The topic of taxing churches comes up semi-regularly now, in both the US and Canada. That feels new to me, like maybe it’s a sign of increased cultural hostility or what some people have taken to calling the “negative world,” where the broader culture is predisposed against Christianity.
But it turns out it’s not new. I went digging around an online collection of historic newspapers and found debates on the topic going back to 1783. In the British House of Commons, Sir Richard Hill said he thought the idea was pretty outrageous, especially when no one was talking about taxing theaters. That was almost exactly the argument I heard when I first reported on this topic in 2020. Except the scholar I spoke to said museums, not theaters.
So my assumption was wrong. The world hasn’t changed as much as I would have guessed, based on my experience and, just, general sense of things. That’s one of the gifts of journalism, history, and digitized newspaper archives: getting corrected. Gently (hopefully!) but corrected nonetheless.
