I love it!  Crony Christianity!  It’s like crony capitalism when government and big business work hand in hand (benefiting each other) to the detriment of those paying the bills—you—but this time it’s religious charities feeding on the taxpayer teat while directing government policy.

And, I am overjoyed to see that so many people, writers like Lee Cary, are starting to understand the depth of this evil perpetrated on the American citizen by ‘religious’ behemoths in the name of Christian charity.

Lee Cary, a retired United Methodist Pastor, has coined the perfect phrase to describe what we have been talking about for years.  Here is his description at American Thinker this morning (hat tip: Judy).  Emphasis below is mine:

Crony Christianity challenges the separation of Church and State.

Crony Christianity is the collaborative arrangement between government and Christian faith-based organizations whereby government funds Christian organizations to deliver goods and services that advance the political agenda of the government. Any government.

The crisis surrounding the flood of unaccompanied alien children into the U.S. has promoted crony Christianity.

It is a variation of the spider’s web of similar arrangements, spun between businesses and government, that we call crony capitalism.

The Players

The five players in crony Christianity are: (1) the bureaucrats who run ecclesiastically-related organizations; (2) the church laity aligned with the various denominations that underwrite those organizations, in-part or in-full; (3) officials within government agencies that grant money; (4) tax-payers who fund government grants; and (5) the clients who receive aid from the faith-based organizations that operate with government funding.

The Pathway to Crisis

For reasons that remain unclear and widely debated, the Obama Administration has choreographed the influx of tens of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children” (this term typed into TAGGS – Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System – accesses the list of grant recipients) into the U.S. from several Central American countries.  [Could the choreographing have been a mutual arrangement between the Bishops and the Obama Administration?—ed]

The federal government began to prepare for the flood of children before the tide arrived, and before the legacy media amped-up its coverage of the story. Both knew what was coming before most of the rest of us did.

Those Christian social service organizations that already had an established funding relationship with the federal government stood near the front of the line to help resettle the children, along with secular organizations already knowledgeable of, and dependent upon, federal grants.

Cary then gives us an extensive (but not complete by any means!) list of grants both secular and religious (religious Leftists!) government cronies received to care for the “children.”

It is worse than Cary thinks!

It would seem that Cary is not aware of the fact that virtually the entire budget of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration program (Appleby’s salary too most likely) is funded by US taxpayers.  And, it’s my contention that the Bishops and lobbyist Appleby actually may have started the border stampede in late 2013 with their trip to Central America and subsequent report, here.

Here is Cary on the USCCB:

The Times  [NYT] quoted Kevin Appleby, Director of Migration Policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said, “We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country. We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.”

Appleby presumes to speak for the American tax-payers when he refers to “our money” His title suggests that he should only speak for the money contributed by Roman Catholic laity, and the Roman Catholic Bishops.

Appleby is speaking for the American taxpayer whether we like it or not (98% of the USCCB’s budget is federal money, your money!), so he can’t speak for private Catholic donors because there aren’t enough of them paying his salary and footing the bill for the Bishops ‘good works.’

I have a theory too, that since the refugee contractors (the USCCB is the largest) didn’t get amnesty through Congress (S. 744, the Gang of Eight bill would have given them more clients for their federally-funded services) that they needed a new client base and the “children” fit the bill.

They were probably already staffing-up in anticipation of amnesty and thus in need of more of Caesar’s money.  When amnesty failed to get through the House they had to find another reason to tap the federal treasury—yup! the “children.”

Read Cary’s entire American Thinker piece by clicking here.

All of our coverage of the ‘Unaccompanied minors’ scam is here.