Part 3

The church cannot be heard to claim that it is a public or a quasi-public institution. It exercises no public function of any description which should warrant granting it immunity from the general laws binding on all members of the community. Its mission is to preach something which it calls the gospel. By its own insistent declaration, it derives its authority to teach solely from the being whom it worships as its deity.* It is not in any sense commissioned by the state or by the people, and asks no permission of either to carry out its purposes. Its members are held together by a body of doctrine accepted by them all; and they maintain a form of worship which they count pleasing in the sight of their God. If they are mistaken, it is labor and devotion thrown away; if they are right, they will be individually and collectively rewarded by heaven, either in this life or in some other. All this is strictly their own business and that of their deity. It does not concern the state in any way whatever. The state has no means of knowing whether they are right or wrong, and is not being served in any way by their ceremonials. Its work and theirs do not lie parallel in a single respect. The further function of the church, _as a church_, is simply to seek to convert others to the body of dogma which it puts forward as the message of God to man and the revelation of the divine will. Here, again, the state is in no way concerned, provided the alleged divine will is not an incitement to any form of lawlessness or crime. If the attempt at proselytism fails, the community is in no way affected; and if it succeeds, the state receives no possible benefit, and owes the church nothing for the putting forth of its activities. As God is the only possible beneficiary of the church's efforts, it is for him to pay its taxes*, if it is itself unable to do so. The state is under no moral compulsion to discharge his obligations. If he does not see fit to come to the rescue of his needy representatives, their conclusion must logically be that he expects them to pay their own bills. The church, like every other organized or unorganized group of human beings, receives certain definite and regular services from the state, which cost money to render, and which create a debt just as palpable as the debt to the carpenter who builds the meeting house or the coalman who furnishes fuel to keep it warm. If the church had any adequate conception of common honesty, it would pay its taxes without a whimper and as a matter of course*, just as it pays its gas bills or settles any of its accounts with individuals. It does not inform its private creditors that it should be exempt from payment for services rendered, just because it is a religious body; and it would be given small shrift by any court, should it attempt to evade such claims on such a ground. As little has it a moral right to take from the public without returning an equivalent in material remuneration.

* Even by a miracle if necessary. It is recorded that when Jesus was called upon to pay taxes in Capernaum (Matt, xvii) he made no argument for exemption, but straightway dispatched his disciple Peter after the didrachma, with which, it is assumed, the debt to the community was discharged.

THE NO-PROFIT SOPHISTRY.

A weak attempt to justify church graft consists in the affirmation that it is engaged in purely altruistic labors, and is not a profitmaking institution. It is not engaged in any openly commercial undertaking. Salvation is free, and all are welcome to its inestimable blessings. The sophistry and lack of ingenuousness which make it possible to present such an argument with a straight face can scarcely be characterized in parliamentary language. It fairly reeks with self-evident fallacies. First of all, if the church chooses to run its affairs on a non-profit basis, that is strictly its own business, and does not concern the state in any way. If it has no property, it escapes taxation as a matter of course, like the individual who has nothing. But if it is able to own property, it immediately incurs a specific obligation to the state, which is totally independent of the use it makes of its property. The man who retires from business, and lives on his income, is not thenceforward exempted from all taxation, because he is no longer making money. Nor does it serve as an excuse that he is making no profitable investments, but is using up his bare capital, and is spending his time and part of his means in philanthropic work. In spite of all this, he is a member of society, and must meet his obligations as such, whenever the tax collector comes around. The same is true of an organization. The church takes up just as much space, receives as much social protection and as much benefit from every civic improvement, whether it is making money or not. The state does not forbid it to make money or to engage in commercial enterprises; and its failure to do so is purely voluntary, and is entirely irrelevant to the discharge of its pecuniary obligation to organized society. Its privileges may be free; but what does that mean to those who count them as worthless? It is a cheap evasion of responsibility to offer in lieu of the specific payment of a debt, to render the creditor some form of alleged service for which he has no possible use, and which means nothing whatever to him. This remains true, even if the unbeliever is under the spell of error, and ought to appreciate the blessings of religious counsel. The dance may be one of the most beautiful forms of art; but if Vernon Castle offered to discharge a monetary obligation to a blind creditor by the execution of the most wonderful Terpsichorean evolutions in his presence, there would be no payment of the debt, even though the artistic performance might be intrinsically worth far more than the sum owed, and would be readily so appraised by all who had their eyes. No matter how valuable religious exercises may be in themselves, nor how much satisfaction they may give those who believe in them, the civil rights of the unbeliever remain on a par with those of the believer; and it remains true that the offer by the church of un-desired services can in no way constitute an obligation. Let the church be supported by those who accept its offer, and who desire to profit by its privileges, such as they are. This remains no affair of other persons, or of the state. The benefits of religion are subjective and strictly personal; and the state is in no way qualified to pass on their value. To say that non-churchmen should help pay the expenses of the church because they can become churchmen if they wish to do so, is to say that a debt can be contracted without a consideration.

* Not that the church always regards the payment of its private debt as "a matter of course." The Rev. Dr. Huntington of Grace Episcopal Church, New York city, and William R. Stewart, one of the church wardens, in 1908 asked an architect, J. Stewart Barney by name, to prepare plans for extensive and expensive alterations in the church building. The architect did the work in good faith and to the full satisfaction of the church, but was deliberately cheated out of his pay on the pretext that, though the church wanted the work done, knew and approved of its being done, received and was fully pleased with the benefits of it, yet it had not technically authorized its pastor and warden to give the order! Grace church is one of the wealthiest religious bodies in New York. Such is Christian honor and morality, the exalted character of which is supposed to lay the community under a burden of gratitude toward the church!

THE CHURCH'S COMMERCIAL ASPECTS.

It is not strictly true, however, that the church is in no sense a profit-making institution, or that it has no commercial aspects. If the church were not successful in a business sense, it could not accumulate property or capital, and would not have to worry about exemption. There are more ways of making profits than by straight buying and selling. An organization which is able to play on the hopes and fears, the superstitions and sentiments, the beliefs and enthusiasms of its members and of those who come under its spell, and thereby to secure the means of buying land, erecting buildings and paying v current expenses, cannot honestly pretend to be a purely benevolent society. Let its teachings be true or false, good or bad, the principle is precisely the same. It receives money from individuals, who believe that they receive, in spiritual, to some extent in intellectual and esthetic and even in physical values, an adequate return for what they pay. This is a plain business proposition, whether the value is really there or not. The fact that no definite price is fixed for the services, but that payment is at least nominally voluntary, is wholly irrelevant. A restaurant conducted on the liberal plan of "eat what you like, and pay what you think it is worth," would be no less a business enterprise, and its property taxable as such. As a matter of fact, business men in some lines have actually been known to follow a similar plan. How successful the church has been in this regard may be seen by the enormous wealth which various church corporations have acquired, always under the claim of being non-profit-making institutions. Trinity Church corporation of New York owns hundreds of houses, and pays taxes on some $15,-000,000 worth of property, which it cannot deny that it uses for purely commercial purposes, besides its immense holdings of valuable land and buildings claimed to be used by it only for worship and hence exempt from taxation, amounting to approximately an equal value. Where did Trinity church, which keeps up the sham of representing the faith of the poor Nazarene reformer, who "had not where to lay his head," and who lived mainly by hand-to-mouth charity, get the means of purchasing some $30,000,000 worth of property, if it is a purely non-profit-making institution, which has honestly followed its alleged master's express injunction to "take no thought for the morrow," and to "lay not up treasure on earth"? Exemption on that part of its property used "exclusively for worship," by setting free a large proportion of the moneys accruing to it from its members and benefactors, which would otherwise have been used in paying its debt to the community, enabled it to use its surplus in investments which were of a directly commercial nature. One hand washes the other, and the state is the dupe of the pious legerdemain.

A STRICTLY CASH BUSINESS.

Even the religious and ceremonial features of the church are not free from commercialism. The Romain Catholic church represents the extreme example of the money-making aspect of religion. Its audacity in pretending to deserve consideration as an organization devoted purely to worship, and in no sense to profit, is beyond the power of words to characterize as it deserves. The dupe of papistry pays, in good, hard, current coin, for all that he gets, and for a great deal more than the actual value that he receives. For the pious and credulous Catholic, life is one long litany of "pay, pay, pay," wherever the priest and the church are concerned. The shouting Methodist may be satisfied to yell that "salvation is free," and to take a chance on the collection as a means of defraying the high cost of delivery on the "free" article; but the Roman Catholic priest knows a better trick. It is strictly a cash business with him. The Catholic believer must pay his little ten cents every Sunday for the "privilege" of sitting on a hard bench, and listening to a ceremony very little of which is intelligible to him. In order to catch him in all the relations of life, and to entangle him in a network from which there is not even a momentary escape, the astute hierarchy has devised a series of no less than seven sacraments. So cleverly is the scheme arranged for the trapping of credulous flies that a consistent Catholic can take scarcely an important step in life without incidentally paying tribute in some form to the church, the most monumental beggar history has known. Every real or pretended service of the church has its price, and no evasion is tolerated. The confessional and the system of penance are finely constructed to wheedle or frighten more money out of the ignorant and susceptible. The greedy priest hovers about the sickbed, ready to take any possible advantage of human weakness. The patient or his relatives may be reduced to a sufficient state of imbecility to seek the aid of the church's pretended miracle system or of some of its holy relics. If recovery seems hopeless, there is always the pleasing possibility of coaxing or bulldozing the half dead and mentally decayed victim to make a will in favor of the church, no matter what cruel and unjust deprivations are thereby imposed on helpless dependents. What would be baseness in any other human being, becomes transmuted into the most exalted virtue on the part of the priest; and any graft is permissible and commendable, from the Romish viewpoint, if the church is the beneficiary. An immense traffic is carried on in all sorts of "consecrated" objects for the greatest variety of purposes. Even at death, the church does not relax its hold, but has concocted the preposterous fable of purgatory, in order to keep its foolish dupes continually paying out money for which nothing whatever is given in return. Then there are all sorts of indulgences and dispensations for those able and willing to pay for them, besides the practical coercion by which, under the guise of voluntary beneficence, the slave of superstition is continually mulcted for various alleged needs of the church.

FREE-WILL OFFERINGS NOT ALWAYS VOLUNTARY.

The Protestant churches adopt a different method, not quite so successful in dragging the hard-earned dimes out of the worn purse of the poor washerwoman or in stealing the coppers off the eyes of the corpse, but reasonably efficacious. They, too, to at least some extent make merchandise out of "the house of the Lord." The pew rent system is as plain a business affair as the buying of seats in a theatre. The collection is the most important item in almost every Protestant religious service. It is nominally voluntary, but there are numerous ways of inflicting acute mental discomfort on those who do not come up liberally "to the help of the Lord." By skillfully playing on the emotions of the congregation, and if possible inducing in them a state of hysteria, an astute moneyseeker like Simpson of the Christian Alliance or Billy Sunday of the "gutter gospel" can induce a scared, madly excited, hypnotized crowd to help the Lord to the extent of thousands of dollars, none of which can be recovered by the victims on the next day, when they have become sobered and ashamed of their fit of spiritual intoxication. And the church has the phenomenal impudence to boast that the money thus tricked out of persons reduced to a frenzy in which they did not know what they were doing was "voluntarily" donated! Large funds are also secured by this "non-commercial institution" through church fairs, grab bags, special entertainments and other devices which are held to be decidedly commercial when carried on by worldly people, but which become mysteriously sanctified when conducted for the benefit of the church.

The claim that the church, as a non-commercial institution, is entitled to the kind chaperonage of the state in the shape of exemption from the obligation of paying its honest debts, besides being bad and invalid in itself, has not even the poor merit of resting on a basis of fact. Moreover, since there are plenty of other noncommercial institutions, which pay taxes like any other concern, no reason is given why the church should be the one special pet. Social and recreative institutions are not conducted for profit, nor are Socialistic or Anarchistic groups, the property of which is not exempt from taxation. All of these, like the church, meet the desires or gratify the tastes of individuals, and are of the greatest subjective value to those to whom they appeal, while worthless to everybody else, and in no way connected with the legitimate functions of society in its collective aspect. Hence none of them can justly make the slightest claim to be exempted from the duty of "rendering to Cæsar that which is Cæsar's."

TOWARD THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH.

Exemption of church property from taxation is a deliberate invitation to the concentration of wealth, in opposition to its equitable distribution.

While social reformers are straining every nerve to devise and apply effective methods for the breaking down of monopoly, the policy of favoritism toward ecclesiastical bodies is building up the evil in its most aggravated form. If the churches really regarded themselves as simply trustees of the resources placed in their hands by private benevolence and state favor, and spent all or practically all that they received for the benefit of humanity, some defense, though even then an insufficient one, might be made of the practice of tax exemption. The tendency, however, is wholly in the reverse direction. The more the churches receive, the more property they accumulate, heedless of the stern warning of Isaiah, the iconoclastic Hebrew reformer, who, according to tradition, was sawn asunder for offending the priests and the king by the heretical doctrine that Jehovah "would have mercy and not sacrifice" and preferred social justice to religious ceremonialism. "Woe," cried the prophet, "unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land!"

It needs no expert knowledge of political economy to comprehend how readily untaxed property can be made to multiply. Sharing all the social advantages, and bearing none of the social burden, its owners can bide their time through all the tips and downs of the market, sure to gain in the end.

All things come to him who is in a position to wait longest. While the possessions of others are automatically limited by the effective lien placed on them by the taxing power, the churches can placidly increase their holdings to their hearts' content. In the long run, they can outbid competitors, who must add the cost of annual taxation to the original payment for the property acquired. Safe in the evasion of their civic duties, they have nothing to do but to grow richer and richer. Paying no taxes, they become independent of the state, an _imperium in imperio_, a power rivaling that of organized society itself.

WEALTHY CHURCHES, IMPOVERISHED PEOPLE.

No class in the community can grow steadily richer without causing other classes to grow relatively poorer. The two tendencies are halves of the same process. If a larger and larger percentage of the land falls into the possession of a given institution, it is mathematically demonstrable that a greater number of individuals must remain landless and homeless, and that the cost of access to the remaining land in the community must become greater and greater, making it harder and harder for the common citizen to live. Untaxed property in any community adds heavily to the common burden.

That this is not mere speculation may be seen by a glance at history, where it will be found in land after land, and in century after century, that favoritism to the church, wherever tolerated, has wrought incalculable evil to the people, largely through the heavy accumulation of wealth by the ecclesiastical body. So unendurable has the condition become that in country after country the only possible relief was found to be through wholesale confiscation, thus settling accounts at one stroke. Thus, Henry VIII of England became a reformer in spite of himself, and though personally a dishonest tyrant with few if any redeeming features, at least conferred a lasting blessing on the people of England by forcing the church parasites to disgorge enormous values which had become means of the most intolerable oppression. France and Portugal, though for centuries staunch Catholic countries, found the wealth of the church and the impoverishment of the people to go regularly hand in hand, and were finally forced, in decreeing the separation of church and state, to adopt stringent measures for breaking the monopolistic power of the hierarchy. The Philippine insurrection against Spain was largely an uprising of an outraged people against the priests and friars, who were coming to own everything, and to reduce the population to a state of vassalage. The part played by the priesthood of Mexico in the impoverishment of the people, while the church revenues waxed greater and greater, is familiar to all who are acquainted with the causes which have brought that unhappy land to a state of chaos and wholesale bloodshed.

SOME RESULTS OF THE SYSTEM.

Like tendencies are to be observed as a result of exemption of church property from taxation, wherever the false principle is in vogue, the only variance being one of degree. In Montreal, for instance, we have a striking example of the effect of wholesale exemptions. In 1913, when the evil had reached its height, and relief was imperatively demanded, the church had already come to own no less than one-fourth of the real estate in the community. This was simply the logical outcome of favoring this class of landholders at the expense of all others. The Montreal provisions were unusually lax, thus hastening the inevitable result; but they did not differ in principle from those of the American states which favor monopoly by leaving church property untaxed. The case of Trinity Church of New York city, already cited, with an accumulation of about $30,000,000 in property, is ominous of the fearful possibilities of an indefinite continuance of the policy of permitting one group of citizens to prey upon all the rest. The one missionary society named for St. Paul the Apostle, in the same city, owns not less than fifteen lots of land, appraised at various amounts from $2500 to $11,000 each, and is still adding to its accumulations. It would be hard to conceive of a more unwholesome state of affairs; and the process continues with unabated celerity. The peril against which England found it necessary to provide in the Statute of Mortmain is a very present one. If church property is to be permanently exempted from taxation, it is not difficult to see how an enormous percentage of all the property of the community may ultimately come to be tied up in the hands of these wealthy ecclesiastical corporations which have already made so substantial a beginning in this direction. We are jeopardizing the rights and liberties of future generations.