more.
Scientifically, the sensation of a “warm fuzzy feeling” is more related to the release of chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. Activities that can cause the release of these chemicals and the subsequent feeling of a “warm fuzzy feeling” include spending time with loved ones, exercising, engaging in hobbies or activities that bring pleasure, and achieving goals or accomplishments. This sensation can even be triggered by memories and thoughts, not only by physical experiences. So thinking about family, love, or God would typically evoke good feelings, and the illogical trap is sprung.
Engineering The Holy Ghost
The marketing teams for the church figured out that these feelings can be engineered with the proper setup. That’s what the church-owned media company, Bonneville International, focuses on. They registered and trademarked it as a process they call HeartSell®. Bonneville is a subsidiary of Deseret Management Corporation (DMC), a for-profit arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
HeartSell®
The for-profit marketing subsidy owned by the church, takes practices of the church and integrates them with marketing. It is no longer online, but from around 2008 through 2015 the Bonneville International website described their marketing approach as something eerily similar to how the church operates. They loved their idea so much they even trademarked a name for it, HeartSell®. They call it a “uniquely powerful brand of creative” and “strategic emotional advertising that stimulates response.”
Affecting Change by Reaching the Hearts and Minds of our Audiences
At Bonneville Communications, our ability to touch the hearts and minds of audiences makes us an essential resource for organizations with vital messages.
For more than 30 years, our creative professionals have designed public service and direct response messages for national nonprofit organizations such as the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Boy Scouts of America, National Hospice Foundation, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and The Salvation Army.
Our unique strength is the ability to touch the hearts and minds of our audiences, evoking first feeling, then thought and, finally, action. We call this uniquely powerful brand of creative “HeartSell”® – strategic emotional advertising that stimulates response.
Our people not only create effective messages; we get them out effectively. We maintain an ongoing public service relationship with more than 11,000 radio and TV stations and networks, and cable networks and systems in North America alone. We distribute public service and paid media campaigns directly from our offices in Salt Lake City.
We provide all pre-production, production, and post-production services, as well as state-of-the-art special effects and post-production facilities, closed captioning, electronic tagging, and video and audio duplication.
We are an advertising agency engaged in communications for quality life. Our people are driven by the belief that advertising can – and should – be a powerful, positive influence on the values and lives of people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150219201604/http://www.bonneville.com/?nid=32
With HeartSell the marketers present you with information and media that intentionally tugs at your heart in the right way to sell something to you. To manipulate your feelings and bring you to act on these feelings – which they tell you at church come from God and bear witness of truth. This mixes how marketing works and how religion works. The missionary discussions and devotional talks are engineered to be effective with the same techniques that the for-profit marketing subsidiary of the church calls it’s uniquely powerful strategic emotional advertising. The same emotions that HeartSell® is credited with generating are also credited to the Holy Ghost. They are engineering these warm fuzzy Holy Ghost experiences to literally “convert” the audience. The church is selling the Gospel then? with the Spirit? or with HeartSell®?
If church leaders think God causes these feelings through the Holy Ghost, why do they need to employ Bonneville’s Heartsell® to foster emotional responses in media? Are the truth claims of the church even true? Do they need to be true to feel good about them?
This technique can thus be used to ‘sell’ any product, any idea, irrespective of whether or not
Donald Cohen, Examining Church Claims – A Multi-faceted Approach to the Claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
there is any truth or real value to it. And without doubt, this technique is used extensively in the various Church media productions, educational materials, etc., and accounts for why people feel the ‘spirit’ and are thereby effectively manipulated into drawing the conclusion that the Church is true. Those are strong words, I realize, but I don’t see any more accurate way of describing what is really going on here.
http://dlcphoto.com/Temp/ExaminingChurchClaims.pdf
We may ask if HeartSell® was effective. Bonneville boasts many awards for advertising and HeartSell® is even mentioned in encyclopedia.com in the listing for the company.
By the mid-1990s Bonneville subsidiary Bonneville Communications had earned about 400 awards, including 15 Clios for advertising excellence, three Emmys, and a Bronze Lion from the Cannes Film Festival. Bonneville Communications used what it called “Heart Sell” emotional advertising to promote the LDS church and also other clients, including Foot Locker, Kinney Shoe Corporation, Wilson’s Leather, B. Dalton Booksellers, The Salvation Army, Charter Medical Corporation, and The American Cancer Society. A company publication in the mid-1990s stated, “As one of the pioneers of high-quality public service advertising, Bonneville Communications clears more free air time for its clients than any other agency in the world.”
https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/bonneville-international-corporation
The church and its marketing efforts seem to acknowledge that these warm fuzzy feelings from the Holy Ghost are psychologically induced. The church is manipulating people.
The Church has known for a long time that you can induce feelings in people, and people will be moved by those feelings to behave in certain ways.
There is an inner dialogue that takes place around, the minds narrator. May I remind you that the science in this is understood, even at Bonneville Communications – a church owned company that produces all of their videos and many of the church’s promotional materials.
They call it Heartsell, and until recently you could find an interesting write up about how they use this exact process and offer their services doing this exact thing – manipulating emotions to drive our behaviours – for companies across the US.
Here is what Bonneville Communications had to say about this:
“Our unique strength is the ability to touch the hearts and minds of our audiences, evoking first feeling, then thought and, finally, action. We call this uniquely powerful brand of creative ‘HeartSell’® – strategic emotional advertising that stimulates response.”
There can be no doubt that the ‘Feeling’ of the Holy Ghost is psychologically induced. For example, when Paul H Dunn spoke from the stand, many many members noticed how powerful his stories were, and they claimed to have felt the spirit testify during those talks. Later we find out that those stories were made up. How then do we explain the discrepancy?
Science can explain how we receive information from external stimuli and how it affects both the internal voice we experience as we process its meaning quietly in the background of our minds, and it can explain how this then affects our feelings which in turn drive our behaviours. This occurrence happens every single day to everyone who takes the time to slow down in their environment and recognise it.
Comment by Dee,
https://gregtrimble.com/science-behind-feeling-the-holy-ghost/#comment-102
Marketing is an amazing thing. This uniquely powerful, strategic emotional manipulation of peoples’ feelings has been trademarked by the LDS Church. HeartSell® has proven to be a useful tool in advertising; it seems it’s also effective in LDS proselytizing…
Bonneville’s HeartSell® is a seduction of the eye. It strategically appeals to our emotions to stimulate a pre-determined response. It is a marketing ploy designed for us to watch with our eyes — devoid of conscience — and then be willingly catapulted to action.
Strategic Emotional Advertising, by Sharon Lindbloom – June 8, 2007
https://blog.mrm.org/2007/06/strategic-emotional-advertising/
Consider if the speakers at General Conferences are given “Heartsell” training. Or what about the producers of the media (and social media) publications of the Church.
Bonneville made “Heartsell” available commercially. This is kind of like pimping out the Holy Ghost. They sell this unique type of marketing service to any company that will pay, “such as the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Boy Scouts of America, National Hospice Foundation, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and The Salvation Army.”
HeartSell Scriptures
He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool…
Proverbs 28:26
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/prov/28?lang=eng&id=p26#p26
He who trusts HeartSell® is a fool?
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/jer/17?lang=eng&id=p9#p9
How does it feel to have a corporation like the church manipulating your feelings and marketing their own brand of truth to you? They engineer or psychologically induce feelings in people which they attribute to the Holy Ghost. They attempt to HeartSell® you. They use strategic emotional advertising to stimulate you to feel a certain way, tell you it is from God, and “invite” you to commit to their rules and their ways of thinking. Please share your thoughts below or register on wasmormon.org to share your full I was a Mormon story with the world.
More reading:
- https://bonneville.com/about-us/
- https://gregtrimble.com/science-behind-feeling-the-holy-ghost/#comment-102
- https://blog.mrm.org/2007/06/strategic-emotional-advertising/
- http://johnlarsen.org/podcast/Archive/MormonExpression250.mp3
- https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/l2xp8c/heartsell/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/75e2w0/i_have_been_out_for_a_long_time_and_i_didnt_know/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/abairj/manufactured_feelings_of_the_spirit_heartsell/
- https://discussmormonism.com/viewtopic.php?t=137365
- https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,618601,618601,quote=1
- https://ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=37790
- https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/7226dj/my_face_when_i_realize_i_dont_have_to_listen_to/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/493315/the_lds_church_has_broken_archiveorgs_heartsell/