Exempting the Churches / An Argument for the Abolition of This Unjust and Unconstitutional Practice

by James F. Morton

THE INEQUALITY OF EXEMPTIONS.

The exemption of church property from taxation is a direct and unqualified violation of every one of the foregoing principles. It is a denial of the foundation truths of democratic government. It is a mean and underhanded attempt to do indirectly what cannot be done more directly. In its essence it is nothing more or less than the indirect support of the church by the state. It is the connivance of the state in the picking of the pockets of its citizens by the church. Every dollar of taxation which the church is allowed to dodge is one dollar more laid on the shoulders of the honest taxpayers. To exempt the church from taxation means to lighten its load at the expense of the people. It means that the state helps to proselytize in the interests of special cults. The smaller or incipient sects, which own no land or buildings, are placed at a relative disadvantage, regardless of their merits compared to the older and stronger religious bodies. The state rewards mere acquisition in such a way as to facilitate greater acquisition. It helps the strong as against the weak, the wealthy as against the poor. The trifle saved by the small country church, with its cheap structure located on land of a nominal value, is relatively of immeasurably less help to it than that given to the rich city church, with its magnificent edifice erected on a plot worth its tens of thousands of dollars and constantly appreciating in value. Even as among the churches themselves, the system of exemption works thus unfairly and in the direction of concentration of wealth. It affords temptation to the churches to procure and hold much more land than they really need, regardless of the growing wants of the community.

Talk of the ethical and educational attributes claimed for the church is wholly beside the question. It is not the business of the state to raise its revenues only from the baser elements of the population. As its private citizens do not pay taxes in proportion to their lack of virtuous qualities, so neither should the institutions which enjoy state protection. Our great philanthropists, scientists, inventors and educators are not exempt from taxation on the ground of the great good they are doing. As citizens of the state and nation, they receive their share of social advantages, and do not whine over the fact that they are asked to pay their quota toward the maintenance of those advantages for the common good. Their good deeds in addition are voluntary, and not performed in the expectation of being permitted to shirk their social obligations by way of reward.

CHURCHES DOCTRINAL, NOT MORAL.

No amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that the church is primarily a doctrinal organization. No theories of supernaturalism are needed, in order to teach a pure morality, founded on the social relations of human beings. If the church existed primarily for ethical purposes, we should not have the spectacle of some hundreds of struggling sects, each loudly proclaiming itself as the great repository of fundamental truth. The religious denominations, at their best, are rival establishments, vociferously competing for public favor. To say this, is to cast no reflection on their sincerity. But even the highest degree of sincerity does not necessarily involve freedom from error. As mutually destructive theories cannot be alike true, it follows as an imperative conclusion that not more than one religious body can be entirely correct in its doctrinal formulas. All may be wrong; all but one must be. And if the truth rests in a single religious sect, there exists no competent and wholly impartial arbiter to settle the dispute in the eyes of everybody. Even if it were not a fact that majorities cannot determine truth, no one denomination has anything like a majority. The largest single body is the Roman Catholic. Yet even this powerful body numbers less than a sixth of the population of our country. Far behind it comes the Methodist, a much subdivided body. Even if all its branches be counted as one united organization, it includes less than one in ten of the population, and is far from containing even a majority of the Protestant Christians. Exemption from taxation is primarily assistance toward the spreading of doctrine. Inasmuch as only one of the beneficiaries of this disguised state aid (if even one) is the repository of basic truth unmixed with glaring error, it follows that, no matter where the truth may lie, at least five-sixths and possibly an enormously higher proportion of the money thus released for doctrinal proselytism represents the subsidizing by the state of what is mathematically proved to be false teaching. On this simple proposition all must agree.

THE PREPONDERANCE OF ERROR.

If all religious bodies are exempt from taxation, no member of any one of them can dispute the fact that for every dollar which the state indirectly contributes to the cause of truth, it gives from five to a thousand times as much to error. If all but a mere handful of the people accepted some one creed as divinely inspired, while exemption from taxation would still be an unjustifiable infringement on the rights of the minority, there would at least be some plausibility in the attempt to justify it on the ground that the balance of probability might fairly be claimed for the views of the overwhelming majority. Unsound as such an argument would be, it would possess an overwhelming weight in comparison with the present position of the tax exemptionists, who would not merely leave the enemy to sow tares amid the wheat, but would themselves fairly choke the good seed with a crushing preponderance of foul weeds. If the democratic principle of separation of church and state forbids the manipulation of public funds, and by an obvious parity of reasoning the taxing power of the state, for the promotion of any given sect which may possess the whole truth, the general subsidizing of all sects, so far from being less obnoxious to objection from the standpoint of honest administration, is even more so, since it ensures the survival of a mass of falsehood, incapable of being sustained by its own unaided efforts. It fosters the less worthy among the sects, which could not win their way by merit; and it insidiously corrupts the more worthy, by inviting them to thrive by parasitism, rather than by appealing to the force which resides in truth and in the consistent devotion to high ideals.

THE PARTIALITY OF EXEMPTION.

In thus granting an indiscriminate subsidy to a vast number of doctrinal bodies, the state violates the fundamental doctrine of democratic neutrality and impartiality. It favors a portion of the community at the expense of all the rest. The millions of dollars which are thus given back to the churches do not come out of the air, but out of the pockets of the taxpaying citizens. It is the worst form of taxation without representation. It places a premium on dogmatic faith. It is an establishment of religion in direct defiance of the spirit of the Constitution. Contrary to the rudimentary principles of democracy, it places the state in the position of formally endorsing the proposition that religion is a public function and not an affair of the private conscience. It differs from medievalism only in degree, but not a whit in kind. It is worse than robbing Peter to pay Paul; it is robbing Peter and Paul to pay Judas.

Rights of Conscience Disregarded. Not only is exemption from taxation a covert subsidy for the spread of doctrinal proselytism; not only does it place the state in the position of paying for the circulation of incomparably more error than truth; not only does it rob part of the community for the benefit of another part; not only does it violate the principles of justice and of impartiality as among the conflicting beliefs of its various citizens; not only does it force the taxpayers to support religion, whether they wish to do so or not; not only does it unite church and state in defiance of democracy and equal liberty; but it constitutes a direct and deliberate violation of the fundamental rights of conscience. It is not a mere matter of making individuals pay for that toward which they are indifferent; it is stealing their money to assist in the circulation of dogmas which they regard as positively pernicious and evil. In a democracy, all citizens possess the same rights, and can lawfully be called upon to surrender no freedom or prerogative except for some public end of paramount consequence. No majority, however large, can offer the faintest valid excuse for trampling on the private convictions of the humblest member of society. By all uncorrupted minds, it would be at once recognized as the most glaring tyranny to demand that any individual be compelled to make public or private profession of a faith in which he did not actually believe, or that he be required to participate in public worship against the dictates of his own reason and conscience. Such infamies have been perpetrated in the history of mankind; but they are now justly abhorred by all who have assimilated the elementary lessons of civilization. No longer are men and women hunted down as heretics for their honest inability to believe that a muttered priestly conjuration can turn a cracker into the flesh of a deity or a cup of wine into his blood. No longer are the fires of persecution kindled for those whose mathematical training has made them incapable of accepting the paradox that one is three and three are one. The thumbscrew and the rack no longer punish with a hell on earth all who have too high an opinion of any God whom they can conceive as existing to believe that he is so vile a monster as to have prepared a hell beyond the grave for any of his own children. Even in the backward countries where democracy and religious liberty are equally obnoxious to the powers that make their rule a curse to their subjects, and where the miserable thing known as a state church thrives to the fullest extent, such concessions to the growing decency of the world have been forced upon a reluctant priestcraft, that its venom is largely drawn. Once in a long time, after years of patient and incalculably subtle plotting for its nefarious end, it may achieve a crowning infamy, such as the murder of a Francisco Ferrer; and even for this triumph it pays dearly in the end, by arousing against itself the loathing of all that is honorable on earth. In the main, however, priestcraft, growl as it may, even in the lands where its strength for mischief is greatest, can only suppress free speech, free press and free assemblage; indulge in acts of petty persecution, which arouse resentment rather than inspire terror; punish refusal to bow to a religious procession or indulgence in the expression of honest opinion with fine or relatively brief imprisonment. It can annoy, but it can no longer crush.