by Sandy » Mon Aug 28, 2017 8:40 pm
Keith has a point. The first amendment guarantee of religious liberty is an individual right, just like every other right guaranteed in the first ten amendments. It essentially makes any "religious" belief or practice a matter of individual conscience. But the other provision is the establishment clause, which means that there is no official government recognition of the church. The inherently religious nature of a church body is protected by the government's restriction to recognize and relate to it as an institution. If you want to read some fascinating arguments for this position, go to just about any evangelical conservative source that protested the sending of an ambassador to the Vatican. Put simply, that's the same argument used to support the tax exempt status of a church. If a church is not recognized as an entity by the government, and what takes place inside is protected religious liberty, then taxing it would be official recognition, i.e. "establishment of religion." Technically, in the government's eyes, as defined by court rulings and law, it ceases to be a "church" in this sense when the content of its message is no longer purely religious in nature. It is then an organization subject to taxation.