Megachurch Fraud and Fake Prophets: Prophets and Losses

A ledger of the men who discovered that the surest miracle is a credulous congregation and a working card reader.

A word, first, on what this is not. It is not an issue about faith. What a sincere believer holds in his heart is his own business and no one else's, and a man kneeling in honest devotion is the last person on earth this newspaper would ever mock. This is an issue about the other men — the ones who studied that devotion the way a locksmith studies a lock, put on the collar to work the register, and built fortunes on the trust of people who came seeking God and met instead a sales funnel. The blade aims at the wolf, never at the flock. Every specimen below is a con. Not one of them is a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Jew. They are merely dressed as one.

The Aviator

He requires a private jet, and then a larger private jet, on the stated theological grounds that the commercial cabin is infested with demons and the Lord's work cannot be conducted in coach. The donations of the faithful — many of them poor, many giving what they cannot spare — are converted, through this reasoning, into a fourth aircraft.

The verdict: He has located the one passage of scripture that commands a Gulfstream, and he alone, by happy coincidence, is qualified to fly in it.

The Healer

His miracles correlate with uncanny precision to the size of the gift. The laying-on of hands has, in a long and lucrative career, never once regrown a limb, restored an eye, or emptied a wheelchair that stayed empty — but it has, reliably, emptied an account. The lame walk for the cameras and are wheeled out the back.

The verdict: He sells the one product that cannot be returned by a customer who is, by the terms of the sale, too dead or too devoted to complain.

The Forecaster

He names the date of the end of the world, and sells the preparations for it — the bunkers, the books, the survival kits, the final tithes from people liquidating their lives. On the appointed morning, when the world conspicuously fails to end, he consults his calculations, discovers a small arithmetical error, names a new date, and declines, as a matter of firm principle, all refunds.

The verdict: The apocalypse is the only product whose total failure to arrive has never once hurt repeat sales.

The Weeper

He sobs, on camera, that the ministry is collapsing, that God Himself will recall him unless the faithful wire, tonight, the money they were saving for rent. The crisis is permanent and recurs on schedule. The only thing reliably rescued, year after tearful year, is the lakefront house held by the tax-exempt entity that is, on paper, the church.

The verdict: His tears are real in the way a salesman's enthusiasm is real — produced on demand, in earnest, for a commission.

The Anointed Exception

He receives, alone among all men, a private revelation that the rules binding the entire congregation do not, on careful spiritual reflection, bind him — and that the exemption applies with particular force to the commandments concerning money, power, and other men's wives. The flock fasts. The shepherd, divinely excused, does not.

The verdict: Every rule he preaches is a wall around the sheep and a door for himself, and he holds the only key, which he says God cut personally.

The Indulgence-Seller

He sells, in modern and tax-advantaged packaging, the oldest product in the entire trade: forgiveness, priced per sin, payable in advance — which is precisely the thing his own church says cannot be sold, and condemned the selling of. Salvation becomes a subscription. Grace, which the actual faith insists is free, is marked up, bundled, and sold back to the people it was promised to for nothing.

The verdict: He took the one thing his own scripture says cannot be bought, put a price on it, and found, to no one's surprise but the buyer's, a market.

The Prosperity Theologian

He teaches that wealth is the visible sign of God's favor — a doctrine of remarkable convenience, since it sanctifies his own mansion as evidence of holiness while quietly indicting the poor in his pews for the sin of their poverty. Give to him, the logic runs, and God will make you like him. Almost no one becomes like him. He remains the proof anyway.

The verdict: He has built a theology in which his greed is divine favor and their need is divine judgment, and he passes the plate to the judged to fund the favored.

The Relic Merchant

He monetizes the mail-order splinter, the vial of tears, the weeping statue, the factory-blessed water, the anointed cloth run off by the gross — faith's one perfect growth industry, requiring no inventory it cannot manufacture in the back and no supply it cannot expand at will. The miracle is wholesale. The markup is retail. The buyer's hope is the only raw material, and it is renewable.

The verdict: He has solved the merchant's eternal problem of scarce supply by selling a good that can be produced, infinitely, out of nothing but the customer's longing to believe it is real.

Notice, at the close, who is never the target of a single line above. Not the widow with her envelope. Not the sick man hoping against the odds. Not the believer on his knees in a quiet room, asking for nothing and selling less. They are the wronged party in every entry, the marks these men were built to work. That is the whole moral of the ledger: the con is not that people believe in God. The con is the man who saw that belief, recognized it for the open and trusting thing it is, and decided to charge admission. Render unto God what is God's. He is the one in the collar making sure it routes, first, through him.