Sen. Grassley, a Baptist, has targeted six Pentecostal ministries, demanding that they turn over to him every credit card receipt for the last five years. He has also demanded that at least one of the ministries provide him with the names and addresses of every person or group of persons who has ever spoken or performed music in his church for remuneration since 2004. Staffers in Grassley’s office have said that it is their goal to make it all public. So what is really going on? What is the senator up to? Why are some of the ministries resistant to this? Why does this represent a threat to freedom of religion in America? What does it portend for other faiths?

An End to Popular Christian Television? A New Religious McCarthyism?

“What do you have to hide?”

This is the rallying cry of First Amendment opponents who suggest that the truly innocent need not fear. But history is replete with people of sincere political or religious conviction who have seized the levers of power and used them to destroy those of opposing views. Even modern American history has seen what a powerful senator can do to people foolish enough to trust him with all of their personal history. In the McCarthy hearings, hundreds of private citizens waived their constitutional rights, volunteering everything in the belief that their innocence would protect them, only to see lives and careers publicly destroyed forever. It may be happening again.

Throughout history seismic shifts have occurred—revolutions, sometimes political, sometimes religious, and millions have died. During the great plagues of the Middle Ages, aroused Christians blamed the Jews and massive pogroms resulted in the wholesale slaughter of entire communities. Sometimes these powerful shifts occurred within one family. Queen Mary ascended the throne of England and Protestants were killed. Her sister Elizabeth succeeded her and the Catholics were persecuted instead. From country to country and sovereign to sovereign, anything could happen. People hardly knew how to live in anticipation of the next shift.

The American founders started something new. They not only wrote a constitution, whose First Amendment protected the press and religion, they established a Bill of Rights for citizens too.

Today, America is strangely complacent about these rights. If allowing the government to listen in on our telephones or sift through our emails will help catch a terrorist, then why not? What do we have to hide?

But history has shown that governments, in the hands of the powerful, can be capricious and unjust in their prosecution. Cardinal Richelieu once boasted, “Give me four lines written by any man and I can have him tried as a criminal.” When government decides guilt it can surely prove it and the target is helpless. Innocence is no guarantee against a resolute prosecution. Indeed, the greater the investment of time and resources the more certain the conviction, if for political-economic reasons alone.

One of the more compelling stories in All the Presidents’ Children, gives the account of Michael Reagan, the president’s son. Michael exchanged an item in a store one day and his accompanying Secret Service guards misunderstood. They thought he had shoplifted and the message traveled along the Secret Service telegraph for several years until his father finally confronted him. Michael was devastated. It took months to clear the matter and when it was over Michael asked his father why he hadn’t believed him in the first place?

“Well,” President Reagan offered sadly, “They saved my life, son; I trusted them.”

If a president’s son can be the target of injustice, any ordinary citizen is certainly vulnerable.

Our founding fathers wanted a government that had checks and balances. They wanted to avoid injustice. And the system put in place seemed to be a remarkable improvement on anything yet seen. But even then, it did not work perfectly. Huge numbers of Americans were slaves. And modern DNA is showing how glaringly flawed our justice system continues to be.

Nor has a guarantee of religious freedom always worked. America has experienced periods of rampant religious persecution. Jews, Mormons, Catholics have all been targets. As late as the 1920s, six “know-nothings” were elected to the United States Congress as essentially the party of anti-Catholic bigots.

This is at the heart of the concern of Baptist Sen. Grassley’s investigation of six Pentecostal ministries: Joyce Meyer, Creflo A. Dollar, Eddie Long, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and Paula White. Grassley, a Baptist, has not named any ministries from his own church denomination. Even ministries that preach the same things and have more extravagant lifestyles are exempt if their heads have Baptist ordination.

Baptists, who see Pentecostals and Charismatics as doctrinally flawed, and who only a generation ago taught that many of them were actually demon-possessed, have long chafed under the popularity of the Pentecostal-Charismatic television outreach. Since the 1970s Pentecostal and Charismatic television ministries have dominated the Nielsen ratings. And it has been reflected by the shifts in American society. Today, according to the Pew Research Foundation, numbers of denominational Pentecostals alone match Southern Baptists and when Charismatics are added, defined as traditional Christians believing in a supernatural “Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” which include so-called Catholic Charismatics, they now number close to 28% of the American population. (A recent Barna Survey puts the total number at 23%.) It is a staggering number, but it explains why television habits of the American people persist. Pentecostal ministries can be toppled by scandal or in one case even taken over by Baptist leadership and others only re-emerge to take their place.

But so what? If they are truly innocent, why not let their doctrinal enemies take a look and see what they want? What do they have to hide? For the same reason that major newspapers and television networks will not let the public look and see what they want.

Almost all major newspapers and television networks have stringent security rules. You enter their buildings only with photo identification and add your signature to a sign-up sheet in a lobby where an armed guard stands vigilant. You slap a paper, bar-coded I.D. to your lapel and wait patiently for someone to escort you to the elevator and to the right floor. You cannot just wander the halls. You cannot rifle through a reporter’s desk, explaining that you want to see his sources in case they are lying or misleading.

The First Amendment is a wonderful thing. It allows the media the dignity and time to refine its newsgathering and writing and research without fearing that the government or some enemy will pull information out of context and release it publicly without explanation.

The same security and rights are accorded the U.S. Senate. They, too, have security. They, too, will not let you see what you want. They, too, know that information pulled out of context can be misleading and can be used to harm. The president cannot send armed guards into the Senate to take documents nor can the courts.

What does the media have to hide? What does the Senate have to hide? They have a right to hide from abusive and intrusive power that interferes with their right to do their work under the Constitution.

There are thousands of ministries and religious organizations. Many of these organizations have leaders far more wealthy than Grassley’s six, and some enjoy lifestyles far greater. They all have homes large and small, owned by the ministry or owned personally by their pastors who get parsonage allowances. Some have schools, some have jets, some have tennis courts and indoor swimming pools, some even have hotels. Some own large acreage in the middle of city centers, acreage that is worth more than all of the assets of all six of Grassley’s targets combined. Some have tapestries on the wall worth more than the homes that the networks will fly over in their helicopter videos when their attacks begin. Why isn’t there a fair way to sort all of this out? To determine what is honest or not? To determine which salary is justified and matches the doctrines preached and which salaries and compensation packages don’t?

Ah, but you see, there is. Such a system is already in place. And over the years it has been refined by the Congress and the presidents and the courts. It has all of this down to a fine science. It is the Internal Revenue Service. This agency is tasked with sorting out all of this. It may confirm, for example, that salary to a religious leader be determined by a “compensation board” which is not influenced by those who receive the pay. And, ironically, all audits of religious organizations are guided by rules that Sen. Grassley authored himself.

So what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that two of the six ministries he is publicly attacking have just experienced an exhaustive audit by the IRS and were given a clean bill of health! A third has recently hand-delivered a letter to the IRS, asking them to conduct an audit of its organization.

Since the IRS cannot do what the senator wants, he has decided that as a one-man prosecutor, trial and jury, he, himself, will take out the six ministries that have coincidently been the doctrinal nemesis of his own church for the last century. He has told us that he has been mulling this over for two years. He knows that what the courts and prosecutors and evidence and fairness can’t do, demagoguery can accomplish. He knows this because he has a powerful ally, the media.

Grassley knows that the media hates all religions (except some selected white Protestant brands, traditional favorites of elderly stockholders now in their Connecticut retirement and still possessing some small influence on their investments). The media tends to hate Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons and any and all offbeat brands like the Church of Scientology, etc. So he will spoon-feed the story to his media sidekicks, who are chomping at the bit over these few ministries who have been culled from the herd and are thus vulnerable to attack.

It is nothing personal for the media. It is show business and food. They would just as easily pounce on Sen. Grassley’s own Baptists and eat them as well. He knows that and is willing to risk it to get rid of some doctrinal enemies. Besides the herd will just move on to the next watering hole, a little safer now that the media lions have been sated.

And how does the Media feel about being used to settle a doctrinal score? They don’t even bat an eyelash. All religious belief is a blur to them. And programming is just formula. They have already sent helicopters over the house of one ministry touting it as a mansion, from the sky, not pointing out to their viewers that the preacher doesn’t actually own the house they are showing, the ministry does, nor pointing out the obvious, that “the mansion,” which sits in steamy, sultry Texas, has no swimming pool and is built on acres of land that is worth less than a quarter lot in New York, Boston or Los Angeles. But, boy, does it look awesome from a helicopter and it has lots of square feet. So it will work for the story and the public will all feel the appropriate outrage because they will not know the other side.

So popular religious television, as we know it today, is in jeopardy. One man, with a savvy understanding of the media and the power of religious bigotry and how to use it to his own advantage will see to that. And why? Why is he doing this? Because he is sincere. Because he truly believes that he is right and his doctrines are right and the others are wrong. He is doing this to protect all of those dumb people who are too foolish to understand the false doctrines they have embraced. He is doing this for their own good. He is saving them from hell.

And when he has brought down all of their television programs and they have all renounced their fanciful ideas about healing and feeling healthy and having a better lifestyle now, in this world, instead of waiting for eternity, when they have accepted that poverty is a virtue to be relished with humility and sickness a blessing to be savored, then he will leave them alone for a while but he will be watching. From his perch in the United States Senate, he will be watching.

Posted by Doug Wead

Doug Wead is a presidential historian and New York Times bestselling author. He is a former special assistant to the president to G. H. W. Bush. Wead grew up a Pentecostal and was once a board member to one of the targeted six ministries.
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