Here’s another recent example of how Christians spend their money:

Change Marks 10th Anniversary Of Rector (Cate Lecuyer/The Salem News; Jan 29)

BEVERLY, Massachusetts: If a new altar isn’t enough to mark the 10th anniversary of the Rev. Manny Faria, rector at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, a visit from the bishop — for the first time in five years — should do the trick.

The Rt. Rev. M. Thomas Shaw will give Sunday’s 10 p.m. service and bless the new altar — paid for by an anonymous $100,000 donation from a parishioner.

“To me, it was a godsend,” Faria said, “because I didn’t think it was responsible to start a capital fund to move the furniture around.”

But the donation came with a request that it be used to enhance the worship space, so church members spent the summer working with architects to create a new look.

They finished everything up a couple of weeks ago — just in time for Bishop Shaw to consecrate the new altar and chancel space around it.

“He was actually supposed to come in December,” Faria said, “but he was called away to South Africa so he had to reschedule.”

The trip is part of a regular rotation, where bishops make the rounds to different churches. The goal is to have them come once a year, but that doesn’t always happen, and visits are often made by the two suffragan, or assistant, bishops. A visit by the diocesan bishop is an honor that hasn’t happened since September 2006.

The biggest change to the space was eliminating a set of stairs leading to the chancel, so parishioners in wheelchairs can go forth to receive Communion. Church members also kept the original altar, but moved a second one forward — so Faria can preach closer to the congregation — and replaced pews with chairs on both sides of the chancel. Workers also created a credence table and cross out of a bulky wooden pulpit, and moved the baptismal font from the front of the church to the entrance, where it traditionally belongs.

Another parishioner also stepped up with a $30,000 donation to make the organ movable, so the space is more appealing for outside concerts or church events.

“It’s much airier,” Faria said. “It gives us the flexibility we never had the old way.”

The space, however, still “looks like St. Peter’s.” Although there have been changes since he became the rector 10 years ago, the church has always maintained its identity, Faria said.

While some parishioners have come and gone, many others have remained a part of the community for years. Lately, there have been more young families with kids, which has led to a larger Christian-education program. Faria said he’d also like to start holding alternative services that appeal to high school and college students. Church members have also become increasingly involved with international issues, like the awareness of Arab Christians, and went on a mission trip to Israel last year.

“I’m very excited about what we’re doing as a parish,” Faria said.

This story strikes me as noteworthy for a number of reasons.

Here are a few of them:

1) An Episcopal church is involved. The somewhat similar stories I shared yesterday involved Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches. Clearly, lavish spending on churches is not limited to any particular Christian denomnination but involves many (including the most well-known and popular).

2) Rev. Faria didn’t think it appropriate to ask people to pay to “move the furniture around” – yet he calls the $100,000 donation from one parishioner for precisely that purpose “a godsend.” Apparently he didn’t try to convince that parishioner to spend the money in a more socially useful way. Apparently he prefers instead to think of that donation as “a godsend” – something in accordance with the will of gOd and Jesus – rather than an insult to the gOd who condemns graven images and Golden Calves or an insult to the Jesus who told people to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and indicated that perfection involves selling all we have and giving to the poor.

3) Why did the parishioner think this was a wise use of $100,000? Was he or she crazy? Or was he or she merely acting in accordance with a lifetime of conditioning that offers high praise and gratitude to people who lavish money on material items for a church? Even when such gifts are given anonymously, they allow the giver to think of him- or herself as good and holy even though such gifts help a few, relatively well-off people in relatively unimportant ways. Once again, religion seems to be perverting genuine morality – in this case, taking a rather goofy donation that benefits a church/club and its people and presenting it as if it were as worthwhile as the purchase of life-saving vaccines. It’s similar to the way religion can transform terrible acts of war and violence and present them as supremely good, gOd-approved things.

4) Are donations like this tax deductible? As far as I can tell, they are. Should they be? It’s hard to see why.

5) The story tells us that another parishioner donated $30,000 “to make the organ movable, so the space is more appealing….” In a world in which thousands of children die every day because they don’t get food and medicine costing a few pennies, do Christians *really* believe this is the sort of thing that makes their Jesus smile? Why? Just how out of touch with their own scriptures are they? How insulated are they from the needs of the real world?

6) The story concludes by quoting Rev. Faria as saying “I’m very excited about what we’re doing as a parish.” Besides the new altar and making the organ movable, the only things that his parish is doing that are mentioned are these: A larger Christian education program; an awareness of Arab Christians; a mission trip to Israel; and hopes for alternative services geared towards students. None of these things seem to do anything for poor people, sick people, or society as a whole. Instead, they all seem to be self-centered attempts to deepen and spread a sectarian message or to support the people who embrace that message. As sociologist Mark Chaves discovered during his in-depth study of congregations in America, this is typical Christian behavior.

7) Nowhere in this story does the reporter question or challenge the appropriateness of these expenditures or activities. Instead, we find that a journalist is once again acting as little more than a PR agent for the church. The only information that gets passed along is the information provided by that church. Although most stories that get published about atheist and humanist groups seem to include comments from disapproving Christians, few if any atheists or humanists are ever quoted in stories like this one. All of this reinforces the general cultural assumption that what churches do is good and that it’s rude or inappropriate to question that.

8) The Bottom Line seems to be that we live in a society in which mainstream Christian church activities/expenditures and charitable activities/expenditures that benefit society as a whole have become conflated and confused. Christian churches that spend the vast majority of their budgets on themselves, their music, and their message are generally seen and presented as unquestionably good while secular organizations that do more good things for far more people are often covered less often and then presented as less good, less noble, less efficient, and of course less in the eyes of the Supreme Judge. It’s an ass-backwards situation, and virtually no one in the mainstream media seems conscious of this, let alone interested in exposing and correcting it. Stories like the one quoted in this entry underline this reality.

9) I usually come across stories like this one only because I specifically go looking for them. As far as I know, no one else is out there attempting to track where the $100 billion-plus raised by US religious institutions every year is going. No matter how much money a church irresponsbily spends on an organ, it apparently always remains a local story. The fact that churches across the country and around the world are spending huge amounts of money on organs every day remains a fact that’s apparently recognized by few. The fact that I’ve pretty much limited my sporadic research to organs, and only to easily accessible public sources, makes me wonder just how much I might be missing. The fact that most of the information I do find is only what the churches have released and want people to know must also be kept in mind. As outrageous as the church expenditures I catalog may seem, they’re only a *very* small part of what’s going on out there. A full accounting would almost certainly shock me in ways I can’t now imagine.

10) The fact that so few people seem interested in a full accounting and so many are content to settle for the meagre, pro-church, anecdotal accounts of food banks, soup kitchens, hurricane relief efforts, fund-raisers for Haiti, etc., seems to me to be just one more indication of our culture’s pro-religion bias and the tendency of people to embrace comfortable illusions rather than face disturbing truths. Atheists who can help theists discover, understand, and change those disturbing truths are providing them with a service at least as important as any that’s ever been provided by an organ player or an altar polisher.