The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Richardson’s initial offer, on May 9, 2014, to deliver the invocation at a city commission meeting was met with a polite response, but his request was deferred and subsequent efforts were rebuffed. “As a resident of Winter Garden, I would like our city to be known for its inclusiveness for all points of view and its respect for all individuals,” Richardson wrote to the city clerk. “Opening up the commission meeting invocations to everyone would be a wonderful step in that direction.” But openness was not forthcoming. After a period of reflection Richardson decided to make his case during the public comments period of city commission meetings. The commissioners were unmoved. Richardson returned again and again to politely request an opportunity to offer the invocation. All told, he appeared before thirty-five meetings.13 At one meeting he was ejected for failing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.14

  The city responded by instituting a rule that anyone wishing to perform an invocation must represent a 501(c)(3) organization.15 The intent, Richardson believed, was to make it harder for nontheistic individuals like him to compete in the invocations contest. But Richardson, who happens to be a member of a 501(c)(3) called the Central Florida Freethought Community, was nonetheless able to supply the necessary documentation. Still no luck.

  Richardson met with the city manager and multiple commissioners and followed up on those meetings with dozens of public records requests and emails. He circulated a nonbinding petition asking the city to either remove the discriminatory aspects of their invocation policy or to drop the invocations entirely. The city still rebuffed him. At a meeting on January 11, 2018, Richardson stated his case yet again during the public comments section.

  “You have a policy that allows you to unfairly discriminate,” Richardson stated, his voice firm but measured. “Meeting after meeting, month after month, your silence and inaction confers your consent for discrimination and exclusionary practices just as surely as if you crafted every word of this policy personally. I urge you to once again to reject discrimination, reject tribalism, reject exclusionary practices.” In an audio recording of the event, after Richardson speaks, a member the audience can be heard loudly declaring, “Fake news!” Richardson claims that person was Linda Rees, the wife of the mayor.16

  In May 2019, Richardson spoke at a final hearing as Winter Garden city commissioners debated whether to affirm their existing policy. After issuing yet another plea for inclusion, he was followed by Tim Grosshans, who stood up to air his views on the matter. “We heard clearly from the city manager that both the current and the proposed procedures are constitutional,” Grosshans said. Adding, “I do think it needs to be inclusive for residents of Winter Garden,” he said, “You have done well and I encourage you to continue to do so.”17 The commissioners voted to stay the course.

  As of this writing, four years after making his initial request, Richardson has not been given the opportunity to deliver an invocation in Winter Garden. He has, however, been able to deliver invocations before public meetings at other Florida towns through the Central Florida Freethought Community. His speeches consist mainly of celebrations of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and appeals to the spirit of inclusion. Like other members of the CFFC, Richardson would prefer that cities and towns respect the diversity of their populations by skipping sectarian invocations altogether and focusing instead on rational deliberation over public policy matters that affect their residents. But as long as representatives of religious organizations insist on putting their stamp on proceedings, he feels his voice needs to be heard, too.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of Winter Garden, even as Richardson continues his long slog for a symbolic recognition, Tim Grosshans has plenty of other fish to fry. He has no trouble securing invocation slots—he or his staff show up about every six months—so he invests his energy in other projects with more directly tangible benefits.

  Grosshans sits on the board of Foundation Academy, a pre-K–12 school serving close to 1,000 students on two different campuses. His wife, Carol, serves as vice president of education. As of this writing, the school bills itself as “FBC [First Baptist Church] Winter Garden’s largest ministry,” and Grosshans delivered the 2019 commencement address.

  Foundation Academy’s 2016–17 student/parent handbook reflects the movement’s normalization of gender hierarchy. It informs school families that the husband “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family,” while “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”18 The wife had indeed better be gracious, for she has the additional “God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.” In a section on “the Christian and the Social Order,” the handbook identifies same-sex relationships as a form of “sexual immorality” and warns students and parents of the consequences: “We believe that any form (including practice, self-identifying statements, or public promotion) of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery and pornography are sinful and may result in expulsion.”19 The handbook also makes clear that opposing abortion is part of being a good student: “We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.”20

  None of which stands in the way of the Foundation Academy collecting public funds to carry out its mission. As a religious nonprofit, of course, the academy is exempt from some taxes and reporting requirements. More than that, it has a claim on direct subsidies from taxpayers through Florida’s bountiful school voucher program. The school also accepts money from a state-funded school choice program called Step Up for Students, which grants the school up to $7,111 per qualifying child. Additional public funding is available through another state-funded program called the McKay Scholarship, which provides for students with learning and other disabilities.

  Pastor Grosshans’s friend Senator Marco Rubio is a big proponent of such “school choice” programs. In 2018, Rubio released a video celebrating “National School Choice Week,” an initiative supported by voucher and charter lobbies and funded by the Gleason Family Foundation, which also funds the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the libertarian Cato Institute.21 Florida has one of the nation’s largest private school voucher programs and in 2017 spent close to $1 billion on vouchers.22 A reported 80 percent of the funds for such programs are funneled to religious schools throughout the state. Foundation Academy certainly appears to be thriving financially. It is presently embarking on a five-year expansion, which will include an athletic complex with a sophisticated, contemporary design, enlarged classroom capacity, and a fine arts building.

  As a pastor, of course, Tim Grosshans is entitled to a minister’s housing allowance—another unique subsidy to clergy and houses of worship that is not available to secular nonprofit groups and their leaders. According to IRS code, pastors are allowed to exclude the amount used to provide or rent a home or the fair market value of the home, including furnishings, property insurance, homeowners’ association fees, utilities, even remodeling expenses from gross income. The Treasury Department rejected the ministerial housing exemption when it first came up in 1921, but Congress forced it through. With the overhaul of the tax code in 1954, housing or “parsonage” benefits were made more lenient, largely as part of Cold War efforts to promote religion.23 Today, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of full-time clergy claim the housing allowance. In 2017, according to the Treasury Department, the exemption was predicted to cost approximately $9.3 billion in forgone taxes over the next decade.

  The exemption is meant to apply only to a minister’s primary residence, and is supposed to exclude commercial properties or vacation homes. While most pastors are moderately compensated, this rule has done little to slow the housing grift of mega-preachers, many within shouting distance of Winter Garden. Before her death in 2016, Jan
Crouch, an Orlando televangelist known for her astonishingly buoyant hairstyles, cofounded with her husband, Paul, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which was headquartered in Southern California and by 2010 was the third-largest over-the-air television station group in the country, that year receiving $93 million in tax-exempt donations.

  The couple’s vast portfolio grew to include more than thirty residences, many of them tax-free “parsonages,” in Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Florida, paid for in cash. It also included a pair of planes valued at $8 million and $49 million. Trinity Broadcasting Network “ordained” employees as ministers, which allowed the Crouches and their network to escape paying social security tax. The Crouches enjoyed a lifestyle of thousand-dollar dinners, antiques paid for with TBN credit cards, and a $425,000 payoff, in 1998, to Enoch Lonnie Ford, a former employee of the network, on the condition that Ford keep quiet about what he claimed was a sexual encounter with Paul Crouch.24

  In America today, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the financial pathways that lead from the public coffers to mega-preachers’ lives of bounty. Trump adviser Paula White, former senior pastor of the Apopka, Florida–based New Destiny Christian Center and cofounder with her former husband of the Without Walls International Church, headed one of six ministries caught up in a lengthy investigation by the Senate Investigation Committee for alleged misuse of church funds and tax-exempt status.25 The investigation also roped in the ministry of Georgia megapreacher Creflo Dollar, known for his collection of private jets and multimillion-dollar homes. Like White, Dollar resisted cooperating with an investigation into his various business entities, which included “private airports and aircraft leasing opportunities.” The committee had questioned “the use of the church’s tax-exempt status to avoid taxation” but eventually abandoned its efforts and called instead on pastors themselves to engage in “self-reform.”26 All around the country, the stories may vary in detail but they come down to the same bottom line. The ability to direct and protect the flow of public money toward religious groups, and above all religious groups with the correct creed, is an intended consequence of the “religious liberty” agenda.

  In order to understand how the Alliance Defending Freedom and its political allies turned “religious liberty” into a gravy train of public money, it is important to take a closer look at some of the distortions in reasoning that they persuaded the Supreme Court to enshrine in law.

  Starting in the 1980s, Jay Sekulow and others on the extreme wing of the religious right began to take a curious line of argument in Establishment Clause cases. In most such cases, there is a distinction between the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion—such as a public school teacher’s right to pray—and the First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion—such as an attempt by that public school teacher to lead students in prayer during class. Rather than invoke the Free Exercise Clause, however, Sekulow and his allies suddenly began to appeal to the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. In an argument that formed the tip of the legal spear aiming at the Establishment Clause, they asserted that religion is just speech from a certain, religious point of view. And to prohibit speech of any type on the basis of viewpoint is, by definition, to violate the Free Speech Clause.

  One could spill a lot of ink explaining why it is absurd to suppose that religion is not religion after all, but just speech from a religious point of view. But fine arguments are not necessary in this case because the Constitution itself supposes that religion is a category of activity distinct from speech. Why else would the First Amendment take the trouble to guarantee the freedom of religion and then turn around and add a separate and distinct guarantee of the freedom of speech? Indeed, the obvious fact that religion is a distinct activity is essential to make sense of the Establishment Clause, the very first clause of our First Amendment. Congress is proscribed from the “establishment of religion”—a concept easily grasped—but it isn’t proscribed from the “establishment of speech,” because the latter is nonsensical. What, after all, is the justification for religion’s substantial and unique tax benefits if religion is nothing more than a form of speech like any other?

  Supreme Court justice Byron White spotted the incoherent nature of this argument in a 1981 case Widmar v. Vincent, in which the Court decided that excluding a religious group from meeting on state university campus facilities amounted to a violation of its free speech rights. The opinion of the majority, White argued in his dissent, “is founded on the proposition that because religious worship uses speech, it is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.” White concluded, “I believe this proposition is plainly wrong … Were it right, the Religion Clauses would be emptied of any independent meaning in circumstances in which religious practice took the form of speech.”27

  Yet subsequent legal advocates of the religious right seized on the opening created by the Widmar decision and generated other cases that followed a similar tack. “Our purpose must be to spread the gospel on the new mission field that the Lord has opened—public high schools,” Sekulow told the supporters of the newly formed American Center for Law and Justice in 1990. “Yes, the so-called ‘wall of separation’ between church and state has begun to crumble.”28

  Rendering the Establishment Clause unintelligible, as far as the legal advocates for Christian nationalism were concerned, was a feature of the new line of argument, not a bug. Indeed, if they could recharacterize efforts to invest religion with the authority of government merely as the exercise of free speech rights, then the Establishment Clause would largely go away. Efforts to enshrine this novel line of constitutional misinterpretation achieved a critical victory in the 2001 case of Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

  Good News Clubs, a widespread initiative sponsored by an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship, seek to convert children as young as four and five years old to a deeply reactionary form of evangelical Christianity. The organization installs the clubs as after-school programs in public elementary schools, both because that’s where the youngest and most impressionable children are and, more importantly, because their presence in the schools often confuses small children into thinking that the public school endorses their particular religion. Public schools have a cloak of authority in the minds of small children. Most of them can’t distinguish what is taught in school from what is endorsed by the school. They think that if something is being taught at their school, it must be what the school wants them to believe.

  Prior to 2001, public schools across the United States generally excluded Good News Clubs out of Establishment Clause concerns (among other reasons). Indeed, for many years, public elementary schools routinely tended to exclude all religious groups from use of their facilities, just as they excluded, and continue to exclude, partisan political groups, for reasons that seemed obvious enough to all.

  With Good News Club v. Milford Central School, Justice Clarence Thomas gave the Christian nationalists everything they asked for and more. Speaking for the conservative majority, Justice Thomas announced that in excluding the Good News Club because it was religious in nature, Milford Central School discriminated against its religious viewpoint, in violation of its right to free speech. There was no more reason to be concerned about the Establishment Clause, he further argued, than there would be if the school included a soccer club—which, he claimed, also involved speech from a certain point of view.

  In his dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens easily spotted the absurdity. Schools in general still exclude partisan political groups from using their facilities—and yet no one supposes that in doing so they violate the free speech rights of those groups. Political groups are barred as a category on account of their nature, not their specific political views, and religious groups were barred in the same way—until Thomas, with guidance from the Alliance Defending Freedom, produced the palpable nonsense that excluding a group on the basis of its religious nature was to discriminate again
st its religious views. In reality, Thomas had simply obliterated religion as a meaningful category of activity, subject to constitutional constraints, such as the Establishment Clause.

  Justice David Souter, in his dissent, saw even further into the potential consequences of such a breakdown in logic. If excluding a religious group on account of the fact that it is religious is a violation of its speech rights, then religious groups belong to a super-category of activity that can never be excluded from school (or other government functions). That is, while political groups, or sporting groups, or business groups, might be excluded on the basis of the nature of their activities without violating their speech rights, religion alone would have a trump card that guaranteed entry under all circumstances. Thus, Souter concluded, “this case would stand for the remarkable proposition that any public school opened for civic meetings must be opened for use as a church, synagogue, or mosque.”29

  The only part Souter got wrong was the bit about the synagogue and the mosque. Only conservative Christian churches stood a realistic chance of claiming the new bonanza. A religious group called The Satanic Temple proved the point. In the wake of the Good News Club decision, members of The Satanic Temple—a nontheistic religious order with chapters around the country and overseas—attempted to create after-school clubs of their own and install them in a handful of schools that had already accepted Good News Clubs.30 A key difference was that, instead of teaching small children that without Jesus they would suffer eternal torment, as Good News Clubs do, The Satanic Temple clubs aimed to teach reason and empathy. They hired a curriculum specialist who produced detailed lesson plans focused on the principles of equality and kindness.

  The schools could not slam their doors fast enough, throwing up a variety of procedural and legal hurdles. After news of their plan broke in the Washington Post, Satanic Temple leaders received multiple, often public, death threats. They weren’t the only other group operating from a “religious viewpoint” effectively shut out from public schools: Wiccans, atheists, Muslims, and other minority religious groups have attempted similar gambits and been excluded from the schools through a variety of means. These episodes are a stark reminder of what I have amply documented in my last book: when members of minority or unpopular religions seek to exercise their “rights” in the same way conservative Christians do, they are frequently prevented from doing so. Public school buildings are not, as it turns out, a “viewpoint-neutral” forum, open in practice to all religions regardless of rank or social status, as the Alliance Defending Freedom argues. “Religious liberty” in America today is largely religious liberty for certain “approved” groups.