In this article I argue that the massively excessive wealth of religious organizations is as big a scandal as their paedophilia - and it should be completely exposed by way of a film. I would call this film Pay To Pray: the true story of religion.

The wealth of religions isn’t God-given. Worldwide, religions are tax-exempt and are thus subsidised by citizens everywhere. They pay little or no tax on their incomes from tithes, donations, bequests, investments, and in some cases, trading profits. Depending on the system of government, they are also subsidised by freedom from taxation at federal, state and local government levels. Individual ministers of religion can receive very generous fringe benefits i.e. perks such as cars and mortgage payments, within taxation systems. Overall, this is in effect legal corruption: the use of public money - taxation, for a private purpose - religion.

Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we pay for the religious to be religious, mainly through the tax exemptions they are allowed. The cost to us, and the opportunity cost to the budgets of our societies, is very significant. With global warming coming over the horizon, we are throwing money at religion through exemptions and grants when every available dollar should be dedicated to science, education and other public purposes.

The secular critique of the philosophical and political aspects of religion has attracted nearly everyone’s attention.  Few have ever really evaluated the economic.

Few have sought to explain how each of us, with few exceptions, everyone who is or has ever been a taxpayer anywhere in the world, pays up to ten per cent of our income supporting the religious. This is the idea I sought to explore in my book, The Purple Economy.

The scale of their wealth allows churches to influence politics domestically so their tax privileges are never threatened. Others, such as the covert American fundamentalist group known as The Family, exposed in Jeff Sharlet’s book of that name, have used their money to successfully influence politics internationally as well. Their efforts run in tandem with the Vatican’s agenda.

Citizens of Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America, the Muslim nations, all are being ripped-off simultaneously. Look at the different political facades in the West and the basic charity law and system of tax exemption that is there. We need this to be widely understood.  Islam’s relationship to money is different, but the results are similar, and that also needs to be explained.

While we have been exposing religion as a delusion and a poison, the churches’ wealth has continued to grow. While we have our pyrrhic victories in books, journal articles, university classrooms and conferences, their wealth continues to grow. While their widespread abuse of children and adults is remorselessly exposed and their adherents leave, their wealth continues to grow.

From their point of view, they can accept any flack we throw at them, because they understand perfectly well that even as we criticize them, we are enriching them.

How rich are they? To take one example, the minority Church of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, in the United States, was said to be worth $30 billion as long ago as 1996. Their founder, Joseph Smith, said in 1827 that an angel appeared to him three times with critical information that he, Joseph Smith, was chosen to share. He was clearly an impostor but his cult has grown into a massive, tax-exempt organization.

The often heard claim that the missing revenue from religious tax exemptions can be reconciled to the value of the charitable work they do, is extremely dubious.

• First, governments subsidize much of this work, often up to 50 per cent or more, which means taxpayers are paying for this charitable work, at least in part.
• Secondly, many citizens, religious and secular, do volunteer charitable work for their own personal reasons. It is wrong-headed to equate that work with its commercial value, for the whole point of doing something voluntarily, is that one willingly foregoes its commercial worth.
• Thirdly, it is important to draw a distinction between the ‘good works’ charities religions run which have some public purpose, for which tax exemption could still be applied, and the religion itself.  To ‘advance religion’ itself through publicly available religious activity has been considered to be legally a form of charity from the 17th century. It was considered to be something for the public good, for, in the 17th century, one’s religiosity was assumed. Clearly, that is not the situation in the 21st century, but we still retain the exemptions through the definition of religion as charity.  Churches who decide to do nothing but proselytise, using their tax-exempt status to build empires of wealth for that purpose, are perfectly legal, and there are very many of them.
            This allows many churches to do a cosmetic amount of what we understand as work for the public benefit, or none at all, with little regulation or accountability. My definition of a church is that it is an ‘unregulated on-shore tax haven, subsidized by taxpayers, to pursue the supernatural.’

Some examples

Let me introduce Mr Edir Macedo. You may have never heard of him, because, to the best of my knowledge, there is no book about him in English.

He started as a lowly lottery official in Brazil when he decided to start his own evangelical religion, the Universal Kingdom of God. By the early 1990s he had amassed a fortune. It was estimated in 1996 that he was pulling in US$800 million per annum from donations at his 1800 temples in Brazil and another 300 in thirty more countries.

One of his executives fell out with him and went to the Brazilian tax office. Edir Maced was secretly filmed instructing preachers to threaten his followers with eternal damnation if they did not donate. When this film was played on television in Brazil, 100 000 people turned out in Sao Paulo to defend him. He soon moved into Portugal where, among other things, he built an extravagant palace with extensive grounds for his personal use comparable to the one he has in Brazil.

On the other side of the Pacific in Japan, there are about 180 000 new religions and cults, all trading on the tax-exempt system. The Nikkei Weekly reported in 1992 that ‘Under Japanese law, religious bodies registered with the Agency for Cultural Affairs don’t have to report their income derived from religious activities. For some larger groups, this amounts to billions of yen in tax-free income annually’. 

The tax-exempt new religion phenomenon became so widespread that noted Japanese filmmaker, Juzo Itami, made a film about it in 1987. The film was called The Taxing Woman. It was a comedy that had as its lead character a determined female tax official pursuing a property developer laundering money through a bogus religion.

Comedy aside, there was a particularly sinister dimension to the Japanese exemptions for religion. The cult, Aum Supreme Truth, was tax-exempt and accumulated vast wealth. They purchased a pastoral property in Western Australia in 1993 where they experimented with sarin gas on sheep. Two years later, they used sarin to mount a terrorist attack on Tokyo’s subway. Twelve people were killed and thousands injured, but the figure could have been much higher. The Japanese had subsidised a home-grown, terrorist cultic group to attack them.

In the 1980s, many Buddhist temples in Japan were failing economically, as the Japanese began to lose interest in Buddhism, one of their main religions. A Buddhist monk hit upon a plan. The temples had always had a ritual for stillbirth, an opportunity for women to grieve for babies lost in this way. The monk realised that if the ritual for stillbirth was extended to abortion they could make a fortune in the same way gynaecologists and obstetricians had profited from the banning of the contraceptive pill in Japan until 1989. This meant that Japanese women, inevitably, were confronted with unwanted pregnancies and the medical profession could turn women’s personal crises into a constant stream of income. In an extension of that, the ritual of mizuko kuyo was expanded by the Buddhist temples to encourage, and then trade on, women’s guilt about their abortions and the consequences for the heavenly destination for the soul of the foetus. Billboard advertisements about the new service appeared on railway stations everywhere and the business boomed. Not content with the revenue from the expanded ritual, the temples realised they could make even more money by leasing space in the temple grounds for a small statuette to stand. When they ran out of space, the temples cut down trees in the temple grounds to make room for more statuettes. All the income from this pernicious business is tax-free.

In Thailand in 1998, the government had to draft a bill to regulate the building of Buddhist temples and impose punishments on monks guilty of misconduct. The country’s high-status monks were pulling in $40 000 a day in donations from Buddhist devotees anxious to improve their life’s prospects. Some of Thailand’s 30 000 temples became major money-spinning operations. There was a huge trade in religious trinkets, fortune-telling, advice about winning lottery ticket numbers. One temple ran a ‘holy water’ supermarket offering 200 different kinds of holy bottled water. This led to further widespread impious conduct by monks who were seen driving Mercedes and BMWs, speaking on mobile phones kept under their robes, smoking, installing air-conditioning in temples, and there were, of course, tales of paedophilia and sexual abuse of women.

The image of ascetic Buddhism as the reasonable alternative to western monotheism is not the whole story. Behind the smiling face of the Buddha, the same grasping for tax exemptions and benefits is happening.

Similarly, Christopher Hitchens exposed the Mother Teresa phenomenon in India, whose piety saw her fly to Los Angeles for state-of-the-art medical treatment so she could delay her happiest day, meeting her God, for as long as possible.

In 2006 in South Africa, a business magazine, FM, investigated wealthy religions there. It reported ‘the religious sector is a substantial part of the South African economy … yet the financial position and business management of these institutions are little understood.’ It said ‘despite the fact that their tax-exempt status means that every taxpayer effectively subsidises their access to social services, there is no legal obligation on religious institutions to disclose publicly their financial affairs’. The magazine said even churches  ‘ … employees’ salaries are tax-exempt, and some receive seven figure sums.’

In Russia in the 1990s there were scandals concerning the Orthodox Church, which was engaged in the large scale importing of goods, taking advantage of the church’s tax and customs-duty breaks. Moscow’s head of the church’s department of external relations, Metropolitan Kirill, who, since January last year, is now His Holiness, Cyril, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, was himself accused of trading in duty-free imports of tobacco and alcohol. In 2001 Kirill made the reasonable suggestion that taxpayers should be given the option of a portion of their taxes going to a cause they would want to support, be it secular or religious. While he was looking for a way to fund the Orthodox Church, his point is well made and stands in distinction to the current regime of church taxes now in operation in some European countries.

Church taxes are like the ancient tithes, at about 9 per cent. They are deducted from the income of every citizen who does not formally withdraw from their church. The German tax office collects them and pays them to the churches. They date back to the 19th century.

By sheer coincidence, I was sat next to a young German woman, a scientist, on a flight to Wellington in 2008. She told me her elderly father in Germany had just received a letter from the tax office saying that if he did not have a document proving he left the church in the 1960s they would demand a back payment of three thousand euros.  These church taxes are in addition to the church’s tax-exempt status and other breaks they receive.

Greeceis currently facing severe budget cuts to rein in its debt but you can be sure the  exemptions for the Greek Orthodox Church, which is effectively a state within a state, won’t be touched.

Inside the Vatican, there is the secretive Vatican Bank. While the literature on the bank is growing, no one really knows how much money it has because it is not subject to audit. They only accept cash and gold as deposits, which, as critics have noted, together with the lack of a public audit, is perfect for money laundering by the Mafia et al. The pope alone owns the bank. It has been reported they destroy their records every ten years so as not to leave a paper trail in case a disgruntled employee turns into a whistle blower.

Similarly, the wealth of the churches in the United States is a vast subject but I would like to touch on a significant attempt by free thinkers in the state of Colorado to wind back church exemptions from property taxes. The Colorado free thinkers, led by John Patrick Michael Murphy, started a citizens’ initiated referendum to do this. They got 66,000 signatures to oblige the state government to run the referendum. Well, the campaign was doing okay until the churches’ million-dollar television campaign against the Amendment commenced. The free thinkers maintain the churches deceptively lied that a citizen’s taxes would increase, not reduce, if the Amendment was passed. They didn’t have the funds to counter the churches’ misleading campaign so they lost. But this was a good attempt by secular citizens, the first shot across the bows of the phenomenon I’m talking about today.

I haven’t discussed Australia because it’s mostly there in my book, The Purple Economy. On the front of this book I reproduce article 2 from the French legislation of 1905, which formally separated church and state in France. In English, it reads simply, The Republic does not recognize, nor subsidize, any religion.

This is the first time in history, to my knowledge, outside communist revolutions, that a democracy, through the state and its taxpayers, said we are no longer going to pay you to be religious. It was written at a time when clerics were considered to be public servants on the payroll of the state. This legislation broke that arrangement, forcing the church to pay for its own clerics, which was a major step, but there is an important qualification. The legislation did not touch the exemption from tax and charitable status of the churches!

That is the privilege that extended from Europe to all parts of the world, to keep churches and clerics in the manner to which they have become accustomed and turned the churches into billionaires.

The main concern of religion is not God. That concept is the smoke and mirrors they use to control the vulnerable. Nor is the main concern of religion necessarily political power – it’s money, for the money facilitates the power. The religious believe they can avoid death, but they know they can avoid taxes.

Pay to Pray

The film would first describe the history of the tithes and other taxes usual in the pre-capitalist era characterised by the troika of monarchy-nobility-clergy. It would then describe the formalisation of exemption from taxation for religion through statute, and how that system of privilege spread from Europe in the parliamentary colonial era to infect the world.

I see the making of such a film as a form of political action, which, firstly, would have the aim of exposing the wealth, privilege and greed of religion to citizens everywhere. Secondly, the film would help to raise funds to further practical, secular, political actions to oppose religious hegemony, and help fund charities concerned with religion’s victims. To use Phillip Adams’ words, I am not interested in being a minor irritant to religion. I think we should be a major irritant. The purpose is to help change the public’s perception of religion from one of benign institutions to which one must defer and show respect, despite their scandals and their irrelevance to most Western citizens, to one of institutions whose pursuit of financial self-interest and power, directly impacts on a citizen’s personal life in ways that they, the public, did not previously understand.

The film would show how religion causes the citizen, and society, financial harm. This harm has consequences at both a personal and societal level.  Belief, doctrine and liturgy get in the way of understanding that religious organisations are first and foremost corporations whose commitment to the accumulation of capital exceeds their commitment to the faith.

A film explaining these worldwide tax rorts I’ve discussed today, made in the Michael Moore model, would generate many millions of dollars for our cause, taking a line from his success.

We cannot change these tax arrangements, and church money-grasping, if public opinion is not even aware of what is happening and how it affects us personally. Before we can change it, we need to understand it. This was brought home to me by a poignant letter in the Sydney Morning Herald last year. It demonstrates that when you understand religion is first and foremost about money, there is a good chance you’ll vote with your feet.

Anne Freestone, a resident of the Central Coast of New South Wales, wrote:

The Catholic Church is not that dissimilar to Scientology. I recall vividly the last time I attended Mass. In the homily, the priest announced the parish would be undertaking ‘prayers for the dead of the parish.’ In order for the parish to pray for my recently deceased three-year old son, I had to register and ‘DONATE WITH NOTES ONLY.’ At the time, our family had lots of medical bills and funeral expenses, but I paid so the parish could pray for my baby.

I never returned to see … if it actually did so.

This is just one of the many stories the film could capture.

If every religious person in the world, whatever religion, simultaneously prayed for global warming to cease we know what the result would be. So why are we subsiding them and exempting them from vast sums of taxation when science, in particular, is desperately lobbying for research funding?

I will be seeking ways to make the film. Through it, I see the potential to generate sufficient profit to continue and expand the argument and to roll back religious influence in the 21st century.  Citizens worldwide may be very hazy about the theory of evolution, as Richard Dawkins has recently detailed in his latest book, The Greatest Show On Earth, but, nearly all of them, I suggest, have evolved to have a sensitive hip-pocket nerve.  If we touch that nerve, I predict lights will go on in that part of the brain, the self-interest lobe, that becomes indignant when it realises it has been gypped. That is when religion will lose at least some of its grip on the gullible. I suggest the Colorado citizens’ initiated referendum with its 66 000 signatures demonstrates that possibility.

Postscript:The Greek Government has just introduced a bill to tax the property income of the Orthodox Church.  It is estimated this new tax will generate 10 million Euros per annum.

--Max Wallace

Max Wallace is Director of the Australia New Zealand Secular Association and author of The Purple Economy: Supernatural Charities, Tax and the State, Melbourne, 2007.