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.

If you have been on Planet Earth in recent months, and have the slightest interest in (a) religion, (b) politics or (c) both, then you know that the rise of Citizen Donald Trump has raised lots of questions about religion, politics and exit polls.

To be specific, the press has been obsessed with the idea that evangelical Protestants have fallen in love with Trump.

Sure enough, some evangelicals are quite fond of Trump, especially those who -- in the words of historian Paul Matzko of Pennsylvania State University -- are "cultural" evangelicals, as opposed to folks who frequent church pews once or more a week. You may want to check out this academic paper by Matzko: "What Evangelical Support for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump Suggests About the Future of American Evangelicalism."

But forget Trump for a moment. The most interesting concepts in Matzko's paper concern the fault line between evangelicals who backed Rubio and those who support Cruz. Here is a chunk of my "On Religion" column from this week:

"... White collar" evangelical elites have appeared to favor Rubio while "evangelical workers" may appreciate Cruz's hard-line stance on illegal immigration.

However, Matzko believes a deeper, more complex split is emerging, one rooted in history.

On one side, he wrote, are "18th Century evangelicals -- a "persecuted religious minority" in American culture that yearned for the "liberty to practice their faith free from State interference. To that end, they allied with freethinkers like Thomas Jefferson. … They had little interest in fomenting sweeping social change, in using State power to make America more pious, holy or Christian. They asked only for the freedom to be left alone."

On the other side, Matzko argued, are "19th Century evangelicals" who, by the end of that century, had begun to gain cultural influence and political power. This would eventually lead to talk of a "Moral Majority."