All of this really boils down to transparency. It appears that FRC decided to call itself an “association of churches,” when it’s most definitely not a church, in order to avoid giving the government any information about their finances. The gambit was first exposed in 2020 in a piece by ProPublica’s Andrea Suozzo….
To make sense of what’s going on, you need to know that all non-profit groups are granted a tax-exempt status by the U.S. government. That incentivizes people to donate to them for the (theoretical) betterment of society. But there’s a simple catch: The groups have to file a Form 990 report with the IRS every year explaining (among other things) how much money they took in, how it was spent, and how much their top staffers made in salaries. The 990s are public documents that allow the public to keep tabs on whether non-profits are really living up to their stated missions.
Importantly, that rule does not apply to churches, even though they’re also technically non-profits. They don’t have to fill out the 990s. They don’t have to make those details public. That means we don’t always know how much money big-name megachurch pastors make—or how much of the congregation’s money goes right into their pockets. We don’t know who the biggest donors are to those churches or if the money goes where the churches claim it goes….
In 2018, we learned that two Christian groups that are not churches, Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel, had designated themselves as churches anyway. How did they do it? Simple. They lied. Or at least stretched the truth beyond any conceivable reality.
