Christian History Home > 2002 > Of Church, State, and Taxes
Of Church, State, and Taxes
If you want to know what the establishment of religion looks like, check out church history, not American tax law.
Elesha Coffman | posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM
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The American colonies largely adapted European church-state systems. Calvinist Puritans in the Northeast founded a Geneva-esque theocracy. Virginia Anglicans divided their colony into parishes and gave a group of church officials in each parish the right to levy taxes. Roman Catholics in Maryland established their own parish system. Other than tiny populations of Baptists, Quakers, and Anabaptists, everyone believed that religious institutions deserved some kind of privileges. As the colonies banded together, though, which institutions deserved what privileges became the sticking point.
The Constitution solved this problem by abolishing European-style church establishment, but it hardly ended the accordance of benefits to churches, particularly in the area of taxation. Virginia exempted churches from paying property taxes in 1777, followed by New York in 1799 and the city of Washington in 1802. The Seventh Congress also passed a property tax exemption in 1802. Nobody viewed these laws as contravention of the establishment clause—which, after all, states that "Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. European rulers had used taxes to prohibit the free exercise of religion before, and Americans didn't want it to happen here. (Instead, America limits the free exercise of religion with zoning regulations, privacy law, education policy, restrictions on government grants … but that's a different story.)
Property tax exemptions for parsonages are currently in force in all 50 states. Due to concerns about the Warren case, the exemptions have been reaffirmed unanimously by both houses of Congress as well. Apparently, treating churches more like schools than like factories still makes sense to lawmakers. What makes no sense is the connection critics wish to draw between subsidized housing for pastors and the medieval or early modern parish system—the only form of establishment the framers of the Constitution knew well enough to try to avoid.
Links:
Parsonage in Peril
Taxing Church Property
Colonial Taxes in Virginia
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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