Your Lifefunder Sucks
Anyone can do Catholic crowdfunding! And that's actually very dark!
One thing I've learned from writing all of these pieces is that we shouldn't overthink the reasons why people do things. Why does Taylor Marshall keep saying the Pope is evil? Well, he makes a lot of money when he says it. Why did Amy Coney Barrett write so many terrible legal papers and opinions? Well, she knew that having a record like that would impress Donald Trump and make her an attractive judicial appointee. Why did Randall Terry try to make it as a country singer despite possessing no musical talent whatsoever? I actually still haven't cracked that one. My point is that when it comes to far-right Catholicism, you're much less likely to find widespread coordinated evil plots than you are to find a bunch of stupid people doing stupid things, stupidly, for stupid reasons.
Put another way: people like money, power, comfort, and attention. There are exceptions, but when people make decisions, a lot of them make those decisions based on what's going to help them gain or hold onto their money, power, comfort, and attention, and as it turns out, getting a lot of one can also help you get a lot of the rest. In right-wing Catholic media, which I've stared at for a very long time against all reasonable advice like it's a solar eclipse, we see this in the predictable cycle of drumming up outrage to get clicks and ad revenue, and turning that steady outrage into subscriptions and donations, to generate more content for more outrage. But an individual can do all of that even if he doesn't work for a media company or have a blog. Because there's LifeFunder, the Kickstarter-esque crowdfunding website of right-wing Catholicism.
LifeFunder is not the only organization in the "Christian Fundraising" space; the largest such platform is the truly horrifying GiveSendGo, with whom PayPal has severed ties and who has an awful lot of fundraisers devoted to paying legal fees for people who stormed the Capitol back in January (for more on GiveSendGo and their support for various white supremacist causes in the name of Christianity, you can read this piece in The Nation from April). But LifeFunder is run by LifeSiteNews, a previous G.O.T.H.S. subject, current source of vaccine misinformation, and perpetual site that is so bad you can feed their articles into a predictive text generator and basically start writing their pieces yourself.
LifeFunder basically appears to be a side hustle for the folks over at LSN - they state up front that they don't take a cut of the fundraising, although they do solicit tips from donors who are already giving funds to help keep things running. Like the main LSN site, the approach appears to be to gin up outrage, include the fundraising as a call to action, and then collect the emails of scared and angry Catholics with disposable income, whom LSN can hit up for more money whenever they need.
Some of the fundraisers at LifeFunder look pretty harmless - somebody is getting money together for a mission trip, a convent needs repairs - but many of them tie right in to the bullshit you can find regularly at LSN: anti-vaccine misinformation, homophobic hatred, and warped accusations of censorship and cancel culture run amok. Examining them has helped me better understand how "money, power, comfort, and attention" work as motivators in the dark corners of the Catholic internet, and how those motivators can interfere with the church's ability to, you know, work towards a world where those are not our main motivators. So, in the words of Mike and JF from Your Kickstarter Sucks: it's six-pack time.
1. Help Students Defeat Vax Mandate at Jesuit College ($3,360 of $30,000 funded as of 9/24/21, 26 days to go)
As an increasing number of institutions push vaccine mandates for the insidious reason of "stopping easily preventable deaths", some brave students are standing up for their right to just open-mouth breathe in the middle of their lecture halls with no protective measures whatsoever. That's currently happening at Creighton, the Nebraska Jesuit university that has a pretty unobjectionable vaccine mandate very clearly tied to Catholic teaching:
"Absent alternative vaccines that have no connection at all to these cell lines, the use of vaccines that were tested using these cell lines is considered acceptable by the Catholic Church due to the need to protect public health, especially those most vulnerable to COVID-19...The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has written that the reasons to accept the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are sufficiently serious to justify their use, despite their remote connection to morally compromised cell lines. “In addition,” the bishops write, “receiving the COVID-19 vaccine ought to be understood as an act of charity toward the other members of our community. In this way, being vaccinated safely against COVID-19 should be considered an act of love of our neighbor and part of our moral responsibility for the common good.”"
But can our moral responsibility for the common good really take priority over an opportunity to crowdfund $30,000? According to ten students who attempted to sue the university over the vaccine requirement, the answer is "no". One of them was Lauren Ramaekers, who was the president of Creighton's Students for Life group, who justified her decision to skip getting vaccinated - and thus get un-enrolled from classes while just nine credits short of her degree - by citing "my pro-life values I've lived throughout my entire life—and if I'm not upholding those than I'm doing myself an injustice in what I believe to be true". And whether you believe that the president of a Catholic university's pro-life club should look up what her church actually teaches about the moral acceptability of using these vaccines to end the pandemic, or whether you believe that the president of a Catholic university's pro-life club should give a shit about protecting her classmates from a deadly contagious virus, one thing that all parties can agree on is that her case has already been thrown out in court. Which maybe explains why her group's fundraising has stalled at around 10% to goal.
2. Help Couple Avoid Jail for Anti-Vaccine Stickers ($32,721 of $50,000 funded, 36 days to go)
Okay, I think the headline is a little misleading on this one, this couple is not anti-vaccine, and I don’t think it’s fair to characterize them as such. It’s impossible for them to be anti-vaccine, because you can't be anti-vaccine if you also don’t think the pandemic is real. From their fundraiser:
“We’d just like to leave the world a better place for our seven children and others. We’ve used our 1st amendment rights to fight the evil, fraudulent pandemic our government has pushed on us. Our outspokenness on this topic has made us well known in the community and a target of harassment by the authorities.”
I bet it has! Because a whole bunch of people watched their friends and family die through a Zoom window while you were handing out stickers telling them it was all in their heads and driving around in your plague-riddled Mystery Machine.
I’m not sure how you rack up $50,000 in legal fees for putting up stickers, but the actual charge appears to be for criminal trespassing after going to the local library, making a loud scene, threatening the librarians, refusing alternate accommodations since they didn’t want to wear masks, and then refusing to be escorted out. Their milder-sounding sticker persecution story, however, is being carried by all sorts of respectable outlets including LifeSiteNews, “Breaking Christian News”, “Information Liberation”, and, oh boy, explicit neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
3. Help a Catholic Dad Keep Catholicism in Schools! ($31,298 of $100,000 funded, 6 days to go)
Without scrolling down further in this piece, take a guess at what has caused Toronto Catholic school board member Michael Del Grande to rack up six figures of legal fees. Just grab a piece of paper and write down what you think the inciting incident was.
Now, before we get to the inciting incident, Del Grande was fired from the school board after multiple contentious board meetings - including one that reportedly lasted seven hours - and pressure from the community he was serving. He is claiming that he has been persecuted for his faith, and has hired a lawyer to make his case for reinstatement to the board. He has made multiple statements to LifeSiteNews attempting to explain his side of the story, after being specifically told not to do so by his fellow board members. Anyways, based on the timeline at LifeSiteNews, it was because of this:
It was because somebody put up a Pride flag at a school, that's what led Del Grande to lose his mind, to take on debt, to go on long homophobic rants at seven-hour board meetings, to demand including an “oath to the magisterium” in the school’s operations (which appears to be a thing he made up), to sarcastically push for including "bestiality and pedophilia" in the district's non-discrimination clause to show what a slippery slope it can be when you accept the"gender ideology" represented by Pride flags.
It seems extremely unlikely that Del Grande will hit his fundraising goal on his timeline, which is very funny.
4 and 5. My Son Died After Pfizer Jab - Help Me Warn Others ($19,612 of $20,000 funded, 17 days to go) and My Husband Died After Hospital Refused Ivermectin ($15,995 of $15,000 funded, 23 days to go)
These two are not funny, and I bring them up not to go in on two grieving families, but to highlight how predatory this whole setup can be. Taking their stories at face value, these are two families that clearly were consuming a lot of misinformation that led them to "the vaccine is driving widespread child deaths and we need to warn people" (it isn't and we don't) and "ivermectin is a proven effective COVID treatment and my husband should have it" (it isn't and he shouldn't). They've suffered unimaginable loss in the middle of an ongoing global disaster. And LifeSiteNews was there to find a way to make money with stories like these that were catnip to their audience. Every donation and every share on campaigns like these is an opportunity for LSN to ask for donations directly for their own operations, and an opportunity to keep reinforcing their own made-up narratives about the pandemic and the ongoing circle jerk of outrage, clicks, and money. Which then, of course, will lead to more unimaginable loss in the middle of an ongoing global disaster as more readers absorb these stories. Really a win-win-win for our friends at LSN. Hey, speaking of outrage, clicks, and money:
6. Help Father Altman in His Fight For the Faith ($393,090 of $100,000 funded, 7 days to go)
After achieving viral success last year with his “You cannot be a Catholic and a Democrat. Period.” video, Wisconsin priest James Altman has embraced the hustle mindset. Between LifeFunder and GiveSendGo, Altman has collected a small fortune and used it to go give a keynote address at CPAC and hang out with Mel Gibson and start some group called "The Coalition of Cancelled Priests" and continue to spread his message that vaccines are evil, the election was stolen, and Democrats and Pope Francis are all going to hell for being secret gay Satanists.
Altman, for basically a full year now, has been a man that has inspired Catholics everywhere to say "somebody really needs to do something about this guy". The crazy thing is, somebody actually did. Altman's boss, Bishop William Callahan of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, has removed Altman from active ministry in his parish and forbidden him from leaving the diocese or preaching at all while he pursues canonical penalties against Altman. He said, in so many words, "I'm your boss, and if you can't do your job, you're going to lose your money, power, comfort, and attention". He's actually following the process for reining in a rogue priest, and in a different era, that would have been at least enough to get Altman to shut the hell up and stop making inflammatory public statements.
But it's not enough to do that today, because Altman - along with all of these other people I've highlighted - has found an alternate path to money, power, comfort, and attention. We shouldn't overthink the reasons why people do things: Altman started doing his whole reactionary shtick, and the money, power, comfort, and attention started rolling in. Because of sites like LifeStarter, and the broader media network in which it resides, he has no reason to stop. Altman doesn't just get his own version of reality, he gets his own economy to support it. So does the mom threatening her local librarian, or the student trying to skirt her school's public health rules, or the school board member talking about bestiality for seven hours. And all of those people present themselves as brave voices speaking out for their beliefs, unafraid of consequences, except that they're trying extremely hard to avoid those consequences, that's why they're raising money. If you ignore your university's vaccination policy or proudly defy your bishop's orders as a priest, there are probably going to be consequences of some kind. They may not always be just, but they're probably going to be there, and they're probably going to cost you some combination of money, power, comfort, and attention, and if you're willing to let that happen for your principles, then yeah, that requires some level of courage. But if you leverage the situation to ask the internet for tens of thousands of dollars, for more money and power and comfort and attention, well then you're not really sacrificing very much for your principles at all. Which might lead others to ask what those principles really were in the first place.
Sacrificing money, power, comfort, and attention is not easy. Every Catholic who cares about the suffering in the world struggles with figuring out the best way to make things better, and what sort of sacrifice it requires. Everybody gets it wrong sometimes; I personally get it wrong a lot of the time. LifeFunder benefits, among others, the people who claim to practice authentic Catholicism, to be the true good obedient followers of the God who “emptied himself” to join us on Earth - to use Paul's phrase - but these folks don't even pretend to have an interest in sacrificing money, power, comfort or attention, and in fact are openly hustling to amass more of all of it. And as long as the incentives for Catholics in public life, including for some of our clergy, are completely inverted through platforms like LifeFunder, we're in a lot of trouble.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of new installments.