Fleecing Sheep.

It always makes me boggle (“What’s your boggle?”) when I hear Christians comparing themselves to sheep. There’s a fundamental disconnect there between fantasy and reality, but the disconnect is hardly new.

Portrait of Marie-Antoinette of Austria (Photo credit: Wikipedia). Get this gal a shepherd’s crook, STAT!

In centuries past, a fad emerged around Marie Antoinette’s day for “pastoralism,” which meant that all these foppish courtiers and dazzling women dressed in what upper-class nobility thought shepherds and milkmaids wore and romped around their idea of hobby farms with crooks and yokes and pails pretending to be peasants. The only way such a fad could exist was for these nobles to be completely disconnected from the day-to-day lives of real peasants. A couple hundred years previously, these same nobles would have lived cheek-to-jowl with their peasants and been intimately involved with their lives in every way (see Montaillou: Promised Land of Error for loads of info about exactly how involved nobles were with their peasants). But Marie’s crowd thought this was just the jolliest lark imaginable, and you can imagine just how efficient and useful they were at their “tasks.”

English: Engraving of Marie Antoinette à la paysan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia). I’m sure this outfit was more comfortable, at least.

In the same way, modern people think that of the shepherd as some kind of massive humanitarian or something, and sheep as this gentle, docile, protected little flock. The only way this delusion can exist is if the people thinking it have no idea what animal husbandry is like.

Folks, the vast majority of shepherds don’t keep flocks of sheep because sheep are cute or they need pets. They do it because they want to use the sheep for something. Either they want to fleece the sheep, shearing them of their warm coats of wool*, or else they want to kill and eat the sheep. They may protect the sheep, but they’re doing it for a purpose. They may rescue little lambs, but they’re doing it because lambs grow up to be productive and nobody sensible lets an investment go to waste.

With that said, let’s look at Ed Young and James MacDonald, the pastors of the huge megachurches Fellowship Church in Grapevine (Texas) and Harvest Bible Chapel (Chicago).

Ed Young came to my attention with a news article from 2010 about his incredible wealth and luxurious lifestyle. He’s a Prosperity Gospel type of preacher, telling people that his god blesses those who he loves, and by “bless” of course he means “showers with material wealth;” he’s flat-out told his church attendees that if they don’t tithe a full 10% (probably of gross; my own pastor used to preach a 10% gross rather than take-home net because “you want a gross blessing, not a net blessing, right?”), then they are not only wasting their time in church because their god will only curse them, but they are wasting his time too. When he put his mansion up for sale, it listed for over US$2 million dollars (enjoy the bonus ridiculous interior design–people should not let rednecks have unlimited funds).

His blatant cash-grabs are obvious to everybody, it seems, except for the majority of people in his congregation. He says he wants to be “open and honest,” but for some reason (as of 2010) hadn’t told his congregation about his private jet, million-dollar salary, or quarter-million-dollar housing allowance. When the news got out about his beyond-hypocritical lifestyle, a few folks did defect. But he did take the time to make a weird video swiping Gatorade’s logo to make a drink called “Haterade,” which he sips on the video before making a Gary Busey-style grimace of distaste at the viewer. The message is clear: don’t criticize him.

Though Young’s been trying to hide his activities online by means like getting videos removed, the truth is that, as this report puts it (and puts it so well I don’t want to paraphrase but quote), “the new age of social media is now making it more and more difficult for preachers the likes of Ed Young to promote their scams and lottery gospel without getting exposed on sites like Facebook and YouTube.” He’s taking the tack we see so often with wrongdoers in Christianity–demanding people stop talking about him. I’ve written before about how hard it is for dissenters to talk about what they see going wrong in Christianity, and how the religion tends to punish those who come forward. Christianity’s tendency to shoot the messenger definitely works to the benefit of its financial predators, though obviously to the benefit of lots of other types of predators too.

James MacDonald isn’t nearly as nice. Here’s the basic rundown of his sins: he got his megachurch into staggering amounts of debt, has a hugely expensive home and draws an untold fortune every year from various sources. That’s a simplified version of what he’s put his parishioners through, of course. While this was going on, he stripped his church elders of power and ensured that anybody who got onto that board or stayed on it was in lock-step with himself. He began taking steps to ensure that his sub-pastors could do less damage to him when they went sideways (his term) on him. And he began using his authority as the lead pastor of HBC to tell his satellite churches how much they were going to donate, over and above their normal tithing, to his various church-building projects. Not that it worked; at the time of this writing, HBC is right about at US$65,000,000 in debt. That’s “million,” by the way, not a typo, and even while in that amount of debt, MacDonald’s response is to build more churches and expand to more debt. A growing group of elders are speaking against his leadership, which has garnered some of them excommunication and ostracism, because, as MacDonald puts it, “the elders speak for God in our church.”

By now, it’s almost a joke to outsiders about how lavishly so many megapastors live. It might just surprise folks at how far we’ve moved past the gold faucets and air-conditioned doghouses of the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker days. In the evocatively-titled piece “Pulpit Pimps”, The Root describes the current crop of hypocrites: Eddie Long, with his US$5 million-dollar-a-year salary; Kenneth Copeland, who owns not only a private jet but a private airfield; Creflo Dollar, who owns not one but two Rolls-Royce cars and million-dollar-homes in at least two cities as well as a private jet; Paula White and Joyce Meyer (and one day, Joyce Meyer’s day on RtD is coming), who each have the obligatory jet and super-expensive house; the repulsive list goes on and on and on. As the joke goes, “Jesus died so they could have a mansion;” according to page 12 of a study from 2010, the average mega-pastor makes almost $150,000 a year!

Obviously, these people consider their “ministries” to be businesses, and as such, they’re going to take whatever precautions and actions they must to protect those businesses. They’ll use whatever power is at their disposal to keep those businesses making money. They’ll neutralize whatever threats they must to keep the sheep fleece-able.

Can you even imagine a businessperson who refused to talk about how his or her business worked, how much money it made, or how it spent that money? Such a person would quickly come under metaphorical fire for poor practices. Transparency in money handling is something we consider essential to running a good business. Any other charity or non-profit that refused to discuss those things would quickly find its charter getting revoked. But people put up with it from their church leaders. Efforts to hold churches accountable, like ECFA, are almost laughably ineffective because church leaders don’t have to be accountable. Nothing forces them to be so.

If I had to create an organization ripe for abuse and predation, I couldn’t possibly do a better job than what American churches have managed to accomplish: freedom from all accountability, exemptions from the rules that other non-profits must follow, and nobody to force them to do the right thing. If I were a predator, you bet I’d be involved in church ministry; the real miracle is that there aren’t a lot more predators like MacDonald and Young involved and that most ministers are actually decent folks.

Look, to become a church leader, most of the time all you need is a lot of charisma and a decent understanding of how to manipulate people. It’s that simple. You don’t necessarily need a formal education, nor do you need to have any actual training in leadership. You just need to be able to influence crowds. It’s not hard to learn how to do that, either. We’re talking about basic psychology here, not magic or rocket science. People aren’t hard to manipulate (remember the Wizard’s First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation almost anyone will believe almost anything”), especially by predators who totally lack a conscience, like this horrible Nice Guy who got spurned by the object of his affections. When that manipulator is claiming authority from nothing less than the author of the entire universe, it’s really hard to see past the cloak of borrowed authority to the predator beneath.

Sheep don’t tend to question their shepherds. They just go where they’re directed, do what they’re told, and if they do wander off, they can be grabbed and forced back into line. Sheep don’t critically evaluate their shepherds or use rational thinking to examine their situations.

And they not only get fleeced, but when their usefulness as fleece-givers dwindles, they end up in pieces on their loving shepherd’s dinner-plate.

I wish Christians would reconsider comparing themselves to sheep. Unless it’s to Shaun the Sheep, because he looks really rad.

Shaun the Sheep (Photo credit: Diva Sian).
HE DIED FOR YOUR KNITTING.

* True story: I’m standing in a hobby shop around 2002 looking at knitting wool and nursing the tail end of a vicious head cold, and some Yuppie soccer mom with sensible hair and a big cross necklace comes to shop next to me and starts griping about how she could never use “real wool” because “they kill the sheep for it and that’s just mean.” I think she was totally serious; she didn’t look like she’d cracked a joke since the Nixon Administration. I don’t even remember what I said in response, if anything at all. I’m not often at a loss for words, but that was one of those rare moments.