Cru: Christianity as a pyramid scheme

If you know me well, you know of my disdain for multi-level marketing organizations.

I’ll leave it to John Oliver to explain why.

Unfortunately, I was once a part of an MLM. It wasn’t Herbalife or Nuskin or LeVel. It was the organization formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru.

It started off innocently enough. I had grown up attending church, and I carried many of those beliefs into college. And, as a new freshman with limited social abilities, when I was invited to attend a meeting of the university’s largest student organization, I was all for it.

The messages certainly sounded a lot like what I heard in church, and at least some of the missionaries had churches sponsoring them. I already considered myself to be Christian, so a lot of this to me was preaching to the choir.

But, as time went on and I got more involved in the organization, there were some major red flags. There was a lot of pressure to attend weekly Bible studies in addition to the weekly meetings. Plus, I was already attending church on Sunday mornings and meeting with my “discipler” once a week at the campus Starbucks.

This was a significant time commitment. If someone couldn’t make it because heaven forbid, he had to study on a Sunday night, the leader would secretly ridicule him (and it was always HIM in my group — they separated the young men and women when it came to these groups) for not managing his time better or not having his priorities in order. The Bible passages selected were often about the Great Commission or designed to deepen your level of commitment to the organization. There was lots of talk about obedience to God, which was I now realize was code for obedience to the organization. And, of course, we heard constant reminders about clean living and traditional values about sex.

And then there were the retreats.  One weekend each fall, Campus Crusade would schedule an overnight trip to a retreat center away from the city and the university. The praise band that played worship songs at the weekly meetings led worship at the retreats, and people loved to sing. And then there would be sermons and prayers, all strategically designed to deepen everyone’s commitment to the organization. I got a lecture once on “Spiritual Multiplication,” which ended up looking quite a bit like a pyramid.

This still didn’t seem too far removed from the churches I grew up in, so it didn’t ring too many warning bells in my head. I even joined the praise band during my sophomore year and played keyboard.

But, after a while, I saw how different it was from church. Sure, I had heard messages about evangelizing at church, but this was a whole new degree of intensity and marketing. Everything was bait-and-switch…Christianity in disguise.

My discipler, an older student, asked me to host a “Focus Group” in my dorm and invite all the people who lived in my hallway and didn’t already participate in Campus Crusade. Over a period of weeks, I plied them with free food and asked them seemingly innocuous questions about life and then philosophy…but then I transitioned with a hard right turn to the stuff found in gospel tracts. I lost friends over that, and I deserved to.

The director of our campus ministry got a stage in the middle of the campus courtyard and asked our praise band to play secular music…songs that were popular, whatever. He was disappointed when we didn’t do that and just did what we always did. I don’t think we even knew how to go about acting like a secular band. The goal, I suppose, was to trick people into thinking we were just a regular rock cover band who happened to play for free at the weekly Campus Crusade meetings instead of at a bar. Wouldn’t that be fun?

But perhaps the most sinister thing was the constant emphasis, week after week, on summer projects and joining Campus Crusade staff after graduation. There was even a spring break “missionary trip” to Panama City Beach, Florida that involved bait-and-switching unsuspecting beachgoers. Someone was always talking about how great it was, and there was always pressure to sign up. I and a couple of others signed up for a different Campus Crusade spring break trip…to Chicago to work with a community center in a poor area. This felt quite a bit truer to me than what they were doing in Florida, but it was really the same shit, different climate. Bait and switch.

So, during my sophomore year, I decided I wanted to go on a project the following summer. My initial interest was in Japan, but that didn’t seem financially possible. So, another option was doing web development work at Campus Crusade headquarters in Orlando, and I thought I could use my skills in online journalism (I was in charge of the online version of the university newspaper) “for God.” To me, it made sense.

Tell you what they did – you know the Holy Roller preachers all the time follow the people around, preachin’ an’ takin’ up collections? Well, they wanted to preach in this camp. And a lot of the older folks wanted them. So it was up to the Central Committee. They went into meeting and here’s how they fixed it. They say ‘Any preacher can preach in this camp. Nobody can take up a collection in this camp.’ And it was kinda sad for the old folks, ’cause there hasn’t been a preacher in since.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

What didn’t make sense was where the money was going to come from. I had to raise thousands of dollars of support just to attend, and if I wanted to earn minimum wage, well that means raising twice as much support. I was told by the organization to ask friends and family for the money. I was even given templates for letters that had suggested donations starting at $100 and going up from there.

I’m not proud of this, but I was about to mail a letter to my grandfather, who lived a fairly meager existence, asking for $100 or more so I could go work on a website in Florida during the summer. Thank goodness my parents stopped me before I could send it because I would have always regretted sending that letter.

My university was a private school, with high tuition costs and a lot of the students there came from affluent backgrounds. But I was there on a full-tuition academic scholarship, and there would have been no way I could have attended that school otherwise. But it’s easy to see how so many of them could have raised the money. I did not have that luxury. So, I didn’t go on that summer project. I found an internship that actually paid me for my work instead of the other way around.

During the fall of my junior year, I was still attending the Campus Crusade weekly meetings, but I had gotten away from a lot of the other activities. Around this same time, I took a course about evolution, and it really changed the way I thought about all the things I had been taught about religion. I had heard about evolution many times before, but never in this level of detail and never so persuasively. This was a whole semester devoted to evolution, and I saw how Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. I had also taken Philosophy 101 during my sophomore year, and that chipped away at my faith as well.

But even though I still considered myself a Christian at that point, there was no way I could continue to be a Campus Crusade kind of Christian. After the sour taste in my mouth from the summer project fiasco, it was no big loss to leave. I still attended church, but I started attending different churches that were more progressive and open-minded.

I struggled to make sense of what had happened to me with this organization, and I eventually realized what it was: a pyramid scheme. That “spiritual multiplication” concept wasn’t just to explain about winning souls for Jesus, it was about bringing them into Campus Crusade and them going on summer projects and joining the staff. Most importantly, it was about them raising their own support from which the organization got a huge cut while risking nothing. Campus Crusade for Christ gets its money from its own “staff,” who get it from their friends and family. I’m not saying there’s some MLM-style compensation structure as they multiply themselves spiritually, but it certainly does benefit the organization to have more people raising their own support from more friends and family. Heaven forbid they operate like a normal nonprofit or church and pay their employees.