Issues & Opinions

Who knew? There’s a backlash against tithing, according to today’s WSJ.

Perhaps everyone but me knew, since I’m an irreligious fellow.

That last trait makes it predictable that I’d point out the obvious: that churches are a business, like any other. It is hard to argue otherwise, concerns about heavenly salvation and eternal damnation notwithstanding. Denominations, and the churches within them, compete with one another for congregants, and they do so with a variety of devices.

The Megachurch Effect

Resistance to tithing has been increasing steadily in recent years, as more churchgoers have questioned the way their churches spend money. Like other philanthropists today, religious givers want to see exactly how their donations are being used. In some cases, the growth of megachurches, some with expensive worship centers equipped with coffee bars and widescreen TVs, have turned people off of tithing. And those who object are finding like-minded souls on the Web in theological forums.

(emphasis mine)

Several things could explain churches’ splashing out on such non-eternity-related items as coffee bars or the long-term lease and $100 million renovation of the Houston Compaq Center (nee Summit), but the three most obvious are grandiosity, marketing, and both. A for-profit business might engage in the same sorts of activities, for the same reasons. And bully for both, the secular and the spiritual – it’s all part of the game of making certain your operations remain funded. Customer retention is an issue in both spheres:

Church leaders say tithing isn’t just a theological issue, but a financial one. Americans gave an estimated $97 billion to congregations in 2006, almost a third of the country’s $295 billion in charitable donations, according to Giving USA Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization in Glenview, Ill. But giving to religion is growing more slowly than other types of giving, says Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. That’s partly because people are attending church less frequently, says Mr. Rooney, and are giving to a wider array of causes, including secular ones.

The difference is, that you’d seldom (never?) hear a businessman outside of religion making a comment like this:

That worries some church leaders. “If everyone gives 2% of their income because that’s what they feel like giving, you aren’t going to have money to pay the light bill and keep the doors open,” says Duane Rice, an official with Evangelical Friends International, a denomination that believes that tithing is required by the Bible.

Ignore, please, the nougatty richness of Mr. Rice’s appeal to biblical authority in claiming religion’s right to proportionate payments, and focus just on the plaintive cry that, well, it’s got to be 10%, because if not, well, they’ll not be able to keep the lights on.

He’s badly confused on cause and effect here. For-profit or not, the lights going off is God’s way of saying you didn’t make your customers happy, thus bringing in enough money, and not the other way around.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”

Karl Marx would be so proud. Up to but not including the empire-building, self-importance, and rank perfidy sometimes seen in the clergy.

I could hardly care less how tricked-out any given religion cares to make itself. As long as they can get people to pay for the services offered, more power to them. Offering a service people value is how business is done. Whining when you find that they don’t value your service? Not very businesslike at all.