The Megachurch Scam & Nonprofit Loophole: How Celebrity Pastors Exploit the Bible to Get Filthy Rich

Turns out the Israeli government is targeting American churches to indoctrinate unsuspecting Christians. Nathan Apffel, director of “The Religion Business” explains. Nathan Apffel is an investigative documentary filmmaker best known for creating the docuseries The Religion Business, which examines financial fraud and abuse within American religious institutions while calling for the institutions to realign with the ethos of Christ. Now available to stream on https://tuckercarlson.com. Paid partnerships with: VanMan: Use code TUCKER for 15% off your first order at http://vanman.shop/tucker Vulnerable People Project: Stand with Christians in the land where Christianity began, go to SaveWestBankChristians.com Defend: Enter code "Tucker" for 20% off your purchase at https://defendcellcam.com TCN: Watch 'The Religion Business' only on https://tuckercarlson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tucker Carlson?

  Thanks for coming back.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 0:06Tucker Carlson?

  Maybe you can help solve a mystery. So I've always known that different people have different views on Israel. I've never been upset about it. Post Gaza, I'm rethinking about if all those views are legitimate, but I know that decent people have different views on Israel. Totally fine. And that includes Christians. And but in the past year, it does seem that for some Christian leaders, I don't want to call anyone out by name, but Israel's the only thing that matters. So they'll approach fellow Christians with one question in mind. Where does this person stand on the government of Israel? And so it occupies a much greater percentage of mental disk space than I ever imagined, certainly than it does for me. So what is that?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's the old covenant. You know, I was raised just non-denominational Christian in large scale churches, and we were pro-Israel.

• 0:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It's just a consistent deal. When you look at... I'm always going to go back to Scripture. So I'm always going to use the Bible to reference my perspective and what I what I think is going on.

• 1:08Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  The nation-state of Israel has just become an idol to the church in regards to how they perceive, not all of them, but how some of them perceive it. And you have to ask why. And so we've done a little digging in regards to some Pharaoh filings and others. And when you look at the old covenant in the Bible, it's one of those spots or parts of the covenant that you can weaponize. Israel's one of them. Giving and generosity, tithing is one of them. And when Christ came, He came to fulfill that whole old covenant, that whole contract, a new covenant. It's literally a new covenant. So that old covenant is complete, done, fulfilled, put on the shelf. A new contract is in place, and that's Christ's contract, Christ's covenant.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  And if you're a Bible-believing Christian. But what that new covenant does is it takes the teeth out of the old covenant, the old contracts, you know, that mosaic law. But people like to lean on that contract and that law because you can weapon, I'm going to say weaponize it. You can build empires again and build power structures around basically double dipping in covenants. So you can say, take some things that Jesus said and grab a couple of things from the old covenant and mash them together, and you have... Just a different thing. You have Judeo-Christianity. You know, not Christianity and not Judaism. You have Judeo-Christianity.

• 2:29Tucker Carlson?

  It's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's neither or. It's, it's so Israel, the nation state, has become one of those cards that you can pull and say, hey, if you don't back the nation state, then you clearly don't believe this book or, or, you know, that God is our God. And so I always push back. I consider myself kind of an auditor in this regard. So I wanted to audit the nation state of Israel and say, what is it exactly scripturally?

• 2:56Tucker Carlson?

  So that is, boy, it's, it's jarring to hear you put it so plainly, but that is really what they're saying. If you don't support the Netanyahu government, you're not a Christian.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've heard it. I've, I've heard that and.

• 3:09Tucker Carlson?

  Some, like the, the dimmer ones, like Huckabee just say it out loud, but that is the assumption behind a lot of it.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Well, and if, and if my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ haven't read the book in its entirety, then they'll take what Huckabee or what their potential pastor says from the stage as, as scripturally sound. And so that's what I've had a great time doing.

• 3:29Tucker Carlson?

  I disagree. I mean, yeah, I've read the book, by the way, more than once, but I didn't need to read it to know that Jesus is probably not endorsing killing the innocent, killing kids.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Well, I would say there's even a naivete. There's a strategic ignorance around that. Right? Like in season one of The Religion Business, a development economist breaks down what strategic ignorance is, and we as humans want to stay strategically ignorant of things that push against our bias.

• 3:54Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, I've been there.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so have I. And so that's the thing is, is as we grow and hopefully mature, we look at the, the surroundings and say, okay, what is truth and what is not truth?

• 4:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  And a really simple truth is the nation state of Israel is not the ethnic tribe that's described in the Torah. And so if that's our baseline, then, okay, now we can reshape our, we can look at what's truth and not truth and, and see, you know, where people are leveraging that card or weaponizing that card for their own gain.

• 4:24Tucker Carlson?

  But you would think, again, even if you're not familiar with the details of that book, you haven't read the older New Testaments, you would sort of intuit, you would sense that Jesus is not in favor of, say, like genocide.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Correct. I would hope. But there's always a counter argument, like in these FARA documents, you know, the, you know, these, literally, the foreign agent is Israel Minister of Foreign Affairs, you know, and...

• 4:49Tucker Carlson?

  So I keep stepping up. So what are those documents? So you're basically saying, in order to understand this, you look not just at the theology, but at the money?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Correct, at the money. Because, so, okay, yes, I think most people would say genocide in Gaza is wrong, right? But then they will always find a counter, which is, well, there's bad things, there's evil inside Gaza that needs to be removed, right?

• 5:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  And so that's where this FARA document is interesting, is because you can see the nation-state weaponizing the American church to sway their opinion to say, hey, you know what? No, the genocide is rationalized, and we're not going to call it genocide because of X, Y, and Z. So that's what this document just shows. It shows that millions of dollars came from the nation-state of Israel to sway massive mega churches in America, or at least the pastors, because when you can sway the pastor, the pastor can sway their congregation.

• 5:40Tucker Carlson?

  So how does it work?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  How does, in regards to the system?

• 5:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, the system. What are the FARA means Foreign Agent Registration Act?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 5:49Tucker Carlson?

  What do those documents show?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  So this one shows, in particular, basically, we'll call it like a marketing effort, and ironically, this is fun, there's multiple pages of just hundreds of churches on the West Coast that have very large audiences. And what it is, is it's a marketing effort, it's a geo-fencing effort. So if you go to your church, and you walk into that building, there is a digital geo-fence, and if you ping your phone, that geo-fence is triggered, and what that means is they're going to get your phone's IP address, they're going to start sending you messages, and sending you advertising that's pro-Israel, and, you know, anti-Palestine, for lack of a, and it says all this in the documents. And so ironically,

• 6:34Speaker 01

  this is what, I called my dad this morning, because I was like, hey, what church did we go to when we were kids? And sure enough, the churches, the two churches I went to from the day I was born to 21 years old are on that list. And so that means had I walked into those churches, I could have potentially been geofenced and then they would have tracked my phone and they could ping me pro nation-state Israel material. And so this effort is funded by Israel, by the nation-state of Israel.

• 7:02Tucker Carlson?

  And is it, when you say funded, like, does money flow to the church? Does the church know that it's congregations being geofenced?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Uh, no, not necessarily. So that's where it gets dark is the church doesn't even know that they're being targeted. And so it's like, it's a, it's like a subversive targeting.

• 7:23Tucker Carlson?

  Is a foreign government doing this to our churches here?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Correct. A great example would be like, hey, if I, if my kids are in college and the Chinese-

• 7:31Tucker Carlson?

  What if the Iranian government was doing this to us?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  What, or China, Russia, Iran, what happens if they were targeting our universities? We would be up in arms. So we have a foreign government targeting our churches. And then at the same time, they also are targeting the pastors, wanting them to come over to Israel, the nation-state. They walk through, you know, the, you know, they, they give them tours of the historical sites, which is awesome. But they're leveraging the Old Testament and these historical sites to basically calcify the nation-state and say, oh, what we're doing is biblical and what Palestine and these evil, these other evil people are doing these to be wiped out. Like a great, like, there's some, I highlighted some of it for you in this document, but it's wild. Once you get past the list of

• 8:17Speaker 01

  hundreds of churches, it's such a long document. But so, "A Christian Ready: Show Faith by Works, A Christian Education and Israeli Information Campaign." "The goal is to combat low American evangelical Christian approval of the nation-state of Israel." Says it right there. So this, this entire goal to geofence your church is to combat your low approval rating of a nation-state. Well, maybe we should question, like, why is there a low approval rating? Are you committing genocide? Like, that might be a reason why-

• 8:48Tucker Carlson?

  And that does affect approval ratings.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And so the messaging that we are going to use inside this geofenced, it's all pro-Israel and then anti-Palestinian state. And they list the messaging that they're gonna, that they're gonna hit the churches-

• 9:01Tucker Carlson?

  The anti-Palestinian state?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yep. The first is, of course, Hamas is a Palestinian terrorist organization.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  There was never a state of Palestine at any time in history. So these are the bullet points that you're going to see on your phones from this campaign. And then you can just keep going. There's, there's a pastoral and education resources. So they're going to give pastors educational resources. That's pro nation state Israel and anti Palestine. They're going to go to college and Christian college universities and do the same thing. And you can just go through it. So this was millions of dollars was spent on this campaign. And this is my favorite one, ready? They proudly in their digital support effort. This is the largest geo fencing and Christian targeting campaign in US history. That's what they call it in their own, in their own documentation. We're targeting Christians. And this is the largest targeting of Christians ever. And then they go to Christian events.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  And this is a funny one for me. If you know Greg Lowry, but his church is Harvest in Riverside. And he puts on these big festivals. And he's in, he's in a big scandal right now because he had a, um, he ran orphanage. His church ran orphanages in, um, in where was it? Ah, man, it's, it's in the show in Eastern Europe. And one of the pastors there allegedly raped and sodomized hundreds, potentially hundreds of orphans there. And Greg Lowry knew about it. They sent a team over and he did nothing about it because it was such a big revenue generator. And, uh, he's, he's one of their, he's one of their, he's actually, he's ironically, hopefully their main spokesperson.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  They've got a photo of him in their deck too, saying, we want Greg Lowery to be the face of this.

• 10:41Tucker Carlson?

  Seriously?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So millions, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs spends millions of dollars geo fencing our churches for pro Israeli, pro nation state Israeli propaganda. And if your pastor's behind it, then hey, your pastor's going to say the same thing.

• 10:59Tucker Carlson?

  It's just hard to believe. You know, there's this line in Mark 13, I think, where Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, he's like, or saying to others, religious leaders are in trouble because they wander around in their long flowing robes. They get respect from everyone in the marketplace, but they're actually cheating widows out of their property. And you read that and you're like, would a religious leader really cheat a widow out of her property? Like, that's just crazy. Only in first century Palestine could that ever happen? And you're here, like, it's just amazing. It's. It's just hard, it's hard, it's hard to believe a religious person would do that.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's religious organizations that are registered churches that literally buy out permanent life insurance policies from elderly people that need money for pennies on the dollar.

• 11:44Tucker Carlson?

  Actually?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Actually, yeah. Part of their business model as a church is to basically go up to a widow or elderly couple that's struggling and say, you know what, we're just gonna buy your permanent life insurance policy that you've been paying down for 40 years for pennies on the dollar because you need money. There's one that's built, I was told a $700 million war chest based, came off of that. They have 700 million sitting in the bank off of buying out elderly people's permanent life insurance policies.

• 12:11Tucker Carlson?

  Oh.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  So they are, and, and my, my translation reads devouring widows' houses, and they're devouring houses in the name of Jesus.

• 12:20Tucker Carlson?

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• 13:25Speaker 02

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• 14:07Speaker 02

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• 14:18Tucker Carlson?

  Who registered for this?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Um, this was a, uh, uh, an LLC named Show Faith by Works, registered in my hometown, San Diego, California. But the name of the foreign principle is Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, right on the, right on the cover. Page one.

• 14:36Tucker Carlson?

  How many pastors know that there's an effort like this behind?

• 14:43Tucker Carlson?

  Their views on Israel?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say strategic ignorance. I, I think they just see it as, as gossip online. They don't want to get involved. Um, this is a hot button topic, topic for my family, you know, because I have, I have family that are retired pastors or my, my uncle's a missionary in Kyiv. Like, I'm very, very close to this and most of them just don't want to believe it.

• 15:07Tucker Carlson?

  You know, so they don't believe that money is actually coming from a foreign government to influence the opinions of their.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Correct. Well, and, and if, and if I even put this in front of them, they'd point to the book.

• 15:17Tucker Carlson?

  And say what?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And they'd say, Nathan, like Israel bless Israel and you'll be blessed.

• 15:21Tucker Carlson?

  Does it say that?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. And we went through the, we had a great conversation.

• 15:25Tucker Carlson?

  I just love that.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. We had a great conversation about this earlier. It's, it's, uh, it's this idea. And, and since our last conversation, when we were talking about it is finished, when Christ says it's finished on the cross. I just went down a full rabbit hole in regards to digesting that old covenant versus new covenant concept. And there is no way scripturally you can double dip in both the old covenant and the new covenant in the Bible. If you are a Christ following Christian, that old covenant, that old contract is fulfilled and done.

• 15:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  We don't look backwards. There's a great analogy that I was, or maybe I want.

• 16:03Tucker Carlson?

  Why the curtain in the temple is rent.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Let, let me know if this is a good analogy or if I'm way off base, but like. I'm a laborer, right? And I need a job. And you're like, hey, Nathan, here's the contract. If you mow my lawns, cut my trees and clean my pool, like, we're good. I'll pay you at the end of the day. So that day I show up, I mow your lawn, I cut your trees to like exactly how you want it. I clean the pool and you're like, here's your payment, Nathan. And I go on and I'm like, I fulfilled my contract with Tucker and I'm gonna go to the next house, right? But instead, I wake up the next morning, I go, you know what? I'm gonna go back to Tucker's house and I'm just gonna start doing stuff. Cut the trees, mow the lawn again, even though it's already done and he's not gonna pay me. Because I fulfilled the contract with you. I'm supposed to look forward and move on to the new contract. But this is what churches are doing.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  They're like, I don't know, we're gonna come back to this old one and play in it because we like some of the, some of the things in here. We like to cherry pick parts of the old covenant because it justifies our current model. The tithe justifies how we can fund the business, right? Israel justifies how we can drum up attention for this idea of old tribal, old tribal Israel. But it's, we're just grasping at straws, if that makes sense. Because Christ's message in his new covenant is a, it's, it's an unconditional, but very unknown. You, you march into the unknown in his covenant. You have to have full faith in him and the Holy Spirit. Legalistic covenants, just they're easy to understand, right?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  You give me 10% or 23.3% based off of Old Testament tithe laws and you're good, right? You're done, Tucker. Go on your way. But Christ says, no, no, no, you have the capacity and the, the knowledge to give. What does your heart tell you? Yes. So it means you have to stand up and lead, right? In Hebrews, it talks about you are your own priest now. Like, there's no mediator between the, uh, the holy of holies and the outer courts. Like you, Christ is that mediator and you walk straight through into the holy of holies. But that means you have to stand up and understand it and take responsibility and be that priest. But so if you're that priest, what does it mean? You don't need the institution anymore. The model, you don't need to sit in that pew.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Right? Like you have, you have Christ, you have his word, his logos, like his in you, on your heart and mind. So you got to lead Tucker, you got to lead like Christ. That's a dangerous, dangerous man or woman to be walking around in, in any community or any government because hey, this, this architecture, this legal architecture of America doesn't hold me in this, this does, this book does. And so we've, we've kneecapped Christianity and we've put it on a shelf and we've consumerized, consumerized, we've, you know, we've turned it into a consumer product. And now we just have a bunch of kneecapped Christians walking around, giving their 10% if that to a church, to an institution

• 18:57Speaker 01

  that is not biblically sound. And then we can support nation state of Israel and say, hey, I'm a Bible believing Christian, when at the end of the day, like, no, I believe in, in what we've built. I believe in the institution we've built, but I don't necessarily believe this book.

• 19:11Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's a wrong turn if you arrive at that conclusion. So how, I mean, I always want to assume that people are employing what you called strategic ignorance. They, they don't know because they don't want to know. And therefore they're not honestly quite as guilty as someone who knows and does it anyway. But given that, how big is the economy around this question? Like I noticed all these pastors going to Israel on these trips. I've known a lot of them who do that. Is that all paid for by donors or the government?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's an estimated, I mean, I want to make sure I pronounced the name right. It is.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Where is it? S J something. It's about 320 million a year is dumped into this bucket to get, to get pastors overseas. Oh, there we go. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews generates about 315 million a year in individual donor giving. And what that does is it, so let's, let's, let's dissect that name for a second, right? International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Okay, 315-ish million goes into that pool every year. You'd think it's to educate people on the historical sites, right? I'm a Christian, I'd love to see, you know, all these beautiful historical sites. I've been to Rome and the hunched down in the prison where Paul was held like that. You get to experience this stuff and you're like, wow, this is real.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Like, you know, it happened. I can see Paul's journey and I can see the hill Christ died on and it's real powerful. But that 315 million is going to border security. It's going to ambulances inside Israel. It's going to...

• 20:51Tucker Carlson?

  Border security?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:54Tucker Carlson?

  Israeli border security?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it says it on their website, this is where this money goes. So when you think about this, this isn't, this isn't an international fellowship of Jews and Christians. Because if it was an international fellowship of Jews and Christians, you'd care about the Christians in Gaza.

• 21:09Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  You'd care about the Christians in Lebanon. You'd care, you know, you'd care about these Christians in these other parts of this region just being obliterated.

• 21:16Tucker Carlson?

  Killed by the government, yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  But so what this is, it's actually a fund that's just calcifying the nation-state of Israel and utilizing the historical sites as the rationale for this fund.

• 21:27Tucker Carlson?

  But the money is going to the ongoing operations of the government of Israel?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Part of it, yeah. And then what you're doing is you're bringing pastors over and saying, "Look at all these beautiful historical sites." Does that make sense? So you're taking the faith and you're using the faith as the cookie, so to speak, or the carrot to explain the nation-state of Israel and their actions. And you're using Christian donor money. That's 315 million from Christians, individual Christians, that are giving generously to this fund with strategically ignorance, with their ignorance, you know, with their, what does the Bible talk about? Scales on the eyes, right? So you can't see through your scales. But what you're actually funding is parts of this war mechanism. It's just like the LDS Church and their investments in, you know, defense companies. Southern Baptist Convention, same thing.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Guidestone is heavily invested in weaponry of war.

• 22:19Tucker Carlson?

  Are you serious?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we've, we've created machines, we've created this, this Christian machine, this apparatus that funds what we think ignorantly is good intentioned international fellowship of Christians and Jews. But no, what it's doing is it's calcifying a nation state that, that is bombing Christians in other parts of that region, killing them, and they're justifying it. And this money is going to those efforts. Part of, part of that money's going to those

• 22:47Tucker Carlson?

  efforts. That is absolutely crazy. Christians ought to be safe in the Holy Land of all places, but they are not. Keep in mind, these are the descendants of the first converts, the first people who followed Jesus, people whose families have worshipped in the land Jesus walked for centuries, for thousands of years. And these same people are now facing enormous pressure to leave, fleeing their homes amid war and anti-Christian terrorism. Untold numbers of innocents are lost and without hope, fellow Christians. But how do you support them? There are groups out there who claim to support them, whose real agenda is to move them out of their actual homeland. We think that's wrong. We think that's evil, in fact.

• 23:29Tucker Carlson?

  And so we've looked far and wide to find a group that is actually supporting Christians in the Middle East. And we found one. It's called the Vulnerable People Project, VPP. It's one of the very few groups consistently helping vulnerable Christians throughout the Holy Land. They deliver food and water to Christian communities trapped in Gaza, for example. They help rescue civilians. They provide emergency aid to families who have nowhere else to turn. Today, they are helping Christian churches and families safely remain in the communities where their ancestors worshipped Jesus. There should be a lot of groups doing this, and trust us, we have looked for over a year now, and there aren't. But the Vulnerable People Project is doing exactly that, and their work makes an amazing difference in people's lives.

• 24:14Tucker Carlson?

  A gift of just $33 helps provide a day of protection and support for the vulnerable Christians in the West Bank. Who's looking out for them? Nobody. Well, they are. A monthly gift of $83 helps sustain that protection throughout the month. So, visit savewestbankchristians.com and stand with Christians in the land where Christianity began. That's savewestbankchristians.com. We are proud to partner with them. Thank you.

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• 25:42Tucker Carlson?

  How many people who are involved in this know?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Involved in this fund?

• 25:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  I don't think, I don't think any of them would, would rationally sit here and say, "Oh, I know about that." You know? No, no, we want to get our pastor over to Israel to experience the historical sites, Nathan. Okay, cool. But that's, that's not bad, right? But what you don't realize is you're funding security on the border. You're funding, which, which I think is great, ambulances when a bomb comes over into Israel. But you should also be funding ambulances when a bomb goes into Gaza, if that's your mission.

• 26:15Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, and you certainly shouldn't be funding bombs into Gaza.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:18Tucker Carlson?

  Which is what, in effect, you're doing because you're freeing up

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:21Tucker Carlson?

  those resources. Wow, that is really, um, so now there is, in part, thanks to your efforts. Unawareness of a lot of this in a way that there wasn't a couple of years ago. Like, there are a lot of people, including, the Farah report said it, there are a lot of evangelicals who are skeptical suddenly about whether it's a good idea to support Israel. What are pastors like this, are they getting pushed back? Like, what's their experience?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  They're kind of, a lot of these pastors, so this Farah doc, a lot of these churches are mega churches. They went after the, they geo-fenced the big boys, right? Because, like, if you geo-fenced a small rural church in Pennsylvania that has 75 members, what's the point of that? No, I want to geo-fence a church that has 7,500 members, 10,000 members. And so, these guys are already big influencers in regards to their church, and then in regards to the social media sphere. So, they just, like, calcify together. You know, you have groups of them now, just going on podcasts, sitting, doing the same thing we are.

• 27:24Tucker Carlson?

  Is that true?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:26Tucker Carlson?

  Defending these positions?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, his name's Jack Hibbs, he was on a podcast the other day. And he said, you know, "Israel was created in a day." And there's prophetic words in the Bible that say that. Well, no, they signed the documents in a day. But the nation-state of Israel was decades in coming. And so, does that make sense? They just take, they'll take a scripture out of context and apply it to the nation-state. And then, everybody will take that same soundbite. Similar to what I said with you last, that Christianity is more of a socialist construct than a capitalist construct. Everybody goes, "Oh, Nathan's a socialist, Tucker had a socialist on, he's a communist." Same thing, you take three or four words, and you can create whatever, you know, whatever conversation you want around.

• 28:09Tucker Carlson?

  So, you're not a socialist?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I am not a socialist, no.

• 28:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. But it's all part of the propaganda machine, I mean, they don't.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 28:18Tucker Carlson?

  Right. So, but like, someone like Jack Hibbs, or, not, you know, to call him out by name, but, uh, he deserves it, but, um, sorry, excuse me, trying to stay Christian.

• 28:31Tucker Carlson?

  Does he get any pushback? Or do, or another way to ask would be, do pastors like that have growing churches or shrinking churches? Like, is this, is Christian Zionism in retreat? Or is it expanding?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  I can't speak empirically on that. But I would say it's retreating from, from, from just my, my sphere of influence. You know, a lot of these churches now are, are their congregation shrinking? And they have these huge buildings. So what they're doing is they're putting up curtains about halfway through the pews. And, and they shove everybody to the front. So people can't sit in the back anymore. So they're starting to stack their churches, if that makes sense. So they look full, but they're really at 20, 30% capacity.

• 29:11Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And then what they do, a lot of them do is on their social programs, like we have, we have a solid online presence. We will never delete a comment. We will never block someone unless they're actually threatening someone. But what these guys do a lot of times is they'll curate their comments. So they'll block us or block our followers and just delete any comment that has a negative, you know, negative pushback on what they're saying. And so when you go on, on some of these pastors Instagrams, it's just nothing but hearts and loves. And you're 100% accurate pastor, lovely, lovely, lovely. But it's because they've just curated the content. And so Christianity, institutional Christianity in these big organizations is just a curated business set on top of the gospel.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  And, and so when I look at their, especially Jack Hibbs and these other guys who are very pro-Zionist in regards to their agenda, most of their comments are just curated. And so that, that always makes me smile because.

• 30:06Tucker Carlson?

  But does Jack Hibbs have a congregation? Is there like a church where he's preaching every Sunday?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a preacher, yeah.

• 30:14Tucker Carlson?

  And is it a growing church, do you know?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  I honestly, I haven't done much research on Jack Hibbs. I just, I just smile whenever I see his, his social content. We, there's, there's a lot of pastors out here, Tucker. There's 400,000 churches in the U.S. And so unfortunately I can't, we can't look at them all. But what we're trying to do is we're, we're looking at patterns, right? Where recently someone sent me a book and, and in the book, they defined my character type and yours as an auditor, basically. Like you guys are here to audit the systems we've built, whether that be our government, whether that be our religious institutions.

• 30:47Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And we're here to say, hey, what part of these systems isn't aligning with with the ethos underneath it? So in Christianity, what part of the machine that we've built, the tradition, isn't aligning with scripture? And the nation state is one of those, you know, tithe is one of those. Running organizations with no external accountability where millions funnels in is one of those. None of that is inherently biblical or Christ like, right?

• 31:10Tucker Carlson?

  Tithing is not scriptural.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Tithing, tithing is not scriptural for a modern day Christian.

• 31:16Tucker Carlson?

  Huh.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:17Tucker Carlson?

  So where does the notion come from?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Um, it's, it's actually only flared back in the last couple hundred years. So tithing was not a thing. You can go through the, the, the history of Christianity from Christ, from Christ on, and Christians weren't tithing. And tithe literally means a tenth, translates to a tenth.

• 31:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And so most, not all, but a lot of churches today and pastors today present that, hey, you need to tithe. Give us 10% of your revenue because the Bible says to tithe. Well, the Old Testament, the mosaic laws say to tithe. But what's funny is there's not one tithe in the Old Testament, there's three. So if a tenth me, or if tithe means a tenth, technically you're supposed to be paying, paying three tenths. Now, the difference is the third tithe was only once every three years. So there's three tithes. So if you're a pastor out there preaching tithe, you need to be preaching 23.3% from your congregation, not 10%, if you want to lean on the biblical tithe.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  But so when you look at the tithe laws, Israel of the Bible is, is a theocracy. So those tithes were actually a form of taxation. It's what kept up government and religion. It was combined. Today, we're not a theocracy, we're, we're a democratic republic. So what the church has done, the recent church, the modern church in the last couple hundred years, is they needed to figure out a revenue stream. So I'll get, I'll say with good intentions, these pastors looked to the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, and said, hey, like the Levites were asking for 10% or demanding 10% based off, based off the mosaic laws, so we should ask for 10%. And it baked in this legalistic demand from your congregation.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  And then, hey, if you don't tithe Tucker to me, you're a bad boy. The Bible says to tithe. But when you look at the New Testament, remember Paul was a Pharisee's Pharisee. He was the man who knew the law better than anybody. So Paul wrote a bulk of the modern New Testament. So if Paul expected you to tithe, you better believe he would have said in his epistles, "Hey Tucker, you're gonna tithe to your body and then we're gonna distribute it." He didn't say that. Christ never said that. Instead, it was free will generosity. So Tucker, you're gonna give from the desire and passion of your heart. And you're not gonna know what your left hand is doing or your right hand is doing, because we don't want you to basically build systems on top of this generosity.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  And the crazy part about the New Testament generosity is when, when these early churches would pool resources, it would always go to poorer gatherings, to poorer communities. They weren't insulating themselves and building corporations. They were just distributing it wherever there was a need. And so what the tithe has done is in the last 200 years is it's given a fixed revenue stream to an institution, to a tradition we've built on top of Christ. And now that we've been teaching, we've been, I've been taught, I was taught tithing from childhood. Now that we've been taught this tithing model, they can't, it'd be really bad for them to go, "Hey, actually, the tithe really isn't, isn't biblically accurate.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  We need you just to be generous." And here, this is a fun one, or it's not fun, it's very sad. Someone, someone sent me this. And it's a, it's a slip that a child brought home. And so this was going to a, he was, I think the, the child was between 10 or 14 years old. And this is what they were taught in their, in their youth group. "My commitment, I am expanding my generosity to multiply by committing to the following over the next year." So Tucker, you're a 12-year-old boy, ready? You're gonna tithe Tucker 10% from your allowance.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  This is on the sheet, ready? You're gonna give a percentage of your birthday money, or Christmas money to the church. You're gonna earn money, yard work, et cetera, and specifically, you're gonna do that for multiplication. And then here's the other, ready? You're gonna sell some of your electronics. You're gonna take clothes to a resale shop, and you're gonna give a portion of your savings to the church. This went to a little kid. And at the bottom, you're gonna add it all up and tell this church what your total commitment is.

• 35:38Tucker Carlson?

  In writing?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  In writing. That went to a child.

• 35:44Tucker Carlson?

  That is wild.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Where is any of that scriptural?

• 35:50Tucker Carlson?

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• 36:35Tucker Carlson?

  it's your barn, cabin, anything else you need to keep your eye on when you're gone, this will do it for you. And unlike a lot of security systems, this is affordable. Peace of mind for an honest price. DefendCellCam.com is the address. Go there, see for yourself. DefendCellCam.com. If you've got a signal, you've got 24-hour security. So, what do the churches do with the money?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Well, they'll say they give some of it away, but statistically, based off the financial...

• 37:05Speaker 01

  But the financial data, about seventy percent just goes to buildings and salaries, and less than six cents of every dollar ever leaves the institutional walls now. And so what we've built is just traditions, like, it takes me back to the story of Christ in the temple. You know, when he's whipping, and he said, "You've turned my father's house into a robber's den." We've built institutions on top of the teachings of Christ, and that institution now is so hungry financially, that it just pulls all resources in, to the point where you're telling kids to sell their electronics and give us the money. "Hey, actually, no, take your clothes to a thrift store and then bring us that money." "Hey, you know, give a portion of your savings to us as well."

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Like, you're indoctrinating a child into this thinking. And none of that is in the New Testament.

• 37:58Tucker Carlson?

  Well, Jesus doesn't say, "Sell everything you have and give it to the church." He says, "Give it to the poor."

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Poor, correct. So what we've done is, we've just built businesses, unaccountable, non-transparent businesses, on the top of Christ, and on the top of the Scriptures. And when you look at what the church was in America, the church was actually the institution that pushed back against government encroachment. It pushed back against human greed, and it did, rightfully so. It was the community, it was like the community think tank, for lack of a better term, and this is, we'll go to this socialist comment, right? So, I said last time, Christianity is more socialist than capitalistic. America is, our economy is built on capitalism.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  A great social concept, because it lifts people in nations out of poverty, but there is that marginalized that's left behind. Christianity is in that marginalized. That's why we pool our resources and give to the poor. And so, Christianity is not about ownership. Christianity is not about growth and profits at all costs. Christianity is the opposite. And so Christianity is the hard line against power and against authority, but what's happened is, we've taken those structures, those capitalistic structures, and brought it into the church, and brought it into an institution that is antithetical to that.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  And so now, the institutional church has been co-opted by the very mechanisms it's supposed to push against.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  All in the name of Christ. So hey, bring more money. Hey, and it's been, it's been co-opted by the politic now too. And so the church, the beautiful body of Christ is now a, um, an MLM, a multi-level marketing scheme, for lack of a better term. It's a franchise, you know, and you could see it play out, you know, a lot of, a lot of, as denominations die, evangelical, non-denominational churches are flourishing. And so what's happening is now they're building satellite campuses. So it's like, we're going to build as many campuses as possible. We're going to get you guys to churn and burn. So you're going to come in, you have an hour and a half, grab a coffee, grab a donut, we're going to sing some emotional songs, we're going to give you some, a couple scripture verses and then get out, we gotta do it again. And so we've

• 40:19Speaker 01

  franchised faith, and we haven't franchised it in a good way either, I feel. We franchised it in like a fast food way, right? It's like the cheapest, fastest, quickest way to turn and burn this thing. And so what we've done is we've commoditized Christianity when it wasn't supposed to be commoditized. And now we've tribal, we've, we, it's tribalism too. Now we're either right or left. So now it's, you can see the politic grabbing onto it and weaponizing it as well.

• 40:44Tucker Carlson?

  Are most churches pretty open about their politics now?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Oh, very. Yeah.

• 40:49Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, very. Well, the Johnson Amendment was supposed to like, keep that at bay, but Trump basically wiped the Johnson Amendment out.

• 40:56Tucker Carlson?

  What was the Johnson Amendment?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  The Johnson Amendment was you couldn't, um, uh, I don't have the exact language, but you, you couldn't, um, advocate for specific candidates from the pulpit.

• 41:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And so, uh, and, and you'd get in trouble. You could potentially lose your tax exempt status if you did that. Well, Trump basically wiped that out. So what's happened is you literally have pastors from the pulpit and I, and I've been to these churches saying exactly who you should vote for, because there's no fear anymore about losing your tax exempt status. So the church, not all churches, but many churches, whether right or left, are just, um, champions for tribal party, political parties at this point. And you like, you're, you'll be hard pressed to go to, actually, I would love anybody to DM us if you go to a church that doesn't preach tithe and doesn't preach politics from the pulpit. You're going to be hard pressed to find a successful church.

• 41:48Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Doing that today. Yeah.

• 41:53Tucker Carlson?

  I've never seen that.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Really?

• 41:55Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Oh, do you go to many big churches, many like mega churches? Okay, well, that's a problem. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, I go to a lot of them. That's what I visit.

• 42:04Tucker Carlson?

  And they're open about this or that candidate?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 42:08Tucker Carlson?

  They can't just say, give to Caesar what Caesar's they have to like?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Well, that's a funny one. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and render to God the things that are God's. Because that's an inflection point for the church too. Right? Your congregation pays taxes. But why does the church have this interesting carve out where they don't pay tax?

• 42:27Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Well, it goes back to 1913. And, yeah. The, I said, we talked last, I talked about kind of the weaponization or the box that churches climbed into, religious organizations climbed into, which is the 14-point checklist. I think tax exemption was the carrot for them to climb in. It's, hey, Tucker, we're going to give your church tax exempt status. You don't have to pay taxes, but you're going to have to play by these rules. And so you climbed into the box. And now this box can be weaponized right or left. Now, foreign agents can come in and just sell concepts to the box. If that makes sense. And hey, if I do anything wrong, if I don't live inside these 14 points, I might get kicked out of this box. Which, what is getting kicked out?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Lose your tax exempt status. Great, who cares? Lose it.

• 43:17Tucker Carlson?

  Are there churches that don't claim tax exempt status?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  There's a couple. Yeah. Very, it's, there's a, I would, there's a new model that, you know, like I called us kind of auditors on systems. We don't get anything perfect, but we're just trying to get things right, more Christ-like.

• 43:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  And so, I don't only want to be an auditor. I want to be a reformer. I want us to help usher in change that's more Christ-like. And so, as we look at the system, there are legal structures that hedge against man's...

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Evil hearts, for lack of a better term.

• 43:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  We corrupt things.

• 43:57Tucker Carlson?

  There's no better term.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. And so I think it'd be really brilliant if we were honest enough with ourselves as Christians and as leaders to be like, hey, let's build a system. And our founding fathers did this brilliantly. They're like, let's build a system that keeps it safe from ourselves.

• 44:11Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And so I think there's going to be a new wave of pastors and a new wave of Christian leaders that say, how do we build a system? Because we do need a system that is protected from ourselves. And I think it starts with open source accounting. So everybody can see where the money goes. And then there's legal architecture that you can play into that's not tax exemption, that doesn't have to do with tax exemption, that builds a better ecosystem for a transparent church. And that's what we're working on. We have some really cool stuff happening over the next few months because of that.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  God gave me a Ferrari.

• 44:45Speaker 05

  He gave his son, and you want to argue about 10%.

• 44:48Tucker Carlson?

  Millions of Christians donate to their church every week. It's generous and it goes to a nonprofit. I get another amen. Well, it turns out the nonprofit designation is one of the most powerful legal and financial protections in all American law.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  $53 billion is stolen every year. Mind your own business.

• 45:08Tucker Carlson?

  In fact, some of the most powerful financial institutions in America are not banks, they are churches.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  In the for-profit world, if you went out and raised money for something like this and didn't build it, that would be called fraud. But in the religious world, we call it faith.

• 45:20Tucker Carlson?

  Filmmaker Nathan Apffel set out to find out, what is happening here? You have been warned for criminal trespass. You are being detained. This is not a series that attacks faith. This is a series that attacks people who are using faith to get rich. At what point do we call this not only a business, but a straight up scam? We have a new multi-part series called The Religion in Business, and it covers it all. It's now available at tuckercarlson.com. I would assume all churches would have transparent accounting.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  No, very, um, as denominations, denominational structure, you, you had to be transparent with the denomination, which is good. But as denominations die and non-denominationalism is rising, non-denominational churches are accountable to no other church. Most, usually. Some people will say, oh, no, this church, this pastor sits on my board. Yeah, but it's like, there's no handing over of P and L statements or budgets.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  So what's happened is a lot of churches, like there's a church in Florida, their budget is 91 million a year. Their congregation gets a single sheet of paper with three little, like three pie charts on it. And says, here's where your 91 million went.

• 46:28Tucker Carlson?

  Where does it actually go, do you think?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Like, there's just buckets, you know, there's just massive buckets. 20, I, I don't have the, the pie charts in front of me, but 27% goes to salary. Okay. Well, what does the head pastor make? You don't need to know, Tucker.

• 46:41Tucker Carlson?

  They don't tell you what the pastor makes?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  No. You don't know what the pastor makes? This is the crazy part is you don't know their retirement packages. And, and I've, I've heard about his retired, this individual's retirement package. This church in particular, uh, we did a series of videos on because they took a PPP loan, a 1.7 million dollar PPP loan in 2020. A few months later, they bought a 12.7 million dollar hunting ranch. And then a few months after that, the PPP loan got forgiven and it was dumped on the American taxpayer.

• 47:11Tucker Carlson?

  No, they forgave those loans?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  And my question, my only, my question was, hey, is this Christ-like to claim financial hardship? Take a 1.7 million dollar PPP loan as you're buying an almost 13 million dollar property for the church that's not essential. And then you dump 1.7 million dollars worth of debt onto the American taxpayer? That doesn't sound very Christ-like. And I got eaten alive for that comment.

• 47:38Tucker Carlson?

  What was Jesus's real estate portfolio?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Huge. The world.

• 47:44Tucker Carlson?

  Son of man has no place to lay his head, I think he said.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:47Tucker Carlson?

  He said zero real estate portfolio. What kind of, you got a negative reaction to that?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 47:51Tucker Carlson?

  How?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it goes back to Israel. This is a good correlation, actually. They said, Nathan, look at how many baptisms they're doing. Look at how many salvations they're doing. And they go, how dare you? Quite, and then one individual even put the, the percentage of the total PPP loan forgiveness debt in a comment. And he goes, Nathan, this is all it is to the American public. He tried to rationalize it. He's like, it's point zero, zero, zero, zero, two, two percent or whatever of the total PPP loan debt. So why do you care? And that is, that is the, the biggest issue I have with all of this is.

• 48:27Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, that reasoning justifies like, I don't know, shoplifting from a grocery store. They got tons of food.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:32Tucker Carlson?

  What, what percentage, if I steal this candy bar, what percentage of the total candy bar inventory is that? It's just zero point, point, point, point.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  That sounds pretty Christ like, right?

• 48:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Oh, man, it's, it's so the, but here's the thing as an auditor, and I'm going to use this term. It's exhausting because there's just so much corruption in the system. And so I'm really excited for the next six months because it's okay. How do we become the leaders in the change? You know, and how do we show different models and say, hey, here's how we can do it different, differently? Here's how we can build systems to protect it against ourselves.

• 49:05Tucker Carlson?

  So if you don't mind, will you describe the ideal model for an American church?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  I don't like, we're.

• 49:12Tucker Carlson?

  What would be a massive improvement?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Transparent accounting is, is ba, is base level step one. Like your congregation, your donors should know where every dollar goes and they should be able to ask. Your pastor's salary should be public knowledge. Just like if, um, if I invest in a for-profit publicly traded company, I know those executive salaries.

• 49:32Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I know where the money goes. So why should that, I, I invest in that company? If I donate and fund this organization, I should know where the money goes as well.

• 49:41Tucker Carlson?

  But they don't disclose that.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  They don't disclose that, no. Many churches do not. So there's, there's great, I have a lot of friends and denominations, Methodist, Methodist, Baptist, you know, and, and their salaries are known for the most part. And so I love it because it checks them at the door. There is that check, if that makes sense.

• 49:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  And my Methodist friends in Florida, you guys know who you are, like they're hilarious because they're bivocational. And they're like, Nathan, half our pews are filled with drug addicts and homeless. You know, but we're on the front lines and, and their program is so awesome. And they basically turned their, their church into a, um, a co-op where all these community nonprofits can thrive and encourage each other. And, and they've just given parts of the building to the nonprofits and it's become this community hub. And I'm like, oh, Jesus is right here. I feel, you know, I feel him. You got, you got homeless people coming in and getting meals. You have, um, uh, handicapped children in the little school there. It's beautiful, you know? And then you have people in the community packaging up food and I'm like, oh, I feel it. I feel the work, you know?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  And, uh, and then I walk into a, a church where I don't know the pastor's salary, where he just acquired a 12.75 million dollar hunting ranch. And, um, and I'm like, okay, I'll grab a donut and a cup of coffee and see the performance. And usually the performance is on the projector screen. I don't even see him in person.

• 50:58Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 51:01Tucker Carlson?

  And no one knows what his salary or retirement package is?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure a few people on the elder board do. But yeah, it's, um.

• 51:09Tucker Carlson?

  What would happen if a church just declined nonprofit status?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I think that's the most brilliant option out there. Uh, because what it does is it holds you liable to the Fed and the state. Um, you're rendering the Caesar, the things that are Caesars. And, uh, then you're not liable to get in that box. I think it'd be a, like, I think it'd be a really fun experiment. All of this is, is an experiment, right? America is an experiment, a governing experiment.

• 51:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Our, our institutions that we've built on top of Christ, those are just experiments. Those are traditions of men. And when we can see it for that, and that's not doctrine, then we can audit the, the experiments and say, where are we failing? And I think a really cool experiment would be to start a church as a for-profit vehicle. And here's a great example. If, if the religion business takes off and we're doing season three and four, and we keep going as we reform the system, we'll need a space eventually to build our sets out because our sits, sets are sitting in storage right now. And we're talking about internally, okay, how does our for-profit business help the community? Well, all of a sudden we have warehouse space. Let's hold a church, let's hold a gathering. I hold two a week right now. One's in my house and I'm like, well, we could make it a little bigger.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  And we don't even need to ask people for money because God's blessed us with this space. You know, we could, we could start a church organically like that to where a for-profit vehicle funds the ability to hold church. To hold the gathering, if that makes sense.

• 52:30Tucker Carlson?

  So why don't people do it?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  I think it's just nonprofit's status is a really easy thing to grab. You know, in 1913, when the nonprofit sector was carved out, there was 12,000 organizations. Today, there's 1.9 million nonprofits. So you say, okay, Tucker, well, you know, population expansion. Well, the population only expanded through 4.3% in the last 110 years. So you do the math, that would put us around 65,000 organizations. So you ask, you have to ask, why is there a gap from 65,000 organizations to 1.9 million? The sector just exploded and it's because there's less accountability in the legal architecture. And then religious exemptions are just completely dark. And what I mean by that is they file no 990 with the IRS.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  They file very few documents with the state. And so the church, the institution, which is supposed to be the beacon of light, plays in the darkest legal architecture there is in the US. And it's just become status quo. Now it's like, hey, let's start a church. And now what's cool is, not what's cool, I shouldn't say that, it's very pathetic, is certain denominations have lobbied the government over the last 50 years to add vocabulary in front of the word church. So now, if I have a church that's not a nonprofit, that has religious exemption, so I don't file a 990, I can start acquiring for-profit companies and pulling them under my church banner as a church. So I can have an investment fund registered as a church. I can have a TV network registered as a church. I can have a radio station registered as a church.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  I can take almost any vehicle, any legal for-profit business and bring it under my church, and it gets to reclassify as a church. You have organizations like Compassion International, Ravi Zacharias Ministries. These organizations used to file 990s because they were regular nonprofits and they reclassified as a church. So it means they no longer had to file 990s.

• 54:24Tucker Carlson?

  You can do it with any business?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  If you have a church, you can bring it under your fold as what's called an auxiliary, a convention, or association. There's different classifications. And you can basically build a conglomerate as a church. So a thrift store, that same church in Florida has a thrift store. A thrift store is registered as a church. It files no 990s. You're selling clothes. Well, let me rephrase that. You're taking clothes for free, washing them, and then selling them, as opposed to just giving them away to people who need clothes. But you're making a profit off of that. But why would a thrift store be registered as a church? So you can start building these businesses, these conglomerates, and all under the banner of one church.

• 55:06Tucker Carlson?

  And none of them pay taxes?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  None of them, no, they do not pay taxes. And what's crazy is that same church, they have a new business, relatively new. It's basically consulting firm to build your church. So Tucker, you can hire my consulting firm, and I'm going to teach you how to build your church. I'm going to give, you know, lay it out for you, talk about the screens and everything. That's registered as a church as well. So a consulting firm to teach you how to build a building is registered as a church. So that means it files no 990s. No one knows what people are making at the executive level. It's just like religion is the organized, organized nonprofit religious exemptions are the perfect vehicle to just abuse the system. And I'm not saying everybody's doing that, but I'm saying the legal architecture is the perfect vehicle for abuse.

• 55:53Tucker Carlson?

  The Mormon, the LDS church, Mormon church, is one of the biggest landowners in the United States.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were the second largest private landowner. They might be the first now.

• 56:02Tucker Carlson?

  Wow.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:03Tucker Carlson?

  So what, like, how big is the enterprise and what's its purpose?

• 56:09Speaker 01

  The LDS church?

• 56:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  The LDS churches, their net assets are about 350 billion, billion with a B. They have, they have over 300 billion in the market just invested through a, through a hedge fund called Ensign Peak Advisors. They'll hit a trillion dollars if they continue the growth rate. They'll hit a trillion dollars in net assets in the next 15 years. And the crazy part about the LDS church is they make so much profit in the market. They made 25 billion last year in interest alone in the market. The entire global LDS church costs around $7 billion to run. So that means they could fund the church in perpetuity just off a percentage of the

• 56:53Speaker 01

  interest they make in the market, but they still demand that their congregants give them 10% a year. And they'll push Mormon, my Mormon, my Mormon friends are going to push back and say, Nathan, like, hey, you know, we, we don't have, it's not a demand. Yes, it is, because you don't get to get into your celestial kingdom unless you pay your tithe, your 10%, your tithe. And so they could cut off, they could say, hey, guys, stop giving to us right now. Give to the community, give to people in need, take that 10% and give to people in need. But they don't, they say, give it to us still. And they could fund the church in perpetuity just off a percentage.

• 57:29Tucker Carlson?

  So what are they doing? What's the point of all this?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  There, I'll argue for them. They're going to say, Nathan, you know, Joseph in Egypt, he's stockpiled for seven years.

• 57:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  For the seven year famine, that's what we're doing. Well, you've stockpiled indefinitely. Like you, you could fund the church indefinitely just off the interest. So I don't know what they're doing. That would be their only rationale. But I, I see it as it's like the Lord of the Rings, right? There's the shiny ring, like their hedge fund is their ring and they just can't give it up. And so it's just, it's just growing.

• 58:01Tucker Carlson?

  Do pastors actually get rich doing the job? Are there some who do?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Kenneth Copeland, I've seen estimates, no one knows what they're, no one knows the exact number because it's, it's not, salaries aren't known. But some estimates, Kenneth Copeland is worth 700 million, around 700 million. Yeah.

• 58:22Tucker Carlson?

  Is that, I mean, that's, I mean, since Jesus does say it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel through the eye of a needle, but possible.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:32Tucker Carlson?

  That seems like very obviously the wrong path for a Christian church.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Well, there's a, there's a beautiful part of the New Testament where Paul defines leadership qualifications.

• 58:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  And lover of money is, is one of them. You cannot be a lover of money. You need to live modestly, right? And it's like, it's painted in there. And there are amazing pastors and shepherds out there that live by that standard. But there's this growing number. And, and again, it goes back to that socialist comment. When we see Christianity as a capitalistic venture and we build businesses on top of Christ with capitalism in mind, that's what happens.

• 59:11Tucker Carlson?

  It does, I mean, this is, as someone who loves America and is very pro-America, it pains me to say this, but I do think that Christianity as a religious faith as the, you know, the key to eternal life is something bigger than any nation-state, even your own. And so you probably want to keep your religion from becoming infected by cultural assumptions that are just by definition bound to a time and place. Like, this is about eternity, right?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:39Tucker Carlson?

  And to what extent do you think, so that's my preference just to, it's not an anti-American statement at all. I love America, but I don't want Christianity to reflect America. I want Christianity to change America.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Amen. And again, Christianity was the hard line against corruption. Like, the church was supposed to be the antithesis of corruption, and instead, the system, and this is, I really want people to ask, why has it corrupted? Is the institutional model has corrupted to mirror our corruption in government? They run simultaneously now. The government says, we're going to collect taxes, you know, and you're going to give it to us. And with these massive bills, you're never going to know where the spending goes. You've just got to give us more money. The churches are doing the same thing. They're saying, hey, you're going to give us your money. We're going to build the system. You've got to trust us. And now we're going to start petitioning your kids to go sell their electronics to give us, you know?

• 1:00:33Tucker Carlson?

  To give it to us.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  In the name of Jesus, you know? It's just, it's such a sad spot to be right now, to look at the body of Christ that I love. And it's just, I always use the analogy, we've built a tradition, we've built an institution, an expensive machine, a consumerist machine that entertains us and keeps us fed, but that institution has chained us to the pews financially. Because if we leave, if you actually preached this whole book in its entirety, a lot of people would get up and leave, because they'd be called to go out. They'd say, hey, God's calling me to do this other thing. But with that goes my money and my time and my attention.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  And so the the model we've built is actually antithetical to the calling in the in in the Gospels.

• 1:01:25Tucker Carlson?

  So the theology that these churches preach serve serves the church, not the kingdom of God?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  I've, yes, and I've said one statement that people have hung before. I've said, anybody who plays in this system for a full career gets eaten by the system. And and you've nailed that. When you play for the institution, when you are on stage and you have this seventy million dollar a year operating cost, your message, your your theology, everything you preach, from giving kids sheets on how to give you more money shifts to build and calcify the machine we've built on top of Christ.

• 1:01:59Tucker Carlson?

  No, that makes total sense.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  And I've and I've talked to amazing pastors who've just been eaten by the machine. And then the good ones, here's the sad part. As the big ones grow, they drain resources from the small churches that are actually still embedded in the community, doing the good work. And a lot of those small ones shut down. Statistically, right now, church closure is outpacing church expansion. And the churches that are closing are the small ones. And those small churches are the backbone of their local communities. And so when I say uh, all pastors who play by the system die by the system, even though even the good ones get eaten by the system. Because the big church gobbles up their congregation and gobbles up the resources that funded this beautiful, small community church.

• 1:02:43Tucker Carlson?

  Is anyone pointing any of this out? Do you feel like a voice in the wilderness?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  I did for a couple of years. Um, but but I think our message is starting to resonate and there's other, there's other watchmen on the wall, so to speak. Um, that's in Ezekiel, I think Ezekiel three.

• 1:03:00Tucker Carlson?

  So there's clearly a a religious revival going on in the United States, a Christian revival. Where are people going?

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  That's, that's a really good question. I think people are searching. They don't know, there, there's some go to the mega church, some hopefully go to scripture and just sit quietly and read scripture and pray.

• 1:03:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Um, my, my encouragement would be to go, go find a small church in your area.

• 1:03:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Like that church needs your help. Those smaller pastors that that are often bivocational, because even their even their congregation can't fund a full-time salary, go support them with your time, with your with your talent, with your with your resource, like those small ones. And ironically, with the small ones, need your help. It's like they need you to to help with the kids.

• 1:03:47Tucker Carlson?

  So bivocational means that the pastor is a carpenter, roofer?

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:03:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  And that's what the beautiful pastors that I've sat with, because I've sat with probably a thousand plus pastors around the US at this point over the last five years, is the bivocational ones are usually the ones preaching the the most biblical theology.

• 1:04:06Tucker Carlson?

  Noticed that. Yes, I've noticed that.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Because their salary, their livelihood, their the food that sits in front of their kids is not dependent on this book.

• 1:04:15Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that was Paul's model. He, you know, the first great evangelist.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Tucker Carlson?

  Was making tents.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and there's a there and you know, it's the Bible speaks about, hey, if you if you make your living from from the gospel, you have your reward. You've been you've been paid your reward. And I want my my reward to be upstairs, you know?

• 1:04:34Tucker Carlson?

  How do you the big denominations you think are less corrupt?

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  No. The big I wouldn't say that. The big denominations just have hierarchical oversight on the on the financials. And so it used to it it does it does bring some accountability to the system, but it's not it's not quality accountability, but there is some structure. Like Methodist Methodist, for example, you know what your Methodist pastor makes. It's a baseline. And so you're not joining the Methodist church to get rich. Let's just say, no. But like Baptists have slipped a bit, you know? I know I know Baptist pastors that are very well off, you know, and.

• 1:05:16Tucker Carlson?

  How?

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Just because they've kind of taken the non-denominational model. A great example is there's a massive church. And here's another example to the capitalist mindset. Remember when we talked about franchises, like Christianity is almost becoming franchises? So when you bring really smart businessmen and women into leadership at these churches, they bring their capitalist business mindset into the machine. And it's corrupting the machine. And what I mean by that is, I'm going to give two examples. There's a very large church in Houston. Oh, your family goes Second Baptist, right? So that's a billion-dollar enterprise that's been funded by Houstonians for almost 100 years. So local Houston Christians generously gave to build this tradition, this awesome tradition.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  It's a school, it's a church, it's a lot of things. But now it's, all that power's been consolidated into six people's hands. And they can decide what to do with that billion in assets. They can move it out of state. They can sell off parts of it. And so what I mean by that is when we franchise out Christianity, the resources don't stay in the town that funded it. And a great example is there's this small church in Sarasota that I visited, and it was acquired by a church in Dallas. And so these individuals in Sarasota funded this building for years. And now the church in Dallas can just sell it off whenever it wants, and all that resource heads to Dallas. And so the people in Sarasota, the Christians in Sarasota, gave generously. And that's what I mean, is all money and resource ends up siloing at the top now.

• 1:06:50Tucker Carlson?

  Why would a church in Dallas want a church in Sarasota?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  I've got my opinion. I think it's to justify the beachfront home in Florida.

• 1:06:59Tucker Carlson?

  Wow.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. But so what I'm seeing is, and what we're seeing is money's siloing at a national level. And then what does that mean? It means you can, all of a sudden, these national groups and these big conglomerates become what, like, become political apparatus, basically.

• 1:07:14Tucker Carlson?

  It's just surprising, but I guess not really surprising, to learn that what's happening to every other part of our society is happening to churches, where your vet is now owned by some private equity concern out of New York, and you're... Stores in your town are gone because of Amazon and Walmart.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Tucker Carlson?

  And like it just, the big things get bigger, the small things disappear.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  We call it the Walmart effect in the religion business. When a megachurch moves into a town, it has to find consumers somewhere.

• 1:07:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  So it looks, so that it attracts, you know, there's, everybody's not Christian. There's only so many Christians in, in your town. So what happens is the, the megachurch draws Christians and consumers from the small churches, entertains them and bedazzles them and gives them a good sprinkled donut. And then the small churches close. And what happens is usually the Walmart moves on, the megachurch corrupts. It's usually a sex scandal or a financial scandal. That shuts down and then there's no small churches anymore, which were the backbone of the community. And so the Walmart effect is in full effect. And there, again, I don't want to just be an auditor. There's, there's beautiful reform on the horizon because I'm seeing home churches spring up all over the, all over the US.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  I'm seeing people actually go back to the small churches in their community because they're looking for authenticity. The, the non-denominational kid, me, who, who ran around on stage and did every, you know, goofy thing my church would put on and I had a great time is I'm, I love exploring Catholicism and, and Orthodoxy and I call it the kaleidoscope of Christianity because I want to see where every denomination thrives and then where I think theological pinchpoints are. Cause then I can build my own perspective on this, on this book. And now my faith is my own, if that makes sense. And so I love going to small churches now. It's kind of like my, my jam.

• 1:09:09Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they're great.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Tucker Carlson?

  They're great. I've been to, yeah, regularly been to a church with three other people.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you this, the, I, I get arrested at, at big churches. I get kicked out of big churches, even when I'm just going to visit without cameras. If I just want to go see, sit, but I have never had a bad experience ever at a small church.

• 1:09:27Tucker Carlson?

  Totally agree.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  I usually have people come up and they're like, oh, you're the religionist guy. And they like hug me or want to, you know, want to sit with us and it's, it's awesome. And they're like, oh, you're great. Cool. Awesome.

• 1:09:37Tucker Carlson?

  That's. So last question, which is like a big question. Well, it's a small topic, but I think it's a metaphor. And it's about the treatment of Palestinian Christians, which is how I got into all this drama in the first place, because I just noticed that Christians in the United States, some of whom loved Israel, and that didn't bother me at all. But we're going out of our way to ignore what was happening to their brothers in Christ in the Middle East. And I was offended by that. And so began all of this. But is that changing?

• 1:10:07Tucker Carlson?

  Are you seeing greater concern from Christian churches about what's happening to Christians in the Middle East, the Holy Land?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's changing at the institutional level. It's changing at the individual.

• 1:10:19Tucker Carlson?

  Is it?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  I think it is, yeah. I have so many healthy conversations with my Christian brothers and sisters about this topic in particular. And people are just, Christians are waking up. They don't really know where to go.

• 1:10:35Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  You know, it's when the scales fall off for the first time, you're looking around and you're like, whoa, this is far more beautiful and far more complex than I realized.

• 1:10:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  But it's, we as Christians can just look to the scripture and look to the Bible and say, this is our roadmap. And that's it. And God will walk us out. And so I do think at the institutional level, I haven't seen change. But at the individual level, I've seen massive, massive theological change over the last couple of years.

• 1:11:01Tucker Carlson?

  Really? And who's leading that? Or people just independently coming to?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say watchmen on the wall. Like, there's, there's a lot of people out there that are digging. And then they'll put their, they'll put their research online. They'll put it on social media. They'll reach out to us. I'm, I'm just one of many. We're just one of many that are starting to pick up the Bible and say, let's read this cover to cover.

• 1:11:24Tucker Carlson?

  It used to be that the critics of Christian churches in the United States of their corruption, of their scandals, were all anti-Christian. So it was a way to undermine it. You know, the Boston Globe with its Spotlight series, you really got the sense like they just hate the Catholic Church for other reasons, which I think is true. But now you're seeing criticism of this kind of behavior, of church behavior from people who are mad. Because they're really sincere Christians.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And I even have massive, like, there's a pastor who's been on your show, a great guy. He's a good friend of mine and we're developing a relationship and he, he, he's, he's, he works at a very large church, one of the biggest in the US. And he, none of what I say scares him. He's like, I agree with everything.

• 1:12:07Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm like, awesome. So even, even at the pastoral level, there's starting to be a shift where they're like, we should be the beacon of truth and the beacon of light and transparency.

• 1:12:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  And so I think there's going to become a tipping, there's going to be a tipping point in the next six to 12 months, where the whole machine, the apparatus starts steering away.

• 1:12:27Tucker Carlson?

  Also, to me, a tip off is defensiveness. We're all defensive when called out on what we're doing wrong. I certainly am. But we're not supposed to be.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Tucker Carlson?

  And we're number one, called to humility. That's like the ticket price for admission, I think, is, you know, we're screwed up and need help. That's why we're here.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Tucker Carlson?

  So to hear that people are willing to acknowledge what they're doing wrong without being defensive seems like the best sign ever.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  It's, I'm really excited. And I think, could you and I both agree that we sit here as, as men who are evil, like at our core, and Christ gave us the example to chase after. And I think if we can get more people around the table with that as the baseline, then we can look at the institutions, my own institutions, the, the corporation that we built on top of the religion business, we're looking at because we're like, is this the best vehicle, like to do what we need to do? We don't think it is, right? We want to be, we want to be the beacon of transparency. So.

• 1:13:26Tucker Carlson?

  Do you ever go to an AA meeting?

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:28Tucker Carlson?

  You gotta go to an AA meeting. You don't need to be an alcoholic to, to enjoy the beauty of an AA meeting. I don't want to drink, but I still like, I love AA meetings because the, the price of being able to speak is admitting in public how screwed up you are. And it just changes the vibe completely. Like, there's no hierarchy at all. The one thing that unites every person in the room is their common flaw.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Tucker Carlson?

  And it's, that's the basis of like, truth and love.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  So what happens if the church took that model and said, okay, let's all gather around this table. We're, we're all POSs. Let's just admit that. Okay. How do we fix this? Right? How do we fix what we've built? I think it would be the most collaborative, fulfilling experience.

• 1:14:11Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  For small pastors, big pastors alike.

• 1:14:14Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  So let's get that together.

• 1:14:17Tucker Carlson?

  You should go to an A meeting and, and I don't go often enough, but occasionally I go and there's like, there's always the guy who's like still shaking, you know, he's just got off it. And then there's the guy who's, you know, been off for 40 years and he's like, got his life together, maybe rich, and they're exactly the same.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Tucker Carlson?

  As people, as we all are, every person is united in.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's why Christ crushed hierarchies.

• 1:14:39Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  He's like, all, all of you guys are the same. There's no hierarchy, except the Father. We got one good teacher, you know, and it's, but we've built hierarchies again on top of Christ. I, I say, um, you know, prior to the Reformation, there was one church, this monarchical Roman Catholic church and the Reformation, Calvin's, Vingli, you know, Luther, they came in and they, they, the leaders of the, the leaders of the Reformation really shook the church. And all we did though, they didn't shake, they shook everything except one thing. They didn't shake the institutional structure.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  And so what happened was the Reformation came through, they broke the stained glass, they burned cathedrals down. You know, they're like, we're going to do it differently, which was awesome, good intentioned. But as they came over to America, we just built the same structure again. We built a non-transparent, unaccountable, financially hungry machine with usually one person at the head. So I always tell people, we have 400,000 mini Vatican's in America now. There's 400,000, estimated 400,000 churches. We've just built 400,000 mini Vatican's, right? And so we just built hierarchy again. And it's like, no, we gotta, we gotta crush all of them.

• 1:15:48Tucker Carlson?

  I agree. I agree with that. I agree with that absolutely vehemently. Thank you for this film and for all the work that you've done on it.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Doug.

• 1:15:54Tucker Carlson?

  On this topic, despite the abuse you've taken.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.