My daughters are going on a youth mission trip this summer.  While I am not Christian, my husband is, and so my children go to church.  Last night, there was the mission trip fundraising meeting, where youth were being extroverted youth, and I got to remember exactly why I hate churches and groups of people.  It was the banter that got to me.  That and the cellphone use by the other youth.  They couldn’t leave their cellphones alone.  My kids don’t have cellphones, which is a whole ‘nother topic in itself.  The youth group leaders could not keep the room on topic, and the younger leader also instigated the off-topic banter at times, completely isolating the new kids and not allowing them to talk.

Ah, but that wasn’t what I was writing about.  Churches can only raise money by parasite/charity.  I get it, they’ll lose their non-profit status if they do things for profit, but it changes the way business is done.  When a youth group is fundraising, and not the women’s group, or the committee that runs the homeless shelter, or the college students, or the national charity organization’s overhead, they are limited in what they can do.  Bake sales are out, because another part of the church gets to do those.  Rummage sales are out, because another part of the church gets to do those.  The youth can put in labor for another part of the church, or for their congregation at below minimum wage rates, or they can do an auction of stuff, or put on a talent show, or a parents’ night out.  They can’t do another dinner, because that’s already been done too recently.

The list of things they can’t do is much longer than the list of things they can.  They can’t run a for-profit ongoing business, of any kind.  They can’t go outside of the church community and sell their services on craigslist.  They can’t invest in stocks and bonds and use the excess to run their programs and mission trips.  Thus, they have no stable source of income at all.  They have no clue about how to drag in the big whale donors, because youth group leaders are poor and don’t run in those circles.

I was thinking about the Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition as I was sitting there, increasingly alienated from church culture entirely.  Churches are parasites.  They take the money from their congregation, and flow it out into the greater community, which would be good in the Solari Report sense, IF the money actually stayed within the community, but it doesn’t.  It goes to another State, or even another Country entirely.  The realization that Churches of all stripes are financial tapeworms was a chilling one.  The Ferengi would have the money coming in, and it would stay within the local community instead of being siphoned off by the national church, by the 85% overhead of the church’s national charity organization, and they would certainly invest it wisely.  They would be feeding the local children in soup kitchens instead of digging wells in Africa or building houses in Mexico.

I think my values have changed in the last 30 years.