What will Grassley find and why will anyone care?
In Part One, I laid out the big picture of how prosperity gospel enterprises like Kenneth Copeland Ministries are organized.
It was too complicated to hold most people's attention, I admit. Sen. Grassley's committee will have the same problem with its inquiry into the specific financial practices of the Big Six megaministries. Failure to file form XYZ. Ho hum.
It's worth asking the questions Grassley has posed, but the evangelists are unlikely to be very forthcoming. They have legal and accounting advisors to help them hew to the regulations, so I doubt they have done much tax dodging they aren't prepared to defend in court.
Defending themselves to the faithful is a different matter — especially when actual dollar signs are attached to lavish personal expenses. Too much disclosure could affect donations, and these empires are cash hungry. Jim Bakker went to prison for defrauding his investors, but it was the exposure of his blatant hypocrisy — and subsequent loss of revenue — that brought down the PTL Clubhouse of cards.
It was already blatant, you say?
To you, maybe. But if anyone can explain away spending the widow and orphan money on himself, it'll be a prosperity gospel preacher talking to his faithful. Of course, those explanations do fly a lot better when you control the pulpit, the broadcast and the information.
Remember, UnitedHealth Group chairman William McGuire had long been able to justify his outsized compensation based on his value creation for shareholders, and not many argued. But when he was perceived to have enriched himself even further by backdating stock options — cheating — that's when things rapidly began to crumble.
Are televangelists cheating? It's not that simple. We'll look into that next time.
