And God Said, “Let There be Essential Oils”: Multi-Level Marketing and Christian Women

“Spiritually Fly Membership is your personal guide and daily companion, offering the wisdom, structure, and support you need to navigate healing, personal growth, and balance in your everyday life” (Hunter, 2021). By simply purchasing the membership, Faith Hunter from BODi promises to help members live a “soul-aligned life” and “nurture an unshakable sense of self” (Hunter, 2021). BODi is a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) company that sells fitness programs like Spiritually Fly, diet plans, supplements, and other health products in order to promote physical, mental, and spiritual growth. MLMs like Bodi offer an important glimpse into the future of Christian faith and spirituality and how views of religiosity may develop with respect to consumption, sales, and religious practices. Understanding how influential these companies are among Christian women—and the potential consequences of this form of faith-based late-stage capitalism—is an important contribution to the conversation in religious studies on the interaction between commodification and spirituality, which was initiated by scholars such as Kathryn Lofton.

I will present primary data from many social media pages, conference recordings, and Zoom leadership calls and, through qualitative content analysis and systematic analysis of the language and religious rhetoric that is used, offer a glimpse into the ways in which a new form of Christian spirituality is being produced around MLM companies. A central example is Gary Young, the founder of Young Living, saying on his blog that he believes “essential oils are a conduit between us and God” (Young, 2014). However, if this were the case, then the message Young is sending to his company is that one would have to buy, sell, and promote these products in order to be part of this special communion with God. Another case of this correlation between God and MLM products is found on a MONAT representative’s blog post, in which she says, “I saw a spiritual parallel between the way MONAT works on hair and the way God works on our hearts” (Windham, 2018).

Based on my research, the profile of the MLM “hun” (a term used to describe members of MLMs, which comes from the common “Hey Hun!” opening in cold messages) are typically young, typically White, and typically Christian women. These young White women are mystically drawn to the sorts of communities that promote the Christian faith along with capitalist ideals like early retirement, alternative streams of income, and work-related time-freedom. By investing in this arena of religious study via consumerism, I will reveal where there is a lack of methodological attention to the spiritual processes that are taking place within these communities, despite the fact that the interaction between faith and consumerism is ripe with the same language and conversion/evangelical mechanisms that we see within Christian faith-based communities. For example, companies are offering spiritual well-being that is based on the sale of egregious products like Young Living’s “Magnify Your Purpose Essential Oil Blend,” which retails for $53.95. I will explore how faith is being deployed among multi-level marketing spaces through the intentional use of language, as I previously mentioned, and other Christian concepts that construct the foundation of these consumer-based communities.

Utilizing the argument in Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism reveals how MLMs and Protestant Christianity relate to each other so well in the first place. The rhetoric of having a strong work ethic, comparing business success to moral worth, and finding purpose by following one’s “calling” are all concepts that Weber has identified within this work, and MLM communities have expressed. Other research in this area comes from Mara Einstein’s Brands of Faith (2008) and Religions as Brands (2014) by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Program, which explore religion and marketing as they operate together in the Western world. Selling the Sacred (2024) also offers essays on the analysis of “marketing religion as a product and marketing products as religion” (Einstein and Taylor, 2024). Additionally, I will apply the theory of lived religion and the cultural theory of religion as consumption that scholars like Kathryn Lofton have done research in.

Kathryn Lofton offers incredible insight into the interplay between consumerism and spirituality in her book Consuming Religion, where she explores a modern conception of corporate and consumer culture as a form of religiosity. My argument centers on Lofton’s perception of spiritual consumer culture, revealed in her assertion that “capitalism does not replace religion, nor does it merely support it; rather, it produces religious subjects who understand their self-worth through acts of consumption” (Lofton, 2017). My research derives from this concept and focuses on the ways in which the spiritual lives of women in MLMs are cultivated.

My research indicates that the lifestyle MLMs encourage is one that reveals an increasingly intertwined relationship between commerce, identity, and faith. Most of the time, what these women are seeking is to fulfill the image of the perfect Christian family, and MLMs are promising them that dream. When they are engaging with MLM marketing material, they do not see a product or business being sold to them; they see a community of other Christian women who want to put their families first, heal their bodies and minds, and live in a God-honoring way. All of which just so happens to align with protestant capitalist ideals. With the development of new MLMs every year, there is a great need for research that addresses the role of corporations like MLMs in the lives of faith practitioners. Recognizing how the Christian identity and spirituality are affected by these businesses is fundamental for understanding how faith and capitalism have become inseparably linked in modern America.

Einstein, M., & Taylor, S. M. (Eds.). (2024). Selling the Sacred: Religion and Marketing from Crossfit to QAnon. Taylor & Francis.

Hunter, F. (2021). Faith Hunter. FaithHunter.com. https://www.faithhunter.com/ 

Lofton, K. (2017). Consuming religion. University of Chicago Press.

Windham, R. (2018, November 1). A MONAT kind of message. Rachel Windham Blog. from https://www.rachelwindham.com/blog-tips--tidbits/a-monat kind-of-message 

Young, G. (2014, November 27). Giving thanks for what God gave me. D. Gary Young Blog. https://dev.dgaryyoung.com/blog/2014/giving-thanks-for-what-god-gave-me…;