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Awkwardly timed issue: Should hard-pressed churches still want to be tax exempt?

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Awkwardly timed issue: Should hard-pressed churches still want to be tax exempt?

THE QUESTION:
Should hard-pressed churches want to be tax-exempt?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

“Religion Q & A” has pondered tax exemption three times already, in items posted on November 9, 2013; January 22, 2017; and then on October 25, 2019, when stripping of tax exemption from houses of worship erupted as a surprise issue in the Democratic campaign for president.

The 2019 round involved CNN’s “Equality Town Hall” when anchorman Don Lemon asked candidate “Beto” O’Rourke if “colleges, churches, charities” that “oppose same-sex marriage” should lose their tax exemptions. O’Rourke said yes, that no tax break should be granted to “any institution, any organization” holding that belief. No-one else on stage (Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, Steyer, Warren) expressed disagreement.

But later, Pete Buttigieg (himself in a gay marriage) clarified that such religious colleges and social-service agencies should lose exemptions — but it would be too divisive to penalize religious congregations.

He didn’t mention it but there’d be a major legal tangle if churches and other non-profit groups that favor gay marriage retain tax exemption, but it is denied to those who dissent. The courts say it’s illicit for government to discriminate this way on the basis of viewpoint or to get entangled in one side of doctrinal disagreements.

Now there’s a new twist. Instead of complaints from liberal politicians, secularist lobbies or cities hungry for revenue (which in the Covid era means all of them), a cover story in the January-February issue of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today said churches should not even want to be tax exempt.

Talk about awkward timing. Only weeks later, COVID-19 slammed everything, churches included.


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Plug-In: This Woodward-and-Bernstein fan's way to strengthen ministries? Investigate them!

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Warren Cole Smith wants to strengthen Christian ministries.

A major way he intends to do that: through investigative journalism.

Smith, 61, has served since October as president of the independent donor advocate MinistryWatch.com.

“Our overarching goal is to create transparency and accountability in the Christian ministry world,” the 1980 University of Georgia journalism graduate told me.

Rusty Leonard, who founded the nonprofit with his wife, Carol, in 1998, serves as board chairman. Leonard reached out to Smith after a donor provided funding for the new position.

Smith’s past experience includes serving as vice president and associate publisher of World, a leading evangelical magazine, and owning a chain of Christian newspapers. He is working on a book titled “Faith-Based Fraud,” which MinistryWatch hopes to publish in August.

His interest in reporting stretches back nearly five decades to the 1970s Watergate scandal uncovered by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

“When we’re doing investigative journalism, there are two audiences that I care most about,” Smith said. “What do donors need to know to make them more effective stewards? And how can we serve the victims?

“There’s an old saying that I use a lot in this kind of work: Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims,” he added. “So we want to be an advocate for the victims, which is why we will not only cover financial abuse, but we will also cover sexual abuse as well.”

See examples of Smith’s recent work here, here and here.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. DNA points to former suspect in 1985 church murders: Here’s a real whodunit with a major break in the 35-year-old case, thanks to digging by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.


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Dawn of the dead: Faith-based colleges face challenges even bigger than coronavirus

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Dawn of the dead: Faith-based colleges face challenges even bigger than coronavirus

Every week or so, John Mark Reynolds does something that presidents of academic institutions rarely do -- he cleans his office at Saint Constantine School.

This isn't a symbolic gesture in an age of ominous trends, and now a global pandemic, that threaten private education. Reynolds always takes his turn -- with other members of his team -- cleaning administration offices at this classical school in Houston.

"We have no administrators who are just administrators. Everyone teaches. Everyone shares many of the jobs that need to get done," said Reynolds, reached at his "sheltering in place" home office. "We have a maintenance team, but we all help out. The first lady and I plan to water some plants later today. …

"We call this the economy of small."

Saint Constantine is a K-16 Orthodox Christian school, which means it offers four years of college credits. College tuition is $9,000 per year.

"Our whole model was created to survive the collapse of liberal arts education, while striving to preserve the core of liberal arts education through an Oxford-style tutorial system," said Reynolds. "This pandemic is only exposing the weaknesses of what was already a business model fraught with peril."

College educators have long known that painful challenges were coming in 2025, due to falling birth rates and the end of high millennial-generation enrollments.

Now, the coronavirus crisis is forcing students and parents to face troubling realities. A study by McKinsey & Company researchers noted: "Hunkering down at home with a laptop … is a world away from the rich on-campus life that existed in February."

What happens next? The study noted: "In the virus-recurrence and pandemic-escalation scenarios, higher-education institutions could see much less predictable yield rates (the percentage of those admitted who attend) if would-be first-year students decide to take a gap year or attend somewhere closer to home (and less costly) because of the expectation of longer-term financial challenges for their families."


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Were some key quotes accurate? Concerning Jerry Falwell's anger at The New York Times

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As long as there is a Donald Trump, then Jerry Falwell, Jr., will be the face of Christian higher education for editors at The New York Times and elite media in the blue-zip-code media in the Northeast.

This is sad, since the coronavirus crisis — along with life after Millennial-era enrollments — is creating a wave of important local, regional and national stories about private education, including Christian higher education. Hold that thought, because tomorrow’s “Crossroads” podcast is dedicated to that topic.

But back to Falwell and the Times.

Faithful readers may remember a recent GetReligion post — “Rank these stories: Falwell rolls dice with virus or potential collapse of some small colleges?” — in which I chided the Great Gray Lady for its familiar Falwell obsessions. Here is how that piece opened:

What we have here are two stories about Christian higher education during the coronavirus crisis.

One is set in a rather remote part of America, but it involves — kind of — Citizen Donald Trump. The other is a national-level story with news hooks that will affect institutions (and thus newsrooms) in several hundred communities spread out from coast to coast.

So which of these two stories is grabbing national headlines, including chunks of time on TV news? That isn’t a very hard question, is it?

The critique included, logically enough, several chunks of the Times report that was so critical of Falwell. The fact that we did that resulted in GetReligion getting a letter from Liberty University threatening legal action.

What an interesting twist: GetReligion paired with the Times by the Falwell team because of material we published in a critique of the Trump-Falwell obsession at the Times. As it turns out, we were not alone, in terms of getting caught in that crossfire.


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How will America's religion marketplace change after coronavirus crisis is behind us?

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This evolving COVID-19 story is something like a combination of two earlier national crises that were incomparably worse — or so we assume and hope.

The public health parallel was the vast influenza pandemic of 1918-19. This scourge infected a third of the world population and killed 50 million people. Some 675,000 of the dead were in the United States, out of a national population of 104.5 million (less than a third of the current number.) As currently, there was no vaccine so the spread could only be fought through social separation, quarantines, and meticulous hygiene.

Then came the epic economic disaster of the Great Depression, beginning in 1929. In the U.S., by 1933 industrial production had declined by an estimated 47 percent and the gross domestic product by 30 percent while 20 percent of the population was unemployed and a fifth of the nation’s banks had failed. Economic weakness wore on through the decade.

The news media have a huge responsibility to report right now on both the raging health dangers and the economic damage caused by The Great Lockdown.

However, “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” will — someday — be mere bad memories and America will be able to fully assess the carnage. And, meanwhile, if there’s anything that should send people down on their knees in prayer it’s COVID-19.

But with few exceptions, Americans can only do this as individuals and families because of the massive halt of worship services. Here’s an arresting thought from political scientist Ryan Burge (a contributor to GetReligion): “This coming weekend may represent the fewest people engaging in corporate worship in the last two millennia.”

David Crary of The Associated Press (a former reporting team colleague of The Guy) has taken an early look at what religion is facing.


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About that rich young Seattle millionaire: Wasn't there some Bible in there somewhere?

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Remember the rich young entrepreneur in Seattle who took a drastic pay cut so that all his employees could make at least $70K and then buy houses and start families and things like that?

Odds are good that you do. Now, do you remember how a ton of media outlets did stories on this guy and nearly all of them somehow never got around to mentioning that this benevolent entrepreneur is an evangelical Christian?

Well the pros at BBC just did an update on the man that was thorough and entertaining. But guess what part of the story the Beeb team barely mentioned?

In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff — and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he's still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off…

Raised in deeply Christian, rural Idaho, Dan Price is upbeat and positive, generous in his praise of others and impeccably polite, but he has become a crusader against inequality in the US.

"People are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of, so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York with gold chairs.

"We're glorifying greed all the time as a society, in our culture. And, you know, the Forbes list is the worst example — 'Bill Gates has passed Jeff Bezos as the richest man.' Who cares!?"

It would help if this BBC reporter looked at a map.

Price attended a Christian high school in Nampa, Idaho, which is right on I-84. It’s right next to Boise and hardly a rural outpost like, say, places like Caldwell, Sandpoint or Stanley.


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Memory eternal: Religion-beat pro Roy Larson escaped stereotypes and became a pioneer

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During the 1981-82, I spent most of my time at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign — taking graduate seminars, teaching reporting labs, writing my weekly column on rock music for the local daily and burying myself in graduate-project research.

The topic of that thesis — a condensed version ended up on the cover of The Quill — was the beleaguered status of religion writing in most American newsrooms. Over and over again, I heard editors give two reasons (in one form of another) for why they avoided covering religion: (1) Religion news was boring and (2) religion news was too controversial.

That’s the ticket. There were just too many boring and controversial religion stories out there.

Then a story broke in The Chicago Sun-Times that had everyone talking. It certainly was controversial, but no one thought that it was boring. The opening was a blockbuster, focusing on the most powerful leader in America’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese:

A federal grand jury in Chicago is investigating whether Cardinal John P. Cody illegally diverted as much as $1 million in tax-exempt church funds to enrich a lifelong friend from St. Louis.” It went on to report: “The grand jury has issued a subpoena for Cody’s personal banking records as well as one seeking financial documents of the Archdiocese of Chicago dating back to the mid-1960’s.

Church officials were not amused. A member of Cody’s legal team said that the “Cardinal is answerable to Rome and to God, not to the Sun-Times.”

The religion writer on that investigative team was Roy Larson, a former Methodist minister who became a newspaper reporter.

On one level, he fit a religion-beat stereotype that was common when I first started considering this line of work: That of the tired liberal Protestant minister who retired from his pulpit to run a newspaper religion-news section. In the case of Larson, the problem with this stereotype is that his skills as a mainstream hard-news journalist were real and immediately obvious.


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Demographics are destiny: How bad could U.S. Protestants’ money woes become?

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THE QUESTION:

Are U.S. Protestant congregations facing a dangerous plunge in income?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

Note the subtitle of this recent book release: “The Coming Revolution in Church Economics: Why Tithes and Offerings Are No Longer Enough and What You Can Do About It” (published by Baker). Will many churchgoers no longer be able to keep the doors of their churches open? How bad will it get?

Authors Mark DeYmaz and Harry Li are evangelicals who lead the Mosaix Global Network based in Little Rock, Ark., which promotes and aids multi-ethnic churches. In addition to the book, they discussed their scenario and solutions in an article for www.christianitytoday.com. Their analysis pertains to Protestant congregations, so this Q & A article will do the same.

When offering-plate proceeds do not cover the budget, the authors advocate leveraging of any available assets, for instance creating profit-making business sidelines, renting facilities, and developing any excess land. The Guy will leave aside those ideas and discuss only the debate over how bad future finances may become.

One lethal financial threat seems to be off the table — for the moment.

During his failed presidential campaign, Democrat “Beto” O’Rourke drew jeers when he advocated ending federal tax exemption for religious congregations if they oppose same-sex marriage. Even gay candidate Pete Buttigieg, among others, said targeting houses of worship went too far — though he does want to deny tax exemption to religious colleges and agencies that hold such traditional belief. DeYmaz and Li also warn that cash-hungry local governments “may someday” demand property taxes.

The authors see four reasons church planners need to worry.


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HBO's 'The New Pope' serves up lots of sinful sizzle, but no substance worth discussing

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There is often a Hollywood fascination with all that’s morbid about religion. This has traditionally included a profane approach when it comes to the Catholic church — dramatizing reality into what can sometimes be an ugly trope.

This is exactly what we get with HBO’s new TV mini-series The New Pope. As is often the case, it’s also easy to see this entertainment as a form of semi-journalistic commentary about the state of the church.

As always, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights spoke up: “We have been tracking what The New York Times and The Washington Post have been saying about the Catholic Church for decades, and it will shock no one to learn that they are not exactly our biggest fans. More proof was offered today with the reviews of the first episode of ‘The New Pope.’ What they said tells us as much about them as it does HBO, another media outlet that likes to stick it to the Church.”

This new series picks up from “The Young Pope,” starring Jude Law as the fictional (and very conservative) Pius XIII, that ran in 2016. That series ended with the young fictional pontiff deep in a coma. The second series, which premiered on January 13, gets even crazier — and more sacrilegious — with the introduction of a new pope, played in over-the-top form by John Malkovich as John Paul III.

The biggest issue with this new mini-series — coming on the heels of the fictionalized Netflix movie “The Two Popes” — is the total lack of respect there is for the church and faith. The Vatican and the men who run it appear to be more into power and greed than saving souls.

The first episode did pack plenty of drama and intrigue, but that ultimately isn’t enough in this case to sustain a meaningful series.


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