Exempting the Churches Part 1

Exempting the Churches.

by James F. Morton. Jr.

EXEMPTING THE CHURCHES

An Argument for the Abolition of This Unjust and Unconst.i.tutional Practice

By James F. Morton. Jr.

"No person shall be required to support any ministry or place of worship against his consent"--The accepted American principle.

"To relieve the property of a church from taxation is to appropriate money, to the extent of that tax, for the support of that church....

To exempt the church from taxation is to pay a part of the priest's salary."--Ingersoll.

1916.

EXEMPTING THE CHURCHES

AN ARGUMENT FOR THE ABOLITION OF THIS UNJUST AND UNCONSt.i.tUTIONAL PRACTICE.

The history of the democratic spirit, from its first inception to the present day, is that of a ceaseless struggle with special privilege. The principle of caste, in its numerous manifestations, is constantly at war with the right's of man. After centuries of incessant conflict, the advance of democracy is beyond all question; and its ultimate triumph can be denied only by those who hold that progress is destined to cease and civilization to decay. It has become evident that what is democratic is good and beneficial to mankind, that what is undemocratic is evil and harmful to the human race. Kings, kaisers, emperors, czars, hereditary aristocracies and oligarchies of every kind, however necessary or useful factors they may have been in certain early stages of the transition from barbarism to civilization, are now recognizable as drags on the chariot wheel of progress. The world has begun to rid itself of all these anachronisms; and the day of their entire and permanent disappearance can now be foreseen in the not extremely distant future.

Complete autocracies have practically ceased to exist. Monarchy by divine right is recognized for the monstrous lie which it always was; and the few atavistic survivals who continue to mouth that once revered phrase are abhorred, pitied or despised by all sane men and women. Mixed governments are the general rule, since the old and exploded fallacies of personal government yield unwillingly to the march of progress and justice; but in each case the authority is slowly but surely pa.s.sing more and more into the hands of the people; and the hereditary rulers are becoming mere figureheads or subsidiary agents of popular government, pending their final disappearance. In our own and a few other lands, we are happily rid of them long since, and we wish the same good fortune at an early date to the rest of the nations. The reactionaries of the different countries vainly declare that democratic triumph is a sign of degeneracy. On the contrary, where democracy flourishes, all forms of progress are found to thrive best. Each new step in the direction of human liberty has been bitterly opposed by the worshipers of the past. They have poured forth eloquent jeremiads, and vehemently predicted the collapse of society and the deterioration of the race, whenever religious liberty, freedom of the press or of speech and a.s.sembly, a republican form of government, the abolition of hereditary office and t.i.tles of n.o.bility, the overthrow of slavery or any other great forward step was proposed; and in every single instance the result of the increase of liberty proved so beneficial to the human race as to give the lie most unequivocally to the false prophets of evil. Never has autocracy been proved to be superior to democracy in any single particular of a fundamental nature.

THE MEANING OF THE PRINCIPLE.

Reading the future in the light of the past, we may safely maintain that a fuller application of the democratic principle in our own republic can be fraught with nothing but blessings to our people. Democracy does not mean merely the election of officials by popular franchise, nor is it synonymous with unlimited majority rule. Starting from the premise of the equal rights of all men and women, it necessarily signifies the paramount importance of the individual, and next to the individual, the rights of the collective community. It must protect the individual to the fullest possible extent in his "inalienable rights" of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It is only when he alleges the pursuit of these rights as a pretext for meddling with the equally fundamental rights of his fellows that the community, as the representative of the total rights of all its members, finds warrant for interference, and for restraining the invader. There can be no question as to this general principle. The difficulties in application arise only from the facts that the relative rights of individuals are not mathematically determinable and that human judgment is not infallible.

Lawmaking is an attempt, more or less successful, to reach a workable approximation of absolute justice, based on the general democratic principle.

The ant.i.thesis of democracy is special privilege. This is the extension of certain powers to one or more individuals, at the expense of one or more other individuals, without proper compensation and in violation of equal justice. Whatever interferes with equality of initial opportunity falls under this head. Democracy abhors all forms of favoritism. There is no injustice in unequal remuneration for differing degrees of social service; but there is grave wrong in rewarding equal services unequally or unequal services equally. All theories of social reform are based on a more or less clear realization of this truth, and on the supposition, whether correct or incorrect, that conditions exist at present which confer undue advantage on a favored cla.s.s or on favored cla.s.ses.

PRECEDENCE OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

What is true of material advantage is equally true of prerogatives of every description. The state cannot legitimately restrict any form of personal liberty, unless its indulgence involves some definite injury to the liberties of others, and that so great as to overbalance the interests of individuals in maintaining the liberty in question. Where there is a reasonable doubt, democracy demands that it be resolved in favor of the individual. Mere majorities cannot decide the issue.

Redheaded men and women form a very small percentage of the population; but the overwhelming majority of others have no right whatever, under the democratic principle, to decree that this small group shall be exterminated, or even that it shall be subject to a special tax or to any other burdensome restraint not applied to all the people. Freedom of the press is a vital democratic principle, which becomes absolutely worthless, unless it be recognized as a right of even the smallest minority, no less than of the largest majority. The humblest citizen is ent.i.tled to trial by jury and the use of the writ of habeas corpus, although his enemies and accusers const.i.tute the great ma.s.s of the people. Majority tyranny is in no sense genuine democracy, but is a wretched counterfeit. As a practical necessity, the majority must be held to govern in all matters of strictly collective concern; but it has no right to meddle with that which is strictly of a private nature.

The absolute and perpetual separation of church and state is among the most imperative requirements of the democratic principle. Nothing can be so essentially the private concern of the individual as his personal beliefs on subjects of abstract speculation. Here, of all places, the state cannot intrude without rendering itself guilty of the foulest conceivable crime against its citizens. Religious conviction can never be a collective matter. Only if all the brains in a group of persons could be fused into one, would it be possible for such group to hold an opinion of its own. Each of ten men may accept the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church; but the moment an eleventh man, who is of another way of thinking, joins the group, it can no longer be said that the group believes in the tenets of Catholicism. A majority of the individuals composing the group so believe; but there is no one mind thinking for all. Apparent exceptions exist only in the case of mobs, in which the free play of individuality is temporarily suspended, the members of the crowd being hypnotized and maddened out of the capacity for intelligent thought or action by some influence which has been brought to bear on them. This is not a collective mind, but the temporary surrender of a group of individuals to an overpowering and irrational impulse. The mob spirit is at the opposite pole from the spirit of democracy.

OPINION NOT SUBJECT TO MAJORITY RULE.

Not only can a group or a nation not hold a collective religious opinion, but no majority in it, however great, can change the opinion of a single individual by any form of coercion. It may suppress the outward manifestation of opinion, and may indirectly present considerations to the mind of the individual which will lead him ultimately to recast his views in some respects; but it cannot directly command the humblest or most docile of its members to change his mode of thinking on the instant. The pretense of uniformity of faith in a people must, therefore, be the sheerest humbug. Could belief be collective, and made to continue so, there would be some pretext for the advocacy of a state church. Since, however, there is no way of making every individual an organic part of a believing whole, a real state church is an unqualified impossibility. A dominant party or number of individuals may by sheer brute force compel the rest of the community to pay lip-service to a formal organization labeled a state church; but the total amount of belief in the dogmas of such an inst.i.tution will not be increased in the slightest degree by the false label which seeks to represent it as an expression of community-belief. A state church cannot become a centre for collective worship, since no such thing is possible; it can only bring together for joint outward expression of worship a ma.s.s of individuals, the real believers among whom will engage in actual worship, while others, under persuasion or coercion, will go through certain mechanical forms of no value to themselves or to others, in simulation of the reverence which they do not feel, and without which their partic.i.p.ation in the external rites of religion is meaningless.

UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE--ITS ORIGIN.

History joins forces with reason in proving that union of church and state is an intolerable evil. The state religions of antiquity were either the agents of political despotism, or themselves, as in Egypt, formed a special despotism under which both rulers and people were crushed to the earth. Since the advent of Christianity, the rule of the church has never failed to bring disaster. The beginning of the calamity is traceable to the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine, sometimes misnamed "The Great." Of many bad emperors, this man stands out conspicuously among the worst. Usurper, liar, perjurer, thief, murderer, and villain in many other regards, he adopted Christianity as a state religion from motives of an unusually crafty policy. So little did his newly professed faith influence his underlying character, that his crimes of the blackest type continued unabated after his professed conversion. He did not even respect the foundation principles of Christianity sufficiently to become baptized until he lay on his deathbed, when his grossly superst.i.tious mind deluded itself with the fantasy that a few drops of water and a few mumbled incantations would have the magical effect of atoning for a lifetime of infamy, and would carry him straightway into a region of eternal gratification of every desire. During Constantine's reign, organized Christianity began by dividing official honors with the more ancient Roman religion, and ended by usurping the entire authority, and by persecuting those who still clung to the faith of their fathers. Later emperors carried the process still further, ostentatious piety and unbounded corruption going hand in hand, until Rome became a synonym of utter rottenness, and fell an easy prey to the barbarian hordes which poured down from northern Europe.

With the union of church and state under Constantine began a period of mental and moral stagnation, which continued for about ten centuries.

It was an anti-millennium, a thousand years of distinctively Christian rule, productive of every conceivable evil, with scarcely a redeeming feature. So black a night settled down on the human race that by common consent the epoch is appropriately known as that of the "Dark Ages."

The church was sole master, and independence of thought was visited with torture and death. Persecution, ma.s.sacre, religious wars without end, and extermination of whole populations and the merciless slaughter of the n.o.blest of the race were its characteristics. Rome, the alleged "holy city," the centre of church power, was a pestilential swamp of vice and crime beyond the ability of words to describe. Not a ray of hope appeared in the blackness until the raising of voices against the extreme control of the church. The human mind refused to remain forever in fetters, and the rising movements of humanism and the renaissance witnessed the beginnings of the great revolt. The Protestant Reformation, an attempt to purify Christianity from within, succeeded in rending the church asunder, but failed to redeem it from the worst of its inherent evils. Its leaders loved religious liberty as little as did their Catholic rivals. Calvinism proved to be as ready to murder in the name of G.o.d as ever Romanism has been. Persecution of heretics, witch-hunting and the oppression of the whole people for the profit of ecclesiasticism went merrily on in all lands. The gradual fading out of these horrors has been brought about step by step by no other agency than by the gradual emanc.i.p.ation of the state from the clutches of the church.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY THE TEST OF PROGRESS.

Looking around the world today, it is easy to measure the progress of the different peoples by the degree in which they have attained religious liberty. The strictly Catholic countries, where least light has penetrated, and where the right of the church to control the lawmaking power and to dominate public education has been longest recognized, are precisely those most backward in all the essentials of civilization; and in each of these lands, any uprising of the people on behalf of liberty and progress is invariably accompanied by an open war against the special privileges of the church. Thus France and Portugal have found it impossible to win and hold their fundamental liberties except by shaking off the ecclesiastical yoke; and in these lands the clerical element is foremost in the evil work of plotting the restoration of the monarchy and the annihilation of the rights of man.

In Mexico, the priesthood has been fully recognized as the most deadly enemy of the people. In Spain, the founder of secular education, Francisco Ferrer, was brutally murdered at the behest of the clerics; and their a.s.sociates in this and every land have not ceased to spread abroad lies that are intended to blacken his memory and to excuse his a.s.sa.s.sins. The anti-clerical and republican movements in Spain and Italy go hand in hand.

The United States of America started right in theory, although it has not been always firm and loyal to the democratic principle. Observing the evils of a state church, as they had existed in Europe and in the American colonies, our forefathers wisely incorporated into the federal Const.i.tution strong provisions intended to save our land from religious tyranny. By this fundamental doc.u.ment, the right of political organization is expressly derived from the people, and not from any supposed divine sanction. No recognition of any religious doctrine appears anywhere in the instrument. To make perfectly clear the democratic purpose of the Const.i.tution, a bill of rights, consisting of eleven amendments, was added as a condition of the ratification of the instrument by the original states. To the eternal honor of the framers of this bill of rights, the first words of its first article are: "_Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof_." The Const.i.tution itself contains the no less highly significant clause: "_No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States_."

The various state const.i.tutions, while not so thoroughly and consistently secularistic as the fundamental doc.u.ment of the nation, in practically every instance contain a general provision guaranteeing religious liberty. The legislatures and courts have often enough betrayed their trust, and have imposed on the people of the respective states measures of the grossest unconst.i.tutionality and of the most shocking disregard of private right in this regard. Rarely, however, is warrant to be found in a state const.i.tution for legislation looking toward the patronage of any form of religion by the state. The numerous existing encroachments on our liberties are as unlawful as they are immoral.

* For a fuller discussion of the principles of Secularism (the democratic doctrine of absolute separation of church and state) and of improper religious legislation in this country, see "The American Secular Union" (J. F. Morton, Jr., 5 cents), "Christian Sabbath" (J. E. Remsburg, 3 cents), "Congress and Sunday Laws" (3 cents), "The Fourth Demand" (Woolsey Teller, 10 cents). All for tale by The Truth Seeker Co.

THE PEOPLE GREATER THAN ANY CONSt.i.tUTION.

Even were the facts otherwise, democracy is greater than any const.i.tution; and its vital principles would remain valid. From a democratic point of view, the state has no right to impose any religious observance on a single individual, nor to limit any of his actions in accordance with the doctrines of any religion; it has no right to appropriate a single cent of public money for any religious purpose, nor to cast its moral influence for or against any religion or religious sect. Its plain duty toward all forms of opinion concerning religion is to maintain a perfect neutrality, and to treat all citizens on a plane of absolute equality in this respect. The state is officially neither Christian nor anti-Christian. It is simply an organization of individuals for mutual protection and for the more effective forwarding of their strictly collective aims and interests, which are exclusively secular. The moment it pa.s.ses beyond these boundaries, its actions become _ultra vires_ and tyrannical.

As already shown, nothing can be more completely and essentially a private matter than religion. Where the beliefs, words or acts of an individual do not affect the equal rights of any of his fellows, singly or collectively, the state can under no legitimate pretext interfere with them. Not only may it not interfere with the free exercise of any form of religious worship or the performance of any religious acts not properly prohibited on grounds of public policy independent of their connection with religion, but it is guilty of a flagrant denial of equal justice, if it shows the slightest partiality to any form of religious or anti-religious belief, or practices any discrimination against any such. It has no right to help or encourage any or all forms of religion, any more than to hamper or discourage them. The one thing to which they are all, from Roman Catholicism to Atheism, ent.i.tled to receive from the state on precisely equal terms, is protection in the peaceable exercise of their rights, involving full liberty to spread their respective doctrines at their own cost. No honest cult would ask for more, and no self-respecting school of thought would accept less. Whether any particular religion or religion as a whole thrives or decays, is none of the state's business. All it has to do is to give a free field to all, and let them succeed or fail in proportion to their own merits and their ability to convince men and women of their truth and of their claim to support at the hands of individuals.

THE INEQUALITY OF EXEMPTIONS.

The exemption of church property from taxation is a direct and unqualified violation of every one of the foregoing principles. It is a denial of the foundation truths of democratic government. It is a mean and underhanded attempt to do indirectly what cannot be done more directly. In its essence it is nothing more or less than the indirect support of the church by the state. It is the connivance of the state in the picking of the pockets of its citizens by the church. Every dollar of taxation which the church is allowed to dodge is one dollar more laid on the shoulders of the honest taxpayers. To exempt the church from taxation means to lighten its load at the expense of the people.

It means that the state helps to proselytize in the interests of special cults. The smaller or incipient sects, which own no land or buildings, are placed at a relative disadvantage, regardless of their merits compared to the older and stronger religious bodies. The state rewards mere acquisition in such a way as to facilitate greater acquisition. It helps the strong as against the weak, the wealthy as against the poor.

The trifle saved by the small country church, with its cheap structure located on land of a nominal value, is relatively of immeasurably less help to it than that given to the rich city church, with its magnificent edifice erected on a plot worth its tens of thousands of dollars and constantly appreciating in value. Even as among the churches themselves, the system of exemption works thus unfairly and in the direction of concentration of wealth. It affords temptation to the churches to procure and hold much more land than they really need, regardless of the growing wants of the community.

Talk of the ethical and educational attributes claimed for the church is wholly beside the question. It is not the business of the state to raise its revenues only from the baser elements of the population. As its private citizens do not pay taxes in proportion to their lack of virtuous qualities, so neither should the inst.i.tutions which enjoy state protection. Our great philanthropists, scientists, inventors and educators are not exempt from taxation on the ground of the great good they are doing. As citizens of the state and nation, they receive their share of social advantages, and do not whine over the fact that they are asked to pay their quota toward the maintenance of those advantages for the common good. Their good deeds in addition are voluntary, and not performed in the expectation of being permitted to shirk their social obligations by way of reward.

CHURCHES DOCTRINAL, NOT MORAL.

No amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that the church is primarily a doctrinal organization. No theories of supernaturalism are needed, in order to teach a pure morality, founded on the social relations of human beings. If the church existed primarily for ethical purposes, we should not have the spectacle of some hundreds of struggling sects, each loudly proclaiming itself as the great repository of fundamental truth. The religious denominations, at their best, are rival establishments, vociferously competing for public favor. To say this, is to cast no reflection on their sincerity. But even the highest degree of sincerity does not necessarily involve freedom from error.

As mutually destructive theories cannot be alike true, it follows as an imperative conclusion that not more than one religious body can be entirely correct in its doctrinal formulas. All may be wrong; all but one must be. And if the truth rests in a single religious sect, there exists no competent and wholly impartial arbiter to settle the dispute in the eyes of everybody. Even if it were not a fact that majorities cannot determine truth, no one denomination has anything like a majority. The largest single body is the Roman Catholic. Yet even this powerful body numbers less than a sixth of the population of our country. Far behind it comes the Methodist, a much subdivided body. Even if all its branches be counted as one united organization, it includes less than one in ten of the population, and is far from containing even a majority of the Protestant Christians. Exemption from taxation is primarily a.s.sistance toward the spreading of doctrine. Inasmuch as only one of the beneficiaries of this disguised state aid (if even one) is the repository of basic truth unmixed with glaring error, it follows that, no matter where the truth may lie, at least five-sixths and possibly an enormously higher proportion of the money thus released for doctrinal proselytism represents the subsidizing by the state of what is mathematically proved to be false teaching. On this simple proposition all must agree.

THE PREPONDERANCE OF ERROR.

If all religious bodies are exempt from taxation, no member of any one of them can dispute the fact that for every dollar which the state indirectly contributes to the cause of truth, it gives from five to a thousand times as much to error. If all but a mere handful of the people accepted some one creed as divinely inspired, while exemption from taxation would still be an unjustifiable infringement on the rights of the minority, there would at least be some plausibility in the attempt to justify it on the ground that the balance of probability might fairly be claimed for the views of the overwhelming majority. Unsound as such an argument would be, it would possess an overwhelming weight in comparison with the present position of the tax exemptionists, who would not merely leave the enemy to sow tares amid the wheat, but would themselves fairly choke the good seed with a crushing preponderance of foul weeds. If the democratic principle of separation of church and state forbids the manipulation of public funds, and by an obvious parity of reasoning the taxing power of the state, for the promotion of any given sect which may possess the whole truth, the general subsidizing of all sects, so far from being less obnoxious to objection from the standpoint of honest administration, is even more so, since it ensures the survival of a ma.s.s of falsehood, incapable of being sustained by its own unaided efforts. It fosters the less worthy among the sects, which could not win their way by merit; and it insidiously corrupts the more worthy, by inviting them to thrive by parasitism, rather than by appealing to the force which resides in truth and in the consistent devotion to high ideals.

THE PARTIALITY OF EXEMPTION.

In thus granting an indiscriminate subsidy to a vast number of doctrinal bodies, the state violates the fundamental doctrine of democratic neutrality and impartiality. It favors a portion of the community at the expense of all the rest. The millions of dollars which are thus given back to the churches do not come out of the air, but out of the pockets of the taxpaying citizens. It is the worst form of taxation without representation. It places a premium on dogmatic faith. It is an establishment of religion in direct defiance of the spirit of the Const.i.tution. Contrary to the rudimentary principles of democracy, it places the state in the position of formally endorsing the proposition that religion is a public function and not an affair of the private conscience. It differs from medievalism only in degree, but not a whit in kind. It is worse than robbing Peter to pay Paul; it is robbing Peter and Paul to pay Judas.

Rights of Conscience Disregarded. Not only is exemption from taxation a covert subsidy for the spread of doctrinal proselytism; not only does it place the state in the position of paying for the circulation of incomparably more error than truth; not only does it rob part of the community for the benefit of another part; not only does it violate the principles of justice and of impartiality as among the conflicting beliefs of its various citizens; not only does it force the taxpayers to support religion, whether they wish to do so or not; not only does it unite church and state in defiance of democracy and equal liberty; but it const.i.tutes a direct and deliberate violation of the fundamental rights of conscience. It is not a mere matter of making individuals pay for that toward which they are indifferent; it is stealing their money to a.s.sist in the circulation of dogmas which they regard as positively pernicious and evil. In a democracy, all citizens possess the same rights, and can lawfully be called upon to surrender no freedom or prerogative except for some public end of paramount consequence.

No majority, however large, can offer the faintest valid excuse for trampling on the private convictions of the humblest member of society.

By all uncorrupted minds, it would be at once recognized as the most glaring tyranny to demand that any individual be compelled to make public or private profession of a faith in which he did not actually believe, or that he be required to partic.i.p.ate in public worship against the dictates of his own reason and conscience. Such infamies have been perpetrated in the history of mankind; but they are now justly abhorred by all who have a.s.similated the elementary lessons of civilization.

No longer are men and women hunted down as heretics for their honest inability to believe that a muttered priestly conjuration can turn a cracker into the flesh of a deity or a cup of wine into his blood. No longer are the fires of persecution kindled for those whose mathematical training has made them incapable of accepting the paradox that one is three and three are one. The thumbscrew and the rack no longer punish with a h.e.l.l on earth all who have too high an opinion of any G.o.d whom they can conceive as existing to believe that he is so vile a monster as to have prepared a h.e.l.l beyond the grave for any of his own children.

Even in the backward countries where democracy and religious liberty are equally obnoxious to the powers that make their rule a curse to their subjects, and where the miserable thing known as a state church thrives to the fullest extent, such concessions to the growing decency of the world have been forced upon a reluctant priestcraft, that its venom is largely drawn. Once in a long time, after years of patient and incalculably subtle plotting for its nefarious end, it may achieve a crowning infamy, such as the murder of a Francisco Ferrer; and even for this triumph it pays dearly in the end, by arousing against itself the loathing of all that is honorable on earth. In the main, however, priestcraft, growl as it may, even in the lands where its strength for mischief is greatest, can only suppress free speech, free press and free a.s.semblage; indulge in acts of petty persecution, which arouse resentment rather than inspire terror; punish refusal to bow to a religious procession or indulgence in the expression of honest opinion with fine or relatively brief imprisonment. It can annoy, but it can no longer crush.