The Megachurch Scam & Nonprofit Loophole: How Celebrity Pastors Exploit the Bible to Get Filthy Rich

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
Thanks for coming back.

**Nathan Apffel** (0:05)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:06)
Maybe you can help solve a mystery. So I've always known that different people have different views on Israel. I've never been upset about it. Post-Gaza, I'm rethinking about if all those views are legitimate, but I know that decent people have different views on Israel, totally fine. And that includes Christians. And, but in the past year, it does seem that for some Christian leaders, I'm gonna call anyone out by name, but Israel is the only thing that matters. So they'll approach fellow Christians with one question in mind, where does this person stand on the government of Israel?
And so it occupies a much greater percentage of mental disk space than I ever imagined, certainly than it does for me. So what is that?

**Nathan Apffel** (0:50)
Well, it's the Old Covenant.
I was raised just non-denominational Christian in large scale churches and we were pro-Israel. It's just a consistent deal when you look at it. I'm always going to go back to scripture, so I'm always going to use the Bible to reference my perspective and what I think is going on. The nation state of Israel has just become an idol to the church in regards to how they perceive, not all of them, but how some of them perceive it. And you have to ask why. And so we've done a little digging in regards to some pharoah filings and others.
And when you look at the old covenant in the Bible, it's one of those spots or parts of the covenant that you can weaponize. Israel is one of them, giving and generosity, tithing is one of them. And when Christ came, he came to fulfill that whole old covenant, that whole contract, a new covenant. It's literally a new covenant. So that old covenant is complete, done, fulfilled, put on the shelf, a new contract is in place, and that's Christ contract, Christ covenant. And if you're a Bible-believing Christian. But what that new covenant does is it takes the teeth out of the old covenant, the old contracts, you know, that mosaic law. But people like to lean on that contract and that law because you can weaponize it. You can build empires again and build power structures around basically double-dipping in covenants. So you can take some things that Jesus said and grab a couple things from the old covenant and mash them together and you have just a different thing. You have Judeo-Christianity, not Christianity and not Judaism. You have Judeo-Christianity.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:29)
It's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

**Nathan Apffel** (2:31)
Exactly. It's neither or.
So Israel, the nation state, has become one of those cards that you can pull and say, hey, if you don't back the nation state, then you clearly don't believe this book or that God is our God. And so I always push back, I consider myself kind of an auditor in this regard. So I wanted to audit the nation state of Israel and say, what is it exactly, scripturally?

**Tucker Carlson** (2:56)
So that is, boy, it's jarring to hear you put it so plainly, but that is really what they're saying. If you don't support the Netanyahu government, you're not a Christian.

**Nathan Apffel** (3:06)
Yeah, I've heard it. I've heard that.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:09)
Some, like the dimmer ones, like Huckabee to say it out loud, but that is the assumption behind a lot of it.

**Nathan Apffel** (3:14)
Well, and if my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ haven't read the book in its entirety, then they'll take what Huckabee or what their potential pastor says from the stage as scripturally sound. And so that's what I've had a great time doing.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:29)
I disagree. I mean, yeah, I've read the book, by the way, more than once, but I didn't need to read it to know that Jesus is probably not endorsing killing the innocent, killing kids.

**Nathan Apffel** (3:39)
Well, I would say there's even a naivete. There's a strategic ignorance around that, right? Like in season one of The Religion Business, a development economist breaks down what strategic ignorance is. And we as humans want to stay strategically ignorant of things that push against our bias.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:54)
Boy, I've been there.

**Nathan Apffel** (3:55)
Yeah, and so have I. And so that's the thing is as we grow and hopefully mature, we look at the surroundings and say, okay, what is truth and what is not truth?
And a really simple truth is the nation state of Israel is not the ethnic tribe that's described in the Torah. And so if that's our baseline, then okay, we can reshape our, we can look at what's truth and not truth and see where people are leveraging that card or weaponizing that card for their own gain.