The Taxation of Church Property
I am in receipt of a very interesting letter from the Reverend A. B. Taylor, Lakeside, New York, in which he says that he readsThe Frawith much pleasure and profit, and often receives valuable help therefrom in compiling his sermons. Doctor Taylor is an orthodox Methodist, and the fact that I am able to express for him, in degree, many of the things he holds as truth is one of the encouraging signs of the times. It is frank, friendly and beautiful in Doctor Taylor to write me his acknowledgments. But after writing the letter headds a postscript. I might say that I have a suspicion he wrote the beautiful letter in order to add the postscript, but I will not. Here is the P.S.: “One thing I do not like, and can not comprehend, is why you so wrongfully advocate the taxing of church property.” ¶ Then he encloses a column clipping fromThe Christian Work and Evangelist, wherein the reasons for exemption of church property from taxation are fully set forth. Very seldom does one get the entire argument at first hand, but here it all is, skilfully presented ❦ I give it in its entirety: “The worst enemy New York has, or any city has, is the perennial critic who would tax the churches. Some interesting correspondence has recently been going on in one of the New York papers over this matter. Some one by the name of Hubbard discovered that there were several million dollars’ worth of property in churches which was untaxed. The critic supported his arguments by statements that thechurches are not direct public servants, as are schools and hospitals; that they exist to teach certain doctrines of their own, differing among themselves, and which have no direct relation to the public good—some of the doctrines, indeed, being pernicious, according to this critic. The short-sightedness of all this is apparent to the most superficial mind. The policy of taxing the churches would be almost suicidal to any town or city. The churches save New York fifty times what the city loses in taxes from them. Here are a few facts which when perceived stop all such talk at once: The Church is the greatest police force in the community. The Roman Catholic Church alone—we mention that Church because it practises the negative doctrine of restraint more than do the Protestant churches—restrains hundreds of thousands of men and women from petty crimes that would cost New York more than all her courts and police and jails and prisons havecost her for years. Take the churches out of New York for ten years and it would be an unsafe city to live in, and the expense of administering its criminal courts and prisons would bankrupt it. As a matter of fact, the teaching of any particular theological doctrine is the smallest part of any work the churches do ❦ Go into any church in New York and you will find that fully three-fourths of all the efforts are being directly expended in making good citizens. In Sunday school the children are being taught honesty, purity, brotherhood, ambition and the unselfish life. Fully two-thirds of the sermons of the average preacher are direct inspirations to the moral life or instructions in ethics. We venture to say that had our friend collected fifty of the sermons preached in New York last Sunday he would have found forty-nine which dealt with practical religious life to one on the doctrine, say, of the future life. ¶ Of course, there are millions of people who have foundin their experience that the ‘peculiar doctrines,’ as our friends call them, produce the highest type of citizenship. As a matter of fact, the main efforts of the churches of New York are put on producing honest and altruistic men ❦ Heaven only knows what would become of the city if its one thousand four hundred churches were crippled by great taxes. It is bad enough now. The police service the churches render New York saves the city millions every year. The service of furnishing her with honest and unselfish men can not be put in numbers. There are none large enough.” ¶ It will please be noticed that the editor ofThe Christian Work and Evangeliststarts his article by informing us who the worst enemy of New York or any city actually is. This worst enemy, according to my Christian colleague, is the critic who would tax the churches. Thus, before he attempts to reply to the critic, he denounces the critic as not only an enemy of the State, but itsworst enemy. Grafters, thieves, dealers in dope, procurers, sweat-shop fiends, murderers, all take second place: the worst enemy of a city—any city—is the man who advocates the taxation of church property. The editor himself is a Christian, a church-member and a clergyman. Does he stand as a sample of the head, hand and heart of the modern church-member? ❦ I think so. He is a man of education, of position, honored and respected in his denomination. And he tells us that people who disagree with him in a matter of finance are not only the enemies of the State, but its worst enemies. “A traitor to God is a traitor to his country.” Thus did religious fanaticism once link the heretic and the traitor as one ❦ To disagree with the prevailing religion was to be regarded as the foe of society. How hard the tyrants die! ¶ Yet many clergymen believe that it would be better to put church property on an absolute parity with all other property. In fact, manychurches now voluntarily pay taxes. The great and influential congregation presided over by Rabbi Leonard Levy of Pittsburgh requested the assessors to tax their synagogue at its cost valuation of three hundred thousand dollars ❦ In Toronto is a Baptist church—the Jarvis Street Baptist Church, I believe—that has paid taxes on its property for more than twenty years, because the congregation voting on the question decided that an evasion of taxes on the part of a church because it did “good” was really no better than the exemption of an individual for the same reason. ¶ The enemy of the State, forsooth, is the man who asks some one to pay a few paltry dollars for police and fire protection! ❦ Naturally, one might say the enemy of the State is the man who refuses to pay his quota of expense for the maintenance of the Government machinery. ¶ The editor ofThe Christian Work and Evangelistis a clergyman ❦ He is paid by thereligious denomination he serves. This denomination has large holdings of real estate, upon which it pays no taxes. If it paid taxes it would not have so much money to pay clergymen; therefore, one of its leading clergymen, acting as spokesman for the rest, defines for us the worst enemy of New York—“or any city.” Thus we get the quality of logic that rules in our churches. It would be laughable were it not pitiable in its weakness. The church isn’t dead—it can still call vile names ❦ How nimbly it yet flings the theologic stink-pot! The fires of the auto da fe are not extinguished. They are only banked, banked in the editorial office ofThe Christian Work and Evangelist. “The worst enemy of New York or any city!” It is the old, old cry of “Away with him!” ❦ It is the cry of entrenched tyranny, that he who disagrees with you in religious matters is the enemy of the State. Socrates spoke disrespectfully of the gods, and for this theybrewed for him the hemlock. The crime of Jesus was that he undermined the State ❦ Savonarola, Bruno, Latimer, Wyclif, enemies of society—all! ¶ The editor ofThe Christian Work and Evangelistthinks that the State and Religion are one. And he is right. For just as long as the State grants immunity from taxation to church property, the divorce is not complete. We haven’t yet caught up with Thomas Jefferson. Well, you know what the State in the past has done to those who are considered its enemies? Yes, and that is just what the meek and lowly editor ofThe Christian Work and Evangelistwould do to you if he had the power. ¶ Carefully read, analyzed and digested, we find that the sole excuses churches have for not paying taxes are: First, the churches form a police system which prevents certain people from committing crime. Second, the churches supply us a great number of honest and unselfish citizens, who otherwise would be rogues ❦ Forthese two things they claim a cash reward from the community. My answer is that both propositions are assumptions, quite gratuitous, but that, even if they were true, it would not justify the State in remitting their quota of taxes. ¶ I have had a large and varied experience with clergymen and church-members, and that they are better morally and stand higher intellectually are propositions which they admit, but which no one besides themselves puts forward. The names of clergymen, Sunday-school teachers and pious deacons who go wrong would fill a five-foot shelf of books. In fact, it is an axiom that the bankers’ colony in every penitentiary is made up mostly of church-members ❦ When the University of Copenhagen says that church-members are better citizens than non-church-members, I may believe it. Until then, the verdict must be, “Not Proved”—and especially so, in view of the fact that when Christianity was absolutelysupreme the headsman worked overtime, and crime, grime, blood, poverty, disease and woe were the rule, not the exception. The doctrine that some folks are so much better than others that they deserve eternal bliss is the most selfish idea ever put forth by mortal man. Folks who think they are better than others, usually aren’t. That the idea of endless joy for believers, and endless hell for doubters, is not being preached now so much as it was a few years ago, is nothing to the credit of church-members. ¶ All separations of society into sacred and secular, good and bad, saved and lost, learned and illiterate, rich and poor, are illusions which mark certain periods in the evolution of society ❦ The offer of endless life and the threat of endless hell are frightful rudimentary errors of the savage mind, born of fear and frenzy, and then perpetuated as a police system by a Divine Collection Agency. For not only does a religion of fear keep people“good,” but it also makes them pay for being kept good. The offer of immunity from the penalties of sin, through belief in the blood of Jesus, is merely the immunity that human sacrifice once provided, slightly refined and modified. The “belief” in a blood sacrifice has taken the place of the sacrifice itself. ¶ The orthodox Christian Church still teaches immunity from penalties on the acceptance of its creed. From exemption from the natural penalty of a misdeed to exemption from taxation is but a step. The man who can accept the one takes kindly to the other. “Jesus died and paid it all—yes, all the debt I owe.” “Saved by the blood of the Lamb.” That is, throw it off on some one else. Who cares! Any way to go scot-free! And this evasion of a penalty for wrong committed is called “the glad tidings of great joy.” To escape the payment of taxes is a variation of the same idea ❦ Many of these “saved” people do not pay their debts untilcompelled to. If they work for you they loaf and visit on “company time.” They cheat you in a hundred ways, and often spend as much time trying to evade the responsibility of shouldering the burden as, rightly used, would have carried the message to Garcia. ¶ The entire Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments, of a vicarious atonement, and the substitution of a pure and holy man for the culprit, is a vicious and misleading philosophy ❦ That fear in some instances has deterred men from crime, there is no doubt. But the error of religion as a police system lies in the fact that it makes superstition perpetual. Untruth that good may follow is not a nice philosophy. ¶ It will be noted that the learned editor ofThe Christian Work and Evangelistpleads, as a reason why churches should not pay taxes, the assertion that three-fourths of all sermons now preached deal with present-day problems, and the effort is not merely to save souls but to make bettercitizens. This is doubtless true ❦ The church is saving herself from dissolution by becoming secularized. Gradually the world is being educated into the belief that one world at a time is enough. Also, a vast number of men and women see the fact that immunity and exemption are not desirable, that nothing can ever be given away, and that something for nothing is very dear ❦ To make a man exempt is to take from him just so much manhood; and to make a church exempt is to weaken the fabric and place the institution on a mendicant basis ❦ To accept salvation for yourself, with the consciousness that there is still one soul in hell, would turn your paradise into purgatory, if your soul were worth a damn. “One man is no man,” said Aristotle four hundred years before Christ. We are all parts and particles of each other. ¶ This matter of exemption from taxation of certain edifices and certain men, transportation at half-rates, and the ten-per-centdiscount to clergymen and teachers, all hinges on a lack of the Ethical Monistic Concept ❦ It assumes that certain work is sacred and other work secular; that certain places are holy and others profane. My esteemed colleague, the editor ofThe Christian Work and Evangelist, admits that this world is no longer “but a desert drear, heaven is my home.” He admits that we are here, and that this is our home now, at least. When he goes a step further and admits that this is God’s world, not the Devil’s; that every man is doing the best he can with the light and power he possesses; that all human service is sacred; that there is no high nor low; that there are no “saved” so long as men are in bonds to fear, superstition and incompetence; that a smokestack is as sacred as a steeple—then he will agree with me that churches should pay their just quota of taxes. Good people no longer ask immunity from payment of bills because they are “good.” Businessmenare just as “good” as preachers. Business today is founded on the thought of reciprocity and mutuality ❦ We help ourselves only as we help others. And all transactions in life should be co-operative and reciprocal. ¶ Granting for argument’s sake that the Church does do all the good claimed by my Christian brother, still that is no reason for its exemption. “So far as this Court knows, all men who live in houses are good men, making the world of men better by their lives; but this is no reason why their residences should be exempt from taxation.” So said a wise and learned judge in deciding the question of taxation of parsonages in Illinois. Here we get the growing concept of the world of thinking men and women, the concept of Ethical Monism. All is One, and the sacred is that which serves. Pay the price, and provided you pay the price, the thing you buy is worth the money. ¶ The churches will never do the good they are capable of doing untilthey throw off mendicancy. ¶ And the beggar is a robber who has lost his nerve, a bandit with a streak of yellow in his ego. The churches must take their stand, firmly and frankly, as human institutions, asking no exemption, demanding no immunity. Then they will be free. For her own good the Church must meet her responsibilities, and not shift her burden of taxes upon the people who do not believe her creed. If you believe in a “peculiar” doctrine, that is your affair, and you are the man to pay for its support. To say that I must pay for the support of your creed or else be branded as a foe of society is bad logic, worse ethics, and very indelicate, not to say discourteous ❦ Only that is fair and beautiful which neither threatens, bribes, evades, demands nor supplicates.