Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
The Scary Story racket is a two-part grift

The Scary Story racket is a two-part grift

Last updated on: June 28, 2017 at 8:16 pm by Fred Clark

The Scary Story racket is a two-part grift 2017-06-28T20:16:07-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The private jet is the detail that really jumps out at everybody. As it should — it’s such an extravagant example of the kind of crassly self-indulgent excess and exploitative corruption at the heart of this story:

Meanwhile, a company run by Gary’s wife, Kim Sekulow, has received $6.2m since 2000 in fees for media production services and for the lease of a private jet, which it owned jointly with Jay Sekulow’s company Regency Productions. The jet was made available for the use of Jay and Pam Sekulow, according to corporate filings.

That’s from Jon Swaine’s brutally thorough investigation for the Guardian: “Trump lawyer’s firm steered millions in donations to family members, files show.”

The Trump lawyer in question is Jay Sekulow, who is a familiar face to longtime observers of the religious right and the direct-mail fundraising industry that supports it. He was tapped by Pat Robertson in 1990 to launch the American Center for Law and Justice — an outfit Robertson hoped would become something like a conservative white Christian version of the ACLU.

Jay Sekulow (left) is a master of the Scary Story racket.

Robertson was coming off of his 1988 campaign for the Republican nomination for president — he won primaries in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington — and was making the most of the national mailing lists he had compiled as a candidate. At the time, the Christian Coalition was the main new fundraising machine Robertson created to exploit that mailing list. ACLJ was another.

It’s your basic Scary Story racket — a time-honored way of getting very rich for anyone who is both: A) thoroughly unscrupulous; and B) rooted in a fearfully credulous subculture eager to hand over its money to anyone willing to protect them from imaginary monsters. All you need to get started in this business is a mailing list with a few thousand good leads, enough initial capital to pay for postage and letterhead, and the imagination to exaggerate, invent, and amplify an endless cycle of bogeymen that only you can stop from destroying America. Thanks to Pat Robertson, ACLJ had all of that, and Sekulow proved to be very, very good at it.

What has the ACLJ actually done over the past almost-30 years? Not much. They’ve managed to get their name in the paper a few times, but the organization’s actual legal accomplishments are pretty thin.

They would argue otherwise. After all, the black president’s jackbooted secret police never did show up to padlock churches and cart real, true Christian pastors away to prison, right? So clearly the ACLJ has protected its supported from the very menace they long warned them about.

In any case, actual accomplishments are never the main point of a Scary Story direct-mail fundraising organization. The main point is making sure that the mailing list of supporters stays scared enough to keep writing those checks. That’s where Sekulow and the ACLJ have really excelled. The Scary Story industry has made Jay Sekulow a very rich man.

Crackerjack religion reporter Bob Smietana covered a lot of this years ago when he was at The Tennessean: “Lawyer’s family, firm collect millions from charities.” (The formatting for that 2011 USA Today story is messed up because Smietana’s former employer, Gannett, laid off its online copy editors that same year. Ahem.) Smietana outlined how Sekulow’s interconnected network of nonprofit agencies — owned and overseen by close relatives — allowed him to enrich himself and his family. Swaine picks up where he left off, and the numbers and details are appalling.

Here’s Swaine reporting on the fundraising efforts of “Case” (Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism), one of the many nonprofit “charities” in Sekulow’s many-tentacled operation:

In addition to using tens of millions of dollars in donations to pay Sekulow, his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his niece and nephew and their firms, Case has also been used to provide a series of unusual loans and property deals to the Sekulow family.

… For years, the nonprofits have made a notable amount of payments to Sekulow and his family, which were first reported by Law.com. Since 2000, a law firm co-owned by Sekulow, the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, has been paid more than $25m by the nonprofits for legal services. During the same period, Sekulow’s company Regency Productions, which produces his talk radio show, was paid $11.3m for production services.

Sekulow also personally received other compensation totalling $3.3m. Pam Sekulow, his wife, has been paid more than $1.2m in compensation for serving astreasurer and secretary of Case.

Sekulow’s brother, Gary, the chief operating officer of the nonprofits, has been paid $9.2m in salary and benefits by them since 2000. Gary Sekulow has stated in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings that he works 40 hours per week – the equivalent of a full-time job – for each of the nonprofits. Filers are told to specify if any of the hours were spent on work for “related organizations”. He does not.

Gary there, you’ll remember from up at the top of this post, is the brother whose wife Kim runs the company with that private jet. You need one of those RICO Task Force bulletin boards to keep all this sorted out.

The truly disgusting stuff in Swaine’s report is where he details how Sekulow’s “charities” specifically target economically struggling people to collect these millions of dollars for his family businesses. And where he discusses the Scary Stories — what some might call lies — Sekulow promotes to trick them into giving him their money:

Case raises tens of millions of dollars a year, much of it in small amounts from Christians who receive direct appeals for money over the telephone or in the mail. The telemarketing contracts obtained by the Guardian show how fundraisers were instructed by Sekulow to deliver bleak warnings about topics including abortion, Sharia law and Barack Obama.

“It’s time to let the president know that his vision of America is obscured and represents a dangerous threat to the Judea-Christian [sic] values that have been the cornerstone of our republic,” one script from 2015 said.

A 2013 script warned listeners that Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, promised to give Planned Parenthood federal funding to open abortion referral clinics “in your child’s or grandchild’s middle school or high school.”

The Guardian has posted the telemarketing scripts used by Case fundraisers, outlining strategies for squeezing whatever they could get from people on fixed incomes, or from the unemployed and the sick, or from those who would prefer to direct their charitable giving to their local church. It’s really, really gross.

The key thing to remember here is that this is only one way the Scary Story industry exploits their supporters. It’s not just about inducing some frightened old church lady into giving $20 a month that she doesn’t have. It’s also about raising her taxes and cutting funding for anything she relies on so that Sekulow himself won’t have to pay as much in taxes for that private jet, or for all three of his houses.

The direct-mail transactions are only half the game. And that half of the game isn’t half of the money. The really big money is on the other end — the consequence of the political climate created and supported by the army of terrified supporters shaped by a yearslong steady diet of Scary Stories.

They’ll vote for politicians who want to repeal the estate tax. They’ll vote for politicians who want to reduce the capital gains tax. They’ll vote for politicians who want to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, consumer protection, and organized labor. They’ll vote for politicians whose entire agenda is transferring wealth upwards, deregulating every form of rent-seeking, and appointing robber-baron friendly judges who can be relied on to ensure that anyone who opposes such an agenda won’t be allowed to vote.

That’s where the real money comes in. Sure, Jay Sekulow has reaped some $60 million for himself and his family just by cashing all those checks from terrified little old church ladies. But the real payoff — the big payoff — is still being arranged. That comes once people like him cement their control of all three branches of government, ensuring that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell can pass their wish-list of laws, President Trump can sign them, and Not-Gorsuch & Co. can retro-engineer some excuse for calling them constitutional.

Previous Post

June 27, 2017

Christian nationalism and white nationalism

Next Post

June 29, 2017 The Defenders of Slavery Taught us How to Bible

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What Christian group is known for door-to-door evangelism?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Pentecostals Catholics Jehovah’s Witnesses Baptists