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Grassley's comments are problematic, but his investigation is not irreparably tainted. While churches are right to sound the alarm against government intrusion, there's more to do than protest.

This is not the first financial scandal in the church. The silver lining to past embarrassments is the greater transparency they launched in the evangelical movement. In response to some nonprofit scandals in the late 1970s, George Wilson (Billy Graham's business manager) and Sen. Mark Hatfield took the lead in creating the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a "Christian Better Business Bureau." One concern was donor confidence, but another was fear of government intervention. Some similar reforms came out of the televangelist scandals of the 1980s.

Sadly, the health-and-wealth crowd seems largely impervious to such efforts. Investigative news reports and some severe critiques by evangelical and Pentecostal leaders have been met with little response. The TBN celebrities know that any real government intervention would be met with massive opposition, and there's little fear of donor backlash when your donors see opulence as a sign of God's blessing.

The difference between the evangelical push for financial accountability and the disregard for it in the health-and-wealth wing of the Pentecostal movement demonstrates how different these groups can be. Evangelicals split from the fundamentalist movement in the 1940s and '50s because they wanted to "speak the language of the culture," and saw financial transparency for their ministries as part of that strategy. Many of these health-and-wealth preachers, on the other hand, see money as a key part of the gospel. For evangelicals, it's "I once was lost, but now I'm found." For the health-and-wealth types, it's "I once was poor, but now I'm rich." Ironically, the bestseller lists suggest that the prosperity-gospel preachers may be doing a better job of "speaking the language of culture."

Whether they're proclaiming the true gospel is a separate question. And it's a question that the church, not the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance, should answer.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More on the Grassley investigation is in our full-coverage section.

A 2003 Christianity Today editorial said financial transparency was a must, even when not legally required.

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January 2008, Vol. 52, No. 1