June 08, 2005
Cult of the Corporate Megachurch
To say that the Christian Fundamentalists interpretation of the scriptures has become amazingly idiosyncratic and cryptic only begins to convey the unchecked goings on behind the closed doors of today’s Megachurches. The authors of Power Religion offer, for the most part, a predictable litany of concerns over the newfangled direction these updated institutions have embarked on. Charges that the church has strayed from its righteous path are nothing new. There is simply no satisfying the pious for whom religious tenets can conceivably never be observed too strictly. What makes the book’s brand of criticism particularly notable, however, is its striking resemblance to the kinds of charges waged against the Christian Church in the 50s and 60s by, of all people, America’s #1 Satanist, Anton Szandor LaVey. LaVey’s argument was simple: Christianity criminalized our most basic needs and desires and was founded against our better nature. The tone of The Satanic Bible is often sheer exasperation. LaVey could not believe the hypocrisy of a church that said one thing and baldly did the opposite. His point was that the only religion to openly recognize and embrace the power and strength of the human character was Satanism. LaVey did not begrudge the Christian Church's need to change to fit the reality of the modern world. He only thought it was deceitful of the church to continue to call itself Christian. “But, if the world has changed so much,” LaVey wrote, “why continue to grasp at the threads of a dying religion? If many religions are denying their own scriptures because they are out of date, and are preaching the philosophies of Satanism, why not call it by its rightful name – Satanism? Certainly it would be far less hypocritical.” Granted LaVey’s ridicule was aimed at a church that was at that time becoming more openly liberal. The convoluted morality of the Evangelical Megachurch is clearly a bird of a different color. LaVey would, no doubt, have exposed it as Satanic, but for slightly different reasons than he did the church of the 50s. As Jeff Sharlet points out in a recent Harper’s article the exurban Megachurch is the unlikely spawn of forces that were once considered contradictory: free-market economics and quasi-totalitarian, ultra-conservative-style organization. Colorado Springs Pastor Ted calls it “Christian capitalism”. Rodney Stark provided the economic model, a “new brand” of religion supposedly supercharged by market competition. South Korean Pastor Paul Cho architected the cell-group structure to maximize top-to-bottom micro-control. Many other influences are equally at work, but the major innovation Sharlet is concerned with is the merger of economic and faith-based goals into a mega corporate church. The combination of institutional cultures has produced, according to Sharlet, a strange beast, increasingly preoccupied with the aggressive language of cruelty and authoritarism. Sharlet concedes the church has always resorted to the rhetoric of “spiritual war” and world dominance. Struck by the banal exhortation to violence in a Pastor Ted wedding sermon, he concludes, the corporate / evangelical conglomeration takes the rhetoric of cruelty and fear to outlandishly absurd levels. Pastor Ted, Sharlet writes, exhorted the newlyweds by saying, “The Christian home is to be in a constant state of war, massive warfare!”