The Reverend Robert Schuller and his wife recently quit the board of the Garden Grove-based global televangelist church they recklessly drove into a massive $50 million bankruptcy and one of their daughters has announced she intends to create a new church.
Most mainstream media accounts of the developments, especially on Los Angeles television and radio stations, have struck a bereaved pose as if the end of the Schuller family era at the Crystal Cathedral is worthy of a collective sympathetic community sigh.
Schuller deserves credit for all of his lifetime achievements. He built a highly profitable, international televangelist empire. He undoubtedly inspired millions of people. Along with Disneyland, massive traffic jams and kooky politicians, his glass church was one of Orange County's best known icons for decades.
But let's not forget reality.
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There was an ugly side to the Crystal Cathedral operation. Schuller
hauled in as much as $25 million a month in tax-free donations with
appeals mostly to dirt poor Latinos. His pitch was often shameless: “Spare a
dime” for “the helpless” and Jesus “will show [you] the path of life.”
As
I revealed in an April 2011 column based on bankruptcy records,
Schuller, his extended family and closest aides–all of whom you could
fairly call helplessly rich–diverted large sums of church
donations to live exceptionally well. Not many American families enjoy
vacation homes in Laguna Beach, Big Bear, Hawaii and Colorado–all private retreats that gave the Schullers much needed breaks from counting all those stacks of incoming dinero. The
church's top ex-businessman lives behind guards and gates in Newport Coast–Southern
California's most exclusive, ocean-view residential neighborhood that
has been called home by mega-millionaires Kobe Bryant and Dean Koontz.
The
bankruptcy records annihilated the deceitful, cemented facade that
Schuller's every waking moment was devoted to helping the needy. For
example, at one point when the ministry nabbed donations of more than
$14 million, the Schuller clan directly grabbed hundreds of thousands of
dollars while it spent just $22 a day to feed the poor.
It's
no surprise then that the final straw in Schuller's decision to angrily
leave the church board and threaten legal action involves not God, not
the poor, not preaching but rather his own finances. Despite the
millions and millions of dollars he, his family and closest aides have
taken over the years, the reverend wants the faltering church to
guarantee him payments of almost five times the local median household income: $320,000 a year.
Perhaps
it was just a coincidence that a recent Schuller family televised sermon
was titled after the motto on American currency, “In God We Trust.”
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.