>How many churches are really just a cover for nefarious activities or for money laundering?
Well… the Catholic church literally created banking and the international corporation, and all the other churches are derived from them, so…
The digits say everything.
Bingo. The basic structure of our institutions was designed to facilitate corruption. To corrupt any institution you only need to corrupt a very small number of single individuals who are showered with riches and praise ceaselessly, and tasked with disciplining those who work for them.
Centralized power doesn't scale up well, and eventually leads to collapse anywhere it tries to consolidate too much.