Discussion topic: churches, moral teaching, and the IRS

I find myself time and again wondering whether the tax exemption churches enjoy doesn't sometimes come at the cost of truth. To what degree might churches and religious groups be cowed by the threat of losing their tax-exempt status from speaking their minds? Is THAT the greater danger of mixing up church and state, that the church is eventually bullied into a peripheral and largely ceremonial role in peoples' lives? And isn't it at some level in the state's interest to marginalize churches, since they are its competitor for providing leadership and social welfare?

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=16216

I personally think there may be something like a compromise that's made, a kind of buying off of the churches with tax perks. The article asks, is this why you so rarely hear of abortion from the pulpit? I rarely hear anything substantive from the pulpit. Is this why?

Hmmmm....most of our history has been one of churches filling social needs and saving the State from having to adress those needs. I think about out-reach, clothing, education and medical attention.

The rise of the Parochial schools, Catholic universties and Catholic hospitals largely started because of discrimination against Catholics (mostly Irish) in the mid-1800's.

I think the various government agencies were happy to exempt real property from the tax roles.

That was then and this is now. I think old-tyme Liberals would still be happy with this arrangement but, the modern Progressives are anti-religous to the core. Even if it meant people going hungry, naked, diseased and ignorant, this would be an acceptable trade-off for the elimination of religon.

we don't need to religion to do anything of those things-like works of mercy-feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, etc. We just need the state to do that. If we just get the right political system in with the requisite taxes, all those problems will be taken care of to the point of disappearing eventually. In addition, people will become more generous, peaceful and loving because they see it is in their best social interest to do so. They aren't being "compelled" by religious faith to act charitably. Of course, too, the largely irreligious socialist countries of England,France and the Netherlands don't have any of those problems. Why it's almost like heaven on earth there.

Patty Progressive, the naive idealist

See, much as your post was a parody, it was funny because it's true. I think there is really, genuinely a sense out there that if the government didn't step up to offer its assistance, no one would, and people would starve or go without medical treatment, etc. There's no faith in the virtue of the citizens, no sense that people would volunteer their treasure and time and talent to help alleviate suffering. Never mind that that is what churches and civic organizations used to do, that before the New Deal, families and churches and social clubs took care of their own and others. So if there is any problem, well, who ya gonna call? Not ghostbusters. You call the federal government. I read yesterday about a girl who wrote to President Obama to complain about peeling paint in her classroom, and apparently he quoted that letter in his first address to Congress as an example of the kind of work that needed to be done--that is, the executive branch of the federal government needs to involve itself in the condition of paint in schools in a small town in North Carolina. There's no sense of subsidiarity at all, that the people closest to an issue are the best people to fix it. And weirdly enough, that rubs off on individuals--if there's a hungry family outside my door, it's more Obama's problem to solve than my own. We become dulled to our responsibility to each other. It becomes hard to imagine tithing when the state takes three times the tithe and does all the work that churches used to do. So yeah, there's an insidious effect on all of us. But it's hard too to see how being silenced on certain pressing moral issues in order to preserve one's tax exempt status doesn't reduce the churches to the kind of subservient role in relation to temporal power as the temple that Jesus criticized.

The example you pointed to, John Kerry, what exactly was the deal with that?

Was he mis-representing Church Doctrine or disagreeing with it? Was there an actual public threat made by the Church or was a private threat that Kerry made public?

The tough thing is that morals and politics eventually become entangled, they simply can not be kept seperated.