Tax breaks for religion -- Source: Washington Post, 2013
While restlessly rummaging about the interwebs for answers to what the heck is going on in American politics, B&B's vaunted research division blindly stumbled across the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. A reference to that journal asserted it is a key voice for the powerful Federalist Society (FS). That woke B&B up real quick, or wiki wiki as some would say.
The journal is put out by Harvard law school students and is published in three issues per year. It describes itself like this: “The Journal is one of the top five most widely circulated law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship. The late Stephen Eberhard and former Senator and Secretary of Energy E. Spencer Abraham founded the journal forty years ago and many journal alumni have risen to prominent legal positions in the government and at the nation’s top law firms.”
One of the articles in the current issue, by Grant M. Newman, presumably a student, The Taxation of Religious Organizations in America, seemed likely to provide some insight about something of interest. The 30 page paper says this:
“Christ taught his disciples to “[r]ender to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The Supreme Court has, to an extent, rendered to God what is God’s by repeatedly acknowledging that it will not involve itself in the internal affairs of religious organizations. Nevertheless, the extent to which religious organizations remain vulnerable to involvement from other branches of government remains a pertinent question, especially with regards to the government’s power to tax.
This Note investigates the extent to which religious organizations are vulnerable to such involvement. A prime example of such involvement is Congress’ ability to use the Internal Revenue Code to the detriment of religious organizations. As it ensures that what is Caesar’s (i.e., taxes) is rendered to Caesar (i.e., the federal government), any policy of Congress and the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) that thwarts the faithful from rendering to God what is God’s has the potential to impose a prohibitive burden on the operation of religious organizations. The potential to hinder the work of religious organizations through taxation is great. Indeed, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Insofar as Congress retains the power to tax religious organizations, it likewise maintains the power to destroy.
In short, religious organizations benefit tremendously from their tax-exempt status. However, this tax-exempt status is not a given; the tax-exempt status for religious organizations is neither a right that was found to be in existence prior to the formation of the United States and therefore enshrined in the Constitution, nor is it a right created by the Constitution. Rather it is a status that is based on the consent of Congress and listed deep in the bowels of the United States Code. Therefore, religious organizations and their allies must remain vigilant in ensuring that their representatives in Congress and officials in the executive branch uphold those portions of the Tax Code that exempt religious organizations from tax obligations.
In order to understand the threat to religious organizations from adverse changes to tax law, it is important to first understand the provisions in the Internal Revenue Code on which religious organizations are granted tax-exempt status, as well as the legislative history behind these sections of the Tax Code.”
As discussed here by Tokyo Jones previously, the issue of giving tax breaks to religious organizations arguably is unconstitutional as a violation of the constitution's Establishment Clause.
Several things stand out as important in Mr. Newman’s paper. First, this paper presumably represents leading edge Federalist Society thinking and it's vision of what that ideology, presumably some form of an anti-democratic authoritarian libertarianism (ADAL), deems important to defend. That makes sense because devout Christians are a necessary core support group for ADAL ideology. President Trump’s move to install two hard core white male Christian judges to the supreme court accords with what the FS and ADAL ideology stand for.
Second, Newman’s paper displays an obvious defensiveness for the tax breaks that religious organizations use to establish and maintain themselves. That is consistent with what I have experienced over the years with the matter of tax breaks for religion comes up. Religious folks demand their tax breaks, often incorrectly seeing it as dictated by the constitution. In 2013, the Washington Post published an article based on data by Ryan T. Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa at that time, indicating that the value of tax breaks for religious organizations was about $82.5 billion/year.[1] I wrote to Cragun and asked about how solid his estimate was. He indicated that it was a soft, conservative estimate because churches tend to be secretive about their finances and, if I recall correctly, his guess was that the tax benefit was probably closer to at least about $120 billion/year. That kind of money is definitely something to be defensive about.
Third, it was surprising to see how honest Newman is about (1) the tenuous basis in law that religious tax breaks rely on, and (2) how those breaks must be defended, calling loss of tax breaks “the threat to religious organizations.” Another rather blunt bit of honesty relates to the government's power to tax according to Mr. Newman: “At the federal level, all income to a person, be it to a corporation or to a non-corporation individual, is taxable by default.” That kind of thinking is not mainstream among rank and file ADAL adherents, including many or most Trump supporters. If Newman’s honesty and clarity of thought is mainstream among FS members, their legal reasoning is significantly out of synch with the irrational chaos of mainstream conservative-populist rhetoric and belief.
Footnote:
1. Newman cites the same Washington Post article. My searches on the value of religious tax breaks turns up very little. Either I've missed information that is out there, or this is an area that needs more research.
B&B orig: 5/3/19
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