The word televangelist has become a cliché for shameless con artists with boundless greed and jaw-dropping hypocrisy. The list of transgressions committed under the guise of religion is far too long for any one person to detail. Still, some manage to stand out. Pat Robertson routinely blames every natural disaster on God's anger about abortion and homosexuality. Joel Osteen preaches the ludicrous prosperity gospel, a self-reinforcing fraud that says if you show your faith by giving some money to God through the church, He'll bless you with more money. It's worked nicely for Osteen, who lives in a $10.5 million mansion that would make a rockstar envious. Then there's Kenneth Copeland, a garbage dump of a man who in this clip lectures that those who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic still need to keep sending money to their church.
It shouldn't surprise you that these three are all worth tens of millions of dollars. While the bible admonishes against greed and wealth, some pastors have decided that they themselves should be able to decide which bible passages are worth taking seriously. When Jesus said rich people wouldn't get into heaven, he apparently was misinformed. ( I guess even saviours make boo-boos.) The fact that donations often come from people who can't actually afford it doesn't seem to trouble these men in the least.
Besides being successful grifters, Robertson, Osteen and Copeland have another thing in common: you, the good taxpayers of Canada, are subsidizing them.
The writer Tom Wolfe once said a cult was a religion with no political power. But whether they have power or not, every religious organization gets a big gift from both US and Canadian governments: they are fully exempt from paying taxes. They don't have to pay property taxes on any buildings they own, and the donations they take in are not subject to income tax, while their donors can deduct their donations from their own taxes, up to a limit. In Canada, religious charities are also eligible to get back up to half of the GST they paid on certain items.
The three men mentioned above have all set up religious charitable organizations here, which allows them to take in tax-free money from Canadians This is what the CRA considers charitable activities for religious organizations: the relief of poverty, the advancement of education, the advancement of religion and "other purposes that are beneficial to the public as determined by the courts." Almost anything a church does could be considered as 'advancing religion' and they can therefore sell almost any product or service under this aegis. For example, the website for Robertson's 700 Club in Canada is nothing but donation forms and advertisements hawking Christian-themed books, magazines and DVDs. Apparently, this is all they need to do to keep their exempt status.
Essentially, the legal requirements allow you to bring in a lot of money that, unlike a real registered charity, you don't have to spend. You can guess where all that money will go, right? While both in the US and Canada there are requirements that salaries must be 'reasonable', that still leaves a lot of leeway. Besides, there are other ways a pastor can be compensated over and above his salary - through nepotism (having family members working for the organization is a common practice among the megachurches in the US), through the liberal use of expense accounts and by buying expensive toys that are then held as church property. That's how it was legal for this paragon of virtue to get his flock to give him money for a fourth private jet. Add to all this that any blatant wrongdoing will likely go unnoticed because enforcement is feeble. The chances of being audited are minuscule since the CRA only audits a few hundred of the more than 170,000 charities and non-profits in a given year. The chance of being audited is even lower in the US.
It's important to acknowledge that many churches actually do a lot of good work over and above their spiritual functions. They provide food, clothing, counselling, etc, often to people who can't get help from anywhere else. Since the services they provide are smaller in scale and local, they aren't encumbered by the bureaucracy and rigidity that a similar big government program would be. Churches also provide a sense of community, the value of which shouldn't be underestimated in the atomistic times we live in. But it's equally fair to point out that all of this work can also be done just as well by secular non-profits and charities.
Canada has around 32,000 religious charities. If you combined them all, their assets would total $47 billion and they'd be one of the top twenty largest companies in Canada. There aren't any good numbers, but based on the assets it's easy to see that all these tax exemptions cost Canadians billions of dollars every year. When you factor in that only 13 percent of Canadians attend church weekly and that only 29 percent say religion is very important to them, it's clear that a lot people are footing the bill for something they don't find particularly beneficial. Conservatives are big on user fees, based on the view that people who value something should be willing to pay for it. So why doesn't that apply to religion?
Even if we don't completely remove the tax exemptions, the rules should be changed. The requirements for charitable status should be made a lot more stringent by making these entities actually do things that are, you know, charitable. We could also consider making them fundraise for specific projects or activities that donations would be tied to, like a new church building or a food bank. As it now stands, the government is giving the conmen a helping hand, and using your money to do it.
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