Codified U.S. Tax Law Applies to Everyone (Unless You're a Right-Wing Religious Zealot)

Extremist authoritarian Christian churches routinely flout the law because they know they can

The portion of the IRS.gov website pertaining to 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations reads as follows:

"Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.”

Churches and other religious organizations fall under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code as specific types of nonprofit entities, yet thousands of evangelical Protestant and right-leaning Catholic Christian churches across the country routinely and flagrantly violate this code with virtually no accountability from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

I have repeatedly filled out IRS Form 13909 to submit a complaint about tax-exempt authoritarian churches in my area who have violated, and continue to violate, federal tax law and submitted the completed forms as instructed to the IRS. Every time I do, I get the same short response months later that essentially reads: “thank you for your form submission . . . under IRS disclosure laws we cannot share with you what actions may or may not be taken regarding your complaint . . .”

From what I am able to ascertain, no corrective or punitive action is taken to address the grievous and endless violations by these churches and religious organizations. One church in particular has continued to host Republican-only candidate events using their facilities and to openly and unequivocally advocate for the election of these Republican candidates to political offices at all levels of government.

How are these churches able to not only engage in activities like I just mentioned above, but to actually instruct people from the pulpit how and for whom to vote in election years? How do they get away with this? Well, Republicans, especially Donald Trump, oversee administrations that know where their bread is buttered and will never act to enforce this law. Democrats, on the other hand, are too afraid of powerful and well-funded legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom to take this fight on, so they pay lip service to upholding the law but do nothing more.

Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash

We often hear about the separation of church and state and a secular government, with people both championing this separation and government secularism and railing against them. The bottom line, though, is that you cannot have a free and even remotely small “d” democratic society without a secular government. You cannot have freedom of religion without freedom from religion.

The founding generation and the founders themselves were a mess of contradictions, which really is just part of the human condition. They were no less enticed by power than anyone (and often more so) and a large number of them worked to establish a slaveholder and landowner’s Republic where egalitarianism was considered anathema and the only rights they were ultimately concerned with were their own and those of others like them.

Even many of these deeply flawed men (deeply flawed at best, scoundrels at their worst) understood the importance of keeping religious and governmental affairs separate, outside of ceremony and the usual pomp and circumstance. Obviously, they lived in an age where religion, Christianity in particular, held enormous influence and had for a millennium or more on Western civilization. As a result, many of them were often insistent on public prayer and having a chaplain for Congress and other sorts of performative piety because that’s just what was done.

That doesn’t mean they embraced Christian theocracy as a whole or even as a majority or plurality. The men who met at Independence Hall in the Summer of 1787 and those who later proposed the Bill of Rights knew they were not establishing a Christian government. There is no mention of the words “god” or “Jesus” anywhere in the seven articles or first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution. There are only two mentions of religion: The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” and Article VI, Section 3, Clause II states “but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

The Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence, is our nation’s founding document. We live, and have lived since constitutional ratification on June 21, 1788, in a secular constitutional democratic-republic. Article VI, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution, what is known as the Supremacy Clause, states “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” State or local law cannot and does not supersede federal law by constitutional decree.

There is no body of law in the United States that takes precedence over or supersedes federal law and federal law in the Internal Revenue Code clearly states that churches and religious organizations, as 501(c)(3) entities, may not engage in partisan political activity. It’s as simple as that. Nothing dating back to that Summer of 1787 in Philly nullifies or contests that fact.

What these religious extremists rely on in order to continue their blatantly unlawful behavior undeterred are extremists just like themselves on the nation’s highest court—namely Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Coney Barrett. They know that these black-robed fiends who are ostensibly tasked with upholding and applying the U.S. Constitution without bias (though in reality wield it for their political agendas and those of their well-funded owners) will permit Christian theocratic deterioration of our systems and institutions of government.

Democrats in Congress and especially in the next Democratic administration in the White House (hopefully a Harris administration) must find the courage to have this fight with SCOTUS. These Dominionist churches, especially those in this heinous New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, must be held accountable under the law. If Democrats do not fight for the rule of law when they enjoy even slight advantages of power, all is lost for both freedom of and from religion in the United States. That’s not hyperbole.