Pennies from heaven; it's time for Uncle Sam to pass the collection plate.

• Author: Beard, Elliott
• Position: Tax the churches; includes related article on church and state

Elizabeth Lesly is a business writer in Albany, New York.

When Joyce Siegrist's coven, Our Lady of the Roses Wiccan Church, was granted tax-exempt status by the state of Rhode Island in 1989, she was elated. The 40-member congregation is now saving "a good amount of money" in sales tax on the candles, incense burners, chalices, candlesticks and black robes needed for its rituals, which are held several times a month in a rented room of the local Grange Hall.

Why do witches merit a cut rate on newts' eyes, bats' wings, and other party supplies? Well, goes the received wisdom, because those objects are just as sacred to a witch as a crucifix is to a Catholic or the Torah to a Jew. In the eyes of the government, all religions are created equal. That kind of religious relativism seems to make sense-except that it begs the real question: Why does any religious organization deserve a government subsidy in the first place? None does, but all receive one, thanks to a misreading of the First Amendment's religion provisions.

Tax the churches? The idea's been intellectually mothballed for years. These days, it's the province of the fringe-radical anticlerics, the Murray O'Hair school of secular humanists, and crabby fair-tax fanatics. But if you set aside your perfectly reasonable anti-anticlerical bias for a moment, you'll discover that to favor taxing churches you don't have to be a nun-basher avenging the times Sister Mary whipped chalk at you in fourth-grade Latin. In fact, the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions over the past eight years, has ruled that taxing churches is perfectly legal. Several church-and-state experts familiar with the cases--especially a decision in January 1990-predict that local governments will subject churches to real estate taxes before the end of the decade.

The purpose of the First Amendment's religious provisions was to prevent the government from discriminating against or in favor of any religion-in particular or as a group. From the point of view of the Constitution, then, there's no difference between taxing all churches equally and not taxing them at all. (Of course, the state can't tax only churches, even if it taxes them all equally; that would violate the free exercise clause.) But from the point of view of the average taxpayer, there's a mighty big difference: As near as one can figure, the wealth of American religious organizations is approaching a trillion dollars; some church watchers estimate that religious organizations own one-fifth of all private property in the country. The Village Voice found in 1987 that the Catholic Church was New York City's largest private landowner. Meanwhile, the homeowners of any given community are kicking in with ever-escalating property taxes to help provide services like garbage removal and police protection to tax-exempt churches that only one-third of them attend.

This is not to say that churches should be taxed on property used primarily for charitable purposes-soup kitchens, say, or schools; like other nonprofits, churches should receive a Good Samaritan exemption. This is also not to say that our society shouldn't value the purely religious functions that churches perform; taxing something is not generally a sign of public disapproval. But property used primarily for religious purposes should be taxed like any other property. "Strong religious adherents think that religion should be free of any government action; they put religion above government," said Philip Kurland, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. "The Constitution didn't do that."

The highest-profile examination of churches' tax-exempt status in recent years was trotted...