'Jews Against Obama'

It was only a matter of time.

'Hitler Suite' a popular pick in Belgrade

That's not the Westin LAX. It's the Mr. President in Belgrade. And it's sickening.

As a member of the Design Hotel chain, Mr. President boasts many luxurious suites. The most luxurious, on the seventh floor, comes complete with a portrait of former communist leader Josip Broz Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia for more than 35 years. You can enjoy his picture while soaking in your Jacuzzi.

In addition to the Bushes, Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin, there is also a junior suite named after the infamous Adolf Hitler.

The Hitler or room 501, occupied mainly by German, Croat and Slovenian guests, sees the highest demand, according to Zabunovic. ...

Like all Serbs — who were persecuted alongside Jews and gypsies during the Nazi occupation — Zabunovic does not have any kind of admiration for Hitler. But sitting in the lobby of his new hotel surrounded by statues of former U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Madison, he says he refuses to exclude him.

"It is wrong not to have Hitler in Madame Tussaud and other museums," he told ABC News. "All his victims would turn in their graves if nowhere it is reminded what a monstrous criminal he was."

Indeed that would be true if all Hitler's victims were given the dignity of graves. But by capitalizing on Nazi nostalgia, Mr. President is not offering a form of remembrance. It is exhibiting old-fashioned avarice.

Coincidentally, this weekend marks the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

(Hat tip: DMN)

Robertson predicts recession, stock crash

Morning humor from the DMN religion blog:

In what's become an annual tradition (or, if you prefer, joke) televangelist Pat Robertson revealed his predictions for 2008 -- or, more accurately, he let the rest of us in on what he says God has told him will happen.

Here's the story from the Associated Press.

According to Robertson, God has economic disaster in store for us: A deep recession, $150-a-barrel oil, a tumbling dollar. All of this will lead to a major stock market crash in 2009 or '10.

It's worth noting that Robertson's past predictions have often been wrong.

As for the 2008 presidential race, in which Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani, the televangelist was silent on who will win.

Effort to destroy Old Damascus

The city of Old Damascus is presently threatened by an obtuse and cynical plan that would destroy great chunks of it. The Syrian regime is trying to push through a "modernization" and "re-development" scheme, which would raze areas dating back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, including Syria's second oldest mosque, Jami' al-Tawba, of great beauty and historical significance. The company that aims to do this is a regime protégé. The boorish mayor of Damascus, Bishr Sabban, recently described the buildings to be razed as "garbage", not heritage. Like most regime officials, he has been ordered to say (and may, to his shame, actually believe) that the ripping out of the world's oldest city's heart, to replace it with banal and vulgar multi-story hotels, tower blocks, American-style shopping malls and motorways, is a laudable thing.

I found this article in the current issue of Islamica magazine, which I picked up at the MPAC conference two weeks ago. It is a familiar story not simply because historic buildings are being destroyed for the sake of "progress" and profit but because, as is the case with many things in Syria, the hand of Iran is seen in this effort to reshape a neighborhood that is predominantly Sunni Muslim and Christian.

Ave Maria and the pizza man's unanswered prayers

Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, has been receiving a lot of attention for his ambitious -- and pious -- community-building project in Florida. One of my favorite writers at The New Yorker penned this piece last February about Monaghan's plans to build a Catholic seminary and city based on Catholic values, both bearing the name Ave Maria.

But, in another long piece, Portfolio reports that Ave Maria's in need of a miracle. (Cliche writing intentionally added.)

Monaghan and his partners—the Barron Collier Co., a major Florida real estate firm, and Pulte Homes, the country's third-largest residential builder—say it's too early to judge the viability of the project, which, after all, is still in its infancy. But the circumstances of Ave Maria's birth could not be more challenging. It was conceived in 2001, at the onset of the real estate boom, during which the median home price in Naples would double in just five years. The developers were originally hoping to construct 1,000 houses a year at Ave Maria, reaching a goal of 11,000 over the next decade, while also creating parks, shops, restaurants, and 500,000 square feet of office space. That's not going to happen, at least not at the pace the developers had hoped, for reasons that are both symbolic of wider market conditions and peculiar to the unique—and controversial—nature of Monaghan's project.

Ave Maria is coming into being at the dawn of the worst real estate recession since the early 1990s, in a place that could fairly be called the epicenter of the bust. According to one recent study, the Naples area is the spot in America most at risk for a steep drop in home prices. But the deeper problem may be a conflict between Monaghan and his partners over Ave Maria's identity. At this perilous juncture in the town's existence, they can't agree about how Catholic it should be. Barron Collier and Pulte, both of which are far more interested in profits than prophets, are downplaying the role of religion in the town's development, marketing Ave Maria as a place no more intrinsically Catholic than St. Louis or Corpus Christi, Texas.

But Monaghan and the believers who surround him say that the town's religious character is its great strength, not only spiritually but commercially. They worry that by pitching the development to home buyers as just another anodyne suburb, Barron Collier and Pulte risk alienating the very people most inclined to make Ave Maria their home. "I wonder sometimes whether they don't treat this as if it's the same as every other development they do," Monaghan says of his secular partners. "I think if they put a lot of money into marketing to the general population, they might be wasting a lot of it."

Early indications suggest he may be right.

Which raises the question of the day: Would you want to live in a town of not only homogeneous religious beliefs but also moral values?

The better soda: latke or Christmas ham?

This is one of those ideas you know was drummed up just for free press and white elephant gift exchanges. Why? Because nobody would otherwise think Egg Nog soda would sell well -- and that was the best of the eight Jones Soda flavors that come in the Chanukah and Christmas packs.

After the Chanukah pack arrived at The Jewish Journal last month, I knew I wanted to contribute to the unnecessary discussion of whether your special someone really wants Christmas Ham soda. So I called Jones' PR person half a dozen times and asked her to send a Christmas pack to our office. I wish I hadn't.

A few weeks apart, we set up both gimmicks in the GeekHeeb's office and invited our colleagues to sample the holiday fare.

Latkes and jelly donuts might have tasted good last week, but not when they are liquefied and carbonated and, in the donut's case, atomic pink. The apple sauce and chocolate coins (think Tootsie Rolls) flavors weren't much better.

Yesterday, in the waning hours of Chanukah, I threw the Christmas pack in the fridge and got ready. I had been hungry all day. Surely I could pound a Christmas Ham, even one that came in a bottle and wasn't called Spam.

I started with Sugar Plum and Egg Nog, the latter being better, in my mind, than the real thing. Then I moved on to Christmas Tree, which smelled like pine needles and went down like liquid Ben Gay.

Finally, Christmas Ham, the beverage I'd been waiting about a month to savor, or at least sample. All I can say is that after drinking a small cup of it, which I threw back like a shot, I immediately felt ill. The best way to describe the flavor: Imagine squeezing hot dogs dry and than carbonating that juice.

Happy holidays, Jones Soda.

'Your brain on drugs' meets Jack's customer with the munchies

This is incestuous blogging at its best, but the video below justifies it. See, I posted this commercial for Israeli HDTV. Then, Esther Kustanowitz -- yeah, that Esther -- posted the video with a hat tip to me. But she also added this video which is like the bastard child of the Partnership For a Drug-Free America and Jack in the Box.

Hooters in hot water in Israel

Ha'aretz reports that Israel's first Hooters restaurant -- you know, the place with the wings -- is causing a big stir with religious Jews. In the United States, you'd like people have better things to worry about than the lascivious leanings of a lame bar, but in Israel I'm sure they do. Maccabees, sharpen your swords.

Hooters is just the sort of establishment that many of Netanya's religious expatriate Americans were happy to leave behind. But the giant restaurant chain followed them home last week when it opened its first Israeli branch in Ramat Poleg.

Although they say they'd never even seen the new restaurant, prominent members of Netanya's large contingent of religious Anglos were outraged to learn of the opening. But other native English-speakers seem eager to enjoy this piece of Americana, together with dozens of Israeli youngsters who filled the restaurant to capacity.

"Of all the beautiful things in the States, this is what they bring," Rachel Morrowitz, who grew up in New York, complained. "This restaurant comes from the bottom of the American cultural barrel, and it should stay there."

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Deputy Mayor Mendi Weiss (National Religious Party) referred to Hooters as a "cheap and crude establishment" and "a foreign element that should never have been imported from the U.S." Weiss added that "this connects to what Hanukkah is about: a culture war in which the Jews had to struggle to retain their own identity."

Hooters also is planning on opening a shop in the pious Muslim emirate of Dubai.

Borat does Poland

Well, apparently American cultural phenomenons arrive in Poland quite late. But it's still comical to think of a half-naked irreverent Jewish comedian flaunting it on a billboard above an old Communist building.

I plugged the text into InterTran and it came up with this: "wherebyprzez co ubaw, this when armpits."

Thanks to David A. Lehrer, father of Jonah and president of Community Advocates Inc., for snapping the photo.

$100 Chanukah gelt box

No joke.

'Giving makes you rich'

This week I am going to try to post some of the stories I've had sitting in the queue for a little while. This piece from Portfolio is apt for the holiday season and plays into the idea of the prosperity gospel, meaning that the more you give, the more God gives you.

In John Bunyan’s 1684 classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, the character Old Honest poses this riddle to the innkeeper Gaius: “A man there was, tho’ some did count him mad, / The more he cast away, the more he had.” Gaius solves the riddle thus: “He that bestows his Goods upon the Poor / Shall have as much again, and ten times more.”

Less poetically, the idea is this: Giving makes you rich. A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but quite backward-sounding to an economist. You obviously have to have money before you can give it away, right? Or in the pithy words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions—he had money too.”

Well, it turns out that Gaius was right, and new economic research backs him up.

The rest of the article by economist Arthur C. Brooks reads somewhat like a balance sheet, but in it he explains that people aren't just giving more because they make more, but that evidence shows people give more before they become wealthier. In essence, the egg is laying the chicken.

This is a good thing, and a good reminder that charity does pay (oddly, it appears, literally). There could be a biblical explanation for this: If you give your resources back to God, He will reward you with even more.

But the gospel of wealth, something televangelists love to trumpet, takes this too far. Yes, I believe God wants us to give back (at least 10 percent), and yes, I have faith that I will never be fully without means (though I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being rich in spirit and poor in the world). But there is a difference between a place to sleep and a house in the Hollywood Hills. The church is not an investment plan.

Ole E. Anthony, founder of the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, a televangelist watchdog, said he knew people who had given the last of their savings to TV preachers, hoping for a windfall that never came.

"The people on TBN are living the lifestyle of fabulous wealth on the backs of the poorest and most desperate people in our society," Anthony said. "People have lost their faith in God because they believe they weren't worthy after not receiving their financial blessing."

Thomas D. Horne, of Williford, Ark., a disabled Vietnam-era veteran, said that in 1994 he was swept away by the rhetoric of TBN pastors and donated about $6,000 in disability benefits.

Time went by and he did not receive the promised surfeit of money. Last year, he found out that TBN had purchased a Newport Beach mansion overlooking the Pacific. He wrote to the network, asking for his money back.

"I want to recoup my hard-earned disability money I sent to these despicable people," said Horne. He said he has received no reply.

Philip McPeake is another donor for whom God's economy of giving did not deliver. Out of work and out of luck in November 1998, McPeake heard the Rev. R.W. Schambach make an impassioned plea for donations on TBN's Kansas City television station, KTAJ.

Schambach promised that if viewers sent $200 as a down payment on a $2,000 pledge, God would give them the rest within 90 days - with a bonus to follow.

McPeake sent in his money and waited for his luck to change. When it didn't, he complained to the Missouri state attorney general's office and the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites). TBN refunded his donation.

To see how the gospel of wealth can support the luxurious living of those at the top, read this and this.

"Mansions, big planes, money, fame. That's what it's all about now," said the Rev. Hector Gomez, a former Without Walls staff member who left in 2000. "There are prophets for God, and there are prophets for profit. That's the category they fit in."

(Image)

It's not about ethics, it's business

Everyone's favorite Jewish ice cream entrepreneurs, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield -- yes, that Ben and Jerry -- are currently locked up in a bitter battle with soured franchisees.

No religion angle here, except the shirt shopowner Alan Sherman is wearing in Newsweek's photo (right). But this reminds me of a story I wrote last year about accusations that Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light," had used his Christian faith to defraud investors.

Controversy has surrounded Kinkade for the past four years, after stock of the company he took public (Media Arts Group) plummeted from a high of $23 a share to less than $3. In 2004, he bought the company back at about $4 a share. Kinkade is now the sole owner.

His paintings are known for their vibrant colors and idyllic settings, their country cottages, chilly creeks, and glowing clouds. "The critics may not endorse me," the artist told CT in 2000. "But I own the hearts of the people."

Individual investors run some 500 Kinkade galleries worldwide, with the overwhelming majority in the United States. Signature Galleries, which sell only Kinkade art, cost upwards of $50,000 to open. Media Arts Group required that new owners attend a training conference called "Thomas Kinkade University." Yatooma said this is where his clients drank "the Kinkade Kool-Aid."

"Thomas Kinkade University had a revival-like atmosphere. They would close in prayer and join together in worship. Everybody would leave with their head spinning—now sign the dotted line," Yatooma said. "They thought they were going to make money by sharing the light."

Other investors told me that was nonsense, "comical" even, because they opened Kinkade galleries to make money, not spread the gospel. Which reminds me of that Mafioso axiom: It's not personal, it's business.

Two side notes:

According to my friends at Reel Intelligence, Kinkade's inspirations may soon be, ehem, gracing, the big screen. Or, because the movie is "Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas" and a release date has yet to be set, maybe they won't.

Anyway, my favorite flavor is far and away Half Baked.

JJ editor: 'Writers Strike is a Jewish issue'

My editor at The Jewish Journal, Rob Eshman, disagrees with the premise of my Wandering Jew column last week, in which I argued that the writer's strike is not a Jewish story. Here's the nut:

Indeed, "Hollywood writer" is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn't a Jewish story. It's a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

In his column this week, Rob writes:

The Writers Strike is a Jewish issue.

How do I know that? Because everyone is saying it's not. The writers who are demanding a larger share of DVD rights and residuals for their work and the producers who refuse to give it to them both say, repeatedly, that despite the fact that so many of them happen to be Jewish, the strike is not -- as Jewish writers and producers told our senior reporter Brad Greenberg last week -- a Jewish issue.

To paraphrase a Clinton-era favorite, you can be sure that when everyone is saying it's not about being Jewish, it's about being Jewish.

Strip away the brand-name products and gossipy inside Hollywood milieu of this strike, and what you have is a question of fair compensation and just treatment of labor.

It is a question our sages wrestled with, beginning with a law laid down in Leviticus 25:14: "And when you sell something to your fellow, or buy from the hand of your fellow, don't oppress each other."

How shallow has our Jewish life become and how silent have our pulpits fallen when we blithely accept the idea that a 4,000-year-old ethical tradition has nothing to say about how we do business?

Certainly, Jewish ethics should not be dismissed in how the Jewish writers and producers treat each other in this labor dispute. But I don't think that makes it a Jewish issue -- that makes it an issue influenced by Jewish values. The same could be said for most of the things that happen in certain pockets of Los Angeles where Jews abound.

Sometimes, as in the ongoing case for and against expansion of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a controversy becomes a Jewish issue because it deals with more than just morals and ethics but actual Jewish interests and institutions. I just don't think the plight of TV and film writers -- even if it was once an almost entirely Yiddish operation -- fits into this category.

But, then again, Rebecca Spence at The Forward spoke with the same union leader I did, David N. Weiss, and got the exact opposite angle from very similar responses.

Former Pepperdine ballplayer the face of 'Crazy Robertson'

The religion angle here is tenuous -- the subject once played on Pepperdine's baseball team -- but the Wall Street Journal has a story today about one of L.A.'s most recognizable homeless men, John Wesley Jermyn. He's known as the "Crazy Robertson," and this year an overpriced clothing brand was created in his honor (that might not be the right word).

Among locals and online, there's much speculation about Mr. Jermyn's personal history, including one oft-repeated rumor that he's a secretive millionaire.

In a plot twist worthy of Tinseltown, Mr. Jermyn now has a clothing label named after him. Since it was introduced last month, "The Crazy Robertson" brand of T-shirts and sweatshirts, created by a trio of 23-year-olds, has flown off the shelves at Kitson, a haunt of tabloid stars like Paris Hilton. The clothes feature stylized images of Mr. Jermyn, including one design -- available on a $98 hoodie -- that has a graphic of him dancing and the phrase "No Money, No Problems" on the back. At the largest of Kitson's three boutiques on Robertson, shirts bearing Mr. Jermyn's likeness are sold alongside $290 "Victoria Beckham" jeans and $50 baby shoes designed by pop star Gwen Stefani.

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Mr. Jermyn's slide into homelessness is a painful subject for his sister Beverly. And so is the clothing deal. She believes "The Crazy Robertson" founders are exploiting her brother's condition to build their brand. "I think these guys saw an opportunity and they took it," she says. "I am not happy with the arrangement."

Ms. Jermyn, who lives close to the alley where Mr. Jermyn sleeps, says her brother has a form of schizophrenia. He refuses to take medication, she says, despite suffering from fits of shouting and cursing. In the years since his condition began deteriorating in the late 1970s, "he slipped through my fingers like sand," says Ms. Jermyn, 64, who manages facilities for Oracle Corp.

In the late 1980s she testified in court in a proceeding to force her brother to seek help, but psychological evaluators found him "lucid and gracious," according to Ms. Jermyn. She has made countless attempts to provide him with shelter and therapy, and she still visits him twice a week with food. She also pays for his cellphone and collects his Social Security checks on his behalf.

(skip)

Mr. Jermyn was raised in Hancock Park, a historic L.A. neighborhood that's home to some of the city's wealthiest families. His father managed one of L.A.'s largest Chevrolet dealerships.

A star athlete in high school, Mr. Jermyn was selected by the Kansas City Royals in the 1969 Major League Baseball draft. He attended Pepperdine University and played a season for a Los Angeles Dodgers' minor-league team in Bellingham, Wash. (He hit just .205 and made 12 errors in 63 games, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.)

Joel John Roberts, chief executive of People Assisting the Homeless, which provides shelters for L.A.'s street residents, says the branding of Mr. Jermyn is "like designing a line of clothing patterned after Iraqi refugees fleeing the war."

Here is a video of Jermyn's dance-skating.



(Hat tip: LAObserved.)

Jesus makeup and Wash Away Your Sins soap

Well, here's another tasteless attempt to make a few bucks. Among the Looking Good For Jesus products are a mirror compact, a coin purse and a mini kit that "redeems you in his eyes and takes the edge off sinning."

The company, BlueQ, also sells Wash Away Your Sins soap -- if only it were so easy -- and Kills A Kitten Gum, and this is funny, to remind men that every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.

(Hat tip: GeekHeeb)

'Don't have the house of the Lord in sub-prime loans'

When my wife and I sold our condo two years ago and returned to LA, we looked at homes but decided to sit on the sidelines and wait for the market to settle. Good decision. What a mess that beautiful bubble has become. The median-priced home sold in Los Angeles in September was $25,000 lighter than in August and the number of sales was down 30 percent!

The downturn has been fueled by sub-prime loans, which, obvious to anyone in California, were used not just by the poor but also those who wanted to stretch for a bigger home. Even Christian lenders got involved in the sub-prime market, though not as commonly as other mortgage companies, and I've got a piece about how the tailspin is affecting these financial institutions in the current issue of Christianity Today.

HomeBanc Corp. brought a Christian ethos to the seemingly lucrative market of sub-prime home loans. Flush with a staff of believers, the Atlanta-based company opened meetings in prayer and counted a megachurch founder its head of human resources.

But in mid-August, the company, which Fortune magazine ranked the 67th-best to work for earlier this year, filed for bankruptcy, reportedly laying off most of its 1,100 employees and closing 22 branch offices.

HomeBanc's demise was brought on by the same factor that led to its rise—a housing market that expanded, then shrank, on the back of risky home loans. Other Christian lenders felt the pinch, too. But unlike HomeBanc, most weathered the storm well, buoyed by the security of limiting loans for homebuyers.

The Evangelical Christian Credit Union, the largest Christian lender (and, with more than $1 billion in core assets, a rival to the largest secular lenders to nonprofits), never entered the home market. Other Christian lenders protected their home loans by staying away from sub-prime lending.

"Because of what we stand for and because of who we serve, we can't afford to put people into those loans," said Linda Tashiro, chief operating officer of the San Dimas, California-based Christian Community Credit Union. "We have to sleep at night."

Adultery Web site founder's 'happy marriage'

Remember this summer when I posted about Match.com for adulterers? The billboard for AshleyMadison.com said, "Life is short, have an affair." Well, yesterday Defamer got this e-mail from the company. The whole thing is worth a read, but this part's my favorite.

Despite his own "happy marriage", Morganstern believes that monogamy has become outdated and discovered that through the site, there could be a modern solution to this age old problem.

First off, having an affair is not a solution: It is the problem. Secondly, I love that the press release adds this ridiculous clause, "Despite his own 'happy marriage.'" Sounds like Morganstern is the kid whose "hypothetical friend" needs help with a problem he is actually dealing with. Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. Whatever the case, I'm not interested in the marital success of a pimp.

'The Missionary Mogul'

A fairly boring -- maybe just too long -- story by the usually engaging Zev Chafets in this week's New York Times Magazine. The subject of the piece is Lev Leviev, the former dirt-poor Soviet youth who broke the De Beers diamond cartel (they've got a cartel for everything) and rose to become Israel's richest man.

“As a boy, they used to make us stand at attention and salute the statue of Lenin,” he told me. “I’d curse him and the other Communists under my breath. They sent my grandfather to Siberia. They wouldn’t let us keep the Sabbath — we had to go to school on Saturdays. Just being Jewish was dangerous.”

Still, he saw business potential in Russia. He spoke the language, knew the local customs. His father, sensing danger, begged Leviev not to go. So Leviev traveled to Brooklyn, to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher rebbe, for a second opinion.

It is a meeting that has become folklore, both in Chabad and in the diamond industry. Leviev tells the story with obvious relish: “I spoke to the rebbe in Hebrew. I asked him, Should I go or not? He answered me in a kind of antique Russian. He said: ‘Go. Go to Russia and do business, but don’t forget to help the Jews. Remember your family tradition.’ ”

Of course, Leviev hasn't. The 51-year-old philanthropist gives an estimated $50 million to Jewish causes each year, Chafets writes, and "subsidizes an army of some 10,000 Jewish functionaries from Ukraine to Azerbaijan, including 300 rabbis."

'Holy Hampton Hostilities'

"Goldman Ex-Partner, Hedge-Fund Chief Sender Fight Over Church." That's a headline on Bloomberg.com this morning, and the issue at hand is as ridiculous as it might suggest.

Dennis Suskind, formerly of Goldman Sachs, has bought a Methodist church in Sag Harbor, New York with plans to turn it into a house, and Adam Sender, the manager of Exis Capital, is pouting because he says he wanted to buy it for the purpose of showcasing his collection of contemporary art.

The fact that two money machers are arguing over gets to rip apart a place many consider holy in order to satisfy personal ambitions may just be the most telling sign yet that we are in the thick of an age of excess. But that's beyond the scope of this blog.

That might be the case for the Figure Painting blog on Portfolio's site, where I found this post, but its not outside the scope of The God Blog.

This reminds a little bit of the money changers doing business in the Temple. And yet, if churches are not being used for religious services, there is nothing inherently sacred inside their walls. Regardless of any amount of sacrilege, I thinks it's safe to we're living in a time of "irrational exuberance."

Christian insurance

From the depths of my e-mail inbox:

According to statistics released earlier this summer, religious books were the publishing industry's fastest-growing category last year, with Bible sales alone exceeding 25 million copies. And that's just the tip of the iceberg for the $4.5 billion Christian products industry, which runs the gamut from books and videos to toys, games and, now, even insurance.

Launched two years ago in select test markets, GuideOne Insurance's FaithGuard Auto and Home product is now offered to churchgoers in 19 states. FaithGuard offers customers a number of unique benefits including waiving policyholders' deductibles in crashes that happen on the way to church (or Sunday school) and doubling medical payments to persons injured during at-home church activities.

OK, there may be some benefit to having auto insurance that erases the deductible if you're driving home from church. But how common are at-home, church-related injuries?