In 2015, the stand-up comedian John Oliver founded “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption,” to show how easy it is to qualify as an American church and not pay taxes.
Wanting to test the laws and expose glaring loopholes, the English-born host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” show, legally incorporated his parody church, receiving tax exempt status and allowing him to publicly raise tens of thousands through his broadcast appeal for “seed-based” faith donations.
“Churches. America’s favourite place for redemption and sixth favourite place for chicken,” Oliver quipped. “There are roughly 350,000 congregations in the United States, and many of them do great work: feeding the hungry, clothing the poor,” he added, launching his stinging August 17, 2015 report. “But this is not a story about them. This is about the churches who exploit people’s faith for monetary gain.”
A Youtube video of the 20-minute show has since attracted over 29M views. Oliver criticised mega-rich American televangelists like Robert Tilton and Creflo Dollar, who proudly preach the “Prosperity Gospel,” a controversial, but widespread religious belief favoured by the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, that fervent faith and frequent financial contributions, will miraculously boost the donor’s material wealth.
Emphasising the importance of giving to the church whether through compulsory tithes of ten percent of all income; regular offerings and voluntary donations of start-up or “seed money,” the “health and wealth” theology has caught on in developing countries across continents.
Fresh groups are springing up faster that one can recall the seemingly-forgotten Biblical lines from Matthew 19, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, ‘Who then can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’”
Pastors know all too well how possible it is to attract easy tax-free programme financing free from State scrutiny, as generous congregations are handing over cash and savings from their pillows, purses, pockets and personal bank accounts, in numerous places ranging from Trinidad and Tobago, to Guyana, Brazil, India, the Philippines, Nigeria and even high-income nations such as Singapore and South Korea. As Oliver noted, the “Prosperity Gospel” irresistibly “argues that wealth is a sign of God’s favour, and donations will result in wealth coming back to you. That idea takes the form of ‘seed faith’—that donations are seeds that you will one day get to harvest.”
To prepare for his expose and work out just who is harvesting, Oliver joined televangelist Tilton’s mailing list for US$20. In seven months, he received 26 letters, including one with a single US$1 bill that had to be sent back, each requesting ever more donations. He ended up paying US$$319, for small packets of coloured oil and pieces of cloth, and even a tracing of the preacher’s foot, before finally packing it in and pulling away his wallet and nose, no doubt in search of a perfume-bearing podiatrist and an incense-infused exorcism. As Oliver pointed out, “this is all hilarious until you imagine these letters being sent to someone who cannot afford what he’s asking for.”
“I had to send the $1 back with an additional recommended offering of US$37, which I did. So at this point, we’re just two letters in and it’s like having a pen pal who’s in deep with some loan sharks,” he remarked as the show aired. In mid-September 2015, “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption” was shut down by Oliver.
While he made it clear that the church preferred monetary donations, a few contributors took the call far too literally and sent in bags of seeds, and what appeared to be sperm. All of the cash was donated to “Doctors Without Borders,” with Oliver concluding, “if you want to send money to a fake church, send it to Scientology.”
Months before, the aptly re-named Creflo Dollar, born mere Michael Smith, sought US$300 individual donations from 200 000 people worldwide in an infamous video appeal to purchase a US$65M Gulfstream G650, twin-engine private jet that comfortably seats 18.
Facing international criticism and mounting media scrutiny, the Board of Directors of his popular Georgia-based World Changers Church International pulled the video and decided the ministry would pay in full for their leader and his wife Taffee to enjoy sweet safety. The pair joined dozens of other high flying and higher spending mega-church multi-millionaire pastors such as Jesse Duplantis and Kenneth Copeland who prefer the privacy of their own planes to the common crowded commercial airlines to spread Christianity. “We plan to acquire a Gulfstream G650 because it is the best, and it is a reflection of the level of excellence at which this organization chooses to operate,” Dollar’s World Changers said.
Some people believe that if your pastor owns a private jet, you should perhaps find another church, especially since Copeland complained that a public airplane is “a long tube with a bunch of demons.” When a reporter from Inside Edition caught up with Copeland, he explained, “It’s a spiritual thing … I love people … But people get pushed in alcohol. Do you think that’s a good place for a preacher to be and prepare to go preach to a lot of people when somebody in there is dragging some woman down an aisle? … I can’t be doing that while I’m getting ready to preach.”
As he prepared for his fourth jet and storing up modern mechanical treasures in aviation heaven, Duplantis advised followers, the Redeemer would probably take a pass on riding on the back of a donkey: “He’d be on an airplane preaching the gospel all over the world.”
For his acquisition, Dollar declared in a Youtube video, “If I want to believe God for a $65 million plane, you cannot stop me,” he told his faithful followers. “You cannot stop me from dreaming. I’m gonna dream until Jesus comes.”
Just before the New Year broke, stunned Trinidadian authorities had to rub their eyes and look again several times, when the usually jovial, 69-year-old white-haired pastor of the Third Exodus Church, in Abel Country, Longdenville, Chaguanas turned up at a commercial bank bearing 29 copy-paper boxes crammed with over TT$28M in cash, in a late attempt to exchange the old hundred dollar blue bills for the new polymer notes, as the deadline loomed.
The Financial Intelligence Branch stated that Pastor Vinworth Anthony Dayal had promised to come in with the cash days before and repeatedly visited the Central Bank promising to do so. He failed to present the funds on each occasion until the last day, just before the institution closed.
Claiming that the money was funds from tithes unopened and saved over some two decades, the fast-talking, much-loved Pastor Dayal did not put all of his faith in the Almighty, he walked with his security and lawyers. All of the money and millions more, totalling about TT$30M, seized during subsequent searches of the Pastor’s properties, remain in an interest-bearing account as official investigations continue into whether he has committed any crime, except against the poor counting machines. Fellow men in tithes, Duplantis could have advised him to avoid the spectacle of donkeys; Copeland, to forget banks and just buy a plane for easy sailing.
ID is grilling her husband and they are moving to Chaguanas to launch a church. In the words of the critic George Carlin, it will be a true, “non-prophet” organisation.
