Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.

—Matthew, 24:23.

And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.

—Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry.

The list is a long and a proud one. Jim Bakker, off to the sneezer for mail fraud. Jimmy Swaggart, caught frequenting the illicit lady-chalices in that luxurious neighborhood called Out By The Airport. Ralph Reed, shopping the anger of his pious suckers for a fat fee to casino owners who would then sit back and watch Reed bring down the wrath of God and his Chosen Shut-Ins down on the competition and, in his spare time, running a laundromat for Jack Abramoff's money.

To this list of God's own grifters, as The Guardian reports, add the name of Jay Sekulow, defender of religious liberty, recently hired mouthpiece for President* Donald Trump, and all-around lover of other people's money.

Documents obtained by the Guardian show Sekulow that month approved plans to push poor and jobless people to donate money to his Christian nonprofit, which since 2000 has steered more than $60m to Sekulow, his family and their businesses. Telemarketers for the nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (Case), were instructed in contracts signed by Sekulow to urge people who pleaded poverty or said they were out of work to dig deep for a "sacrificial gift". "I can certainly understand how that would make it difficult for you to share a gift like that right now," they told retirees who said they were on fixed incomes and had "no extra money" – before asking if they could spare "even $20 within the next three weeks". 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.

The president* was known to say once that the near-destruction of the world economy had been good for his business. (Senator Professor Warren never misses a chance to hang that one around his neck.) But, compared to the Sekulows, the president* is something of a piker.

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.'

As we occasionally say, economic anxiety certainly manifests itself in curious ways. Some of them, apparently, managed to keep various Sekulows comfortably in the tall cotton.

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. 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. Jay's two sons, and Gary's son and daughter, have also shared at least $1.7m in compensation for work done for the nonprofits since 2000.

The gospel of Matthew is reckoned to have been written somewhere around 75 AD or so. Sinclair Lewis published Elmer Gantry in 1927. And yet these scams still work. We never listen.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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