Clergy: The Disappearing Discount

When the Rev. Robert H. Jonte was a newly ordained Methodist minister in a small Texas town 19 years ago, he got a 2¢-a-gal. discount on gasoline from his service station, the wholesale price when he bought household appliances, and an extra item or two free on his food order, courtesy of the local grocer. Jonte is still a minister in a small Texas town, but now he pays full price for nearly everything he buys. “The clergyman’s discount,” he says, “is completely gone.”

Clearly on’the way out are the assorted discounts, donations and deals that ministers once relied upon to flesh out the modest salary that went with a pulpit call. In 1887, for example, the Rev. William E. Barton was offered $400 a year to serve as pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, Ohio. As Barton noted in his autobiography: “The little congregation was generous according to its means.” Every year there was a donation party, and the proceeds were given to the pastor. Sometimes the families in the congregation brought packages of food instead of money to pay for weddings or baptisms, and castoff clothing for Barton’s children.

Cable Cars Free. Barton had other ways of stretching his income. Like most other 19th century clergymen, he could travel free on the railroads while on church business and got reduced rates at hotels. Many communities developed their own local way of helping out the men, and the women, of the cloth. San Francisco, grateful for the heroic acts of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity during the 1906 earthquake, decided that they could forever ride free on the cable cars—and they do to this day. For that matter, the none-too-numerous clergymen who still take trains travel at half fare.

Otherwise ministers generally pay the same prices as laymen do. The discount at discount houses is the same for preachers as for everyone else; many other stores refuse to favor preachers on the ground, as a spokesman for Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co. puts it, that “a customer is a customer.” Ministers generally get 20% off on rented cars—just as employees of many corporations do. Doctors often do not send bills to preachers, but doctors do not send them to other doctors, either.

Cash in the Pants. One reason for the decline in discounts is that men of the cloth are getting more pay and prefer it that way; they would rather have cash in the pants pocket than 10% off on the pants. Moreover, they increasingly find the “clerical discount” demeaning. “I used to use a railroad discount,” says the Rev. George Reck, pastor of Houston’s Zion Lutheran Church, “but I always felt the conductor was saying to himself, ‘Here’s another chiseler.'” And chiseling can work two ways, suggests Father George McCormick of Trinity Episcopal Church in Miami: “When I’m offered a 10% dis count, I feel that the price has been jacked up 20% anyway.”

In effect, the fringe benefits that modern ministers get no longer come from their positions as church leaders but from their rough equity with the rest of society. On the way out with the discount is a nostalgic custom that dates back to the days of the U.S. frontier—but going with it is a practice that bespoke a general public guilt over paying preachers too little to live on.