No Different

“When it comes to money, they throw the Bible in the creek.”
Unnamed Prisoner in the Nobles County Jail circa 1985 Commenting on the Church

Jan and I are committed church people. Neither of us can remember a time when church was not a focal point of our lives. Given the significant flaws that you know I have, this may surprise you. I offer this personal background as a backdrop for these comments. Many in the Christian church these days feel that they and their church are under attack. They feel that a liberal press and liberal politicians are committed to the church’s demise. When you look at what has happened to the church’s position in our society over the last decades, one could certainly understand a bit of paranoia. According to the widely quoted December 14, 2021 Pew Research Center report, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has plummeted from 78% in 2007 to 63% in 2021 with the largest drop coming after 2011, while the so-called “nones” have risen from 16% to 29% in the same research period. “Nones” are defined as those who saw themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular”. Doing the math, the ratio of Christians to nones, went from about five to one to about two to one. The losses weighed most heavily on the Protestants. Along with these declines went declines in church membership and declines in church giving.

I am NOT one of the people who are trying to do the church any harm. Indeed, we have agonized with others from our church about our losses. We have lost members, we have lost financial resources, we have lost our place in our community and our culture. We earnestly ask ourselves: Where have we failed? Where are we still failing? We feel we have failed our community, our country, our CHILDREN. What did we do? What DIDN’T we do? How do we reverse these trends?

Experts in the field of religion have written REAMS of reports on this trend. I can’t summarize them in the space of this article. But the following factors have been cited:
• The rise in secularism – see the above statistics – They are even more dramatic for those under the age of 30 – 39% nones.
• Association with ultra-conservative politics – For many, Christianity has become associated with the refusal to recognize: Women’s Rights -witness the recent expulsion of the Saddleback Church from the Southern Baptist Conference over the issue of ordination of women; Reproductive Rights – witness the furor over the overturning of Roe v Wade; and Gay and Transgender Rights. Whatever one believes, statistics indicate that there is a significant level of support for these causes.
• Growing awareness of the organized church’s flaws.
– The avalanche of sexual abuse of children and the cover-ups relating to them (Mostly in the Roman Catholic Church but also present in most denominations even in the Southern Baptist Conference).
– Highly publicized failures of individual pastors in terms of sexual immorality and financial misconduct.
• Generational Shifts – Because of immigration and the mobility of young people, younger cohorts are much more diverse – there are lots more people who have not grown up in a Christian culture.
• Existing Christians drifting away – A 2018 Pew Research document reported that 31% of Americans who were raised in a religion have left it, and 14% of those who left did so after age 50.
• COVID – Among other stresses, churches were forced to cancel in-person meetings. Many became much less committed to weekly attendance when in-person church services resumed.

I wish I knew how to change this. I don’t. But I do find it intriguing that the media seems to find the failures of the organized church so “newsworthy”. Unfortunately, the church seems to be more than capable of supplying lots of material to report on. I’m not saying the church’s issues should be covered up. But I believe that these reports are a significant part of what makes people reject religion these days. Consider the report that just came out about the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (most often referred to as the Mormon Church). Some Christians are not willing to share the Christian designation with the Mormons arguing that many of their core beliefs are not Biblical. I’m not going to get into this – I would simply say that many if not most Americans group the Mormon church with the rest.

The Mormon church and its investment arm have been fined $5 million for failure to comply with Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations. I am sure that this allegation and the church’s response to it get to be very intricate and technical. But in summary the SEC alleged that the Mormons were using shell companies to avoid reporting, in violation of SEC regulations. Apparently, the Mormons have billions of dollars of investments in stocks, bonds, real estate and agriculture. The Church and its investment arm (Ensign Peak) have settled with the SEC admitting to some failures in reporting and would really like to have the whole thing just go away and be forgotten. In 2019 a whistleblower alleged the church had stockpiled nearly $100 billion in funds.

There were also some lawsuits from church members who alleged wrong doings by the executive council of the church. Again, I’m sure that whole tussle got very intricate and legal. But I was struck by the statement by the church. They said they had “relied upon legal counsel regarding how to comply with its reporting obligations while attempting to maintain the privacy of the portfolio”. “We affirm our commitment to comply with the law, regret mistakes made, and now consider this matter closed.” What I found interesting is how similar it sounds to every other individual or corporation who gets caught doing something nefarious and wants to distance themselves from it and put it all in the past. Don’t they call that “putting a spin” on bad news?

And let’s be fair – compared to some others, the wealth of the Mormons is chicken feed. Consider the Roman Catholic Church. According to the University of Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, the Roman Catholic Church owns an astounding 177,000,000 acres of land. That number is a bit hard to grasp but maybe this will help – it’s about 275,000 square miles, about the size of one of our little states – TEXAS. Now of course some of that may be land in the middle of the Sahara. True, but some of it is in downtown New York City too. This doesn’t even count the wealth found in the Vatican. The Vatican runs its own multi-billion-dollar bank, and the value of the artifacts stored there is said to be “incalculable”, but certainly in the trillions of dollars. I hasten to add, I am not anti-Catholic. We have so many Catholic friends and have been to so many Catholic masses, that we count ourselves as “Honorary Catholics,” although we are not certain they would want us.

Lots of individuals and companies are cited by the SEC each year. What makes this one stand out to me? I will respond the way I think most Christian skeptics would.

• Why all of the secrecy? What is it that you don’t want the world or even your own members to know?
• Do you really need to have reserves in these amounts? This doesn’t seem reasonable.
• How can you ask some factory worker in Dayton making $35,000 per year to “tithe” (this means donating ten percent of one’s income) when you have reserves like this?
• Wouldn’t it be more in line with the Church’s stated goals to care for the poor and downtrodden to get some of this wealth into THEIR hands?
• It is just like the prisoner in the Nobles County jail said, those Christians are all talk and no action, ESPECIALLY when it comes to something they value – like money.

A few years ago, I was serving on the board of our local congregation. The church was required to sell an easement on church land allowing the gas company to place a gas main. Compensation was approximately $150,000. There was robust discussion as to what to do with this unexpected inflow of dollars. I will admit that part of me believes that church finances will have their ups and downs and that this money could be used to help us through those variations. I said: “We can’t run this organization on a shoestring”. I am pleased to report that at least in our little congregation, my logic did NOT prevail. Most thought that it was not right and not in keeping with our mission to have these kind of dollars sitting in the bank, when one of our missions and the people there, in Haiti, were so in need of help. And we DID send that cash out to do good things in the world, to Haiti and other places. I wish religious skeptics would focus on what local congregations do more than the machinations of national church organizations.

As I said above, I don’t know what the right thing to do is. But I do believe that people, especially the “nones” I mentioned above, want the church to be DIFFERENT. There are lots of ways they can spend their time and money. They need to pay their bills. They need to buy food and clothing. They can buy things for their home, they can take vacations, they can lavish gifts on those that they love. They can donate to other organizations. And if they are like me they are sick to death of the carefully phrased defenses of the questionable actions an organization has taken. The church seems like just one more. Maybe if we were just a little more RECKLESS in how we loved others in the world and how we used our resources to do it, the nones may notice and say – “Hey what’s up with these people? Maybe they know something that I don’t and I should check them out.”