How Religious Institutions Respond to Financial Scandal and Public Trust: An Audit of Five Playbooks
When the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment manager $5 million in February 2023, the church issued a two-paragraph statement, paid, and carried on. No outside auditor arrived afterward. None could. The penalty covered a filing failure — thirteen shell companies had kept a portfolio […]
How Religious Institutions Respond to Financial Scandal and Public Trust
How Religious Institutions Respond to Financial Scandal and Public Trust When money goes missing inside a religious body, the response is rarely improvised. It was designed years earlier, in the legal instruments that fund and shield the institution: the church-tax statute that delivers state-collected revenue, the concordat that governs its banking, the endowment act that […]
How the SBC Executive Committee, the Diocese of Buffalo, and the Vatican Secretariat of State Each Built a Narrative Infrastructure — and What Investigators Need to Match It
On May 22, 2022, Guidepost Solutions delivered a 288-page report to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee documenting that, for two decades, Executive Committee staff had maintained an internal list of accused ministers while publicly insisting no such centralized tracking existed. Six months earlier, on November 12, 2020, the Diocese of Buffalo filed for Chapter […]
Why Religious Liberty Debates Are Really About Who Has Institutional Power
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The Difference Between Religious Practice and Religious Identity Politics
Religious practice is the observable conduct of worship, ritual, education, charity, and communal discipline carried out by a religious body. Religious identity politics is the deployment of religious affiliation, symbols, or demographic claims to influence public policy, elections, administrative rulemaking, or constitutional interpretation. Adjacent concepts include political theology, institutional secularism, church-state bargaining, and confessional party […]
When Religious Institutions Use AI to Generate Policy Narratives: The Accountability Gap Nobody Is Auditing
When Religious Institutions Use AI to Generate Policy Narratives: The Accountability Gap Nobody Is Auditing On March 14, 2024, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Office of Domestic Social Development submitted written testimony to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry on the Farm Bill’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program reauthorization. The testimony invoked […]
When a Prayer Becomes a Policy: Distinguishing Religious Practice from Religious Identity Politics in Public Institutions
Introduction: The Two Faces of Faith in the Public Square A congregation running a soup kitchen out of its basement and a political action committee endorsing candidates based on a single moral issue both spring from religious commitment. But from an institutional power standpoint, they occupy different worlds. The first is a direct expression of […]
The Liturgy of Influence: How Religious Practice and Identity Politics Serve Different Institutional Masters
In public chatter, religious practice and religious identity politics get mashed together all the time. But if you’re looking at institutions—their incentives, their legal wiring, their money trails—you’re actually staring at two very different operating systems. Religious practice is the stuff of lived faith: worship, rites, prayer, soup kitchens. Religious identity politics, on the other […]
Religious Practice vs. Religious Identity Politics: Mapping the Institutional Influence Gap
Introduction: Two Registers of Religious Engagement Religious organizations in democratic systems operate on two distinct tracks. The first is religious practice—worship, ritual, charitable works, and community formation. The second is religious identity politics—the mobilization of faith affiliation to influence legislation, judicial appointments, regulatory policy, and electoral outcomes. The boundary between them is not theological. It […]
The Specific IRS Rules That Let Scientology Retain Tax Exemption Despite Commercial Operations—and What Other Institutions Learned From the Comeback Narrative
On October 1, 1993, the IRS reversed course on a fight it had been losing for more than two decades. The agency issued a closing agreement that restored tax-exempt status to over 150 Church of Scientology affiliates, dropped liens exceeding $1 billion, and walked away from its long-standing position that Scientology operated for private benefit […]