Tophat665

I'm split on this.

Let's first lay aside the relative merits of the good and the bad done by the Catholic church and Islam in general, and the absurdity that is Scientology and focus on the principle: Should religious organizations be taxed.

On the one hand, these are charitable organizations that, ideally, profit only insofar as is necessary to administer and market their humanitarian message. That looks suspect to me when I write it out that way, since the humanitarian aims of the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and any other religious establishments (hereafter "churches") are at the best only part of their message and are at worst merely marketing. Would it be too much then to suggest that the charitable arm of a church should be separately incorporated as a legal, secular non-profit institution and that funding transferred from the church to that charitable arm is beyond question exempt from taxation? To my mind, that is the fair way to do this, and the church itself should be taxed on the remainder, the property as well as the non-charitable income.

The idea of tax-exemption for churches does not grow from any high minded endorsement of their humanitarian efforts, but from the medieval reality that the Catholic church was at one time one of the Two biggest players in any state: a parallell power to the king. As such, it was a shadow government and exempt from taxation as a matter of politics, not ideaology.

So I guess I have to come down on the side of taxation. Now, here is the compromise I would be willing to make: Recognizing that, even with the most generous outlook, some portion of the humanitarian/charitable activity of any church is intended as self-aggrandizement - PR and marketing and prosletyzation - it seems unreasonable to me to require that the legally separate charitable non-profit institution allied with that church not discriminate in their hiring against applicants who are not church members. However, recognizing that church sponsored charity is marketing as well a mercy, government grants to these charities should be at the very least competed with other charities, and most likely altogether banned. A middle ground here would be to allow the government to set aside some minority portion of social welfare funding that may be distributed to church charities if and only if they compete for these grants with the charities of significantly different churches - so Catholic Services would have to compete with, f'rinstance, Jewish and/or Muslim groups to gain any part of this grant funding, and if there were no competetive charities of other religions, then the grant would only be available to secular charities.

Edited for brevity, clarity, and incompetant grammer and typing.

__________________
Light a man a fire, and he will be warm while it burns.
Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.