Churches Are the Conscience of the Nation

Churches have long been a vital part of the conscience of this nation. The Revolutionary War was fomented in the pulpits of the American colonies. Churches complained loudly about the mistreatment of the Indians and Presidents like Lincoln and Grant pressed the disloyal opposition to keep the treaties we agreed to, and to stop slaughtering whole native American villages. Churches drove the abolition movement and church people held together the underground railroad. Churches pressed the WWII government to accept Jewish refugees (which good Democrat FDR resisted). Wilson segregated the military during WWI and it took church-going Harry Truman to desegregate the military in 1946 after black soldiers, sailors and airmen served honorably on the front lines. White and black churches lined up behind Martin Luther King, himself a minister and outspoken political activist, to march for Civil Rights in the 60s against powerful resistance by the Democrat party. 

Today churches are still a powerful voice for the right to life of unborn children which many organizations, politicians and the IRS violently oppose. Such leftist organizations are free shout to the skies about the right of women to kill their unborn children in the womb. In this day and age Christian church organizations (the church triumphant which spans all Christendom) is just about the only unified voice rising in protest. The churches of America provide equal time voices to such tax exempt organizations and yet find their tax exempt status constantly threatened if their moral exhortations conflict with the dominant political narrative.

The Sierra Club, 501(c)5 and partly 501(c)3, and Black Lives Matter a 501(c)3 (same as churches) are both clearly political. Sierra Club does offer tax deductible donation options, but cash donations are fungible and all of its political activities do come under the Sierra Club banner, political or not. Black Lives Matter's website still claims 501(c)3 status despite sponsoring violent political protests and led by avowed communists who use the money to buy themselves mansions.

Pressure on churches to sit down and shut up is growing. A Houston Mayor, a few years ago, demanded that church pastors submit their sermon notes or tapes of the sermon to the mayor's office for review. In Texas that didn't go over so well, but she certainly tried to force churches to testify against themselves in that manner. She threatened area churches with the IRS investigations.

I worked with nonprofits for 40 years and hardly a one did not skirt the no politics rule in one way or another. I know. I taught them how to get their messages to legislatures by being careful how they did it. I worked with coalitions to address a wide variety of community issues - bipartisan coalitions for the most part. I had to teach my progressive brethren to speak Republican and talk them into not chaining themselves to things at the capital. We were practically the only initiative to get what we asked for from the new Republican majority. They were so glad we weren't picketing outside their offices or chaining ourselves to statues of Stephen F. Austin that we found them to be grateful allies.

A pastor here in Washington is in trouble for providing a list of people to vote for to his congregation. It's not the least of his problems. Questions about money and treatment of women makes it look like there are lots of other things for authorities to worry about other than his politics. That's NOT his biggest problem here it appears. So to frame this situation as another example. Concern that the church is meddling in things political seems disingenuous. Liberal churches aren't drawing the same sort of heat these days. Seems if you have a coven meeting in the all purpose room on Thursday nights and an abortion rights group having potlucks in the kitchen, nobody is worried about that.

Had the church folks of my generation remained silent and uninvolved, how far would the Civil Rights Bill got? Southern Democrats took a lot of heat from church folk over how they were treating our black brothers and sisters back then. That heat is why LBJ managed to get enough of them to sign on to the Civil Rights Bill to pass it and he only did that because, as he told fellow Democrats, he thought the party could position itself as the savior and author of Civil Rights in America and "...have those n!@@#%$ voting Democrat for the next 200 years."  He actually said that. Somehow nobody noticed that Johnson didn't have to persuade the Republicans to vote for it.

There's no question that there is a strong conservative lean to Christian churches. Gagging them would be a really effective way to silence the influence of Christianity in the nation's halls of power. That would be a shame. You may not agree that we are a Christian nation, but there's no denying that religious freedom is in the bones of our system of government. We should be careful before we excise that bone in order to get a little peace and quiet while some of us work out our political agendas.  On a Nextdoor discussion thread, someone who was restricted for his political comment said, "I'm a conservative sure, but I don't call people names, lie about them or engage in personal attacks. The people who reported my post cannot say the same. I just present facts and reason."

This may not stay up on Facebook, but I've got several more social media accounts among the dwindling number of conservative friendly social media. Parlor and Realtalk are gone and others are looking feeble. Twitter did come over from the dark side, but even they are facing organized attacks.

If I didn't sufficiently skirt the line of what is now deemed acceptable speech, simply ignore this post and go your merry way. I assure you that I meant no harm to anyone's delicate sensibilities, which I seem to do without intending to. I suspect it will get worse for people like me as the generation whose parents did little to correct them as children and gave them whatever they squealed for rises in influence.

Thank God Jesus is coming. I expect it will happen before the Almighty has to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Just Sayin'

© 2023 by Tom King

Are Churches Stealing 71 Billion a Year from the Government?

The headline reads:  If the Churches Paid Taxes, Everyone Would Only Pay 3% Taxes

First off that's utter horsecrap. There is no "cost to the government from church exemptions. All it means is that the government doesn't take 71 billion dollars of money from people who have already been taxed because they gave money to their churches. Taxing that same money again is not only unfair, but it takes away from the charitable activities that the church already does. It's a propaganda ploy - appealing to personal greed to turn you against churches. The "video" offers no facts, only a clip of a wealthy looking fancy church which is supposed to make you angry. Their reasoning is all based on the idea that the government owns everything and anything they don't take from you is robbing from them.

Let's say the feds gave it all to "feeding the hungry", which they won't do and which by the way is one of the things the churches already do with that money. It won't all go to feeding the hungry. Between 40 and 60% of that money will get eaten up paying for the salaries, supplies, benefits and the buildings in which they have their cubicles for bureaucrats who mismanage the food benefits program and generate useless paperwork for each other; dribbling out what's left to people the government thinks "deserve" to receive food assistance and deny it to them the first time they lift their heads even a little bit above the poverty level.

But, the government reduces your food stamps as you make more money.  That works out to virtually no transition period at all.  They simply reduce your benefits so that you can't afford the added expense of working (travel, clothing, meals at work, etc.). In effect, the benefits reduction keeps you at or near the poverty level until the cut the benefits entirely. So, practically, there is no transition period. Instead, the government programs strategic reductions only serve to extend the time during which you remain at the poverty level.

Talk about glass ceilings!  The gains we made with welfare to work back in the 90s have been virtually done away with in traditional "war on poverty" programs and with Obamacare, the glass ceiling was replaced with an iron one. On in which if you make a little extra some month you go from being on Medicaid to being offered a replacement policy on the Health Care Exchange that costs you more per month than you are making. And if you don't pay it, the IRS was going to make you pay a fine with money you don't actually have.  Of course, they can always take your refund in April. How's that for a hidden tax.  So basically, now if you want to rise above the poverty level, you have to accept that, for a time you will be paying to the government, more money than you make.

Of course this means you don't eat, you don't go to work because you can't afford it, and you can't pay the rent. So, it's better to remain safely below the poverty line where you are dependent on the government. And that, I think is the point. We are creating a dependent voting block that is is being programmed to accept extensive government intervention as the new normal.

Taxing churches will not save the government anything. There is no line item in the budget where the government pays churches to exist. There is only the gleam in the eye of some progressive Democrat looking for votes by creating another expensive government program that grows the size of government, gives it more power and hires more people to work for it.

Taxing is nothing more than a legalized form of systematized robbery from churches, supported by people who hate religion and would like to see religious institutions and people disappear from society. Christianity is the new progressive left's version of the Nazi's evil Jews. You will notice that no one is calling for the World Wildlife Fund, The Sierra Club or Media Matters to be taxed. Why pick on churches?

Because atheists don't like churches and the progressive socialist movement has been, at its heart, an anti-religion movement. They blame religion for all wars for instance, conveniently ignoring that the only time religions have had armies was when they were government religions. Governments wage war. Megalomaniac dictators, kings and emperors wage wars. Not too many pastors wage war, although some did during the American revolution and the Civil War, but that was about patriotism, not religion. One religion that does wage war is Islam, although to be fair, Islam forms a government first before it wages any kind of war other than terrorism.

Anyway, if someone tells you churches are stealing money from the government, ask them if the Red Cross is stealing from the government. How about your local art museums, zoos, your public schools, universities and wildlife rescue organizations?  Are they stealing from the government too.

And how many times is it okay for the government to tax your income? Already they hit you for taxes on your business and then hit you again for taxes on your personal income from the same business and now my "progressive" friends want to take a chunk out of the money that has already been taxed at least twice just because I put it into the collection plate at church.

Here's the video with all its reasons why churches should be taxes. Decide for yourself.

https://www.facebook.com/disclosetv/videos/10155942312185628/
 

Did you notice there were no reasons, other than a visceral reaction to someone having and expensive church building. Taking money from people is not a cost to the government. It's simply letting people keep what is already theirs and do with that money what they want to do. So I'll thank these collectivists to keep their hands out of my wallet and out of the church's offering plates. Be careful my "progressive" friends. Just because they say they are progressive, doesn't mean they are truly moving forward. We are, in fact, reversing course toward a revival of the two class system of the Dark Ages - noble leaders and peasants. The only other class is the soldier class and we know what they are used for. Even way back then, the noble leaders of governments pretty much left the church alone. When the government starts stealing from churches, though, it has truly gone beyond the pale.

And there beyond the pale my friend, lie the dragons in wait for us! And as one wry old philosopher so aptly put it, "Beware for thou are soft and crunchy and taste particularly good flambéed."
© 2017 by Tom king

You might be a Democrat if...

What they don't tell you is that if you tax churches,
you tax church members an extra 1 million
dollars every 7 minutes and 30 seconds beyond
the taxes they already pay. And the church member
has to pay the extra tax, just for believing in something
that progressives don't (God in case you missed that).

THE CRY HAS NOW GONE UP: CHURCHES SHOULD BE TAXED!

So, dear friends, are you saying the government should take 30 to 40% of my tithe and offerings so the government can take over the charitable things that my church does and somehow that's going to work out a lot better for us all?  Not to mention that the government will also use that tax money they take from my tithes and offerings to blow up things, to pay useless bureaucrats exhorbitant salaries to sit in cubicles generating paperwork for each other and interfering with small business, to build roads to nowhere and to imprison people in large numbers.

So you're okay with the church being able to afford 30% fewer pastors and teachers, 30% fewer missions, mission doctors and mission workers, 30% fewer schools and 30% fewer hospitals for the church? 

And that's if the tax rate stays that low. Anyone realize what the tax rate has been under previous Democrat administrations.  Would you believe 70%?  How about 90%.  The tax rate has got that high under the Dems. Is there anybody you believe should give back 90% of what he or she earns by their own efforts?  Does anyone really think that taking that much away from people who create jobs is a good idea?

If you do, you might be a Democrat.

In the interest of equal time, here's ten reason why churches should be taxed.  My favorite is this one:

To exempt churches from taxation unfairly restricts the ability of other social elements that deserve to progress, and thereby goes against what the government was built to do in the first place.

There's an argument that presumes churches don't deserve to progress. He earlier says "Churches don't exist primarily to provide for the citizen; the government does." Anybody else see where we're going. In the typical satanic (yeah I went there) propoganda ploy you lead with an assumption that is false, but which you say is true and then, hoping they'll take your word for it that the first thing is true, you go on to tell the untruth you want them to swallow. In this case, the untruth is that we should give all our money to someone who will take care of us; in fact that someone else gives us our rights and benefits, rather than that we ourselves earn those rights and benefits.  I'd maintain that government exists, not to grant us rights and benefits, but to protect citizens from eternal busybodies who want to always be telling others what to do and restricting our rights and privileges. The whole point of the revolution that created the United States was that we didn't want other people to be meddling in our business all the time.

This ain't how Robin Hood worked.
He actually took from the tax collectors
and gave the money back to the taxpayers.
Obama Hood? Not so much....

The great fallacy in the reasoning that not taxing churches is stealing from taxpayers is that there is an underlying assumption that the government owns all the money and gives it back to us in order to take care of us. It follows under this line of reasoning that, if the government can't take it from churches, then they can't give it to "taxpayers" so that's somehow cheating "taxpayers". If you missed the subtle little problem here, they are calling us tax PAYERS and yet casting the argument as though we were tax "getters". In other words they assume we all agree that government works like this. They TAKE money from you the taxpayer (since the government owned all your money anyway) and leave you a little to muddle by on. Then, the government decides what to do with the money they took from you and they may (or may not) give you some of it back if the government approves of whatever you are doing.  I wrote government grants for more than 20 years. They're very picky about who they give money back to and if they don't like what you are doing, they won't give you any.

Now under the "churches ought to be taxed" scheme, if you are a Christian, for instance, and you give 10-20% of your income to the church and the government TAKES that money through taxation, then you are being effectively charged an indirect luxury tax for the privilege of giving money to your church! You were already taxed once on all the money you kept. Then, you would be taxed on the money you give for God's work also. Now atheists or non-churchy progressives get to keep that 10-20% of their income to use to buy themselves beer and skittles. So, if we're arguing about fairness, I think it's danged unfair that Bob the Progressive gets to not only keep more of his income for his own self-gratification, but that I also have to pay a tax on whatever I do not keep for myself, but give to help my church do its charitable works, thus saving the government money that Bob thinks it needs to spend on said charitable works.

In the real world, Bob the Progressive should not get to tell me whether or not what I freely give to my church is worthwhile or not. He doesn't get to say whether or not my religion is useless and should be taxed. Bob the Progressive is proposing a sort of a luxury tax for people being religious and he's obviously doing it because he doesn't approve of religion and taxing churches he hopes will punish them and decrease their power. King George III would have like to shut up a few American pastors too as I recall.

The right to the free exercise of religion is enshrined in the Constitution. You don't get to meddle with it just so you can save on your own taxes or get yourself some more government goodies. It doesn't work that way.

Check out the 10 reasons churches should be taxed, but only if you've taken your blood pressure meds this morning. It's a rare, honest peek inside the plans of the progressive left for religion in America.  How many false assumptions can you count?

© 2015 by Tom King