How James Madison Echoes in Ground Zero Mosque Debate

ANALYSIS

(Aug. 4) -- New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9-0 on Tuesday to clear the way for the so-called "ground zero mosque," much to the chagrin of its political opponents and pro-Israel groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. The unanimous decision was a powerful rebuke to the movement that has sought to stop the project

For the anti-mosquers still huffing and puffing, there is still a way to get rid of the development -- though churches, synagogues, Scientology centers and other religious institutions would also be casualties. That would be to change the country's tax laws.

According to one calculation, there's as much as $560 billion in religious property in the United States. Since tax laws provide exemptions for religious institutions, that property is untaxed, and that in turn means taxpayers, including those who are unaffiliated with any religious institution, pay more. And this burden falls disproportionately on the poor, noted Eugene Carson Blake, the late Presbyterian president of the National Council of Churches and a civil rights pioneer. (Religious institutions also pay no corporate income or inheritance taxes. Other institutions -- schools, charities, organizations such as the Red Cross -- also receive tax exemptions, but to get them they must wade through a process more cumbersome than the rubber-stamping of recognized religious institutions.)

The origins of the exemptions for religious institutions go back as far as Sumeria and Egypt. Some believe that in the U.S., the protection flows from the First Amendment, which dictates that there shall be no "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. Were the government to control tax policy over such institutions, the argument goes, it would in essence wield control over them.

But James Madison saw it differently, drawing on the same amendment and its opening words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

Journalist Christopher Ketcham explains:

Madison as early as 1784 came to regard church tax exemptions as a kind of subsidy -- in effect an act of establishment. As early as 1817, he was already cautioning that "the danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by Ecclesiastical Bodies have not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S." What Madison feared was not so much theocracy but what we might term theoligarchy, a creeping rule of the religious rich and few. "[T]here is an evil which ought to be guarded against," he wrote, "in the indefinite accumulation of property ... by ecclesiastical corporations."

There are cases where the federal government revokes, or threatens to revoke, this tax-exempt status. In Bob Jones University v. The United States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that the Internal Revenue Service could revoke the tax-exempt status of organizations that undermine public policy -- in Bob Jones' case, by its prohibition of interracial relationships.

More recently, some have called (unsuccessfully) for revoking the Mormon Church's tax-exempt status after the church meddled in California's debate surrounding a ballot initiative forbidding gay marriage.

In fact, whether it's the official anti-gay campaigning of the Mormon Church or the Catholic Church's refusal to bestow communion on a pro-choice politician or its decision to shield child rapists from secular law enforcement, religious institutions often involve themselves in political affairs, even as their tax-exempt status is preserved.

But setting aside that double standard, the precepts of established religions call for helping your fellow man. So why should they continue to get a free ride?

Perhaps it should be no surprise that Madison had a hand in yet another thread tied to the mosque debate, this one relating to fair treatment. As president, he ordered American troops into battle against Muslim Algerians in the Second Barbary War of 1815 yet made no effort to amend the Constitution to deny Muslims rights afforded Christians. Years earlier, John Adams approved the 1796 Barbary Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which plainly stated a philosophy of nondiscrimination.

Article 11 is most germane to the mosque debate at hand:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.