Pennies from Heaven

...Meanwhile, the homeowners of any given community are kicking in with ever-escalating property taxes to help provide services like garbage removal and police protection to tax-exempt churches that only one-third of them attend...

...But from the point of view of the average taxpayer, there’s a mighty big difference: As near as one can figure, the wealth of American religious organizations is approaching a trillion dollars...

...Dean Kelley, counselor on religious liberty to the National Council of Churches, is not about to throw in the towel...

...We were attacked, laughed at, and finally imprisoned...

...The Village Voice found in 1987 that the Catholic Church was New York City’s largest private landowner...

...C. Stanley Lowell made a pretty big dent...

...Breaking down the wall The First Amendment, to put it simply, prohibits both state sponsorship of and state hostility towards religion...

...duly awake to the tendency of the precedents [of church wealth] they are establishing, in the multiplied incorporations of Religious Congregations with the faculty of acquiring & holding property real as well as personal...

...The idea's been intellectually mothballed for years...

...In his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, Madison argued for the freedom of religious expression, but the main point of the treatise was that citizens not be required to pay taxes that went toward supporting or maintaining religions to which they might not subscribe...

...The court held that a sales-tax exemption that applied only to periodicals published by religious groups was unconstitutional...

...They have incomes like big corporations do...

...Gibbs, who would seem to have been in the best position imaginable to know about tax-exemption abuses, said that churches’ immunity from filing tax returns makes it nearly impossible for anyone in the secular world to learn anything about churches’ operations...

...Are the U.S...

...The court held that a sales tax on religious organizations that also applied to other charitable, nonprofit, and local government entities was constitutional...

...The Court held that a property tax exemption that applied not only to churches but also to “nonprofit, quasipublic corporations” was constitutional...

...No one knows for sure, because religious organizations aren’t subject to any financial disclosure laws...

...This is also not to say that our society shouldn’t value the purely religious functions that churches perform...

...Clearly, the founding fathers never contemplated that 1) a religious organization would ever have the funds to blow a billion dollars on one project in 10 years or 2) that they would blow it to cover expenses for such earthly pleasures...

...Government relations with religious bodies must fall in the neutral zone between...

...Because there’s no paper trail, he said, “I have no way of knowing...

...The many should not be taxed to support the religious beliefs of the few...

...Occasionally, the value of a denomination’s billion-dollar pension fund or a million-dollar donation to an individual church will be mentioned in the religious press, but there is no comprehensive accounting of church wealth...

...Of course, estimates based on 193 1 numbers leave a little to be desired...

...Papa I bul I This hear-no-evil, see-no-evil approach to policing exemptions doesn’t provide much temporal incentive for religious organizations to stick to the straight and narrow...

...For all of its good works, the Catholic Church has had more than its share of bad apples in recent years...

...Onward Christian brokers A 193 1 University of Chicago Department of Economics study used data from the Bureau of the Census to estimate the value of overall church wealth divided by the population...

...The highest-profile examination of churches’ tax-exempt status in recent years was trotted out in 1978, in the Chevy Chase/Goldie Hawn film, Foul Play...

...But if they resent his charges, why don’t they step forward and release the figures that would prove his claims absurd...

...But taxes aren’t assessed according to who is making a profit...

...Laid-off factory workers or moneylosing businessmen aren’t freed from their propertytax obligations...

...Even this information is elusive: Local tax assessors are notorious for not keeping current assessments on property they can’t tax...

...Church property should not be taxed because churchgoers “already pay a fair share of running the commonwealth,” he reasons...

...The property in these 14 cities represented only 3 percent of all the private property in the country...

...It relies on “newspaper articles [and] concerned citizens to just bring information to our attention,” said Wilson Fadley, a spokesman at the IRS...

...None does, but all receive one, thanks to a misreading of the First Amendment's religion provisions...

...I think everyone should understand that churches are big business,” Murray said...

...It’s invariably the sects whose adherents lack connections that see their exemptions challenged...

...Jon Murray, son of super-atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and president of United World Atheists in Austin, says that 20 percent of all the private property in the United States is owned by religious groups...

...Madison continued: “And must not bodies, perpetual in their existence, and which may be always gaining without ever losing, speedily gain more than is useful, and in time more than is safe...

...Several church-and-state experts familiar with the cases--especially a decision in January 1990-predict that local governments will subject churches to real estate taxes before the end of the decade...

...One of the seven IRS regional commissioners must approve any audit, and since there is little financial information to substantiate an investigator’s initial suspicions, few investigations are launched...

...Because of the lack of disclosure and oversight, the public hears only about the handful of spectacular cases that the press digs up-the air-conditioned dog houses and payoffs to prostitutes...

...They have huge payrolls, take huge collections every Sunday...

...Whether it’s a church or haberdashery, it does not greatly affect costs to the fire department...

...According to the Los Angeles Times, the number of court cases charging Catholic Church personnel with sexual abuse approached 2,000 in 1990, and the Church has paid out as much as $300 million to settle such claims in the past six or seven years...

...they put religion above government,” said Philip Kurland, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago...

...The estimated value of these thousands of properties: $3.99 billion...

...I wonder if the same things are going on,” said Gibbs, who is now an attorney in Washington...

...Providing police and fire protection to the whole city is part of the cost of running the whole city and should not be charged to nonprofit organizations...

...Heaven The 40-member congregation is now saving "a good amount of money" in sales tax on the candles, incense burners, chalices, candlesticks and black robes needed for its rituals, which are held several times a month in a rentIt'S time for Uncle Sam topass ed room of the local Grange Hall...

...1989: Texas Monthly v. Bullock...

...While it’s troubling that Long received all of this tax-exempt money, it’s even more disturbing that the payments went undetected for nearly four years...

...And with a credit rating the lowest in its history, the state of New York is struggling to recoup revenue from any source, however meager...

...1970: Wulz v. Tux Commission of New York...

...1990: Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. Board of Equalization of California...

...One of the terrorists explained her bitterness this way: “Ten years ago, we attempted a peaceful campaign for the taxation of these billiondollar corporations...

...If churches’ financial information is shielded from there have been enough such cases in recent years to the prying eyes of the IRS, how is the IRS able to uncover any abuses of tax-exempt status...

...Those that are conducted tend to be aimed at churches that stand out-those with pastelsuited preachers, politically unpalatable doctrines, arcane sacraments-because they are the ripest targets for media scrutiny...

...The way the following Supreme Court decisions define that neutral zone, it is up to the legislature to decide whether to tax or not to tax religious organizations...

...And as a big business, they should bear part of the burden of keeping up the country-roads, parks, etc...

...The Constitution didn’t do that...

...They all pay, whether or not they belong to any church in the area, and therefore cover the fire protection and other city services enjoyed by a religious institution that means nothing to them...

...that would violate the free exercise clause...

...Well, a century and a half earlier, James Madison, whose Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments had provided a key philosophical underpinning of the church-state relationship, cautioned against much the same “absurd” realities...

...The language used in the Swaggart decision was so broad that many legal experts say that other church property-like investment income, donation income, and real estate assets-can now be taxed...

...Well, goes the received wisdom, because those by Elizabeth Lesty objects are just as sacred to a witch as a crucifix is to a Catholic or the Torah to a Jew...

...Last year, The Washington Post reported that Stallings for years had used church funds to lavishly renovate his private Anacostia home and had put at least one of his lovers on the parish’s payroll...

...The administrative roadblocks to starting an investigation are formidable...

...like other nonprofits, churches should receive a Good Samaritan exemption...

...It was only after the Rev...

...Teresa of Avila parish...

...taxing something is not generally a sign of public disapproval...

...As a former tax administrator and a taxpayer, I have concerns, particularly based on some of the things that have happened in the last 10 to 15 years...

...Amen and G-men Zealots like Murray drive people in the religious community nuts...

...But there is enough evidence to suggest that cities and states could generate quite a bit of tax revenue by milking these sacred cows...

...Michael W. McConnell, the University of Chicago law professor who argued the case for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries and lost, saw the decision as the beginning of the end of some of the tax exemptions for the nation’s religious bodies: “Now, church activities and church properties are just as fully subject to taxation as any other properties may be...

...The exemptions cost those cities over $4 billion in lost tax revenue...

...In 1989, 464,136 religious organizations were registered with the IRS...

...Still, the Rev...

...It comes from the same sources-members and contributors...

...In the eyes of the government, all religions are created equal...

...But Martin A. Larson and the Rev...

...population of approximately 250 million, the value of such wealth today would be more than $700 billion...

...Why do witches merit a cut rate on newts' the collection plate eyes, bats' wings, and other party supplies...

...After a Coopers & Lybrand audit, it became clear that the archbishop was providing Long with a lot more than affection-between 1986 and 1990, Long received more than $21,000 from the funds of the archdiocese and two of its parishes...

...This is not to say that churches should be taxed on property used primarily for charitable purposes-soup kitchens, say, or schools...

...Why be taxed again...

...These days, with more than half the country rarely, if ever, seeing the inside of a church, and many cities and states struggling to come up with the money to pay for basic services, Madison’s message is more important than ever...

...That kind of religious relativism seems to make sense-except that it begs the real question: Why does any religious organization deserve a government subsidy in the first place...

...I cite the TV evangelist cases and I also cite some of the very abusive tax shelter cases...

...But property used primarily for religious purposes should be taxed like any other property...

...Strong religious adherents think that religion should be free of any government action...

...In fact, the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions over the past eight years, has ruled that taxing churches is perfectly legal...

...It’s time we put some of these billions for heaven to work here on earth...

...The cost of running a city should be borne by the producers of wealth, such as profit-making corporations and employed individuals...

...Pretty nuts, right...

...a lot of church property is listed on local tax rolls under a different name...

...But if you set aside your perfectly reasonable anti-anticlerical bias for a moment, you'll discover that to favor taxing churches you don't have to be a nun-basher avenging the times Sister Mary whipped chalk at you in fourth-grade Latin...

...Unfortunately, the Bureau of the Census stopped collecting information on church wealth in 1936 because the funding dried up...

...These days, it's the province of the fringe-radical anticlerics, the Murray O'Hair school of secular humanists, 1 and crabby fair-tax fanatics...

...and no one has the stamina or the zeal to visit every municipality in the country and comb through tax rolls in search of these imperfect assessments...

...Tax the churches...

...Last year, Archbishop Eugene A. Marino of Atlanta resigned after word of his longtime affair with Vicki R. Long leaked out...

...It’s a very, very sensitive issue,” said Larry Gibbs, who was IRS commissioner from 1986 until 1989...

...From the point of view of the Constitution, then, there’s no difference between taxing all churches equally and not taxing them at all...

...The Times cited a 1985 internal church report that estimated the organization could face $1 billion in such claims by 1995...

...Meanwhile, New York City is again flirting with financial crisis and cannot provide even the most basic services for its lower- and middle-class citizens...

...These days, the only sliver of church wealth that anyone can guess at is real estate holdings...

...some church watchers estimate that religious organizations own one-fifth of all private property in the country...

...George Stallings Jr...

...Larson estimated then that more than 10 percent of all the real property in the country was owned by churches and exempt from taxes-at a value of at least $155 billion in the 14 cities alone...

...The organized and main-line religions in this country are very jealous of their prerogatives, and any indication at all that the IRS is doing anything at all to violate a right of a church will guarantee that the IRS, Congress, and the media hear about it from organized religion...

...In January, it cut the value of its once-coveted Regent’s scholarships to just $25 per student for the spring semester...

...Pennies from Heaven It's time for Uncle Sam to pass the collection plate by Elizabeth Lesly When Joyce Siegrist's coven, Our Lady of the Roses Wiccan Church, was granted tax-exempt status by the state of Rhode Island in 1989, she was elated...

...But they support the economic system, so the economic system supported them...

...A fire department is] employed to protect the community against fire...

...of Washington, D.C., broke with the Catholic Church to form the afrocentric Imani Temple that the Church thought to check into how he had handled the finances at St...

...Have the churches, as Madison feared, accumulated more than is safe...

...The results were staggering for the time: Total church wealth $ per capita 1890 $65,037,000,000 $1,036 1912 $1 83,300,000,000 $1,965 1922 $320,804,000,000 $2,95 1 Without even adjusting for inflation or appreciation, and multiplying the per capita value of church wealth in 1922 by the present U.S...

...There may be no violations of the letter of the religious tax exemption statute here (though one would hope that the IRS is investigating), but surely there is a violation of its spirit...

...In an 1832 essay, Madison warned that “besides the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property . . . by ecclesiastical corporations...

...The state’s Board of Equalization and Assessment in 1988 counted 7,533 church- or clergy-owned properties in New York City alone that were wholly or partly tax exempt...

...Now that’s reassuringan enforcement system reliant on tattle-tales, axgrinders, and the press, which has trouble reporting on the subject since no information is publicly available...

...For the entire state, the 29,801 church properties in 1988 had an estimated value of $9.6 billion...

...It would be much, much more now,” shouted Larson, who, at 94 and nearly deaf, hasn’t updated his research since 1976...

...Right now, religious organizations are the only nonprofit groups in the country not required to report financial information to the Internal Revenue Service...

...Elizabeth Lesly is a busrness wrrter rn Albany, New York The purpose of the First Amendment’s religious provisions was to prevent the government from discriminating against or in favor of any religion-in particular or as a group...

...Of course, the state can’t tax only churches, even if it taxes them all equally...

...In the past decade, the agency has revoked the tax exemptions of only about 20...

...They took on the tedious process of reviewing the tax rolls of 14 large cities and published their findings in 1976...

...The running gag in the movie was the villainous Tax the Churches League, an organization of wackos so obsessed with church wealth and power that they planned to assassinate the Pope to make a political statement...

...If they love the people and love the community, why don’t they put up the money to keep the community going...

...Today Larson can’t even guess how much the property holdings are worth after the economic boom of the eighties...

...Yet suggest that some of the massive religious tax exemptions go to support less-than-spiritual pursuits...

...For an example of what all that untaxed property can mean for one state, consider New York...