Coercion to tithe does not require physical force

The Church is reportedly planning to use its tithe to fund its ‘No’ campaign against the draft constitution. Tithe is one of the Church’s terms for the offertory which it collects from its congregations every Sunday (or, for the Seventh Day Adventists, every Saturday).

In a Judaeo-Christian practice as old as Leviticus, the laity has had to pay to the temple or church a certain fraction of their incomes every time they enter the shrine to worship. The collection, we are told, is taken on the Lord God’s behalf. Whether He actually receives it is none of our business.

Though the Euro-Christian Church still calls it tithe, the percentage has been much bigger than that ever since feudalism became ecclesiastical Rome’s chief beneficiary and closest ally in Europe. A vassal paid the landlord a percentage much larger than 50 per cent of all his agrarian produce.

At the end of every production period, all land tillers — from the highest vassal through the baron and the knight down to the lowest — deposited their agricultural levies in large parochial (or parish-run) granaries called tithe barns.

Why does the Church prefer the archaic English word tithe to the modern word tenth? Because all religions find archaic terms usefully mystifying. That is why the Syrian Church preaches in Aramaic and the Roman Church preaches in Latin — two languages which have been dead for millennia.

Levying a tax

But a tithe is simply “a tenth” (usually of one’s harvest, income, profit, proceeds, etc). The verb “to tithe” means to exact or demand a tenth (of anything) from people. It means to levy a tax in kind or to pay such an imposition. There is thus much that is extortionate in all “tithing” systems.

All members of a shrine appear to pay it gladly. The only question is whether their volition — their faculty of judgment — is mature enough. Coercion does not necessary require physical force. The kinds of words used to induce payment amount to exploitation of naïve sentiments, that is, to mental duress.

As Malcolm X comments in his Autobiography, black American priests “… spoke not so much to our souls ... (but) to our wallets and pocketbooks. They spoke numbers; they wanted to build their congregations, they wanted to build their bigger churches, they wanted to bank bigger collections.”

“They never spoke to our intelligence,” he adds. “With fatherly distance, they treated us like children and expected us to be either grateful or happy.” What is true of black American priests is true also of black African, brown Arab and yellow Korean church leaders.

The Rev Myung Moon is the epitome of it. But Pat Robertson, Maurice Cerullo, Werner Bonnke and other sweet-mouthed televangelists show that in white Euro-America — where our priests learned their game —the black priest is not a cause but a consequence.

The black American preacher excels only in the swagger and abracadabra of language with which he woos the toegoth — the Old English word which has given us our tithe.

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