Fresh out of seminary in Chicago, from 1982 to 1985 I served a coalition of four Montana fellowships which were the Unitarian Universalist solution for congregations too small to be considered “churches.” They met in homes, like the earliest Christians, or in small public spaces like schools or the buildings of larger denominations. Someone brought along the symbolic chalice with a flame in it. I carried with me a glass compote, normally used to serve marmalade, with a fat candle in the middle.
In those days they told us that only two or three in a thousand people were naturally UU’s so, for example, in Valier pop.300 there would be only a third of one person to be the basis of a congregation. We’ve over-achieved, since I’m an entire person. In fact, I’ve spoken to several people in town whose thoughts are very much in line with UU ideas. They are usually “unchurched”.
The Missoula congregation was housed in a building that once belonged to Leslie Fiedler, a renegade free-thinking academic who had sold the UU’s the house in hopes of offending the mainstream. The congregation had a taxation problem in that the top floor was a kind of apartment which one set of leaders offered free to a woman who had been abused. Their idea was that it was a charitable refuge. The tax people thought otherwise. It was a stalemate until she moved out for another reason.
If she had been the minister, that floor of the house would have remained non-taxable. In fact, the next minister did live there. He was a retired single man without much income nor many needs.
In 1988 I walked out of service to UU congregations, asking myself as Judith Walker-Riggs puts it, “What did we think we were doing?” She was born the same year as me but had been ordained fifty years earlier. She did a lot more than I ever thought of, but I was beginning to think I was just unsuited for ministry. I came back to Browning where I had spent the Sixties, my happiest years.
The Methodist congregation had just lost its minister once, and then lost the replacement in a matter of months. So they asked me to take the pulpit for a year for the payment simply of living in the parsonage to keep it tax free. It was a good year, but I still didn’t think I was a natural minister.
The trouble is in the idea of the INSTITUTION, the church. To most Americans church IS religion; religion IS about God and nothing else; religious leaders don’t need any college education — just to be inspired. That’s the formality. The reality is more like being a bingo-calling, potluck organizing, funeral whitewashing, figure of propriety with no power. Americans can’t distinguish between power and emotion, nor between money and success.
My education was in terms of Comparative Religion and History of Religion in many different places under many different circumstances. Churches were not necessary, God was not a useful concept, personal virtue was not the same as beliefs, ritual ceremonies were startling, and religious institutions that collaborated with the state were often murderous, justifying genocide on ground of heresy.
When people’s horizons only went as far as the next mountain or river, this was pretty easy to manage. Today, I had a conversation with a clerk at the local momandpop in which he told me that had once attended a divinity school, then when God evaporated went to a biology degree and taught science. He compares his outlook to Buddhism.
This is not unusual, in fact it is common among youngsters and those who accept modern science, finding it far more awe-inspiring than even social change or individual therapeutic stances. “Spiritual but not Religious” is a category used in titles and to describe organizations. How does the government either tax or exempt people who are “spiritual” but not institutional?
It’s just part of the chaos swirling this collision of galaxies one of which belongs to those white-haired “believers” in a construct that is now obviously as much governmental as religious versus a construct that has nothing to do with buildings or ordination of clergy? All the time the bullies were trying to make people believe in dogma, they were off somewhere else watching the skies. We used to joke that it was hard to get UU’s to join congregations because they didn’t like coming indoors.
But if everyone is a free-thinker who doesn’t bother with paying taxes because there’s nothing to tax except their ideas, then what is there to exempt? No longer can the government fiddle the definition of religion in order to use taxation as a control. Will the mega-churches based on capitalist success still survive if they are defined as NOT religious but only hiding behind the concept?
If charitable organizations as well as religious bodies qualify as doing good to society and therefore deserving tax exemption, why can’t individuals? Why isn’t taxation exempted for truly spiritual people? And why do we continue to consider Mother Theresa spiritual when she hoarded a fortune she could have spent on sick and starving children?
Society is not rational. Most individuals get their ideas about huge moral issues from stories told by the media which is controlled by rich people who secretly think MORE of Mother Theresa for hoarding, that she had discovered how to monetize sick and dying children.
These days I’m not taxed because I’m below the poverty line. It’s hard to know whether this is a praiseworthy restraint on my part, or simply beneath contempt. It gives me freedom to explore “spiritual” matters and even question what that is? What IS the meaning of life? I get 1,000 readers a day on this blog, but they are not a congregation. I am ordained, which means only endorsed by the UUA as recommended by the Montana fellowships of 1982. Some grew, one died, most don’t believe in God but consider themselves religious, and only two have buildings on which they pay no taxes. Some of them think that as citizens, they ought to. None has a lot of money.
If more info is wanted, this is interesting, but the guy is way behind the times. Most lawyers know nothing about religious thought at the leading edge. Nor are "writer's rooms" any smarter.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/are-churches-always-exempt.html
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