I think this applies to Christianity too. At the risk of being polemical, say I believed that Christianity is a scam whereby a select group of people convince the children of the faithful that they are in peril of eternal punishment if they don't grow up to give 10% of their money to the church.

I think this is a rather misleading characterization, since calling it a scam implies that the people doing the convincing are perpetrating a deception they do not believe in themselves, which I doubt is true in any but an extremely small and unusual minority of cases.