By Ian Tuttle
Tuesday, August 24, 2015
If John Oliver has a reputation for destroying his
opponents, perhaps it’s because he picks such easy targets.
Last Sunday, on his popular HBO show Last Week Tonight, Oliver devoted 20 minutes to the “prosperity
gospel,” a greasy theology that has long been plied at the fringes of American
Christianity.
Conveniently forgetting that it’s the Parable of the Talents, the evangelists
of the “prosperity gospel” preach that God manifests his blessings in the form
of material wealth, returning ten- or fifty- or a hundredfold one’s initial
offering — which usually can be made out to the evangelist himself.
Predictably, televangelists such as Mike Murdock, Kenneth Copeland, Robert
Tilton, and the prophetically named Creflo Dollar have profited enormously from
the faith of their flocks; Dollar recently asked his congregation to finance
his new $60 million private jet, after his previous jet ran off a runway in the
U.K.
That well-meaning people get snookered is a predictable
consequence. Oliver recounts the case of Bonnie Parker, a cancer patient who
donated thousands of dollars to Kenneth Copeland’s ministry in the belief,
based on Copeland’s teachings, that doing so would cure her illness. That faith
has the power to heal is a belief that extends far beyond “prosperity gospel”
circles, but certain televangelists have a tendency to exploit it. Ms. Parker,
who died in 2004, donated to Copeland and forewent medical treatment.
This is nothing new. As has been the case for decades
now, some shepherds are mainly in the business of fleecing.
But Oliver is not content to let the Almighty right this
wrong. He eagerly invokes a different deity: the federal government. “Not only
is everything you’ve seen so far legal,” he says midway through the segment,
“but the money people donate in response to it is tax-free. Because if you are
registered as a religious nonprofit — or especially a church — you are given
broad exemptions over [sic] taxation
and regulation.” He cites as faults the IRS’s failure to define a “church” and
its admission that its guidelines concerning the regulation of religious
organizations are “purposely broad,” and he considers it nothing short of an
outrage that, according to his reporting, the IRS has audited only three
churches since 2009.
Being at present our country’s most illustrious guest
scold, perhaps Oliver is still becoming familiar with certain principles of the
American project — for example, the First Amendment. It was a fairly radical
thing, after all, for the Founders to require that government be restrained
from trampling on religious beliefs, not the other way around. But I assume
that Oliver knows that — and objects to its inevitable consequences: persons
such as Robert Tilton. Yet the irony surely escapes John Oliver that he has
made himself the televangelist not of “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption,” the
“church” he has set up to mock current IRS law, but of a faith far more radical
than any being preached in infomercials. Oliver and his disciples would have
the federal government separate the wheat from the chaff among American
theologies.
There are many reasons to be terrified of such an effort,
not least that virtually no situation is materially improved by the
intervention of the Internal Revenue Service, whose curious inclination to
lavish special attention on politically conservative nonprofits over the past
several years should indicate that the IRS is hardly an objective political
body, let alone one qualified to pronounce on matters theological. But it is,
most importantly, an inversion of the American solution to the tension between religious
and political loyalties. The former, except in rare circumstances, trumps the
latter. “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and
such only as he believes to be acceptable to him,” wrote James Madison in his
1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.” “This duty is
precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of
Civil Society.” Not so Oliver’s progressivism, the doctrines of which require
whatever homage one may render to the Creator to be submitted to the approval
of, and subordinated to the claims of, the omnipotent State. That such an
arrangement will be used to silence more than a few jet-setting ministers
should be obvious.
The perversion of Christian theology worked by the worst
of the “prosperity gospel” proselytizers is troubling — but matters of
conscience were always to be given the greatest latitude. It’s not the
government’s job to dictate the type of healing in which Bonnie Parker invests.
As a solution to the problem of money-grubbing ministers, perhaps the first
solution should be to discourage people from listening to someone named “Creflo
Dollar.”
Then perhaps a similar effort can save us from the
televangelists of progressivism.
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