Celebrity Pastors’ Walter White Problem

In the final season of Breaking
Bad, Walter White, the chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, has made more
money than he can spend without breaking his cover as a mild-mannered cancer
survivor. In one scene, he and his wife stare disconsolately at a ton of hundred
dollar bills stacked two feet high, realizing it was all but useless to them.

Recently we’ve been discovering that celebrity pastors
understand that they have a similar conundrum. Having built megachurches with
budgets in the tens of millions and generous salaries to match, they can’t
really spend all the money they’re earning. Unless they’re fully certified
prosperity preachers, there’s a certain decorum that pastors must follow when
spending their congregation’s money. When you live off money given to God, your
public lifestyle ought to be just slightly constrained.

It’s the Walter White Problem. White couldn’t spend his
fortune because it was dirty. Pastors can’t spend theirs because it’s holy.

Take Steven Furtick, pastor and founder of the 14,000-member
Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC. Last year he realized that the local NBC
affiliate was about to report on a three million dollar mansion he was building
for himself. Anticipating that his congregation might take a dim view of that
kind of thing, Furtick told his church that it was “not that great of a house”
and that the money for it had come entirely from income from his books, one of
them a New York Times best seller.

Neither claim was true. Sure, compared to the Biltmore,
Furtick’s house wasn’t that great, but, at 16,000 square feet, it’s
grander than almost any other house in North Carolina. To pay for it he’d have
to sell 1.5 million books, though it’s unlikely that he has sold more than
350,000.

Last year, Elevation Church spent $7.5 million on salaries,
a sizable portion of that going to Furtick. His church income surely dwarfs his
book royalties, so why the denial that his pastor’s salary was used for the
house?

Walter White. You may have the cash, but you can’t just
spend it however you’d like.

We don’t expect our pastors to live in palaces, especially
ones paid for from the collection plate. Furtick sensed this in his protest about
the television report. “I thought this ain’t right,” he told his church. “I
didn’t even build that house with money from the church.”

This is a big reason why celebrity pastors love the book
business. It’s more comforting to think that the pastor’s five-car garage was
paid for by faceless Amazon customers than from a tithe check. Even if the
mansion money actually does come mostly from the collection plate, the illusion
of Amazon-based wealth is important.

Nothing is better at maintaining that illusion than an
author earning a place on the New York
Times bestseller list. Of course Steven Furtick can afford to build his
mansion, we think; he’s a bestselling author. So is Perry Noble, whose church
attracts 30,000 people each week in South Carolina. So is Mark Driscoll.

But that, too, is an illusion. We have discovered in the
last few weeks that Mark Driscoll and Perry Noble each authorized their churches to spend
around $200,000 to buy 11,000 of their books to artificially force them onto
the Times’ bestseller list. Steven Furtick’s church also bought enough copies of his books so that he, too, appeared on the NYT bestseller list twice. Without
the bulk purchases, though, each of the pastors’ books fell off the list after one
week.

That fleeting bestseller designation is one that the pastors
have embraced and trumpeted. Until last week, Mark Driscoll promoted himself as
a #1 bestselling author. Perry Noble’s Facebook profile says only two things:
He’s a pastor and a New York Times bestselling author. While the bestseller
designation has its own value in increasing future book sales and inflating speaking
fees, its special value is in the appearance of non-church wealth it creates
for these pastor-authors.

The truth, however, is that much of their spendable wealth
is generated by laundered tithe money, so the royalties and speaking fees
comprise a second, hidden church salary. By using tithed money and their own
pulpits to drive book sales and even buy the books outright, celebrity pastors
have turned their non-profits into personal profit centers.

The problem isn’t only an ethical one. Tax-exempt
organizations are prohibited from contriving special financial gains for their
leaders, a violation called inurement that the IRS can punish by revoking the
organization’s tax-exempt status. That seems a risk that these pastors are
either unaware of or comfortable with, because their churches’ budgets,
branding, and messaging are routinely used to sell as many books as possible to
make the preachers even wealthier.

Because it’s earned commercial wealth, it can be freely
spent. Only when pastors can show us that their spending money isn’t really
church money do they feel confident enough to flaunt it, even if they have to
spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of tithed money to create that illusion.

James Duncan is an
associate professor of communication at Anderson University in South Carolina.
He blogs at pajamapages.com.

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