Ten Percent of What, For What: Untangling the Tithing Knot

A knot is not a single bad thing. A knot is what happens when several real, live, working things get crossed at the same point and pulled in different directions. You do not undo a knot by cutting the cord — that just leaves you with shorter pieces of a thing that no longer functions. You undo it by finding each thread and tracing where it goes.

The tithing debate Erykah Badu lit on Easter weekend is a knot.

Thread one: tithing is mutual aid infrastructure. Bishop Talbert Swan, prelate of the Greater Massachusetts Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ, came to the comment section with the receipts. The average congregation has 75 members or fewer. Only ten percent of attendees actually tithe. The average Black church takes in $240,000 or less a year. From that small pool the church pays the lights, the salary of a pastor who often holds a second job anyway, the choir robes, the bus that picks up the elders, and — critically — the discretionary fund that pays the rent for the family one missed paycheck from eviction. Bishop Swan's argument is not theological abstraction. It is the lived economics of small Black congregations as the last functional safety net in the neighborhood. He is right.

Thread two: tithing financed the civil rights movement. Bus companies in Montgomery did not run on goodwill. The Montgomery Improvement Association needed to put 17,000 people in cars and on alternative transportation for 381 days, and the cars and the gas and the legal defense came from somewhere. The ministers' fund came from somewhere. The bail money came from somewhere. The somewhere was tithes and offerings, given by domestic workers and porters and beauticians and schoolteachers who could not afford it and did it anyway. To wave away tithing as captured wealth is to wave away the financial scaffolding of the most successful Black political movement of the twentieth century. The tradition is right.

Thread three: tithing is also an extraction mechanism. Dr. Boyce Watkins is right too. When ten percent of a $40,000 income — gross, in many congregations — flows into an institution where the pastor flies private and the women who fund the institution cannot vote at the trustees' meeting, that is not stewardship. That is extraction. Prosperity gospel did not invent the impulse; it just gave it a microphone. The compound interest argument is real: a young Black professional tithing twenty-five years into a low-yield congregational fund instead of a Roth IRA has, by retirement, materially worse outcomes than her white counterpart who did neither. The wealth gap is not produced by tithing alone, but tithing has been weaponized as part of how the gap is maintained.

Thread four: extraction and mutual aid look identical from inside the practice. This is the knot. The widow's mite and the prosperity preacher's grift use the same liturgical motion. The deacon collecting for the family in unit 3B and the televangelist asking for your seed faith both pass the plate. The institution that paid Fannie Lou Hamer's bus ticket and the institution that paid the bishop's Bentley both teach Malachi 3:10. From inside the practice, you cannot tell which thread you are pulling.

Untangling the knot is the diagnostic work of differentiating which church you are actually in.

That diagnosis cannot happen at the level of should I tithe. It happens at the level of what does this institution do with what I give. The questions the knot asks you to answer are concrete. Where does the budget go? Who sees it? Are the trustees elected, and by whom? Is there a benevolence fund, and is it transparent? Does the pastor's compensation appear in the published financials? When the family in unit 3B needed help, who got it and how fast? Is there a credit union, a cooperative, a member-owned funeral fund — or is the only financial vehicle attached to the church the pastor's personal account? When the women's missionary society fundraises, does the money the women raise stay under the women's authority, or does the trustee board absorb it?

Each of those questions traces a different strand. Together they tell you whether you are tithing into a mutual aid institution, a movement-financing institution, or an extraction institution. The same ten percent does different work in each. The number is not the issue. The structure that receives the number is the issue.

This is also where the genealogical and the prophetic work meet. The Black church's tithing tradition is genuinely sacred — and genuinely captured. Both. At once. The Anancy Webwork posture refuses to resolve the contradiction by collapsing one side. We are not going to be able to say tithing is good or tithing is bad and have it be true. We are going to have to say: tithing in this congregation, under this governance, with this transparency, for this purpose, with this provision for the women whose pennies built it, is good. The same practice in another room is theft.

Erykah Badu asked a question that congregants have been whispering for decades.

Bishop Swan's answer is not wrong. Watkins' answer is not wrong. The tradition's answer is not wrong. They are all in the knot together because we have not built the institutional habit of answering the actual question, which is: whose church is this, and what does this money build?

Until we answer that, every Easter the question will come back. Every comments section will fight about it. Every young person looking for a way to honor their grandmother's faith and survive their student loans at the same time will be told it is one or the other.

The Anancy Webwork lesson here: a knot is the place where several true things meet. Untangling is not a verdict. It is a practice of tracing each thread back to where it lives and asking what kind of governance that thread requires. The tithing question will not be answered by quitting and will not be answered by louder defending. It will be answered by structures we have not yet built — and structures, some of them, that we have already inherited and stopped using.

Which is where the next post in the series goes.