Today’s story concerns the mostly-legal but entirely-sketchy money-making engine that undergirds evangelicalism these days. Even I had no idea how deep the rot goes—and I’m the one who began using that phrase to describe this exact bunch of conjobs! Come with me, and we’ll explore the various ways that evangelical leaders can get filthy rich off of Jesus’ unknowing sheep.
(From introduction: The “synthetic CDO” gambling scene from “The Big Short.”)
(This post went live on Patreon on 9/10/2024. Its audio ‘cast is there too, and available to anyone by the time you see this!)
It all began so innocently
“Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” [Luke 12:27 NIV]
When I run tabletop roleplaying games, I like to start players off with a small-sounding task that blows up into a vast storyline.
Imagine my surprise when that exact same process played out for me in real life!
For a recent post, I wanted to know how Jordan Hall’s legal situation was going lately. In the course of that investigation, I happened upon a website that tracks this kind of thing. It listed a bunch of criminal and civil lawsuits going on. At the time, Hall faced charges of drug possession, driving under the influence, and carrying a concealed weapon while under the influence.
(In August, authorities also charged Hall with domestic violence using a knife and strangulation. Around that same time, his former church has accused him of embezzling over $10k. SO VERY JESUSY, MUCH CHRISTIAN, WOW. For real, it’s a rule: the louder Christians are about their superior Jesusing, the worse they turn out to be.)
I noticed that this site also listed charges filed against one Randall “Randy” Free. So I was trying to remember the name of a Randy Whozit who’d run in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) presidential election a few years back. It turned out to be a different guy; the SBC President candidate Randy is Randy Adams. He was an interesting fellow. At the time, his main focus was educating SBC-lings on the sheer corruption of the North American Mission Board (NAMB).
Randy Free is another SBC pastor, and not one I think Adams would like very much. In 2021, Free’s elders accused Free and his wife of selling their church’s property out from under the congregation. This past December, Free got sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for various financial crimes against his church:
Free and his wife Michelle were accused of taking control of the church’s assets by making himself the president and registered agent for the Cedar Cross Country Church. The Frees then set up a separate non-profit corporation, Team Heritage International, in order to move the church’s assets and sell the church property for between $1 million and $1.5 million. Some of those funds were apparently used by the Frees to buy themselves a house.
But then, I noticed the other posts on the site.
As it turns out, Free wasn’t the first evangelical to ever come up with a scheme like that. In fact, creating baffling businesses with inscrutable funds transfers seems to be a very common way for evangelical leaders to enrich themselves at their congregation’s expense.
Evangelicalism is a business on super-easy mode
Infalli-a-ble, say it with a straight face
That’s right, my God backs up every single word that I say
‘Cause he’s not some old guy living up in the clouds
He’s here on Earth, in my wallet and my bank accounts
[“The Pope Rap” by Trevor Moore]
In America at least, evangelicals’ so-called ministries operate under very different rules than regular businesses. American laws don’t force ministry leaders to follow the same rules that all other businesses must. That’s because ministries aren’t supposed to care about the same things that regular businesses do. They don’t even need to care about the same things that regular non-profits do.
But oh, they do care. They care enormously. As a result, their leaders take ruthless advantage of their comparatively lax legal obligations.
In most states, churches must abide by certain rules concerning their general organization. These include:
Churches and nonprofit organizations must file appropriate paperwork to remain in good standing with the state. This includes Articles of Incorporation, a Constitution & Bylaws, nonprofit (501-c3) filing, IRS-related paperwork, an EIN, and appropriate financial documents. In addition, a church or religious organization must file paperwork listing its board members, a profile of its spiritual mission, insurance paperwork, schedule regular business meetings, and maintain minutes of key meetings.
In addition, churches must abide by other rules regarding employees’ tax classification, the church property itself, nondiscrimination in hiring, and some basic laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Our government asks churches to abstain from politics. In return, churches are generally tax-exempt. (It reminds me of that saying, “No taxation without representation,” except in reverse: No representation? Then no taxation.) To access this incredible perk, churches don’t even need to register with the IRS! Moreover, congregants can donate any amount of money to churches, and all of their donations may be claimed as tax exemptions.
But on the IRS website, on p. 9 of their PDF, we find this interesting bit:
An IRC Section 501(c)(3) organization’s activities must be directed exclusively toward charitable, educational, religious or other exempt purposes. The organization’s activities may not serve the private interests of any individual or organization. Rather, beneficiaries of an organization’s activities must be recognized objects of charity (such as the poor or the distressed) or the community at large (for example, through the conduct of religious services or the promotion of religion). [. . .] Also, private benefit must be substantial to jeopardize tax-exempt status.
Reading that felt to me like hearing an ominous rumble of thunder in the distance, like catching the gunpowder-like scent of incoming torrential rains.
The transparency watchdog of evangelicalism is no more
In addition to enjoying tax-exempt status, churches are under no obligation at all to file Form 990s with the IRS. Form 990 is a declaration of income and expenditures that other nonprofits must file. Though not overly detailed, it gives a rough idea of how much a nonprofit took in versus what got spent on its major staffers and projects. It is a public document. Some ministers proudly file this form, as Oral Roberts did while he was alive.
Some years back, I heard about the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA). It was a voluntary group that evangelical leaders can join to demonstrate their financial accountability to their flocks.
Tellingly, only a tiny fraction of evangelical leaders joined it. But at least the group existed. Until they started up, evangelical leaders faced zero real financial accountability. That said, it’s interesting to me that Oral Roberts refused to join the ECFA, considering it a poor substitute for simply filing the Form 990. (Oral Roberts University, however, joined the ECFA in 2009—right about when Roberts himself died.)
The ECFA still exists. But you might have noticed I’ve been referring to it in the past tense. That’s because the group has somehow been completely gutted.
Years ago in 2011, two senators (Republican Chuck Grassley and Democrat Max Baucus) in the Senate Finance Committee sought to tighten up the laws around ministries. They asked the ECFA to examine existing laws and make recommendations about what needed to be done to make ministries truly accountable. Unfortunately, the ECFA did the dead-ass opposite:
Unbeknownst to Senator Grassley, ECFA’s task force included some lawyers and CPAs working for the very ministries they had investigated and not surprisingly, ECFA recommended only new legislation which would have loosened the tax code, not strengthened it, and thus blew any chance of reigning in the wild abuses we see daily.
WHOOPS.
Making the situation even worse, the ECFA declared that it was, itself, “an association of churches.” They didn’t apply for any sort of official reclassification, of course, preferring instead to simply declare it. They probably did it because “associations of churches” don’t need to file that all-important Form 990 that other nonprofits must. (You can read up about “associations of churches” starting on p. 9 of this PDF.) Indeed, they haven’t filed one with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) since 2020.
In the utterly broken system of evangelicalism, the foxes now guard the henhouse.
The family business (empire) of evangelicalism
So now you have a basic idea of the obligations churches have, as well as a good idea of what rules they don’t have to follow compared to other nonprofits. Their leaders don’t need to report much at all, and if they keep their staffing fairly minimal, then they don’t need to follow many employment laws. But they’re officially not allowed to dabble in politics nor enrich any one private person too much.
But of these few requirements, we can ask the same question we ask of those one-sided church covenant agreements: Or else what? Who forces these evangelicals to follow the rules? Where are the teeth in these laws?
Because very little enforcement occurs around evangelical rulebreaking, ambitious evangelical leaders can play all kinds of games with money. In May 2023, we found out about Johnny Hunt’s vast business empire. Johnny Hunt is one of the biggest names—and most active kingmakers—in the SBC. After a long career in ministry, he became the Vice President of the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB), which has had a really bad reputation for decades.
Once firmly ensconced in his new fiefdom, King Johnny set about entangling NAMB with his personal businesses—err, I mean ministries. After investigating whatever Form 990s they could dig up from Hunt’s empire, Baptist News Global drew up a diagram to show the links between each ministry. Their diagram also includes discrepancies between reality and what actually got declared on the forms. Seriously, this diagram rivals anything I’ve seen out of Endtimes conspiracy theorists.
The end result of this investigation revealed that Johnny Hunt’s children, grandchildren, in-laws, and more work in these different ministries in what sure sound like sinecure positions. Hunt allegedly used his SBC leadership contacts and networks to enrich himself and his entire extended family. If anyone proved to be foolish enough to impede his quest for riches and power, Hunt had more than enough sway in the SBC to fire and drive away that person.
(See also: The crony network of evangelicalism.)
The site that tracks the private planes of evangelicalism
Back during that 2011 Senate investigation I mentioned a moment ago, a prosperity gospel pastor, Creflo Dollar, had flat refused to provide full information to Chuck Grassley’s staff. Not long after it concluded, we all found out why he felt so reluctant to share with the class.
In 2015, Dollar demanded that his congregation in Atlanta donate USD$60M to him so he could buy a private jet. At the time, I remember people being just shocked at his audacity and obvious greed. At the time, he was full of braggadocio about it. He told his congregation and anybody who’d listen about how he totally deserved to live in the lap of luxury. In fact, about the only luxury he didn’t have was a private plane. However, the outcry around this request went viral. He quietly withdrew the request, but he’d get his desire eventually.
Dollar wasn’t at all the only evangelical pastor who craved that ultimate and oh-so-prestigious sign of luxury. In time, the number of pastors with private planes grew to the point where an entire watchdog site sprang up to keep track of their comings and goings! The Pastor Planes project now tracks 63 of these planes. Some of these planes are owned by recognizable groups like Liberty University and Bob Jones University. Kenneth Copeland owns at least three aircraft under the name “Eagle Mountain International Church.”
And yes, Creflo Dollar is listed there as having two planes. One is a Gulfstream G-IV, similar to the one he’d demanded in 2015. It’s not as fancy and was bought used, which I’m sure chapped his ass. Either way, though, he didn’t publicly announce his newest purchase in June, a Gulfstream G550!
This tracking has also revealed a considerable number of apparent personal trips, which are off-limits for business and nonprofit aircraft. Often, evangelical leaders use these planes to commute back and forth from their vacation homes and vacation trips.
Joni Lamb, a famous televangelist, apparently used her private plane to make two dozen flights from her church hometown in Fort Worth to Colorado Springs. Later on, Pastor Planes discovered that her new love interest, Paul Weiss, lived there. They got engaged in March 2023. They honeymooned in Florida, using her private plane to get there and back to Texas.
Trade names in evangelicalism get used to hide a multitude of sins
The love interest in question here, Paul Weiss is a religious marriage counselor/sex therapist. And he has his own super-sketchy financial dealings. He apparently filed a fraudulent Form 990 for 2022. But his real talent for fiction showed up in his use of trade names.
A trade name is a business name that someone or a group uses. It’s not their real name. It’s made up. Sometimes you see people call these DBAs (Doing Business As). And ministries love them. See, even though it’s a made-up name, ministries can open bank accounts in a DBA’s name. They can do business with it.
More importantly, evangelical leaders can shuffle money around between all their DBA accounts. The more DBA accounts they have, the more money they can shuffle around—and the harder it’ll be for anyone to figure out what’s going on. These other groups often get classified by the IRS as “integrated auxiliaries,” and yes, they are exempt from a lot of reporting requirements.
All by himself, Kenneth Copeland—he of the enraged pointy finger and creepy bizarre laugh—counts for “at least 21 ‘assumed names‘” that operate under his main ministry.
What’s really wild is that often, one of these DBA names is extremely similar to another. Donors might not realize that these names represent not one but two completely separate bank accounts. Donald Trump’s lawyer, evangelical Jay Sekulow, uses this trick to his advantage. He runs “American Center for Law & Justice” and “American Center for Law and Justice.” See the ampersand? Those are two totally different groups!
(Sekulow’s telemarketers also learn how to squeeze money out of people they know are unemployed. One of their scripted responses has them scaring their victims with warnings of “liberal activists” trying to “undermine our traditional Christian values.”)
And the shocking amount of luxury real estate church leaders own
We couldn’t talk about the financial weirdness in evangelicalism without considering the humble parsonage.
Traditionally, a parsonage is a house that the church congregation owns. They allow their pastor to live there rent-free. The church doesn’t need to pay property taxes on the house, as long as it fits into some fairly lax state laws.
As you might guess, then, a huge luxury parsonage becomes a way for churches to attract big-name pastors. Those pastors then use the house to display and enjoy their enormous wealth. All they generally have to do is avoid commercial uses of the property. Other churches give pastors a housing allowance. For four pastors tracked by Trinity Foundation, that allowance was in the $100k range. And that’s just what we know from the churches that file Form 990. For those who don’t file that form, I bet we’d find a lot more pastors getting even higher allowances.
Often, pastors themselves buy luxury homes. Trinity Foundation tracked 40 such homes with a total worth of $140M. In 2017, Joel Osteen bought a house in California for $5M. Kevin Adell, leader of Word Network, owns about $18M in residential property. Prosperity gospel huckster and fake faith healer Benny Hinn owns two different beach homes; one of them is worth $12M. He transferred the ownership of one of these houses to an assistant, but he continued to live there.
The unthinkable amount of money stolen within evangelicalism
Sometimes, though, evangelical leaders’ greed gets the best of them—and their congregation freaks out over a step too bold.
In March this year, Trinity Foundation estimates that in 2024, Christian leaders are expected to embezzle about $86Bn. This figure comes from a variety of sources:
[. . .] skimming from an offering plate, restricted donation fraud (diverting mission donations to a personal expense account), and international cash smuggling.
Televangelists have transferred funds across international borders on private jets and failed to report these transactions resulting in “bulk cash smuggling.”
(And I’m suddenly remembering that Creflo Dollar’s excuse for needing a private plane was so his ministry could take hundreds of thousands of pounds of food to needy areas.)
About $7M of that figure may come from TCT Ministries (Tri-State Christian Television). Garth Coonce founded it in the 1970s as a religious TV network. This past January, its leaders sued four board members for abusing their position to get filthy rich at the network’s expense. Those four board members aren’t just anybody, of course. They include Garth Coonce’s widow Tina, Garth’s two children, and his grandson. According to the lawsuit, these four used TCT as their personal piggy bank for over 20 years.
Another $1.7M may come from self-styled evangelical prophet Juanita Bynum. What a blast from the past! In 2011, she embarrassed evangelicals by typing in tongues in her Facebook posts:
Since then, she’s kept busy by vanishing vast amounts of money from her congregation.
A vast sea of bestselling books to enrich evangelical leaders
Another big source of income for evangelical leaders is book sales. Some years ago, I tracked the endorsements on these books to ferret out the links between evangelical cronies. You can actually track the power of the books’ authors by who wrote blurbs and endorsements for them! Naturally, none of these endorsers note their previous professional or personal ties to the authors they’re endorsing.
But I didn’t know enough at the time to reckon with the sheer amount of money these books rack up for evangelical leaders. Even with his constant stream of scandals, Benny Hinn got rich with his 1990s book Good Morning, Holy Spirit. Its sales broke records. Around 2004, Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now got a publishing deal that possibly made the megapastor over $10M all by itself. It was such an incredible deal that Osteen stopped getting a paycheck from his church for pastoring it.
Often, churches buy these books en masse, then sell them through their own private channels. But that’s not the only way a book can be declared a bestseller. In 2014, folks learned that Mark Driscoll had misused his megachurch’s money to get his book onto the New York Times Bestseller List. Busy pastors can hire consulting companies to make enough bulk purchases to qualify their books for bestseller status. As well, a graduate of Liberty University ran the consulting company Driscoll hired!
As common as this practice apparently is, evangelicals tend to dislike it. The resulting scandal became one of the reasons Driscoll lost his megachurch empire.
In fact, of those 40 luxury homes I mentioned, 32 of their owners published bestselling religious books.
And oh my god, the speaking and “life coaching” fees in evangelicalism
Perhaps the biggest moneymaker in evangelicalism is personal coaching and speaking fees. Once an evangelical leader gets popular enough, other churches and groups covet their time—and will pay handsomely for it.
One evangelical pastor, Keith Craft, charges $84k/year for his Life Mastery Mastermind course. You may not have heard of him, but he used to be popular as a Christian rock singer. He also performed stunts with Power Team, possibly the dumbest evangelism group ever created. Back in the 1980s and until their own hypocrisy ripped the group apart, they did muscle-man stunts and tried to relate them somehow to Jesus. (Here’s a 1994 journal article about the group.)
Similarly, John Maxwell, a pastor who worked for a time at the gorgeous Crystal Cathedral, sells leadership seminars that clock in around $3k-4k all told. Maxwell’s price almost makes a leadership seminar run by T.D. Jakes look reasonable at $1k for “Premier” registration.
Oh, and if you remember that conference Mark Driscoll got thrown out of this past summer, they’re having another one this April. The 2025 Stronger Men’s Conference costs about $150 to attend. Its venue, the Great Southern Bank Arena, seats 11k, so if its church host can fill it they’ll make about $1.6M—not counting merchandise and snack sales, of course.
I can’t overstate how important these fees are to evangelical leaders. Almost every single megachurch pastor and big-name evangelical I checked out while gathering information has some kind of coaching program or conference or leadership seminar going on. Even when they don’t charge staggering sums of money to attend these courses, like Paula White-Cain’s free-to-attend “Unleashed” conference, these leaders still sell merchandise and likely expect to move a lot of books. Heck, maybe they’ll even recruit a few new people for their churches!
These coaching and speaking fees might just be the evangelical crony network’s biggest perk. Once someone gets into those illustrious ranks, they can count on fellow crony members to offer them speaking engagements—and they prepare to offer their new pals the same. If you ever want to get a feel for who’s in—and who’s been cast out—of the crony network, just ask who shares all these stages.
On that note, I really suspect that the presidency of the SBC is so hard-fought is that whoever gets to wear the crown—even for just one year—will come out of it with a juicy title to string after his name. That title alone exponentially increases their income.
In evangelicalism, we usually only find out specifics when someone gets taken to court
After a couple of lawsuits, some of Joni Lamb’s financial records became available through the unsealing of court records. They revealed that she doesn’t actually make that much money in direct salary. As of 2011, she made $152k/year. That’s a lot more than a huckster deserves, but nowhere near as much as a similarly-famous CEO earns at a big company. Between her and her late husband Marcus, Lamb enjoyed a total of $1.6M in housing allowances in the span between 2002-2011.
You might have noticed that most of the specific numbers I’ve discussed today came from court cases. That’s about the only time evangelical leaders reveal how the sausage gets made. For example, Benny Hinn doesn’t tend to like revealing his full financial numbers. He’s never filed a Form 990 regarding any of his ministries. But recently, his wife filed for divorce. She’s hiring a forensic accountant to make sure of an equitable split. In fact, Suzanne Hinn appears to suspect her soon-to-be-ex-husband might be trying to hide money from her lawyers.
This fact matters because as things stand now, our government has next to no power over these conjob hucksters and their many fleecing operations. A pastor with a lot to hide simply neglects to file Form 990. Who’s gonna make him? His church, perhaps. If they don’t, nobody else can.
All too many evangelical pastors have become emboldened by this lack of accountability. Even knowing that the IRS specifically forbade them from dabbling in politics and lobbying, many pastors now openly disobey that rule. News sites have complained about it for over a decade—but to no avail.
What this whole situation means for evangelicalism
The only thing that can change this broken system is for the flocks to stop giving money to churches that aren’t completely transparent about their operations. But if evangelical leaders could run a lucrative business honestly, they wouldn’t be evangelical leaders at all. They gravitated to evangelicalism because it offers predators a risk-free environment full of prey.
Everything I’ve described here today feeds into one central idea: Evangelicalism may be declining in both numbers and credibility, but it remains a powerful moneymaker for its biggest names. Thanks to the sheer dysfunction of their authoritarian-style social organization, evangelical flocks don’t know how much money their leaders are wasting on personal expenses and status symbols.
Unfortunately, Jesus certainly isn’t helping his followers learn to accurately judge the character of their leaders. And they seem singularly disinterested in learning to do it for themselves. So in the future, I only expect these schemes and scams and sketchy practices to increase in number. The harder it gets to pare evangelical pew-warmers from their money, the more dishonest their leaders will become to get what they want.
NEXT UP: Did the grand age of evangelical-atheist debates mean anything? It felt like such a big deal at the time, after all. We’ll find out next time. See you soon!
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