re: Religious 501(c)(3) need to be suspended

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Churches are not businesses. Pastors and other paid staff already pay personal income taxes. Most small churches couldn’t afford to keep the lights on if they were not exempt from federal and state taxes. You could easily add a financial burden of 15% to 30% which most churches couldn’t absorb.

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If they are truly non-profit, there would be no profit to tax.

Let’s start with permanently cancelled and go from there.

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Dems would be against this bc their black churches double as propaganda

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Dems would also oppose this because of Mosques.
Papertrail? Where is the money being funneled to by these Islam supporters? Eeeek!

Jesus warned us about these false prophets:

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“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.

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Matthew 7:15

Also Romans 16:18

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For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people.

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If they are truly non-profit, there would be no profit to tax.

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”Profit” isn’t seen as such in the church, but a surplus in tithes and offerings compared to the expenses would normally go to savings for future building expansion projects and missions works, so taxing that surplus would keep that money from such uses. Churches do not operate like businesses where profits go to shareholders as bonuses but to the community through mercy services and ministry outreach, which is why there is a not-for-profit designation today.

The taxes on surplus giving isn’t even the biggest issue, though. Taxing property would be huge, and would cause many churches to have to sell and not own a building, or foreclose and lose the building.

Churches are meant to provide a benefit to society, teaching good morals and providing a good community for citizens to be part of. Taxing churches would make those things more difficult and be a detriment on society. People here need to stop taking their frustrations about Joel Osteen out on the thousands of churches who barely afford to keep the lights on in their buildings.

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Most small churches couldn’t afford to keep the lights on if they were not exempt from federal and state taxes.

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Then consolidate. Maybe there don't need to be churches in stripmalls, etc.

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How would you suggest consolidation occur?

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Church can't make rent. Church closes. Parishioners go elsewhere. Pastor works at H-E-B while volunteering at a new church.

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Pastors and other paid staff already pay personal income taxes.

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So do employees of private corporations. I mean, if we're going to argue that no organizations should be taxed because the individual employees pay taxes, fine. I'm in. But there's nothing special about church employees in that regard as opposed to any other employees.

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Most small churches couldn’t afford to keep the lights on if they were not exempt from federal and state taxes. You could easily add a financial burden of 15% to 30% which most churches couldn’t absorb.

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I'm obviously not anti-church, but your arguments don't persuade me on this, for a few reasons:

1. You are smuggling in the assumption here that the state has an obligation to try to make sure that any given individual church organization survives. They have no such obligation.

2. There are small churches and middle sized churches and big churches and mega churches. You are only telling the story of the small, poor ones.

We have maybe 2-3 rightly called "mega-churches" where I live and a similar handful of big churches. The big churches own prime real estate property in downtown that is worth tens of millions of dollars (not the mega-churches...they built buildings outside of downtown.) One big church in particular might even move into the hundreds of millions of dollars category, as they basically take up half a city block. There are a couple of small-medium churches that own similarly valuable property downtown. I'm talking about churches that might have 30 people show up for a Sunday service, but their building is probably easily worth $8-$10 million just because of where it is.

And they pay zero property taxes.

That seems pretty out of balance to me, and it seems like it's far outside of promoting mere church survival. Churches aren't supposed to be about hoarding prime real estate IMO. Especially since—when you think about it—very little happens in that particular building that I mentioned above building except for 1 hour on a Sunday.

3. I have no particular animus toward churches owning buildings. But buildings are not essential to have a church. The early Christians met in homes for hundreds of years. I've been a part of a church for over a decade that met in a high school gym.

So if we're talking about a small rural community or something, there's nothing stopping them from meeting as small groups in houses or someone's barn and having a bicovational pastor or two lead the congregation and have the small amount of administrative tasks needed in an organization that small handled by volunteers.

And there are those who believe that such a structure is better. Francis Chan, for example, pastored a mega church in California that grew up almost instantly to a 6,000 member roll, and he walked away from it in favor of a decentralized model much more like the early Christians, and he did it because (among other things) he felt like the centralized approach kept the congregation from realizing and using their own spiritual gifts.

There are no taxes associated with that model, so the power to tax is definitely not about to destroy it.

People can decide they want a different model, of course, but then they should be willing to pay for it. Jesus is free. It's the buildings and accoutrements that cost money. Nothing wrong with those if you want them, you just have to pay for them.

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That doesn’t even touch on the intrusion of the state into the church.

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This law does just that by excluding churches from being treated like everything else

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So they'll just have the power to destroy churches that don't follow their approved structure.

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Was the government the entity who approved the structure I offered as a solution to taxation?

Did the government or Jesus or anybody else guarantee church gatherings the ability to afford a large building (possibly on prime real estate, that probably gets used at 20% of its reasonable capacity—and that's being generous) with youth facilities and gyms and pools and classrooms and activities centers?

You guys will have to explain where this attitude of entitlement to have those things, free of government involvement, comes from.

The argument that, "Well, they benefit society, so they shouldn't be taxed" has a lot of problems.