Law & Order

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Tax-free housing for ministers unconstitutional? Chicago Tribune has the newsy scoop

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If you're like me, you may not be real familiar with the clergy housing allowance.

However, my minister friends assure me the allowance — a U.S. tax break — is a big, big deal.

Elimination of it would "significantly increase the tax burden, and hence, diminish the spendable income, of ministers everywhere," Dallas preacher Gordon Dabbs told me. "If and when it goes away, I would expect to see staff cuts at some churches and, almost certainly, some choosing to leave full-time (paid) ministry as it will no longer be financially viable for their families."

Why do I bring this up now? Because the housing allowance is facing a federal court challenge, as Chicago Tribune religion writer Manya Brachear Pashman highlighted in a meaty story earlier this week:

Chicago clergy are fighting a federal judge’s recent ruling that tax-free housing allowances for clergy violate the separation of church and state.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago will be asked to weigh in on the challenge to the so-called parsonage allowance — an Internal Revenue Service benefit that allows clergy to exclude from their tax returns the compensation earmarked for mortgage payments, rent, utility bills or maintenance costs.
The ministerial tax break has been on the books for more than 60 years and is cited by many houses of worship, particularly smaller, independent ones, as an important financial underpinning to carrying out their mission.
But it has become the latest target of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a self-proclaimed guardian of church-state separation based in Madison, Wis., that challenged the tax break, and won, in a Wisconsin court.
“This is a huge privilege and benefit for churches because tax-free dollars go further,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. “They have been allowed to pay lower salaries when it’s all taxpayer subsidies. Clergy pay less, and everyone else pays more.”
Chicago-area clergy say an end to the tax-free housing allowance would drastically reduce their take-home pay, limit how close they can live to their houses of worship and impede their ministries, which often offer safety nets for the communities they serve.
“The housing allowance makes all the sense in the world,” said the Rev. Chris Butler, pastor of Chicago Embassy Church, a small Pentecostal congregation on the South Side, who plans to appeal. “If I’m looking to be God’s pastor to this community and be available to folks inside and outside the congregation, in a city like Chicago, whether I’m doing that as a pastor or an imam or the head of a nonprofit organization, it makes all the sense in the world that I live in that community. In a lot of these kinds of organizations, my church included, we’re not making the world’s biggest salary. This allowance is so important.”


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Unexpected happy ending: A vandalized Arkansas mosque becomes an inspirational tale

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Every so often, the New York Times revisits some of their most popular or most-read stories. Earlier in December, they returned to the story of a bunch of white kids who vandalized a mosque in Fort Smith, Ark., last August. At the time, the story of how the mosque leaders reached out and forgave Abraham Davis was amazing to read and I commented on it for this blog. 

The reporter, Sabrina Tavernise, continued to follow the story for months, especially since Davis was ordered by a court to repay some $3,200 in fines and restitution; an amount that was nearly impossible for him to save. He had finally gotten a job at a convenience store, but it paid very little.

Then –- in one of those happy endings every reporter wishes for -– the mosque got an unexpected grant from a foundation. One of the things its leaders chose to do was pay off Davis’ fine. When the reporter broke the news to him, he was speechless for a time. She tells that story here:

FORT SMITH, Ark. — Abraham Davis had his mouth open, but no words were coming out. We were sitting together on his mother’s couch near her Christmas tree earlier this month and I had just played him a short recording of the president of Fort Smith’s Al Salam mosque.
Abraham had vandalized the mosque with two friends more than a year before. It was an act of bigotry that he deeply regretted. His expression of remorse — written in a letter from jail — and the mosque’s forgiveness and subsequent advocacy for him, inspired my Aug. 26 article, “The Two Americans.”…
But most of the debt still remained to be paid. It was one of his life’s daily stresses: If he stopped making monthly payments, he could end up in prison for six years.


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Was it counseling or confession? A crucial twist in the cold-case murder trial of a priest

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Anyone who has spent much time on the Godbeat knows that religion is complicated and that, when dealing with issues of doctrine and religious law, things can get even more confusing.

It's crucial to get the details right, including using the correct words, using these terms accurately and then helping readers understand why these fine details matter.

Thus, I would like to praise a recent Washington Post story about the infamous, and very complicated, cold-case investigation into the 1960 rape and murder of former beauty queen Irene Garza in McAllen, Tex. However, I want to praise this feature while also noting one strange choice of words that will worry many readers, especially Catholics.

Now, it's crucial to know that Garza's faith is at the heart of this story, since she was a daily-Mass Catholic. (Click here for a previous post about coverage of this case.)

One day this young woman went to confession at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and she never came back. The last person to see her alive was the priest who heard that confession, the Rev. John Feit.

There were good reasons to suspect the 27-year-old priest of murder, including another priest's testimony that Feit had scratches on his hands after midnight Mass -- only a few hours after Garza went to confession. However, the case was complicated on several levels, including fears among local political leaders and clergy that charging a priest with murder might hurt Sen. John Kennedy's chances, as a Catholic, to win Texas in his campaign for the White House.

So what evidence cracked open this old case? This is where the Post feature includes one vague word -- precisely at the point where precision was crucial. Here is the crucial passage:

... (I)n April of 2002, the San Antonio police department received a phone call from a former priest in Oklahoma City -- Dale Tacheny. He explained that in 1963, he had lived at a Trappist monastery in Missouri and counseled a priest from San Antonio.
“He told me that he had attacked a young woman in a parish on Easter weekend and murdered her,” the caller said, according to Texas Monthly. In a letter, Tacheny identified Feit and recounted how he took the woman to the parish house to hear her confession. After hearing her confession he assaulted, bound and gagged her, Tacheny said.

So there are two questions that should be asked at this point.


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Reporters and the Supreme Court cake bake-off: Was religious freedom the guiding issue?

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Although the opening arguments for Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (transcript .pdf here) included a plea for religious freedom, that point got lost in articles about Tuesday’s historic hearing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s true that the plaintiff’s attorney, Kristen Waggoner, barely got out one paragraph of her intro before justices began interrupting her with questions about cakes and compelled speech.

It’s also true that covering a Supreme Court hearing (I’ve done it two or three times) is like covering a knife fight between 10 participants (nine justices and the hapless attorney before them). It takes discipline for media scribes to remember the main thing is the main thing; in this case, whether a believer can be forced by the state to give a message that contradicts his or her religious convictions.

GLAAD, the gay-rights organization that monitors coverage of homosexuals by the media, saw that “main thing” as such a threat, it sent a note to major media outlets, urging them to dump terms like “religious freedom” and “religious liberty” for “religious exemptions.” Read about their directive on Poynter.org and see one New York Times opinion piece that obeyed this instruction to the letter.  

(Tell me: What if a conservative group had sent out a similar missive to mainstream journalists? The Poynter piece, by the way, didn’t include any quotes from media experts who find it problematic that an activist group feels it can tell journalists what to write.)

Fortunately, reporters generally ignored GLAAD's directive. We will start with the Denver Post, the hometown newspaper for both parties in this suit which had a headline that reflected how Kennedy asked “sharp questions” from both sides. It began with a very static lede: 

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a Colorado case about a same sex-wedding cake that ultimately could determine where the legal system draws the line between discrimination and religious freedom.


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Embattled evangelical judge in Oregon gets mixed coverage -- with little religious content

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Not many readers may have heard about Marion County (Ore.) Judge Vance Day and his chapter on America's current religious liberty wars -- but you may soon.

Reading a piece about him in Williamette Week, a venerable alternate newspaper based in Portland, the first thing I noticed was a piece of art showing the judge hiding behind a statue of Jesus.

I thought: A religion story for sure.

Instead, the piece complained about how the judge was using all sorts of out-of-state funds for his legal war chest. For instance:

Day has achieved a lot of firsts. He's the first judge that Oregon's judicial fitness commission has recommended for removal from the bench in more than 35 years. He is the first judge ever to use Oregon's decade-old law allowing embattled public officials to establish legal trust funds. And Day has raised far more with his fund -- at least a half-million dollars -- than other elected officials who have established such funds.
Although Day's ethical and legal troubles have been well-documented over the past two years, the details of how he's used his defense fund to harness a political movement have not previously been reported.
Day has turned his proposed expulsion from the bench into a cash cow -- using his fund to hire big-name lawyers, rake in money from an enigmatic conservative foundation, and cozy up to permanently outraged right-wing culture warriors.

Hmmm. Reading further, I learned that it’s legal to have such a trust fund. Meanwhile, one thing Day has refused to do is same-sex marriages. In blue-state Oregon, that’s blasphemy.


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New York Times gets a scoop (by phone!) with 'first extensive interview' of Sutherland Springs pastor

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I want to congratulate the New York Times on this scoop.

Before doing so, however, a part of me wishes I knew more about how the Times landed "the first extensive interview" with the pastor of the Texas church where 26 people — including the pastor's daughter — died Nov. 5.

Previously, I shared a Dallas Morning News journalist's thoughtful editorial on the media horde that swamped tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas, after the First Baptist Church shooting.  "We can do better," the News' Lauren McGaughy said of how news organizations chronicle such tragedies.

So, I guess my question is: Was the pastor, Frank Pomeroy, a willing participant in the Times' story?

I mean, obviously, Pomeroy chose to talk to the Times for the piece headlined "The Day the Pastor Was Away and Evil Came Barging Into His Church." In fact, this is one of those rare one-source stories that made the front page of the Times.

Certainly, the story contains dramatic, revealing details, starting at the top:

On any other Sunday, Frank Pomeroy, the pastor at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Tex., would have been in the pulpit. He would have seen the gunman, his steely gaze familiar, barge in mid-sermon. He would have heard the gunfire break out.
But he was hundreds of miles away. And so Mr. Pomeroy, reflecting in his first extensive interview on the mass shooting that took place inside his church, can only imagine the awfulness of it. And ponder whether he could have made a difference had he been preaching that day.
Instead, Mr. Pomeroy was attending a class in Oklahoma City on the morning of Nov. 5. A three-word text message came across his cellphone. “Shooting at church,” it said.
He thought the sender, who was the church’s videographer, was kidding. “I hope you are joking,” he wrote back.
The reply came seconds later: “No.”
Mr. Pomeroy frantically tried to call parishioners who were at the service, but no one picked up. “By then, it was too late,” he recalled. “They had been shot.” He finally reached a friend, who was 10 minutes away from the church. The friend rushed to the scene and soon confirmed the unimaginable. Bodies were sprawled everywhere. Among the dead was the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter, Annabelle.

Keep reading, the Times describes compellingly how Pomeroy has had to balance his pastoral role with his parental grief. It's heart-wrenching stuff.


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Malibu, Methodists and the homeless: There is a religion story in here somewhere

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With homelessness being a major discussion topic on the West Coast these days, it’s only fitting that the Los Angeles Times team found this quirky story about what happens when Christians act, well, too Christian. I would argue that there could be a religion angle to this debate.

In a story titled “Malibu church pressured to end homeless dinners, some saying it lures needy to upscale city,” you have everything turned around. Here we’ve got a church doing the right thing while the rich are telling believers to knock it off.

Los Angeles, by the way, has the nation’s second largest concentration of homeless, so it was only a matter of time before their presence infiltrated the dwellings of the very rich living north of town.

Being homeless in Malibu is different...
Residents have long been generous to those who live in the city's 21 miles of canyons, beaches and glittering shopping centers.
For 17 years, religious groups fed homeless people, and the city and private donors put up hundreds of thousands of dollars for social workers to find them housing and services.
But Malibu United Methodist Church -- facing pressure from the city -- in recent weeks took a U-turn, deciding twice-weekly dinners for homeless people would stop after Thanksgiving. The cutoff came after city officials summoned organizers and suggested they were attracting more homeless people and making the problem worse.

What follows is a description of how the Methodists and another Christian ministry, Standing on Stone, have been co-hosting dinners for the homeless at the church twice weekly for three years. Another social service agency helped two dozen of them get off the streets and into decent housing. But then:


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If, somehow, a story about deadly church shootings can be heartwarming, this is the one

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I stopped by the First Baptist Church of Daingerfield, Texas, in 2004.

At the time, I covered religion and politics for The Associated Press in Dallas. Ahead of Texas' presidential primary that year, I noticed that Morris County — where Daingerfield is located — was one of the few places in George W. Bush's home state where the vote had been close in the 2000 general election.

So I headed to the steel-mill town, 140 miles east of Dallas, to talk to voters.

I found one of those voters at the Baptist church:

For Martha Martin, 62, secretary-treasurer at the First Baptist Church of Daingerfield, Bush’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage makes him the choice.
“I think he will go down in history as one of our great presidents,” Martin said.
She said she prays Bush will win re-election, “because I think he’s a moral, upstanding person, and I think he seeks the Lord in what he does.”

What I didn't realize — because I was so young when it happened — was that the First Baptist Church of Daingerfield had been the site of a mass shooting that made national headlines in 1980.

Why do I bring this up now — 37 years later?

Because the New York Times has an excellent story on the somber common experience that now ties together the Daingerfield congregation and the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people died Nov. 5.

The Times' powerful lede:


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There's more to discussions of church-security fears than guns, guns, guns and more guns

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There's more to discussions of church-security fears than guns, guns, guns and more guns

If the following USA Today story wasn't real, then some journalist would have had to have made it up.

You see, coverage of shootings in churches almost always lead to mini-waves of reports about a tricky and controversial subject -- efforts to keep churches safe and secure. Yes, we talked about church security during this week's podcast, so click here to tune that in.

The overused word "controversial" applies in this whole subject because of the tension between increased calls for gun control (which I support, especially when we're talking about military-grade weapons) and people discussing the use of off-duty police and trained volunteers to protect churches.

In news media coverage, this can turn into left-leaning calls for gun control vs. people in large, almost always conservative churches packing concealed weapons. In other words, the whole thing turns into another discussion of guns, guns, guns and more guns.

Thus, the headline on that aforementioned USA Today story: "Two accidentally shot in church while discussing church shootings." And here's the heart of that story:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- A man accidentally shot himself and his wife at an east Tennessee church on Thursday while he was showing off his gun during a discussion on recent church shootings, police said.
Elder members of First United Methodist Church in Tellico Plains were cleaning up about 1 p.m. after enjoying a luncheon held to celebrate Thanksgiving. They began talking about guns in churches, according to Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks.
A man in his 80s pulled out a .380 caliber Ruger handgun and said, "I carry my handgun everywhere," according to Parks. He removed the magazine, cleared the chamber, and showed the gun to some of the men in the church. He put the magazine back in, apparently loaded a round in the chamber, and returned the gun to its holster, Parks said.


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