Bartholomew's Notes

Letter claims investigation motivated by media opposition to “evangelical teachings and socially conservative policy positions”

American Christian Right leaders have come together to decry the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation into the finances of several “mega-ministries”. The leaders have written a letter, which is available on Townhall (I’ve reformatted the signatories to save space and for ease of reading):

United States Congress

U.S. Capitol

Washington, DC 20002

May 2, 2008

Dear Senate Finance Committee Member:

We write respectfully to let you know of our concerns about the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation into the finances of several churches, all of which share the same branch of evangelicalism, and all of which promote socially conservative public policy positions such as support for the traditional definition of marriage.

While we recognize that some evangelical teachings and socially conservative policy positions are controversial, and that these churches have been the subject of sensational investigative journalism, we are nonetheless concerned that this would possibly justify an investigation outside the normal confines of the Internal Revenue Service and established administrative and judicial procedures.

Congress passed the Church Audit Procedures Act in 1984 specifically to discourage politically driven audits of churches. The Act prevents the Internal Revenue Service from initiating an investigation into a church’s finances unless a “high level Treasury official” concludes that there is reasonable cause for such an investigation. The Act also protects a church under investigation from politically motivated leaks during the course of the examination.

We are unaware of any finding by a high-level Treasury Department official that there is reasonable cause to open an investigation of any of these ministries.

We are concerned that the Senate Finance Committee may be setting a dangerous precedent that may be difficult to reverse.  For one thing, controversy will always be a part of religious teaching.  And religious controversy is something the media will inevitably strive to exploit, since the media feed on controversy and have demonstrated a bias against evangelical Christians.  The Committee’s reliance on media reports in targeting subjects for its investigation would therefore only seem to reinforce this unfortunate bias, however unwittingly.

We cannot recall instances in the past where a congressional committee has targeted major ministries under threat of subpoena. The ministries have been asked to produce financial records and internal documents in what appears to be an exercise in disproving their alleged guilt.

Congress has a legitimate role to play in oversight of our laws, including tax laws governing churches. And ministries have the obligation to be transparent in their financial accounting. But the targeting of specific ministries by a congressional committee would seem to intrude on the free exercise of religion guaranteed under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We believe this is why churches are properly exempt from taxation in the first place — to prevent governments from using their power to tax as a way to limit the free exercise of religion.

We respectfully ask that investigations into the finances of specific ministries be left with the Internal Revenue Service, overseen and approved by a Treasury Department official who has affirmed that there is reasonable cause for such an investigation, in accordance with the Church Audit Procedures Act.

Signed,

Paul Weyrich, Chairman, Coalitions for America; Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman, American Family Association; Ken Blackwell, Chairman, Coalition for a Conservative Majority; William Murray, Chairman, Religious Freedom Coalition; Rev. Bill Owens, President, Coalition of African American Pastors; Victoria Cobb, President, The Family Foundation of Virginia; Dr. Gary Cass, Chairman/CEO, Christian Anti-Defamation Commission; Pastor Craig Polston, Kingdom Baptist Church, Fredericksburg, Virginia; Pastor Bob Emrich, The Maine Jeremiah Project, Emmanuel Bible Baptist Church; Dr. Carl Herbster, President, AdvanceUSA; Anthony Verdugo, Christian Family Coalition; Deal W. Hudson, Director, InsideCatholic.com; Rev. Rick Scarborough, President, Vision America; Star Parker, President, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education; Colin Hanna, President, Pennsylvania Pastors Network; Dr. Danny Forshee, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Lavaca, Arkansas; Sadie Fields, State Chairman, Georgia Christian Alliance; Pastor Jack Knapp, Sandston, Virginia; Larry Cirignano, Founder, CatholicVote; James Martin, President, 60 Plus; George Landrith, President, Frontiers of Freedom; Mathew Staver, Dean and Professor of Law, Liberty University School of Law; Rev. Rob Schenck, National Clergy Council

The investigation, as is well known, is being overseen by Sen. Charles Grassley, and he is focussing on Without Walls International Church, Benny Hinn Ministries, Joyce Meyer Ministries, Kenneth Copeland Ministries, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and World Changers Church International. Media reports have, in recent months and years, highlighed a number of financial controversies involving these and other ministries: questions have been raised about Kenneth Copeland’s private use of a ministry jet, and concerning Benny Hinn’s penchant for luxurious hotels. Morris Cerullo, Mac Hammond, and (from Canada) Paul Melnichuk have also faced negative publicity over the use of money. Grassley clearly has a personal distaste for the “Prosperity Gospel” and for the lavish lifestyles enjoyed by certain ministry leaders (who often receive donations from vulnerable people hoping for some kind of miracle from God), but to claim that the investigation is driven simply by media bias against “evangelical teachings and socially conservative policy positions” is disingenuous.

However, the letter does raise a legitimate issue, and concerns about Grassley’s approach appeared in Christianity Today in January:

…take this comment, published on Grassley’s website: “As a Christian myself, and a person who believes in tithing, I feel I have a right to know where my money goes.”

But the law allows churches not to disclose their finances, even to their own members. Indeed, it was Grassley himself who introduced the Church Audit Procedures Act in 1983, which significantly limited irs investigations into church finances.

…Several of the ministries targeted by Grassley (and others not targeted) appear to provide excessive compensation to their celebrity leaders. So we encourage them to disclose their finances. We welcome irs investigations into allegations of mismanaged funds, and we don’t oppose a Senate query into whether further legislation is necessary. At the same time, it’s hard to see how further legislation would be helpful. It would only amount to more government intrusion into church governance.

…But churches—even ones that spout heresies like the health-and-wealth gospel—are protected by the First Amendment in ways that the Nature Conservancy and Smithsonian are not. Grassley was on dangerous ground when he told reporters, “Jesus comes into the city on a simple mule, and you got people today expanding his gospel in corporate jets. Somebody ought to raise questions about [whether] it’s right or wrong.” There’s an important theological question here, but a Senate investigation is not the place to ask it.

Meanwhile, Grassley’s investigation has been noted in other countries; Ghana has many prosperity preachers, and a recent opinion piece in the Accra Public Agenda observed that

…In the USA, a Republican senator, Charles Grassley of Iowa has recently begun a crusade against these so-called prosperity preachers. Grassley is asking the ministries for financial records on salaries, spending practices, private jets and other perks…However, what is important is the pervasive nature of the extent of exploitation that is going on in many churches.

…It appears the modern church has been characterized by a new wave of corruption that is unheard of in religious circles. Rather than instill hope, they are making poverty widespread. Rather than strengthen families, they are tearing them apart; it looks as if people will tear down as many good livable housing to build these huge churches, multiplying the homeless problem in record numbers.

(Hit tip: Melissa Rogers)

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Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action has posted some interesting photographs of apocalyptic Christian Zionist mega-church pastor John Hagee hanging out with some rather well-known people.

Hagee has featured on this blog before (see search function), and his recent endorsement of John McCain has caused some controversy. The video below presents a typical Hagee sermon, although someone else has ornamented it with pictures and music.

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Stronger Russian Church Presence in Israel-Palestine Decried by Greek Patriarch

From Interfax:

Professor of the Moscow Spiritual Academy Deacon Andrey Kuraev said that the Moscow Patriarchate should begin actively preaching among the Russian-speaking Jews of Israel…He noted that the Russian Jewish community in Israel consisted mostly of intelligentsia (middle class), but he doubted that the “local Greek Patriarch” had enough resources to communicate with this group which “shows a great interest in Christianity”.

There are many Russian Israelis whose links to Judaism or Jewish identity are rather tenuous, but who have taken advantage of Israel’s “right of return” to move to Israel. If they are religious at all, their religion is likely to be Russian Orthodox Christianity. The consequences of this population shift (as I’ve blogged before) were the subject of a 1999 academic article by Ian Lustick, entitled “Israel as a non-Arab State”. Roger Owen briefly summarized the findings in Al-Ahram in 2000. Among them:

…First, no meaningful debate on the question of the Jewishness of the Russian immigrants can be carried on without raising the whole notion of the Right of Return and so, by extension, one of the main rationales for the Zionist project in the twentieth century. Second, given the demographic struggle between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians, the Jewish Israelis would be unhappy about any diminution in the numbers they claim for their side. This also makes sense if one considers that the non-Jewish Russians are just as likely to be anti-Palestinian as their Jewish compatriots.

Seen from this point of view, the construction of Russian Orthodox churches in the communities where there is a heavy concentration of Russian immigrants makes perfect sense. So too does the increasing unwillingness to question people’s religion and ethnic origins. According to Lustick, the 1995 census was the first in Israeli history not to ask questions about what is obviously becoming an increasingly contentious, but also increasingly blurred, situation regarding individual religious and ethnic identity.

The ultra-Orthodox political party Shas is particularly opposed to this development, and has referred to the immigrants as “hundreds of thousands of Gentiles flooding the land with pork, prostitution, impurity and filth”. Given the noises currently being made by rightwing Israeli anti-missionary organizations (discussed yesterday) against Messianic Jews, a plan to “preach” to Russian Jews is not likely to be well received in certain quarters.

However, Kuraev’s jibe about the “local Greek Patriarch” being unable to missionize suggests that the Russian church has another priority: extending its influence in the “Holy Land”. As I blogged a year ago, the Russian Orthodox Church has over the last decade or so been reclaiming property in both Israel and the Palestinian territories which it had lost during the Communist era, and the re-unification of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia has doubtless made this process easier. Just a few weeks ago Interfax reported the return of an Orthodox compound in Jerusalem:

An Orthodox compound in Jerusalem, Segiyevskoye Podvorye, will be handed over to Russia in the coming months, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s official spokesman Eddi Shapira told a delegation of Russian journalists in Jerusalem’s City Hall.

…”The process should be over by the end of June,” the ambassador said, adding that the compound would be handed over to Russia.

According to a report in Russia Profile, the compound, also spelt as “Sergievskoe Podvorye”, is

a two-storey, 4000 square meter house with a spacious green courtyard, which was completed in 1879 as a hotel for the nobles and the headquarters of the [Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society].

This building was not included in property sold off to Israel by Khrushchev in 1964, as it was a private residence registered in the name of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. It became an Israeli ministry building, but is now “in decay”, and its return to Russian control was the subject of talks between Putin and Ariel Sharon in 2005. Russia Profile sees such property restorations as the resurrection of the nineteenth-century infrastructure for pilgrims known as “Russian Palestine”, but the compound would no doubt also become a symbol of the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, the organization which Time has described as Putin’s “main ideological arm and a vital foreign policy instrument”.

Meanwhile, tensions between the Russians and the Greek Orthodox Church are highlighted in another Interfax article:

The Union of Orthodox Citizens thinks unfounded accusations of Russians in “nationalism” and “aggressive policy” in the Holy Land expressed by Jerusalem Patriarch Theofilus III during his meeting with Russian media before Easter.

“The problem of failure to perform by the Greek clergy of their missionary obligations to the Orthodox Arabs and Eastern Christian unions correctly stated by the founder of the Russian spiritual mission Porfiri Uspensky is still important,” said the Head of the Moscow department of the Union Kirill Frolov to Interfax-Religion.

Theophilos had apparently accused Uspensky (1804–1883) of bringing racism to Palestine; Frolov in turn accuses Theophilos of preferring the “degraded, dependent, and inactive but unclouded materially position of the Jerusalem Church under unorthodox rule”.

A dispute with the Russian Church is just one more pressure for Theophilos: Israel has made it clear that it prefers his deposed predecessor, Irineos, who, although anti-Jewish (he’s on record expressing his “disgust and disrespect” for “the descendants of the crucifiers of our Lord Jesus Christ”), was at the helm when church property in East Jerusalem was leased to an Israeli settler group (I’ve blogged on this at some length, e.g here) – the deal was annulled by Theophilos. As well as this, Palestinian Christians have been agitating for some time for a greater presence within the clergy and decision-making processes, and a year ago Theophilos promised that things would be improved by now (I’ve no idea if Palestinians are now in fact more satisfied). And if all this wasn’t enough, he recently retained the law firm Carter-Ruck to pursue a libel claim against a British-based Arabic newspaper through the London courts.

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From the JTA:

Should Bat El Levy be asked at Israel’s international youth Bible quiz next week about the messiah’s coming, she may find herself in a bind.

The 17-year-old Jerusalem girl is a world-class scriptural scholar who, as it happens, believes in Jesus.

It might never have been an issue were it not for the sleuthing of an Israeli anti-missionary group, Yad LeAhim, which sees Levy’s participation in the annual Jewish Bible contest as a threat to Judaism.

Yad LeAhim director Shlomo Dov Lipschitz circulated a letter to Israel’s top rabbis last week calling for pressure on the Education Ministry to disqualify Levy from the quiz, which takes place annually on Israeli Independence Day.

…Lipschitz argued that Levy, who comes from a family of messianic Jews — who believe Jesus is the messiah — should not be considered Jewish.

Various Israeli rabbis have joined the chorus against the teenager; the Jerusalem Post reports:

“Messianics are missionaries who proselytize in very sophisticated ways,” said Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of the rabbis calling to boycott the quiz.

“It is forbidden to give them legitimacy by allowing them to take part in the quiz.”

Other rabbis that have called to boycott the quiz include Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, Ya’acov Yosef, son of Shas mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Tzvi Tau, head of Har Hamor Yeshiva.

Lipschitz is a somewhat sinister figure, and he has featured on this blog before; back in 2005 I quoted a couple of articles about him:

Yad L’achim mainly targets the two largest Christian sects seeking to convert Jews – the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Messianic Jews – but also goes after Scientology, Hare Krishna, Falun Gong, Landmark Forum and other cults operating in Jerusalem and elsewhere.

“Over the years we’ve brought back hundreds of Jews who had gone over to Christianity, and we’ve prevented the assimilation of many thousands of others who had started the process by going to a lecture or two from the missionaries,” says Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifschitz, who co-founded Yad L’Achim in 1950. He emphasizes repeatedly that Yad L’Achim “has nothing whatsoever against Christians in Israel, just against missionaries.”

And:

…”When we find out a missionary is working at a company, we go to the boss and explain to him that there are plenty of ways to fire the worker without anybody being the wiser. This way there’s no trouble with the courts, the media, and with Meretz.

“Some bosses are smart, they understand, and they deal with the problem quietly. I’d say we’ve done this with nearly 10 different companies,” said Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifschitz, head of Yad L’Achim.

Another prominent member of the organization is Alex Artovsky, whom Israeli Jehovah’s Witnesses have accused of leading a campaign of harassment.

The Bible Quiz is properly known as the International Chidon HaTanach, and it was established by David Ben-Gurion. According to the JTA:

A ministry spokesman said that issues of personal belief were not the organizers’ concern and that because Levy “is Jewish according to her Israeli identity cards and school registration,” she can take part in the contest.

That of course still leaves a question-mark over the participation of non-Israeli Messianic Jews (although a recent Israeli court ruling may be of some relevance here), but one wonders how Messianics could be excluded but not other Jews who choose not to follow the usual forms of Judaism, or who are non-religious – a Messianic advocate quoted by the Post points to the Lubavitch Messianists, who believe that the late Menachem Schneerson is the messiah. And is it not unfair anyway for the Israeli Education Ministry to organize a competition with a prize which is not open to non-Jewish Israelis?

(Note on names: Yad LeAhim and Yad L’Achim appear to be same organization. There is, though, also another anti-“missionary” group called Lev L’Achim, which I blogged on here.)

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WND touts the upcoming “Southern California Strategic Perspectives Conference“:

WND founder Joseph Farah joins “Left Behind” author Tim LaHaye, former terrorist Walid Shoebat, evangelist Ray Comfort, best-selling author Joel Rosenberg, Koinonia Institute founder Chuck Missler and more…

Other presenters will include Gen. Shimon Erem of the Israel Defense Forces, radio commentator and author Paul McGuire and archeologist Bob Cornuke.

The conference takes place at Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills and is jointly sponsored by the Koinonia Institute and radio station KBRT.

Most of these characters, of course, need no introduction, although it’s fun to see them lined up together. Perhaps there will be a learned debate between LaHaye and Cornuke on the location of Noah’s ark: LaHaye once wrote a paperback entitled The Ark on Ararat, while Cornuke (whose archaeological qualifications come from Louisiana Baptist University) insists that he found it on Mount Suleiman in Iran. Maybe someone will give Shoebat the chance to clarify some of the weird inconsistencies in his account of his past as a terrorist, or ask him about his recent threats to sue those who have suggested he made it all up. And if we’re really lucky, Ray Comfort will be bringing along his banana to compare with Chuck Missler’s jar of peanut butter; both men have argued that these foodstuffs refute the theory of evolution (see here).

The elderly Shimon Erem, meanwhile, is apparently “considered by many as the ‘patriarch’ of the L.A. Israeli community”, and he liaises with Christian Zionists through the “Israel Christian Nexus“, through which he exhorts Christians to support Israel because “we are on the side of God — and God supports Israel”. According to the programme he will speak on “Israel at 60 what does the future hold” (sic for punctuation); this could be interesting, since unlike LaHaye he presumably doesn’t believe “the future” involves Israel being tricked by the anti-Christ, millions of Jews being slaughtered during the Last Days, and the survivors becoming Christians.

I covered Rosenberg’s apocalyptic ruminations just recently, while Chuck Missler’s Koinonia Institute organised the Christian Zionist tour to Israel which I blogged on a few months ago.

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At Talk to Action.

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