Well, God’s money, that is.
It seems that a bunch of ministers have decided risk losing their tax exempt status by endorsing a political candidate in a move they’ve dubbed Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Apparently the idea of church-state separation has been completely lost on these people (not that I’m shocked in the slightest).
Someone will have to challenge this action, of course, or political endorsements by religious organizations will become commonplace – as if they weren’t already, though now only in slightly-less-subtle-than-a-blow-to-the head, “unofficial” ways – and the challengers will of course be painted as evil god-hating pagan atheist devil-worshiping liberals who are waging a war on Christmas and want to outlaw Christianity, but hey, we alleged servants of Satan get that all the time anyway.
The thought of churches losing their tax exempt status over this is a pleasant one, though. Let ’em endorse all they want, but they’ve got to pay taxes. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if many of our financial problems couldn’t be solved by simply dropping those religious tax exemptions altogether. The down side would be of course that many of the charitable services provided by churches – soup kitchens, shelters, etc – might suffer, but there’s certainly no reason that such services couldn’t be moved to secular non-profit organizations that would retain their tax breaks.
I wanted to look into this matter a bit more, but recent, comprehensive statistics on church income seem to be sparse. I did find a report claiming that evangelicals in the US collected approximately 2.66 trillion dollars of income in 2000. That’s a figure that has probably risen since then, and leaves out, one would assume, the Catholic church, thousands of non-evangelical Christians, and organizations of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, as well as all the other groups out there who collect donations in support of mythological figures.
Taxing this income could pay for the entire Iraq war in only a few years, so our children and grandchildren (and so on) don’t have to. It would provide a vast new source of wealth for improving infrastructure, addressing health care costs, improving education, etc – in short, it could be put to much better use in improving the quality of life for all Americans than it currently does. Of course, a few preachers might have to sell their Jaguars.
I’m aware that barring some awesome breakthrough in anti-aging science, there won’t be an America within my lifetime with the political will to even try this. I suppose I could hope that, instead, these organizations could back up their tremendous electoral influence through the pushing of issues and platforms and all-but-open candidate endorsements by actually ponying up some cash to help pay for the actions our elected officials take in their names… but that, of course, would be asking for a bit too much of that personal responsibility stuff that the right-wingers always want everybody else to take.