Yesterday, the Daily Beast published a long, thorough and doggedly fair account by Goldie Taylor of the controversy surrounding Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King. King, who had a very heated and very public falling out on Sunday with other leaders in the movement — in particular, DeRay McKesson and Johnetta “Netta” Elzie — is facing allegations that he has used multiple charitable projects associated with his racial justice activism for personal financial gain.

King maintains that all of his fundraising efforts are legitimate, and that in cases where ventures fail — such as his Justice Together project, which had counted McKesson as a board member before he resigned citing (you guessed it) questions about the organization’s finances — all donations have been refunded in full. However, as Taylor notes, King is asking us to take many of these claims on faith. He has not released a full accounting of his fundraising efforts, and he is being asked to. Until he does, as Taylor concludes, “King’s credibility as a social justice leader of any note hangs in the balance.”

To be clear, Shaun King has done great work independent from his fundraising. His reporting, first for DailyKos and now for the New York Daily News, has made him a go-to source for anyone who cares about racial justice and police brutality. There’s a reason he has over 217 thousand followers on Twitter, myself included. To be clearer, nothing in Taylor’s article openly accuses King of fraud or any other kind of misconduct, and I’m not ready to do so either.

However, one thing about Taylor’s report sticks out to me that, while not serving as proof of any wrongdoing, does make me more skeptical of King’s financial activity: Shaun King got his start in charity work as a pastor at a mega-church.

As Taylor writes:

After a brief stint in the classroom teaching civics, King entered the ministry—becoming a staff preacher at Total Grace Christian Center in an easterly suburb before founding his own church in 2008. As the congregation at Courageous Church grew, so then did King’s public personae. His name took flight, at least locally, as the “Facebook Pastor” for the way he used social media to engage prospective visitors and shore up its membership. By his own account, the charismatic public speaker is a consummate fundraiser. “I have raised millions of dollars for causes around the world. I have sometimes been a first, and early, responder,” King said.

As Taylor notes, King’s claims concerning his religio-charitable endeavors appear to be exaggerated, at best. In one case, King claimed that a web auction house he had founded in association with Courageous Church, where he served as lead pastor, raised “over $1 million” for a Haitian relief fund. However, only $540,000 was actually raised…and only $200,000 was actually gifted. King has yet to adequately address what happened to the extra $340,000, saying only that he resigned from his position at Courageous Church in March 2011 due to “personal stress and disillusionment.” It appears as though Courageous Church’s fundraising for Haiti relief efforts has only now come under serious scrutiny.

This pattern continued with King’s secular charitable work. In 2013, a short-lived crowdfunding site called HopeMob, launched by King, paid out only $198,000 after taking in over $419,000 in donations. King’s personal compensation through the venture was $160,000 — or 40% of the company’s total revenue. As Taylor adds, “Using his HopeMob platform, King raised over $11,000 to support a gun control lobbying effort in honor of the Sandy Hook victims. However, King is not a registered lobbyist and I could find little or no evidence that he paid an individual or entity to formally lobby government entities.” Unlike Courageous Church, HopeMob earned itself a page on RipoffReport.com, with multiple users complaining that they never received the money they raised through the platform.

The thing is, while taking an exorbitant split on the revenue from a nominally righteous endeavor is generally frowned upon, there’s one sector in the United States where it’s both tacitly accepted and relatively common: religion. The general public may cast the occasional eyeroll at prosperity gospel pastors who are transparently bilking their congregants in order to live extravagant lifestyles. But we as a society — both through our tax laws and the cultural privilege we grant religion more generally — have decided that, at the end of the day, that’s something we’re willing to tolerate. After all, don’t you know about all the great charitable work churches and other religious organizations do?

Scratch the surface of all too many mega-church pastors, and you’ll find people who are willing to justify massive personal fortunes based on (perhaps smaller than possible) benefits they provide to others.

Which is why, after reading through Taylor’s account of what we know about Shaun King’s personal history and finances — and what we don’t know — I can’t shake the idea that he really does have something to hide. But I also can’t shake the idea that the only reason people care is because of the work he’s currently engaged in. King has been targeted again and again, usually by right wing outlets such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart, for doing things as a secular activist that we’ve effectively priced into our assumptions about the charitable work of many of our religious leaders.

Pastors — particularly in the South, where King is from — are already well-paid. But many of them still ask their congregants to take it on faith that their personal compensation is fair, that they aren’t skimming off the top and that they shouldn’t be made to open their books. They can ask for this faith from their congregants because churches, unlike secular non-profits, are not required to disclose their salaries to the public. This is why we know that Shaun King took home roughly 40% of the revenue from HopeMob, but we have no clue what his split was at Courageous Church. All we know is that his church took in $540,000, paid out $200,000 and something happened to the rest.

And no one thought that was odd until similar issues arose with King’s secular projects.

All this is to say that Shaun King appears to be learning the hard way that the privileges we grant religion are not privileges we grant other groups — especially not racial minorities. We are willing to look the other way when pastors make a whole lot of money for themselves in the name of charity, while the lives of prominent racial justice advocates are placed under the microscopes of the entire blogosphere until something sticks. Perhaps ironically, that sort of proves King’s underlying point about privilege as it intersects with race, but it won’t let him off the hook in explaining what he’s done with the money he’s raised.