Tax the church.

Are these the end times that Christians look forward to with a rather disturbing anticipation?

About two or thee years ago, an audio clip surfaced on the net about this woman who had called a certain Mwaura to come to her house for a bit of the slap and tickle but he didn't seem all that into her. Now we have Morris. But these two pale into insignificance when compared to the depths men of the cloth will fall to protect their following, their wealth and their power.

I have no idea whether a Ranger Rover-loving pastor hit-and-ran, killing a road user and injuring another. The way he has behaved, though, the statements he has made, do not persuade me that he is an innocent man. The manner in which the officers of the law have behaved regarding the fatal road crash do not fill me with hope that the nexus between godmen, policemen and politicians is healthy or for the public good.

A few months ago we had the spectacle of a godman indecently exposing a member of his congregation, while at the same time lying to her that he had found a cure for her breast cancer. He was unapologetic. He has since had his reputation sanitised by appearing on a popular comedy show. He is not the only snake-oil salesman in the guise of a man of the cloth. Some have built financial and real estate empires by capturing the imaginations of their congregations - as well as their wallets. There is a celebrity evangelist couple that holidays in the United States ad plays golf in South Africa - and does not welcome "poor" people to their church.

A church was a sanctuary once. It was open to one and all. It offered more than spiritual succour to the spiritually poor; it offered shelter for the orphaned and the widowed; it offered education where the government did not; and it ran primary healthcare clinics while the community built capacity. That, at least, is the rosy view of what the church once was. The church hid it avaricious hypocrisy well with acts of charity - what we would call corporate social responsibility in the business world.

These days it acts without shame. Pastors, preachers, bishops, archbishops, evangelists, prophets, apostles - the whole lot is motivated with the desire for material wealth, financial superiority and political power. Widows, orphans and the poor are not welcome. They couldn't care less whether you believed in God and the Second Coming; all that matters is that you will fork over ever larger sums of money to them and obey them in every thing without thought or reason. In return there are ever fewer people willing to cut the church any slack - and that is why all of them are surrounded by high fences, alarms and dogs.

Because the church is now a for-profit organisation, it is time we did away with its charitable status and compelled it to keep accurate books of account so that we could tax it like any other corporation. Its agents have become conmen and murderers. It is time we held it to the same secular standards we hold everyone else and let it survive like its perfidious forebears. If they will no longer offer charity, then they must pay the going rate for conning us too.