A SHORT HISTORY OF COMMERCIAL RELIGION
Awareness of these truths about the sins of religious leaders is not a reason for non-professional believers to gloat. It may appear at first glance that the professional priests/leaders are the ones who have gone astray. That is a short-sighted view.
We must keep in mind that the system does not work unless the non-professionals (generally called the laity) pay the professionals (generally called the clergy) for their religious commodities and services. And because they pay for spiritual services with tithes, offerings (not as God sees tithes and offerings but as the church has taught and practiced what tithes and offerings should be), and fees, they are accomplices to the crime. To put it in terms an economist would understand, it takes a buyer and a seller to make a business deal. In summary, everyone involved in religion guilty of the sin of mixing business and religion.
When we look at scriptures with the eyes of New Covenant disciples, we wonder how Jews and Christians could go so wrong on this issue. The history of this religious paradigm is interesting to review, but a full discussion of that history is beyond the scope of these pages. Suffice to say, it has been around for thousands of years. Here is a brief summary of our best guess of how we got to this point:
It began sometime during the first temple period when all of Israel came to Jerusalem and the temple for the annual feasts and to make the required sacrifices. Levitical priests were in charge of temple functions and received support from the community in the form of a portion of the sacrifices.
It really began to flourish during the second temple period when the pagan rulers controlled everything in the land of Israel except the religion which was left in the hands of the temple elites (Pharisees, and Sadducees). Even though religious leaders were free to practice religion, they did so only because the rulers allowed them to do so under the terms that the rulers established. In other words, they were not totally free.(Note: This is the period during which Jesus confronted the temple leaders and money-changers).
The second temple era ended with the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Without a temple, there was no place for temple leaders to practice their religious business. The church grew rapidly during this period. Initially, leaders (except the traveling apostles) always functioned at the local level and people met in homes. They practiced sharing their resources with others within the community. There was no corporate religious structure that required membership or payment of tithes to higher authorities.
Things really changed after Constantine, the ruler of Rome, made Christianity the state religion. A hierarchy of authority emerged to include a professional, priestly class that included bishops and eventually popes. Because it was the state religion, the state supported the ruling elites with property and income to keep them in power and under control.
Even though the state supported the Catholic church, the church had its own ways of producing income through tithes and indulgences. Thus it became very wealthy doing what pagan religions had been doing for centuries by effectively charging people for religious services performed in temples that honored particular gods.
After the fall of Rome, the religious structure continued to function. Lacking support from the state, however, the ruling elites solicited support from the common people whom they served in exchange for the religious services delivered to the people.
The Roman Catholic church evolved out of the religious structure first established by Rome. The church had developed doctrines and rituals of religious services to which the people had become accustomed and in which they found a measure of comfort. Therefore, the people were very willing to provide financial support for the religious leaders on whom they had become dependent for spiritual well-being. Even though there was not the same relationship between the state and the religion as in the second temple period or in the Roman Empire, there was still a strong church/state relationship that legitimized the authority of the church to operate without restriction by the state.
The cozy church/state relationship endured for hundreds of years but suffered under the US Constitution which provided for a clear separation. While churches had government support (financial and political), the government paid the bills. When the government stopped paying the bills, churches needed to look for new sources of revenue. Leaders looked around to see what worked in the secular community and began applying commercial principles to religion.
After the Reformation, the actors changed, some of the doctrines changed and some of the rituals changed, and the names of the religious organizations changed, but the practice of doing religious business did not change.
The existence of an elite religious class flourished during the industrial revolution and into the modern era along with an education system that fostered the growth of an affluent middle class with an expanded range of career opportunities. Increased incomes meant more money was available to support an increasing array of religious organizations that people might find worthwhile. With new communications and travel technologies, the scope of career religious opportunities blossomed to create a class of religious professionals unlike anything that ever existed. And, as in previous eras, the church/state relationship persists (at least in the USA) through the state’s control over the formation of religious organizations in exchange for income tax breaks for people who financially support churches and other religious organizations.
As church-related institutions grew in terms of adherents and financial resources, they became increasingly challenged to manage their resources (financial and human) well. So again they looked to the secular world for instruction on how to manage the business aspects of church. They did this partly because the government that authorized their existence as charitable/religious non-profits demanded that they do their financial business according to contemporary business and accounting standards. They also did this because the people who were contributing financially to the institutions expected (demanded) that good business practices be used in managing the great wealth that they (the people) had contributed to the institution. In other words, the people who provided the money to pay the bills (people who were savvy in the ways of the business world) would not continue to support an institution that did not do a good job of managing the money given to it. The donors expected accountability, and businesslike ways of managing people and money was necessary to satisfy these business savvy donors.
From this brief review, we see that mixing business and religion is a long-standing tradition in both the religious community and in government. Actually, if we look at the history honestly, we might conclude that religion has always had a business component — at least beginning with the first temple period when Israel wanted a king and God gave clear warnings about what would happen. These warning accurately anticipate the unholy arrangement of mixing religion and government that still exists to this day.