Buildings like firehouses or town offices with police departments attract Federal/State funds for construction and upkeep. People who support their church don't generally share your view that the church is exploiting them.
> People who support their church don't generally share your view that the church is exploiting them
True, but it also doesn't mean they're not being exploited.
I choose to believe my employer cares about me, but it doesn't mean they do, and it's likely they might know I think that and use it to their advantage.
I hold nothing against personal faith, but I find it unsettling the balance of wealth across organised religions - seeing the gold opulence centralised at the (likely) expense of largely the poor across a lot of faiths is horrifying.
It might be more of a societal good for a local church to extract money from their congregation than for it to be spent on, say, padding Amazon's pockets, but it doesn't mean it's not taking advantage of said peoples.
Each to their own, but the notion that tithes might be linked to eternal glory or damnation for the giver can hardly make them entirely freely given.
I have served on the board of a church-related institution. It doesn't push tithing. The clergy aren't getting rich. Personally, I wouldn't associate with a place pushing tithing, politics, or where the clergy is living an opulent lifestyle. That's just my pov.
It's been a few years, but about 30-35% of the budget was for direct charitable works. They partner with another church to run a soup kitchen, help to house displaced families, and do other stuff like provide flowers to hospice, youth sports, subsidized vacation camps, subsidy for poorer parishes, etc. Another 30-35% was for the parish itself... salaries for the priest, capital spending on the property. The remainder is scholarship money for the school.
YMMV, and there are certainly good and bad places, but IMO, that parish is a net benefit to the community around it. Some of the examples here of rural communities the are over-churched is a symptom of the effects of decline. The rural town I grew up in is 10% smaller than it was 25 years ago, and it is increasingly a bedroom community for a bigger city. Folks who live there try to keep community institutions like churches going, but obviously there comes a point where that isn't sustainable.
