Best scam ever

They have thirty homes, including "a pair of Newport Beach mansions, a mountain retreat near Lake Arrowhead and a ranch in Texas." A $7.2-million personal jet is on call for them at all times. They drive luxury cars and eat $180/person dinners. Plus they get hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending money every year.

How did they get all this? By falsely promising their victims, many of them low-income rural Americans, that if they invested so much that it hurt--even if they invested more money than they actually had--they would be rewarded with prosperity in return. This false promise yields the con artists $170 million a year.

Of course the scam is legal, under the state's Fraud Exemption for Religion policy. Paul and Jan Crouch, owners of the hugely successful Trinity Broadcasting Network, can keep on bilking their victims all they want--and they don't even have to pay taxes on the loot.

This revealing Los Angeles Times article is appropriately critical of the Crouches' Orange County-based ministry, but even while exposing the Crouches' hypocrisy, the Times couldn't help but cut Christianity a break in this sentence about the TBN headquarters:

Visitors to the complex, alongside the San Diego Freeway, can attend live studio broadcasts, buy TBN-branded clothing and stroll down a re-creation of Via Dolorosa, the street in Jerusalem where Jesus walked to his crucifixion.

Newspapers are usually very careful about making flat factual statements like this. If the reporter doesn't personally know it to be a verified fact, he or she will usually attribute it. Given the extreme unlikelihood that the present tourist attraction in Jerusalem is actually a street down which anybody named Jesus actually walked to his execution, a better way to state this "fact" might be, "the street in Jerusalem where some Christians believe Jesus walked to his crucifixion."

But instead, we have the Times casually endorsing these facts:

--Jesus existed
--He was crucified
--He walked down a certain street in Jerusalem

I wonder if any of these facts was checked?

UPDATE 9-20-04: The Times has now posted part 2 of the story, focusing on the "prosperity gospel":

Pastor Paul Crouch calls it "God's economy of giving," and here is how it works:

People who donate to Crouch's Trinity Broadcasting Network will reap financial blessings from a grateful God. The more they give TBN, the more he will give them.

Being broke or in debt is no excuse not to write a check. In fact, it's an ideal opportunity. For God is especially generous to those who give when they can least afford it.

"He'll give you thousands, hundreds of thousands," Crouch told his viewers during a telethon last November. "He'll give millions and billions of dollars."