Here in Denmark the churches are funded through taxes, so taxing the churches would be imposing a tax on ourselves twice.
Not a very bright business plan
It's not mandatory. It's the only tax in Denmark that you can obt out of.
Personally I'm fine with it. Most of our churches are from the 11-1300s, and since the priests are employed by the state, we have a very secular way of thinking about religion.
Most people only use the churches and the priests for big events like baptising, confirmations, weddings and funerals and the rest of the year the priests hold service for five old widows.
Does the church in Denmark own property/assets? Are their finances made public? Who oversees their expenditure of public (and?) private finances?
An aside, having read other answers, most seem to be US based perspective, and the church being classified as a charity/not for profit. While I’ve heard of several cases in the US where it’s simple to register as a charity and operate a [clearly profitable business model such as televangelists](https://youtu.be/7y1xJAVZxXg)
I’ll stick to what I know first hand.
To the best of my knowledge, the Catholic Church operates very much like a conglomerate - owning, buying, selling property all over the world, making investments on capital markets, and is evidently a profitable organism. But it is not required to publish its finances as other companies do. The HQ of the Catholic Church is its own sovereign state - the Vatican.
Denmark has an 'Established Church' similar to the Church of England in the UK.
It is state-funded because it is also effectively part-of the state.
If you ever wonder why the founders wrote the specific words 'Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion', it is \*that specific\* arrangement (held by the CoE) they where seeking to prohibit.
We have a church ministerium. The churches do own land, but everything is heavily regulated. The church is not a powerful force in Denmark.
They have no private finances. Everything goes towards just upholding the church year and employing priests and diggers and such.
They certainly don't own any assets worth a dime.
This is indeed very Danish. I love Danes. Germans with a sense of humor (my favorite Dane joke). I worked for AP Moller/Maersk for 23 years so I must have gotten along with ya'll well enough to keep me employed that long.
A lot of people who came to America were Christians who were treated as second-class citizens due to their disagreements with the state church. So, American culture has the separation of church and state deeply baked into our culture. The idea of church and state getting into bed together, politicians getting church doctrine twisted to suit their political purposes, churches getting the state to prosecute people over theological disagreements, it's terrifying. And so we do everything we can to make sure that doesn't happen.
Now, obviously Denmark isn't rounding up heretics and burning them at the stake. This is an arrangement that's worked for your country longer than mine has existed. It's just one that goes against the grain of my culture. It's odd, and if someone tried to set up something like that here, there'd be an outrage. Even if it was my church that was being picked to receive tax money, I'd fight it. Nothing good can come from it, the way I see it.
As much as we would like to believe that church and state are separate in the US, it is far from it, especially the last decade. It is progressively getting worse as the individual states have been changing laws left and right to favor religion, everywhere. Religion needs to stay out of the government.
It's kind of like if I found out you guys ate spiders over there. I'm not going to try to stop you. I'm not going to try to lecture you. You're free to live your own lives. But its really weird and I never want that sort of thing to catch on here.
I agree that nothing good would come of it in America today. We are a much more homogeneous culture, and much, much more secular even though we have a state religion
Yo, no, the pilgrims came here because England was TOO WELCOMING of religious freedom for them.
They originally went to Denmark, but the truth is, they didn’t want their kids learning another language.
Another Dane here!
First of all, unless you're a member of the church, you don't have to pay too much. Even if you are a member, you don't need to pay that much for it in taxes.
Secondly, I don't mind the taxes. But that is also because the churches here usually aren't just made as a place for bigots to practice hate speech, as it seems to be in other countries. Ofc there's exceptions to everything, but generally the churches here are fine - it's a place for people to get together. On top of that, the money are primarily used for good causes.
I see it less as paying taxes for the church, and more as paying taxes for different good causes.
i see that in reverse: taxing the churches implies that they would no longer be tax payer funded... so instead of from the state coffers the churches would begin feeding money into them. double win!
> Because the protestant Church is our state religion.
Why have a state religion? Seems like a bad idea.
> And because most of our churches were build in the middle ages and need constant care.
As historical sites that makes sense, but not otherwise.
I get where you're coming from, but having a state religion in Denmark, Sweden and Norway has proved to probably be a good thing.
It means that our church follows the values of society, have no political power whatsoever, have to align with legislation (so it was very easy to legalise gay Christian marriage for example).
People here a not religious, but the churches are used in the big life events and form a pillar of our culture. As does the monarchy which most people support, but few people have strong feelings towards.
We're weird like that
> People here a not religious, but the churches are used in the big life events and form a pillar of our culture. As does the monarchy which most people support, but few people have strong feelings towards.
Both the monarchy and the church are completely inappropriate diversions of public resources.
The government has the authority to tax its citizens. In return, we ask it not to be wasteful (to the extent that any large political organization is able to do so). Neither the church nor the monarchy are good uses of public funds.
You can say that, but since we live in a democracy and people here show massive support for both the church and the monarchy, then it can't be wasteful.
I'm not a big fan of either, but I can see why both have their merit.
Step 1, stop giving tax payers money to churches.
Step 2, take some of their money from them and use it for good
Step 3, enjoy less hassle from relious nuts imposing their views onto others with their obsene riches.
Catholic church alone..78 billion (at least) in assets. Profits vary from country to country but in Canada 1.5 billion was raised for catholic church in 2019.
The assets of the Catholic church can't even be reasonably estimated. The Vatican houses thousands of works of art that are priceless, and not in the "wow that is super fucking expensive" meaning of the phrase "priceless works of art," priceless as in "there is literally no sales comparison for The Sistine Chapel ceiling, so we literally cannot even reasonably estimate what it's worth."
They own thousands of pieces like this. It would not shock me in the slightest if that, similar to rumors regarding what Vladmir Putin is worth, the Catholic Church is worth orders of magnitude more than anyone would estimate.
The Vatican is an independent nation (legally) though so it doesn't matter what they have. Only what the Church in a particular country has.
Considering how many diocese have gone through or are in bankruptcy right now, the Catholic church isn't as rich as people think. Certainly not in terms of cash.
The Vatican's annual revenue is in the hundreds of millions. That's not nothing, but it's not huge either. It's possessions are valued at around 5 billion.
Revenue for the rest of the church is hard to estimate, because it's really a collection of organizations rather than a single organization. Finances are separated at the diocese level I believe.
They also own land directly in the center of most cities. They probably own 10 billion dollars in Manhattan alone before you even try to value the buildings on it. And that's in the new world where our cities weren't built directly around the churches with the churches at the near geographic center. If you tried to put a value on everything globally, let's say they have to fire sale every single item, land, and building, it's probably closer to a trillion dollars.
Got to be far more than that
Here in NZ which is a tiny country in terms of population, the church has over $1 billion in property.
In a country like the Philippines or US with more than 50x our population, the assets would be massively more than $100b.
Secret is that the church often inherits land and other assets from church goers who bequest everything if they don't have children or other family
They then just sit on the land, leasing it out for hundreds of years which gains in value; an organisation that has been around over 1000 years and intends to be around indefinitely without any exit plan, can play the long game
I like to look at historic churches, some of them are absolute marvels of architecture. But then you realise it was funded by taking from the poor back in the day, especially with threats of "if you don't donate you are a sinner".
Lol, what? It was literally the opposite. Rich nobles donated their riches to the church before they died, and the churches were the first form of social welfare.
Some countries like mine require that charities that pay no tax have to publish financial accounts
Though quite a few manage to bury details. Like a wealthy churchgoers *lending* their evangelical preacher a 100k car, travel, house etc rather than them owning it
Or Seven Day Adventist church owning a huge business notably Cornflakes) so they can push money back and forth between charity/church and business for profit to earn more money for church leaders
Yeah I suspect it's impossible with the available data. If we tax churches, then how much we tax them depends on how much of their revenue actually gets used for charitable causes. In the US, churches are exempt from a lot (most? all?) of the reporting requirements that other charitable organizations are held to. Although we have pretty good numbers for how much people are giving to churches, we don't have very reliable data for how much charitable spending churches are actually responsible for. Most are likely spending enough to still qualify as tax exempt anyways, but we just don't know.
We do! Almost every nonprofit, including churches, need to file a [990 IRS Form](https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-990) Here’s one from the [Archdiocese of New York](http://archny.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-CNY-Finance-Article.pdf) [a different church 990](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/237062126/202223199349322507/full)
So in theory, you can see how much is given to program/charity and how much stays.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I only see total revenue, expenses, and assets in there. Just a basic financial filing. From that I can only assume that the revenue less expenses was used on qualifying charitable causes which likely isn't always true. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if this is the only filing, then I think it supports what I was saying, that we don't have reliable data for how much charitable spending churches are actually responsible for.
I’ll give you, big archdiocese like this have trouble because they have so many arms. [This is from the Archdiocese Catholic Charities.](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135562185/202240909349300649/full) Technically they are a different 501 but they use the 1011 Fifth Ave address like the other affiliated orgs. Also remember (for Catholics) every parish is it’s own thing, with their own fundraising.
There is no 'percentage rule' for regular nonprofits either.
They just have to have an ostensibly-non-political (although every political org has figured out a way to game the system on this) social-benefit mission.
It's perfectly legal for a nonprofit to spend 90% of it's donations on employee (to include CEO) salaries...
True, but the IRS regularly audits nonprofits to verify that they qualify as nonprofits. Churches are only audited under very specific circumstances such as criminal investigations. If they were using their revenue in an untoward way, they have to be pretty flamboyant about it to actually get investigated.
Bingo! The IRS has [special rules when auditing churches](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-religious-organizations/special-rules-limiting-irs-authority-to-audit-a-church), which are significantly more lenient than what a standard 501 (c)(3) nonprofit has to deal with.
From my experience, most churches are barely keeping the lights on.
For every church with 200+ people in a nice building, there's a dozen renting a school, or running in a house, or meeting in a community center. For every pastor making a good living, there's 5-10 who aren't collecting a paycheck at all.
We should tax remittances too.
$60 Billion per year is remitted out of the USA to Mexico alone. That’s just one of dozens of countries that get remittance inflows from the USA.
https://www.google.com/search?q=remittances+to+mexico&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
(Economist article is paywalled, so the above is the Google quick description)
Currently, big banks process those transfers and charge a transfer fee. They make money off the departure of USD.
Instead of letting the banks make hundreds of millions of dollars off of these transfers, the USA should be converting that to tax revenue.
A friend argued years ago that taxing churches would afford them more political privileges and influence than they currently have. I forget the details, but I think it was along the lines of converting their non-profit status to corporate (person). Please clarify that if someone can…
Something else I heard about is that even if you take away churches tax exempt status under religion. That doesn't necessarily mean that they can be tax exempt under non profit charity.
The actual threshold for % (or flat $) of monetary gains donated to charity is actually quite low from what I have heard
Even if it’s not monetary, I believe they could convert to a 501(c)3 food bank and run food share logistics from their place of worship.
I hear some supermarkets use some church-run food banks to pick up and distribute their food shares
They run most political parties. This is just hatemongering. The majority of United States citizens are Christian - they run the whole country, my dude. Not just the GOP.
Reddit doesn't want to hear this but the economic issue is that taxing churches would produce a greater burden on the government than the tax revenue would produce. Religious organizations are much more efficient than governments in charitable work. Any for-profit endeavors are already taxed. There isn't much to be gained economically.
A decent amount in the short term, but with significantly diminishing returns as you'll be effectively closing small churches and ensuring only the large mega churches can survive.
> A decent amount in the short term, but with significantly diminishing returns as you'll be effectively closing small churches and ensuring only the large mega churches can survive.
In many situations, the churches provide a level of social/community services, too. So the cost recovery of those has to be taken into account (as churches are unlikely to take the tax hit without billing back) when calculating the net effect.
And paying taxes is going to be cut out of this charity work, rather than not paying the electric bill or the secretary's salary. So the government would have to pay more to pick up the slack.
You’re absolutely correct- in terms of the specific question, which just asked about revenue
The answer is an incredible amount of revenue
However in terms of the budget, it would be a huge negative as these institutions offer more in aid and public services than they would provide in taxes
I always like to point out the net only because people seem to assume there’s some huge windfall coming if churches/mosques/synagogues/etc are taxed.
Not to mention I don’t think anyone would be comfortable with the level of political involvement they would have if they were taxed, but that’s a whole other can of worms
Given how many times the government wants to cut SNAP and medicare instead of taxing Bezos and Musk, I'd personally rather the local pastor, who is a member of the community, be running the food pantry than just hand the money over to the government for them to do whatever they feel like.
I want to be clear- I completely agree
It’s the distinction between the literal question asked, and what we all interpreted the question as hinting at
(Description vs prescription)
I only commented to make the distinction clear before someone else commented saying you weren’t answering the question
The entire point of not taxing churches, is that government should not have a financial dependancy on any given religious group...
And that religious groups should not be able to be influenced by government granting or removing tax deductions.
Business taxes don't work like personal income taxes, and it's fairly safe to assume that churches would be taxed like a business. Taxing the net income would slow the growth of mega-churches while taking no money from churches which don't make a profit. Mind you that's only until said large churches start evading taxes.
The tax man doesn't care if the local business can't pay it's bills, they're going after it for property tax and other tax money anyway. You don't pay your taxes as a business owner, you get your doors chained shut. Why would churches be different?
You only pay taxes on profits, not on losses.
Churches typically don’t profit.
If you argue that we would stop allowing contributions to a church be tax deductible, then the community services these churches provide would shift to the government who will provide them at a much lower rate of efficiency, especially when compared to the minuscule amount the government would take in from taxing the church- so it’d a big, big, big net loss for the government
Businesses are taxed on profit, not revenue anyway. And churches don't have profit by definition.
Property tax is actually the big thing, because a lot of churches are cash-poor and property rich.
You could start the tax rate at a certain revenue level, say the first $10 million a year is exempt. But I don’t think in the grand scheme of federal revenue, the churches get as much money as people think.
Different tax bands for higher "profits"? So small churches pay 20% and mega churches pay up to 50% (or more). And no loopholes or "offshore" fiddles.... hmmm maybe we should apply that to Google/Amazon/Starbucks/Vodafone and the rest.
Do you also include the Red Cross in this? And how much of this is counter productive? I have to give extra money to charities so that then they can pay their tax and provide help? So, essentially, I'm paying the tax for the charity? I'm not sure this is what anyone wants.
>? I have to give extra money to charities so that then they can pay their tax and provide help? So, essentially, I'm paying the tax for the charity?
That's a good point
And many churches do a ton of stuff for their local communities. Taxing them would severely hamper that.
Reddit likes to pretend every church in America is a megachurch that does nothing to help the poor and just hoards funds. That's not reality.
The vast, vast majority of churches in the US are tiny and can barely make ends meet as it is, often contributing more to the local community and missions abroad than using inwardly. Most churches may only have 1-2 paid "employees", pastor and secretary. Taxing ALL churches would result in many closing, leaving only the hugh megachurches that most of the people asking to tax hate. It's a lose-lose for everybody and wouldn't make much of an impact long term on the government's revenue.
The senior and children pastors at a church I used to go to got jobs driving school buses because the church couldn't afford to pay them and keep up commitment to missions and local charities, so the pastors cut their own pay to keep supporting the work the church is supposed to be doing.
Yeah, the pastor at the church in my home town took up plumbing to be his main source of income, become the church couldn't afford to pay him a full time salary.
This, and the contributions to the community that many churches do vastly outweighs the amount we would gain in taxing them imo. Many churches give out food and clothes and help shelter people in need and some even send people to third world countries and help vaccinate and feed people in dire need. Wether you agree with the politics and message they may try to impose on people or the public, I've worked closely with many churches doing charitable work for other organizations and many churches make up for what the federal and local governments fail to subsidize. Most of the food banks in my area are run out of churchs and they have endless amounts of volunteers and giant freezers and refrigerators to keep the food from spoiling which they all pay for with the donations made to the church. I couldn't imagine the impact it would have by taxing the churches because the bottom line is many of these programs would be hit the hardest and we all know the government wouldn't be responsible with the money gained and provide the services that these churches do.
People who want churches taxed also generally want the government to provide those services. Which is fine as things go.
But considering the difficulty of passing these programs, and the high probability that access is reduced via work requirements, it seems more probably that you'd just end up diverting those funds to the military industrial complex.
This is true, the government is lousy with money in general and often times social bills are passed with other things attached to it so it's weaponized in both media and in policy and like you said a military industrial complex. Most churces, not all mind you, work with very tight budgets and many upon many volunteers to get things to work so they are far more efficient in how the resources are spent and handled, and often times by people who genuinely care and love helping people unlike what you always get when having to deal with some low paid worker just handing out whatever their job is to do, there's many one on one sessions to help specific families and people that the volunteers or church people put extreme effort into helping for the benefit of no one but their guided faith and the responsibility they feel to the needy.
Well the thing to remember is if the church is actually doing charity work they can operate as a 501(c)(3) and not pay taxes. They would just have to open their books like every other 501(c)(3).
A lot of the food banks in the UK are basically through the church today. Historically, before government welfare systems - and we're going back to the workhouses here - the main source of support for the poor was alms from the churches. When Henry VIII went after the monasteries, he did a lot of damage to social welfare in the process.
Also, parish priests in the Church of England don't get a regular salary - they get a stipend for their costs of living and rent-free use of the vicarage/rectory.
In many cases in Western Europe, congregations are declining and so is interest in the priesthood. The Irish have had to import priests for a while - traditionally they were exporters - and are soon not going to be able to conduct all the funeral masses needed.
[https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/leadingarticle/2023/05/30/news/editorial\_catholic\_church\_confronting\_collapse\_in\_numbers\_of\_priests-3310572/](https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/leadingarticle/2023/05/30/news/editorial_catholic_church_confronting_collapse_in_numbers_of_priests-3310572/)
If we taxed churches, and if the churches are actually operating as nonprofits they could operate as a 501(c)(3) and they wouldn't have to pay taxes. They would just have to follow the rules that existing 501(c)(3)s operate under.
Churches now are just immediately assumed to be nonprofit which is demonstrably untrue for many of them.
Hang on. You're only taxed on profits. If your church is only barely making enough money to stay afloat then what makes you believe they will be paying much if anything in taxes?
And it isn't like that money disappears if a church does. It still circulates in the economy and will be taxed somewhere else. Currently, the churches are getting tax handouts that could be better spent on work that helps the broader community, not just focused on discrete ideological groups.
I'm under the impression that most people supporting "taxing" churches don't understand that there isn't a profit. The money would have to come directly from what is given by the congregation. So instead of that money going back into the church or out into the community, it will now go to Uncle Sam. What you're saying essentially is that you don't like that Christians support the churches they attend, and would rather the IRS take that money.
Whenever this comes up I always think this.
It's fine to argue that non-profits should be taxed, but you gotta be honest that's what you want to do and all the other organizations too. You can't just say "I don't like churches and thus want to exempt them from non-profit tax laws"
I don’t think it’s so much “I don’t like churches and thus want to exempt them from non-profit tax laws” so much as, “I don’t like megachurches and televangelists making tens millions living in huge mansions with yachts”
As much as I dislike religion in general and think most of them are cults with extra steps, I get some folks get some value out of it. What fuckin’ community benefits are folks getting from some cunt using their donations to get rich?
And yeah. That should apply to all non-profits. If their members are getting rich off it, they should absolutely pay tax.
Pastors are not exempt from income taxes. The US tax code doesn't prevent people from becoming millionaires though.
If the ask is to raise the tax rate on higher income levels to make it harder to become a millionaire, I would agree with that. Same for increasing taxes on luxury goods like private boats, planes or large mansions.
It is the same in Canada. What I mean is that if the Church itself is bringing in enough money to be able to pay their pastors hundreds of thousands and still have enough money to build enormous megachurches and operate closer to a business than a religion, the Church itself should be taxed like any other business.
The problem I see is, where are the profits that would get taxed? If money coming in goes right back out, there's no net income. And that's generally how churches work - everything gets spent. So unless we're talking about the Mormon church with (ALLEGEDLY) a huge pile of cash & investments, opening them up to income tax wouldn't do anything. Property tax sure.
Exactly, there's no profit, they just pay their top employees more if more revenue comes in.
Now if you want to increase tax on all high income individuals that might work
If you want some insight, I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We almost certainly do have a massive "stockpile" of cash but I feel like I could defend it.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, we really struggled financially. Many years the money we spent on operating costs exceeded the money we took in through donations (tithing, etc.). There was a massive overhaul and we got control of things.
Maybe most relevant to this discussion is that we decided we needed enough money saved to continue operating the church in the event that all income ceased or significantly dropped. So each year a small portion of what we took in (once we got our finances back in the green) was saved and subsequently invested (so it wasn't just sitting there doing nothing). These investments worked well and we achieved our "savings" goals rapidly (the amount we have currently is roughly enough to operate the church for about ten years).
This ability to operate even in extremely difficult financial situations is really important to us because we honestly try to do as much charitable work as we can while still operating the equally important (as we see it) work of the rest of church stuff (weekly meetings, lessons, ordinance work, etc.). We're up to more than $1 billion/year in charitable work and it's rising each year. That's in addition to the day-to-day stuff that happens in local wards (congregations) which is easily overlooked but supported by the "rest" of the budget (tabulated separately from the charitable reporting). Most of my ward's budget, for example, goes toward charitable stuff anyway (helping provide community activities, aiding poor or needy people, organizing service and support, etc.).
I totally understand how tens of billions of dollars in a fund can seem so awful but, at least from my perspective, it somehow still doesn't seem like enough. Bigger organizations have bigger operating costs and require bigger safety nets if operating without debt. I'd be happy to respond to questions or whatever though.
I'd like to force them to comply with non-profit tax laws. They should not get special treatment for being a religion. Yes, many smaller churches likely comply with these rules aside from the paperwork. Larger churches likely would not. If they can afford hundreds of millions for private jets, mansions, etc. they should pay their fair share.
Trying to argue people who want to tax churches just don't like them or want to tax non-profits is a bad faith argument. If I open a charity supporting the homeless, I have to account for that money I receive and how it is spent if I want to be tax exempt. Just because they tape a religion on theirs shouldn't give them carte blanche to do whatever with no accountability.
Asking them to meet the evidentiary status of other non profits is fine by me. That feels like a separate question than "churches should be taxed".
Though I'll grant that "ask churches to meet the evidence burden of other non profits" doesn't role off the tongue
You are the part of the people who dont get tax brackets. The idea right now is all churches in these situations arent taxxed and some people abuse that. You add a fair tax system that says if you are involved in politics like a right wing or left wing church telling people how to vote and are basicly laundering money then you should get taxxed.
You make under a million as a church you get taxxed if you are a church that maked under 500,000 you still pay taxes but after you do the math of income and tax deductions like every other business entity or citizen you pay near $0 maybe qualify for tax back.
Its about punishing rich bad faith religious institutions abusing their station and their idols to make money. Taking advantage of the religious and stupid tp make money.
Honestly they probably find another way but we shouldnt try to stop these types of people.
Your statement sounds like when people say "they are raising taxes" to make people mad but only those making 120,000 get theirs raised so you make people angry over taxes that dont affect them.
I think any realistic discussion at taxing churches starts with a minimum revenue number and also involves offset for charitable works. If done correctly there should probably be a pass through involved as well. Where if you donate x to church and they use it for charity as opposed to outreach the tax break could be passed on.
This would help solve for the funding problems small churches run into, as if they are doing charitable work they should see an increase in dollar flow, while punishing those churches that feel private jets are a necessity.
Couldn't you do a caveat where if the church makes under, say 100K a year (could be higher or lower, 100 is just a nice round number), then its tax exempt? And anything above is taxed, that way the megachurches cant waste money on the lead pastor's third mansion.
Im very much against churches, but if thats what someone wants to do with their life, then so be it
Makes sense to just have tax brackets like for individuals, then. Tiny poor churches pay less in taxes than enormous ones that are hoarding wealth. Easy.
How do you make tax brackets for what are supposed to be non-profit organizations? You can audit Joel Osteen if you want, but if you want to still include First Baptist of Small Town, LA then I don't see what the purpose is other than to make them too poor to exist....which I think is what most of those advocating for taxing churches want to happen anyway because we live in a society that hates God.
Sure, but do you have any credible evidence of the imaginary being you refer to as “God”? There seems to be as much evidence for God as there is for Santa Claus or the Leprechaun.
If they’re not hanging onto a bunch of profits and real estate, then they won’t be paying much in taxes and it’ll be pretty painless for them.
For the churches hoarding huge investment funds and real estate empires without doing much actual charity, they’ll actually contribute some to the community.
My local MCC church has a congregation of about 50 people, most of whom are older, and meets in a historic church. They can barely afford the upkeep. If they had to pay property taxes on the property, which is worth millions just due to history and location, they'd have to close down. Which means the food pantry, clothing closet, and offender reintegration project (to help people arrested for drug possession and stuff like that find legit jobs) would go away too. And then the structure would fall apart because the government DGAF and there's no other funding stream.
Churches are non-profit organizations. They are taxed the same as any other non-profit. Do you think we should be taxing all NPOs or just the religious ones?
That's not entirely true, churches have special exemptions preventing investigation and eliminating much of their reporting and accounting requirements except under extreme circumstances.
They should be treated exactly the same regardless of whether they have a religion or not.
I'll answer these questions for America, because that's the information I'm familiar with.
It depends on what you mean by taxes. Churches already pay taxes. Payroll tax. Gas tax. The answer there would just be to look up how much churches pay in taxes in any country and that's your answer.
Do you mean taxes on profits? Churches don't make any. That's part of being non-profit organizations. So the tax revenue would be 0.
Do you mean sales tax? Churches are required to pay sales tax on any business operations unrelated to their core purpose. So if a church runs a café out of their sanctuary, all purchases there are taxable. So again, it's not a question of "if" it's a question of how much they already pay.
The only thing left would be property taxes, which non-profits do not pay. Or taxes on donations, which makes no sense to me. But the first amendment in the US prevents treating the church differently than any other charitable organization. The one exception churches have is the parsonage. Churches will sometimes provide their pastor a place to live, and that residence is exempt from property tax. That's a benefit other organizations do not get, but closing that exemption would not grant a significant amount of money.
I think most people that are against religion see all churches as wealthy money laundering machines (and some have been) because of the few notable mega churches with pastors flying around in private jets and living in mansions claiming it's a necessary expense for their religious mission work.
The government already has a hard time proving that any of that is in violation of their nonprofit status. I don't see how those same people couldn't evade taxes.
I've been at a few smaller churches that also run a coffee shop or something like that which are "cash donation only" with "suggested prices" so they don't have to deal with taxes. If taxed, that stuff would probably just disappear all together.
The vast majority of churches spend every dime that comes in to keep the lights on in the building and on a meager salary for critical staff (most operation positions in most churches are also entirely volunteer based). Any excess offering goes back out to missions workers or other charitable programs.
I pretty much agree with everything you said. But the question wasn't if we should but how much revenue would be achieved if it was done. From my experience, churches tend to use it more effectively than governments. But I realize my experience may not be typical.
You left out a pretty significant one, personal income tax, and the Joel Osteens and Kenneth Copelands of the world are paying it, just like every other wealthy entrepreneur.
I looked it up and posted it in this thread in another comment. You would bring in about 5 to 7 billion in property taxes annually. The USA brings in about 52 billion in property taxes every year, so it would be a drop in the bucket.
Non-profits do pay property tax though. That's the big distinction.
A lot of churches are cash-poor and property rich, which is something I think a lot of people don't get. Taxing church property would mean putting a lot of these churches out of operation entirely. I know of historical churches with 10-20 people and no paid staff (including pastor) but a beautiful and historic building that's 100+ years old on prime real estate.
You would open up other issues that would cause all sorts of issues. First, you're not going to be able to separate churches from othet nonprofits, in the US anyway. So everyone pays. And charitable contributions would no longer be tax free for individuals or businesses. Charitable donations would go down quite a bit.
That only makes sense if you think government does charity better than actual charities.
This last sentence is IMO a big difference (in the US anyway) between how conservatives and liberals think; liberals are skeptical of private (especially religious) charity as a comprehensive social welfare strategy and conservatives are skeptical of government social welfare.
I think one thing that underlies conservative objections to attempts to find new government revenue streams is that they don't actually believe that doing so will actually result in reducing existing taxes OR improving any government services in any way, which, given experience with the last several decades of Congress, is honestly something of a fair point.
I understand that the government has to run many assistance programs. But I also think a bunch of church ladies is going to serve dinner to the needy more efficiently than the city government.
the reason we don't tax churches is because of the establishment clause. Which the idea was to encourage freedom of religion (and like all things someone's pockets will get lined). Remember churches aren't taxed on net income, which they rarely have any if it's done correctly, all the money should be put right back into the church meaning no net income. And remember many other religions exist and you can't exempt one religious institution and not the others. So the little mosque on the side of town or the synagogue will be impacted too. In the end a church is a non profit organization, so should we start taxing charity's as well like the red cross? If I'm a church and I'm told I'll be taxed because I'm a church, I'd just change my name to charity church and become a charity that has Sunday meetings to avoid it. In the end, not much money will be made, alot of religious freedom could be hinderd if the smaller churches/religions get limited. and it's unfair to consider one non profit different than another just because of their mission. [here's a good read](https://taxfoundation.org/church-taxes/)
I've worked for non-profits my entire life and my parents started a church. You wouldn't make very much at all. This thread is a really cringe and embarrassing display of Reddit stupidity. I \*hate\* religion and churches, but you wouldn't make much money simply because your average church operates in the red constantly. I used to be in support of taxes churches too, when I was younger. But they usually rely on donations from their flock to pay for things. A church is a congregation of people who are already taxed. What exactly about the church are you wanting to tax that you think you will get much money from? Churches don't make income, famous evangelists do. Those are different things.
Edit : I did some digging and found this [https://taxfoundation.org/church-taxes/](https://taxfoundation.org/church-taxes/)
**The notion that taxing churches would raise substantial federal revenue is wildly inaccurate, even neglecting the incoherence of imposing income taxes on a nonprofit organization. Clergy pay income and payroll taxes just like everyone else, and the local property tax exemption, while meaningful, is available to all nonprofits. The housing allowance, however, is somewhat meaningful and is controversial in legal circles. But on the whole, the notion that houses of worship are somehow depleting the treasury is what the Ten Commandments would call “false witness.”**
The page also states that if you taxes churches for property tax (which is the only thing that it would make sense to tax) you would likely bring in about 5 to 7 billion annually.
Less than zero long term. It would make churches start becoming anti-tax and would result in taxes and gov spending dropping.
Churches are untaxed, not to protect the church but as a sort of historical detente between them and the state.
Not as much as Reddit atheists would like to think. Most of them are hemorrhaging money so even if you did squeeze a bit out of the big ones you'd just end up subsidizing a lot more.
Not much. Remember, you're not taking ALL of the churches' money, just a taxable percentage.
Plus, it wouldn't really make a dent in the ~~deficit~~ debt.
I remember reading somewhere that if you took away ALL the wealth of ALL the US billionaires, it wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket.
The current US ~~deficit~~ debtis about $31 trillion.
[There are about 700 billionaires in the US](https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/us-millionaires-and-billionaires-you-might-not-believe-the-wealth/). Let's say they each averages about $5 billion in worth (because not all billionaires have as much as Elon).
That's a total of $3.5 trillion, or a little more than 1/10th of our national debt.
And that's if you took ALL their wealth, instead of just taxing a percentage.
Are there 700 churches worth an average of $5 billion each? Of course not. So even if you took ALL the money of ALL churches, it would be a blip on our economy. And remember, you're not going to take all their money, just a taxable percentage.
You are confusing deficit and debt. Deficit is the difference between how much they spend and how much they take in. Debt is the accumulation of all the deficits.
Diminishing returns is true but there is another question you are not asking. Why don't they?
This goes back to seperation of church and state. Back in the day churches were expected to help collect taxes. They took even more in 'tithes' and embezzled.
European countries demanded the church pay taxes but they couldent afford the taxes and help the people so the people rioted DESPITE the church
Nowadays churches are tax exempt specifically BECAUSE taxing churches tends to invite political blowback.
So how much would they gain? Try net loss.
The only necessary lesson from that is “don’t let the churches be in charge of tax collection, and audit them because they’d probably lie on their taxes.” That’s a totally solvable situation.
Taxing the churches is like requiring a voter ID. It is a result of people enjoying the comfort of an opinion without the discomfort of having put any serious thought into it.
The average attendance at a US church is 65 people. That's probably barely enough to pay a pastor's salary and keep the lights on. The wealthy Joel Osteen megachurches are the exception rather than the rule. Look somewhere else for your windfall.
I find it weird that we're talking about taxing churches when some of our largest corporations don't even pay any fucking tax.
A church is a business, a church is a non profit. Churches are incorporated. Most are operating at a loss from year to year. You can't just count their income and the value of their property. They are not the kind of gold mine of tax revenue that people like to imagine.
If they have any endowments, they are usually locked up by the donors in how they can be used.
I personally don't want to grab money from the local church running a food pantry and hand it to a government that keeps trying to cut SNAP and medicare instead of taxing the rich.
Larger mega churches that bring in millions of dollars should be taxed. Mega churches of today are businesses and are no longer preach the actual message of Jesus Christ.
Smaller churches shouldn't be taxed.
Government still spends more in 1 year than all our billionaires' wealth combined.
We have to dial down our spending. There's no other way to get the debt in control.
Yes, I know loans are continually taken out and paid on time, I'm just curious how that would continue to happen once we get closer to 100 trillion in debt. There isn't enough taxable revenue for that in the country.
Unknowable. Many churches aren’t even required to disclose their financial status. Some actively hide their assets (refer to recent Mormon church scandal where they were hiding and over $100 billion dollars in at least one secret investment fund that finally got revealed by a whistleblower, and resulted in an SEC case).
A lot less than people think, depending on the tax structure.
I can only talk about the United States. Church congregations generally have legal existence as not-for-profit corporations. The truth is that most of them -- not the megachurches, but the small parishes and congregations that are most churches -- genuinely do not turn a profit. When I believed in God I belonged to a small Eastern Orthodox parish in Silicon Valley that had an open budgeting process, so everyone sees the money coming in and going out even if they're not on the governing council. Most years we'd struggle to see a budget in 6 figures, which for the area was minuscule, and nearly every year we'd spend every penny and then some on upkeep, salaries and honoraria (the rector was arguably very underpaid even considering the value of housing), utilities, supplies, and charities. If it had been converted to a for-profit corporation it still would have owed zero in taxes, as corporations are taxed on profits and not gross revenues. I have to believe this is actually typical for most small congregations, or at least not far off. For such parishes, being a for-profit corporation would result in more paperwork, but very little tax revenue, if any.
If the property was taxable it still wouldn't contribute to the income of "the country" since property taxes go to states, counties, and sometimes municipalities, but in no case to the Federal government. And anyway, what proportion of all private property in an entire state is owned by churches? Not a lot.
And to correct what seems a common misconception, or at least a common misstatement: clergy are subject to personal income tax just like everyone else. So this would be nothing new there. We might adjust the rules about what constitutes income, if for example the church provides luxurious facilities like private jets for use at the clergy's sole discretion, but that's a slightly different subject.
Just like 'taxing the rich more': Not enough to matter, vs a multi-trillion-dollar budget hole.
Also, taxing churches while NOT taxing other nonprofits would be a 'gimmie' 1st-Ammendment lawsuit for any competent lawyer.
The overwhelming majority of the US' fiscal problems are caused by a mathematical mismatch in our major social-entitlements: Social Security and Medicare were both designed and funded based on a large portion of the citizenry dying before they could claim benefits (around age 62, at the time) - AND on a 3-child-per-woman fertility rate (To supply new workers who could be taxed to pay for the over-65 population's benefits).
We now have a life expectancy of 87 rather than 62, and a fertility rate BELOW 2 children per-woman. That means entitlement-driven bankruptcy unless the retirement age is adjusted (preferably indexed to life expectancy, to prevent this from happening again 2 decades down the road) and/or the payroll tax raised \*for everyone\*. And raising the payroll tax is a no-go for obvious political reasons.
Probably an amount that would sound like a lot on paper but would only be a relatively small amount relative to the overall revenue. Yes, megachurches pull in a lot of money when you consider it’s all from either donations or selling crappy merch but it’s a rounding error compared
to the sort of tax revenue that mega corporations are able to dodge. I would imagine that on the local level, levying a property tax would be a significant revenue source for cities and counties.
Let's say you're unemployed, the rent is due and children are hungry. You could apply for food stamps. It'll take days just to apply (depending on the state) and you'll have to go through the rigamarol of the application process and hope you'll qualify. Or you could call my church which runs a small food cupboard serving about 50 people with disabilities or down on their luck. We will ask you one question - "How many people in your family?" And we will have a box of groceries to last a few days ready within an hour. Our church is very small so if you think we should be taxed you are depriving people with disabilities of food.
Firstly it depends on what country, and secondly churches are non-profit organisations. You also need to be clear on what exactly you're taxing.
Tax the donations that people make to the massive US evangelical megachurches if you want but they're a tiny tiny minority of churches across the world. My local church has like 40 people, half of whom are pensioners and the pastor is our only salaried worker, and he's definitely not flying around in private jets. I also haven't asked him personally but I'd assume he pays income tax like everyone who earns any salary anywhere.
I also live in the UK where the big commercial prosperity-gospel megachurches and political evangelicalism is bizarre to me.
My church is a registered charity, here in the UK meaning they have to declare their income
They are audited by the government to ensure that the funds are used appropriately. This is only for the UK, not anywhere else.
If stripped of their charity status and taxed as a company the tax gained would be £0, since their expenditure is greater than revenue
When the tax laws were passed in the US, I'm pretty sure they expected churches to remain community based houses of worship. They couldn't have imagined churches buying sports arenas, shopping malls, condo buildings, etc. The fact that some own billions in real estate and pay no taxes.
Probably not very much.
The biggest thing most churches should do is be classified as a non-profit and have the same reporting requirements. That would generally stop the worst examples being used as private slush funds.
Don't know, but I think it's time we found out. Eager to find out how many churches will go down as a result of tax fraud/evasion as well.
My guess.. more than a few.
The bigger question: how much would society lose by taxing churches? If you walk into any church of nearly any religion and say you need help getting groceries, gas, etc... They will not give you the money, but will take you to the store and gas station or even help pay rent. They use their tax exempt status to do good in most cases (Kim Kardashian's mom aside). I was poor and was able to go on an expensive ski trip funded through my church just because other members didn't want any children to feel left out they typically spend all of their revenue on local businesses and not Walmart/Amazon to help their community out... it's a way for citizens to dictate where their charitable money goes unlike the thrift store,red cross, or good will which keeps something like %80 of it in house. Churches as a whole are better charities than nearly any other charity of equal size. We have TRILLIONS of tax dollars missing in the USA but no one is asking for accountability, just more and more and more.
What does the NFL do with their exempt status? They not only are exempt, but receive free tax dollars to build stadiums, lock out the general public from viewing games (blackout games), and charge you more than a car payment per person to view the game in person (snacks and beer not included!), so it's like being triple taxed just to enjoy what you were already taxed to build! It brings in $12 billion per year untaxed! But people always wanna tax churches and make sure someone doesn't sell a watermelon at a farmer's market without collecting tax while the government overspends and loses money and gives over $100 billion to fight a proxy war.
Reminder that if churches were taxed in the US, they could legally donate to political figures and preach in support of specific candidates.
Yes, some do it now, but they can and do get in legal trouble for it.
I don’t know about full taxation, but the parsonage exemption is absurd. There needs to be a reasonable parsonage, like maybe 150-200 % the median home value exemption. A 16,000,000 mansion is not a parsonage.
Property tax yes. They should pay for police and fire services.
Income tax - a bit more problematical. For a business, they subtract their expenses of labor and materials and utilities etc from their revenues to determine net income to be taxed.
For churches, surely they would be allowed to subtract salaries, utilities, repairs etc from their income. But what about charitable efforts by a church? Shouldn't those be subtracted from their income?
I think a revenue tax - ie, 2% of all revenue - might be appropriate as a way to acknowledge that the government provides a useful legal structure and other services for the church to exist.
In Greece, some say that the Orthodox Church own more than 1/4 of the country. Instead of taxing them, the state even pays their wages. Such is their power
>(Number of churches ) x ( average church revenue) x (tax rate).
Presumably if you were engaging in this it would be taxation like other businesses, which would mean taxing on the profit margin at the end of the fiscal year, not on the revenue.
It's crazy that they're not. They should be taxed just like any other business. It's literally a business based on lies and stories. Bonkers when you spend longer than 5 minutes thinking about it.
TL;DR: business tax - Zero ; property tax - likely not worth it.
Business tax: Literally zero.
Churches operate on a non-profit model, so there isn’t any business profit to tax.
Churches aren’t separated from other non profits, so you could technically get rid of all non profit organizations, but even if you did that, nothing is stopping anyone from operating with a net zero profit anyways, which means no tax.
On real estate/property tax, you could raise some money, but you have to remember that it’s impossible to separate out churches from other non-profits. Charging property tax on non-profits hurts all non-profits, not just churches. There will always be good non-profits and bad non-profits, just like there will always be good churches and bad churches. All people can do is vote with their dollars.
Depends. Many countries use taxes to fund churches, so it may not be the best idea in those cases.
That said, in the US, churches rake in $74.5 billion per year in total. That's a lot. Even taxing that at 5% would be a nice income boost.
A lot. Biggest corporation on earth is the catholic church. Mormans have at least 100 billion. Other sects have assets and property. They should be taxed like any other buiseness and deduct their charity if they do it. Between taxing churches and actually taxing rich people/corporations we would have more than enough money to solve every problem. Now the question is do we have enough resources to sustain a utopia?
Income or real estate? Both answers are: “Quite a bit.”
Here in Denmark the churches are funded through taxes, so taxing the churches would be imposing a tax on ourselves twice. Not a very bright business plan
Just print more money to give to churches so you can tax them more! Its basically free money!
The U.S. Treasury has entered the chat...
#NOBODY CAN PRINT OUR MONEY BUT US
Genius!
How do you feel about paying for churches via taxes? I’m glad I don’t have to but I wish the churches did pay taxes.
It's not mandatory. It's the only tax in Denmark that you can obt out of. Personally I'm fine with it. Most of our churches are from the 11-1300s, and since the priests are employed by the state, we have a very secular way of thinking about religion. Most people only use the churches and the priests for big events like baptising, confirmations, weddings and funerals and the rest of the year the priests hold service for five old widows.
Does the church in Denmark own property/assets? Are their finances made public? Who oversees their expenditure of public (and?) private finances? An aside, having read other answers, most seem to be US based perspective, and the church being classified as a charity/not for profit. While I’ve heard of several cases in the US where it’s simple to register as a charity and operate a [clearly profitable business model such as televangelists](https://youtu.be/7y1xJAVZxXg) I’ll stick to what I know first hand. To the best of my knowledge, the Catholic Church operates very much like a conglomerate - owning, buying, selling property all over the world, making investments on capital markets, and is evidently a profitable organism. But it is not required to publish its finances as other companies do. The HQ of the Catholic Church is its own sovereign state - the Vatican.
Denmark has an 'Established Church' similar to the Church of England in the UK. It is state-funded because it is also effectively part-of the state. If you ever wonder why the founders wrote the specific words 'Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion', it is \*that specific\* arrangement (held by the CoE) they where seeking to prohibit.
We have a church ministerium. The churches do own land, but everything is heavily regulated. The church is not a powerful force in Denmark. They have no private finances. Everything goes towards just upholding the church year and employing priests and diggers and such. They certainly don't own any assets worth a dime.
This is indeed very Danish. I love Danes. Germans with a sense of humor (my favorite Dane joke). I worked for AP Moller/Maersk for 23 years so I must have gotten along with ya'll well enough to keep me employed that long.
As an American, this really weirds me out.
How?
A lot of people who came to America were Christians who were treated as second-class citizens due to their disagreements with the state church. So, American culture has the separation of church and state deeply baked into our culture. The idea of church and state getting into bed together, politicians getting church doctrine twisted to suit their political purposes, churches getting the state to prosecute people over theological disagreements, it's terrifying. And so we do everything we can to make sure that doesn't happen. Now, obviously Denmark isn't rounding up heretics and burning them at the stake. This is an arrangement that's worked for your country longer than mine has existed. It's just one that goes against the grain of my culture. It's odd, and if someone tried to set up something like that here, there'd be an outrage. Even if it was my church that was being picked to receive tax money, I'd fight it. Nothing good can come from it, the way I see it.
As much as we would like to believe that church and state are separate in the US, it is far from it, especially the last decade. It is progressively getting worse as the individual states have been changing laws left and right to favor religion, everywhere. Religion needs to stay out of the government.
It's kind of like if I found out you guys ate spiders over there. I'm not going to try to stop you. I'm not going to try to lecture you. You're free to live your own lives. But its really weird and I never want that sort of thing to catch on here.
I agree that nothing good would come of it in America today. We are a much more homogeneous culture, and much, much more secular even though we have a state religion
Yo, no, the pilgrims came here because England was TOO WELCOMING of religious freedom for them. They originally went to Denmark, but the truth is, they didn’t want their kids learning another language.
Another Dane here! First of all, unless you're a member of the church, you don't have to pay too much. Even if you are a member, you don't need to pay that much for it in taxes. Secondly, I don't mind the taxes. But that is also because the churches here usually aren't just made as a place for bigots to practice hate speech, as it seems to be in other countries. Ofc there's exceptions to everything, but generally the churches here are fine - it's a place for people to get together. On top of that, the money are primarily used for good causes. I see it less as paying taxes for the church, and more as paying taxes for different good causes.
Sounds like churches everywhere, some mind their business and I’m sure there are some in dansk that don’t.
Works for Social Security income in the US!
i see that in reverse: taxing the churches implies that they would no longer be tax payer funded... so instead of from the state coffers the churches would begin feeding money into them. double win!
Could just stop giving them money. That's a pretty good business plan.
Well you would stop funding the churches first...
I learned something new today. Does every religion get equal funding? Is it based off number of members? So many questions
> Here in Denmark the churches are funded through taxes Why would you do that
Because the protestant Church is our state religion. And because most of our churches were build in the middle ages and need constant care.
> Because the protestant Church is our state religion. Why have a state religion? Seems like a bad idea. > And because most of our churches were build in the middle ages and need constant care. As historical sites that makes sense, but not otherwise.
I get where you're coming from, but having a state religion in Denmark, Sweden and Norway has proved to probably be a good thing. It means that our church follows the values of society, have no political power whatsoever, have to align with legislation (so it was very easy to legalise gay Christian marriage for example). People here a not religious, but the churches are used in the big life events and form a pillar of our culture. As does the monarchy which most people support, but few people have strong feelings towards. We're weird like that
> People here a not religious, but the churches are used in the big life events and form a pillar of our culture. As does the monarchy which most people support, but few people have strong feelings towards. Both the monarchy and the church are completely inappropriate diversions of public resources. The government has the authority to tax its citizens. In return, we ask it not to be wasteful (to the extent that any large political organization is able to do so). Neither the church nor the monarchy are good uses of public funds.
You can say that, but since we live in a democracy and people here show massive support for both the church and the monarchy, then it can't be wasteful. I'm not a big fan of either, but I can see why both have their merit.
Step 1, stop giving tax payers money to churches. Step 2, take some of their money from them and use it for good Step 3, enjoy less hassle from relious nuts imposing their views onto others with their obsene riches.
Catholic church alone..78 billion (at least) in assets. Profits vary from country to country but in Canada 1.5 billion was raised for catholic church in 2019.
The assets of the Catholic church can't even be reasonably estimated. The Vatican houses thousands of works of art that are priceless, and not in the "wow that is super fucking expensive" meaning of the phrase "priceless works of art," priceless as in "there is literally no sales comparison for The Sistine Chapel ceiling, so we literally cannot even reasonably estimate what it's worth." They own thousands of pieces like this. It would not shock me in the slightest if that, similar to rumors regarding what Vladmir Putin is worth, the Catholic Church is worth orders of magnitude more than anyone would estimate.
The Vatican is an independent nation (legally) though so it doesn't matter what they have. Only what the Church in a particular country has. Considering how many diocese have gone through or are in bankruptcy right now, the Catholic church isn't as rich as people think. Certainly not in terms of cash. The Vatican's annual revenue is in the hundreds of millions. That's not nothing, but it's not huge either. It's possessions are valued at around 5 billion. Revenue for the rest of the church is hard to estimate, because it's really a collection of organizations rather than a single organization. Finances are separated at the diocese level I believe.
They also own land directly in the center of most cities. They probably own 10 billion dollars in Manhattan alone before you even try to value the buildings on it. And that's in the new world where our cities weren't built directly around the churches with the churches at the near geographic center. If you tried to put a value on everything globally, let's say they have to fire sale every single item, land, and building, it's probably closer to a trillion dollars.
Got to be far more than that Here in NZ which is a tiny country in terms of population, the church has over $1 billion in property. In a country like the Philippines or US with more than 50x our population, the assets would be massively more than $100b. Secret is that the church often inherits land and other assets from church goers who bequest everything if they don't have children or other family They then just sit on the land, leasing it out for hundreds of years which gains in value; an organisation that has been around over 1000 years and intends to be around indefinitely without any exit plan, can play the long game
The Vatican also does not keep records they are burned every decade. Conviently.
Well there's always money in the banana stand.
I don’t know if some of the mad lads on r/theydidthemath would be able to get an estimate, but I agree with the other two. A lot of money
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I like to look at historic churches, some of them are absolute marvels of architecture. But then you realise it was funded by taking from the poor back in the day, especially with threats of "if you don't donate you are a sinner".
Upkeep and maintenance on those older historic churches isn’t cheap either. Worse if they are historically registered
Lol, what? It was literally the opposite. Rich nobles donated their riches to the church before they died, and the churches were the first form of social welfare.
Some countries like mine require that charities that pay no tax have to publish financial accounts Though quite a few manage to bury details. Like a wealthy churchgoers *lending* their evangelical preacher a 100k car, travel, house etc rather than them owning it Or Seven Day Adventist church owning a huge business notably Cornflakes) so they can push money back and forth between charity/church and business for profit to earn more money for church leaders
Yeah I suspect it's impossible with the available data. If we tax churches, then how much we tax them depends on how much of their revenue actually gets used for charitable causes. In the US, churches are exempt from a lot (most? all?) of the reporting requirements that other charitable organizations are held to. Although we have pretty good numbers for how much people are giving to churches, we don't have very reliable data for how much charitable spending churches are actually responsible for. Most are likely spending enough to still qualify as tax exempt anyways, but we just don't know.
In Aus they are audited. Simple enough for the ATO to see how much is being used charitably. From what I've seen it's very little.
We do! Almost every nonprofit, including churches, need to file a [990 IRS Form](https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-990) Here’s one from the [Archdiocese of New York](http://archny.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-CNY-Finance-Article.pdf) [a different church 990](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/237062126/202223199349322507/full) So in theory, you can see how much is given to program/charity and how much stays.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I only see total revenue, expenses, and assets in there. Just a basic financial filing. From that I can only assume that the revenue less expenses was used on qualifying charitable causes which likely isn't always true. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if this is the only filing, then I think it supports what I was saying, that we don't have reliable data for how much charitable spending churches are actually responsible for.
I’ll give you, big archdiocese like this have trouble because they have so many arms. [This is from the Archdiocese Catholic Charities.](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135562185/202240909349300649/full) Technically they are a different 501 but they use the 1011 Fifth Ave address like the other affiliated orgs. Also remember (for Catholics) every parish is it’s own thing, with their own fundraising.
There is no 'percentage rule' for regular nonprofits either. They just have to have an ostensibly-non-political (although every political org has figured out a way to game the system on this) social-benefit mission. It's perfectly legal for a nonprofit to spend 90% of it's donations on employee (to include CEO) salaries...
True, but the IRS regularly audits nonprofits to verify that they qualify as nonprofits. Churches are only audited under very specific circumstances such as criminal investigations. If they were using their revenue in an untoward way, they have to be pretty flamboyant about it to actually get investigated.
Bingo! The IRS has [special rules when auditing churches](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-religious-organizations/special-rules-limiting-irs-authority-to-audit-a-church), which are significantly more lenient than what a standard 501 (c)(3) nonprofit has to deal with.
From my experience, most churches are barely keeping the lights on. For every church with 200+ people in a nice building, there's a dozen renting a school, or running in a house, or meeting in a community center. For every pastor making a good living, there's 5-10 who aren't collecting a paycheck at all.
Plus wages and a nice buildings are tax deductible.
We should tax remittances too. $60 Billion per year is remitted out of the USA to Mexico alone. That’s just one of dozens of countries that get remittance inflows from the USA. https://www.google.com/search?q=remittances+to+mexico&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari (Economist article is paywalled, so the above is the Google quick description) Currently, big banks process those transfers and charge a transfer fee. They make money off the departure of USD. Instead of letting the banks make hundreds of millions of dollars off of these transfers, the USA should be converting that to tax revenue. A friend argued years ago that taxing churches would afford them more political privileges and influence than they currently have. I forget the details, but I think it was along the lines of converting their non-profit status to corporate (person). Please clarify that if someone can…
Something else I heard about is that even if you take away churches tax exempt status under religion. That doesn't necessarily mean that they can be tax exempt under non profit charity. The actual threshold for % (or flat $) of monetary gains donated to charity is actually quite low from what I have heard
Even if it’s not monetary, I believe they could convert to a 501(c)3 food bank and run food share logistics from their place of worship. I hear some supermarkets use some church-run food banks to pick up and distribute their food shares
They run the entire GOP and don't pay a dime in taxes.
Christians make up a majority of the GOP but they also make up a majority of democrats too. By this logic Churches run the democratic party
They run most political parties. This is just hatemongering. The majority of United States citizens are Christian - they run the whole country, my dude. Not just the GOP.
Thats racist to say round these parts
We would be able to pull 10's, if not 100's, of Billions of dollars from churches.
Reddit doesn't want to hear this but the economic issue is that taxing churches would produce a greater burden on the government than the tax revenue would produce. Religious organizations are much more efficient than governments in charitable work. Any for-profit endeavors are already taxed. There isn't much to be gained economically.
A decent amount in the short term, but with significantly diminishing returns as you'll be effectively closing small churches and ensuring only the large mega churches can survive.
> A decent amount in the short term, but with significantly diminishing returns as you'll be effectively closing small churches and ensuring only the large mega churches can survive. In many situations, the churches provide a level of social/community services, too. So the cost recovery of those has to be taken into account (as churches are unlikely to take the tax hit without billing back) when calculating the net effect.
And paying taxes is going to be cut out of this charity work, rather than not paying the electric bill or the secretary's salary. So the government would have to pay more to pick up the slack.
You’re absolutely correct- in terms of the specific question, which just asked about revenue The answer is an incredible amount of revenue However in terms of the budget, it would be a huge negative as these institutions offer more in aid and public services than they would provide in taxes
I always like to point out the net only because people seem to assume there’s some huge windfall coming if churches/mosques/synagogues/etc are taxed. Not to mention I don’t think anyone would be comfortable with the level of political involvement they would have if they were taxed, but that’s a whole other can of worms
Given how many times the government wants to cut SNAP and medicare instead of taxing Bezos and Musk, I'd personally rather the local pastor, who is a member of the community, be running the food pantry than just hand the money over to the government for them to do whatever they feel like.
I want to be clear- I completely agree It’s the distinction between the literal question asked, and what we all interpreted the question as hinting at (Description vs prescription) I only commented to make the distinction clear before someone else commented saying you weren’t answering the question
The entire point of not taxing churches, is that government should not have a financial dependancy on any given religious group... And that religious groups should not be able to be influenced by government granting or removing tax deductions.
Business taxes don't work like personal income taxes, and it's fairly safe to assume that churches would be taxed like a business. Taxing the net income would slow the growth of mega-churches while taking no money from churches which don't make a profit. Mind you that's only until said large churches start evading taxes.
The tax man doesn't care if the local business can't pay it's bills, they're going after it for property tax and other tax money anyway. You don't pay your taxes as a business owner, you get your doors chained shut. Why would churches be different?
You only pay taxes on profits, not on losses. Churches typically don’t profit. If you argue that we would stop allowing contributions to a church be tax deductible, then the community services these churches provide would shift to the government who will provide them at a much lower rate of efficiency, especially when compared to the minuscule amount the government would take in from taxing the church- so it’d a big, big, big net loss for the government
Businesses are taxed on profit, not revenue anyway. And churches don't have profit by definition. Property tax is actually the big thing, because a lot of churches are cash-poor and property rich.
You could start the tax rate at a certain revenue level, say the first $10 million a year is exempt. But I don’t think in the grand scheme of federal revenue, the churches get as much money as people think.
Different tax bands for higher "profits"? So small churches pay 20% and mega churches pay up to 50% (or more). And no loopholes or "offshore" fiddles.... hmmm maybe we should apply that to Google/Amazon/Starbucks/Vodafone and the rest.
Do you also include the Red Cross in this? And how much of this is counter productive? I have to give extra money to charities so that then they can pay their tax and provide help? So, essentially, I'm paying the tax for the charity? I'm not sure this is what anyone wants.
>? I have to give extra money to charities so that then they can pay their tax and provide help? So, essentially, I'm paying the tax for the charity? That's a good point
And many churches do a ton of stuff for their local communities. Taxing them would severely hamper that. Reddit likes to pretend every church in America is a megachurch that does nothing to help the poor and just hoards funds. That's not reality.
The vast, vast majority of churches in the US are tiny and can barely make ends meet as it is, often contributing more to the local community and missions abroad than using inwardly. Most churches may only have 1-2 paid "employees", pastor and secretary. Taxing ALL churches would result in many closing, leaving only the hugh megachurches that most of the people asking to tax hate. It's a lose-lose for everybody and wouldn't make much of an impact long term on the government's revenue.
The senior and children pastors at a church I used to go to got jobs driving school buses because the church couldn't afford to pay them and keep up commitment to missions and local charities, so the pastors cut their own pay to keep supporting the work the church is supposed to be doing.
Yeah, the pastor at the church in my home town took up plumbing to be his main source of income, become the church couldn't afford to pay him a full time salary.
This, and the contributions to the community that many churches do vastly outweighs the amount we would gain in taxing them imo. Many churches give out food and clothes and help shelter people in need and some even send people to third world countries and help vaccinate and feed people in dire need. Wether you agree with the politics and message they may try to impose on people or the public, I've worked closely with many churches doing charitable work for other organizations and many churches make up for what the federal and local governments fail to subsidize. Most of the food banks in my area are run out of churchs and they have endless amounts of volunteers and giant freezers and refrigerators to keep the food from spoiling which they all pay for with the donations made to the church. I couldn't imagine the impact it would have by taxing the churches because the bottom line is many of these programs would be hit the hardest and we all know the government wouldn't be responsible with the money gained and provide the services that these churches do.
People who want churches taxed also generally want the government to provide those services. Which is fine as things go. But considering the difficulty of passing these programs, and the high probability that access is reduced via work requirements, it seems more probably that you'd just end up diverting those funds to the military industrial complex.
This is true, the government is lousy with money in general and often times social bills are passed with other things attached to it so it's weaponized in both media and in policy and like you said a military industrial complex. Most churces, not all mind you, work with very tight budgets and many upon many volunteers to get things to work so they are far more efficient in how the resources are spent and handled, and often times by people who genuinely care and love helping people unlike what you always get when having to deal with some low paid worker just handing out whatever their job is to do, there's many one on one sessions to help specific families and people that the volunteers or church people put extreme effort into helping for the benefit of no one but their guided faith and the responsibility they feel to the needy.
Well the thing to remember is if the church is actually doing charity work they can operate as a 501(c)(3) and not pay taxes. They would just have to open their books like every other 501(c)(3).
A lot of the food banks in the UK are basically through the church today. Historically, before government welfare systems - and we're going back to the workhouses here - the main source of support for the poor was alms from the churches. When Henry VIII went after the monasteries, he did a lot of damage to social welfare in the process. Also, parish priests in the Church of England don't get a regular salary - they get a stipend for their costs of living and rent-free use of the vicarage/rectory. In many cases in Western Europe, congregations are declining and so is interest in the priesthood. The Irish have had to import priests for a while - traditionally they were exporters - and are soon not going to be able to conduct all the funeral masses needed. [https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/leadingarticle/2023/05/30/news/editorial\_catholic\_church\_confronting\_collapse\_in\_numbers\_of\_priests-3310572/](https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/leadingarticle/2023/05/30/news/editorial_catholic_church_confronting_collapse_in_numbers_of_priests-3310572/)
If we taxed churches, and if the churches are actually operating as nonprofits they could operate as a 501(c)(3) and they wouldn't have to pay taxes. They would just have to follow the rules that existing 501(c)(3)s operate under. Churches now are just immediately assumed to be nonprofit which is demonstrably untrue for many of them.
Hang on. You're only taxed on profits. If your church is only barely making enough money to stay afloat then what makes you believe they will be paying much if anything in taxes? And it isn't like that money disappears if a church does. It still circulates in the economy and will be taxed somewhere else. Currently, the churches are getting tax handouts that could be better spent on work that helps the broader community, not just focused on discrete ideological groups.
I'm under the impression that most people supporting "taxing" churches don't understand that there isn't a profit. The money would have to come directly from what is given by the congregation. So instead of that money going back into the church or out into the community, it will now go to Uncle Sam. What you're saying essentially is that you don't like that Christians support the churches they attend, and would rather the IRS take that money.
Whenever this comes up I always think this. It's fine to argue that non-profits should be taxed, but you gotta be honest that's what you want to do and all the other organizations too. You can't just say "I don't like churches and thus want to exempt them from non-profit tax laws"
I don’t think it’s so much “I don’t like churches and thus want to exempt them from non-profit tax laws” so much as, “I don’t like megachurches and televangelists making tens millions living in huge mansions with yachts” As much as I dislike religion in general and think most of them are cults with extra steps, I get some folks get some value out of it. What fuckin’ community benefits are folks getting from some cunt using their donations to get rich? And yeah. That should apply to all non-profits. If their members are getting rich off it, they should absolutely pay tax.
Pastors are not exempt from income taxes. The US tax code doesn't prevent people from becoming millionaires though. If the ask is to raise the tax rate on higher income levels to make it harder to become a millionaire, I would agree with that. Same for increasing taxes on luxury goods like private boats, planes or large mansions.
If church money is going to church officials, that's taxable right now. No changes are needed for the IRS to take their piece of it.
It is the same in Canada. What I mean is that if the Church itself is bringing in enough money to be able to pay their pastors hundreds of thousands and still have enough money to build enormous megachurches and operate closer to a business than a religion, the Church itself should be taxed like any other business.
The problem I see is, where are the profits that would get taxed? If money coming in goes right back out, there's no net income. And that's generally how churches work - everything gets spent. So unless we're talking about the Mormon church with (ALLEGEDLY) a huge pile of cash & investments, opening them up to income tax wouldn't do anything. Property tax sure.
Exactly, there's no profit, they just pay their top employees more if more revenue comes in. Now if you want to increase tax on all high income individuals that might work
If you want some insight, I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We almost certainly do have a massive "stockpile" of cash but I feel like I could defend it. Until the middle of the twentieth century, we really struggled financially. Many years the money we spent on operating costs exceeded the money we took in through donations (tithing, etc.). There was a massive overhaul and we got control of things. Maybe most relevant to this discussion is that we decided we needed enough money saved to continue operating the church in the event that all income ceased or significantly dropped. So each year a small portion of what we took in (once we got our finances back in the green) was saved and subsequently invested (so it wasn't just sitting there doing nothing). These investments worked well and we achieved our "savings" goals rapidly (the amount we have currently is roughly enough to operate the church for about ten years). This ability to operate even in extremely difficult financial situations is really important to us because we honestly try to do as much charitable work as we can while still operating the equally important (as we see it) work of the rest of church stuff (weekly meetings, lessons, ordinance work, etc.). We're up to more than $1 billion/year in charitable work and it's rising each year. That's in addition to the day-to-day stuff that happens in local wards (congregations) which is easily overlooked but supported by the "rest" of the budget (tabulated separately from the charitable reporting). Most of my ward's budget, for example, goes toward charitable stuff anyway (helping provide community activities, aiding poor or needy people, organizing service and support, etc.). I totally understand how tens of billions of dollars in a fund can seem so awful but, at least from my perspective, it somehow still doesn't seem like enough. Bigger organizations have bigger operating costs and require bigger safety nets if operating without debt. I'd be happy to respond to questions or whatever though.
I'd like to force them to comply with non-profit tax laws. They should not get special treatment for being a religion. Yes, many smaller churches likely comply with these rules aside from the paperwork. Larger churches likely would not. If they can afford hundreds of millions for private jets, mansions, etc. they should pay their fair share. Trying to argue people who want to tax churches just don't like them or want to tax non-profits is a bad faith argument. If I open a charity supporting the homeless, I have to account for that money I receive and how it is spent if I want to be tax exempt. Just because they tape a religion on theirs shouldn't give them carte blanche to do whatever with no accountability.
Exactly. If they want the status let them comply with the rules and show their books.
Asking them to meet the evidentiary status of other non profits is fine by me. That feels like a separate question than "churches should be taxed". Though I'll grant that "ask churches to meet the evidence burden of other non profits" doesn't role off the tongue
You are the part of the people who dont get tax brackets. The idea right now is all churches in these situations arent taxxed and some people abuse that. You add a fair tax system that says if you are involved in politics like a right wing or left wing church telling people how to vote and are basicly laundering money then you should get taxxed. You make under a million as a church you get taxxed if you are a church that maked under 500,000 you still pay taxes but after you do the math of income and tax deductions like every other business entity or citizen you pay near $0 maybe qualify for tax back. Its about punishing rich bad faith religious institutions abusing their station and their idols to make money. Taking advantage of the religious and stupid tp make money. Honestly they probably find another way but we shouldnt try to stop these types of people. Your statement sounds like when people say "they are raising taxes" to make people mad but only those making 120,000 get theirs raised so you make people angry over taxes that dont affect them.
I think any realistic discussion at taxing churches starts with a minimum revenue number and also involves offset for charitable works. If done correctly there should probably be a pass through involved as well. Where if you donate x to church and they use it for charity as opposed to outreach the tax break could be passed on. This would help solve for the funding problems small churches run into, as if they are doing charitable work they should see an increase in dollar flow, while punishing those churches that feel private jets are a necessity.
Then we tax mega churches. Create a specific church tax bracket.
Couldn't you do a caveat where if the church makes under, say 100K a year (could be higher or lower, 100 is just a nice round number), then its tax exempt? And anything above is taxed, that way the megachurches cant waste money on the lead pastor's third mansion. Im very much against churches, but if thats what someone wants to do with their life, then so be it
Makes sense to just have tax brackets like for individuals, then. Tiny poor churches pay less in taxes than enormous ones that are hoarding wealth. Easy.
How do you make tax brackets for what are supposed to be non-profit organizations? You can audit Joel Osteen if you want, but if you want to still include First Baptist of Small Town, LA then I don't see what the purpose is other than to make them too poor to exist....which I think is what most of those advocating for taxing churches want to happen anyway because we live in a society that hates God.
Doesn't believe in god\*\*\*
God's existence is not dependent on your belief.
Sure, but do you have any credible evidence of the imaginary being you refer to as “God”? There seems to be as much evidence for God as there is for Santa Claus or the Leprechaun.
Right back at you.
If they’re not hanging onto a bunch of profits and real estate, then they won’t be paying much in taxes and it’ll be pretty painless for them. For the churches hoarding huge investment funds and real estate empires without doing much actual charity, they’ll actually contribute some to the community.
My local MCC church has a congregation of about 50 people, most of whom are older, and meets in a historic church. They can barely afford the upkeep. If they had to pay property taxes on the property, which is worth millions just due to history and location, they'd have to close down. Which means the food pantry, clothing closet, and offender reintegration project (to help people arrested for drug possession and stuff like that find legit jobs) would go away too. And then the structure would fall apart because the government DGAF and there's no other funding stream.
Churches are non-profit organizations. They are taxed the same as any other non-profit. Do you think we should be taxing all NPOs or just the religious ones?
That's not entirely true, churches have special exemptions preventing investigation and eliminating much of their reporting and accounting requirements except under extreme circumstances. They should be treated exactly the same regardless of whether they have a religion or not.
The solution is have them report properly. This doesn’t raise any money in taxes though.
I'll answer these questions for America, because that's the information I'm familiar with. It depends on what you mean by taxes. Churches already pay taxes. Payroll tax. Gas tax. The answer there would just be to look up how much churches pay in taxes in any country and that's your answer. Do you mean taxes on profits? Churches don't make any. That's part of being non-profit organizations. So the tax revenue would be 0. Do you mean sales tax? Churches are required to pay sales tax on any business operations unrelated to their core purpose. So if a church runs a café out of their sanctuary, all purchases there are taxable. So again, it's not a question of "if" it's a question of how much they already pay. The only thing left would be property taxes, which non-profits do not pay. Or taxes on donations, which makes no sense to me. But the first amendment in the US prevents treating the church differently than any other charitable organization. The one exception churches have is the parsonage. Churches will sometimes provide their pastor a place to live, and that residence is exempt from property tax. That's a benefit other organizations do not get, but closing that exemption would not grant a significant amount of money.
I think most people that are against religion see all churches as wealthy money laundering machines (and some have been) because of the few notable mega churches with pastors flying around in private jets and living in mansions claiming it's a necessary expense for their religious mission work. The government already has a hard time proving that any of that is in violation of their nonprofit status. I don't see how those same people couldn't evade taxes. I've been at a few smaller churches that also run a coffee shop or something like that which are "cash donation only" with "suggested prices" so they don't have to deal with taxes. If taxed, that stuff would probably just disappear all together. The vast majority of churches spend every dime that comes in to keep the lights on in the building and on a meager salary for critical staff (most operation positions in most churches are also entirely volunteer based). Any excess offering goes back out to missions workers or other charitable programs.
If there are a few wealthy pastors in jets we should increase individual tax rates which would get them
I pretty much agree with everything you said. But the question wasn't if we should but how much revenue would be achieved if it was done. From my experience, churches tend to use it more effectively than governments. But I realize my experience may not be typical.
You left out a pretty significant one, personal income tax, and the Joel Osteens and Kenneth Copelands of the world are paying it, just like every other wealthy entrepreneur.
I looked it up and posted it in this thread in another comment. You would bring in about 5 to 7 billion in property taxes annually. The USA brings in about 52 billion in property taxes every year, so it would be a drop in the bucket.
Non-profits do pay property tax though. That's the big distinction. A lot of churches are cash-poor and property rich, which is something I think a lot of people don't get. Taxing church property would mean putting a lot of these churches out of operation entirely. I know of historical churches with 10-20 people and no paid staff (including pastor) but a beautiful and historic building that's 100+ years old on prime real estate.
You would open up other issues that would cause all sorts of issues. First, you're not going to be able to separate churches from othet nonprofits, in the US anyway. So everyone pays. And charitable contributions would no longer be tax free for individuals or businesses. Charitable donations would go down quite a bit. That only makes sense if you think government does charity better than actual charities.
This last sentence is IMO a big difference (in the US anyway) between how conservatives and liberals think; liberals are skeptical of private (especially religious) charity as a comprehensive social welfare strategy and conservatives are skeptical of government social welfare. I think one thing that underlies conservative objections to attempts to find new government revenue streams is that they don't actually believe that doing so will actually result in reducing existing taxes OR improving any government services in any way, which, given experience with the last several decades of Congress, is honestly something of a fair point.
I understand that the government has to run many assistance programs. But I also think a bunch of church ladies is going to serve dinner to the needy more efficiently than the city government.
the reason we don't tax churches is because of the establishment clause. Which the idea was to encourage freedom of religion (and like all things someone's pockets will get lined). Remember churches aren't taxed on net income, which they rarely have any if it's done correctly, all the money should be put right back into the church meaning no net income. And remember many other religions exist and you can't exempt one religious institution and not the others. So the little mosque on the side of town or the synagogue will be impacted too. In the end a church is a non profit organization, so should we start taxing charity's as well like the red cross? If I'm a church and I'm told I'll be taxed because I'm a church, I'd just change my name to charity church and become a charity that has Sunday meetings to avoid it. In the end, not much money will be made, alot of religious freedom could be hinderd if the smaller churches/religions get limited. and it's unfair to consider one non profit different than another just because of their mission. [here's a good read](https://taxfoundation.org/church-taxes/)
I've worked for non-profits my entire life and my parents started a church. You wouldn't make very much at all. This thread is a really cringe and embarrassing display of Reddit stupidity. I \*hate\* religion and churches, but you wouldn't make much money simply because your average church operates in the red constantly. I used to be in support of taxes churches too, when I was younger. But they usually rely on donations from their flock to pay for things. A church is a congregation of people who are already taxed. What exactly about the church are you wanting to tax that you think you will get much money from? Churches don't make income, famous evangelists do. Those are different things. Edit : I did some digging and found this [https://taxfoundation.org/church-taxes/](https://taxfoundation.org/church-taxes/) **The notion that taxing churches would raise substantial federal revenue is wildly inaccurate, even neglecting the incoherence of imposing income taxes on a nonprofit organization. Clergy pay income and payroll taxes just like everyone else, and the local property tax exemption, while meaningful, is available to all nonprofits. The housing allowance, however, is somewhat meaningful and is controversial in legal circles. But on the whole, the notion that houses of worship are somehow depleting the treasury is what the Ten Commandments would call “false witness.”** The page also states that if you taxes churches for property tax (which is the only thing that it would make sense to tax) you would likely bring in about 5 to 7 billion annually.
Less than zero long term. It would make churches start becoming anti-tax and would result in taxes and gov spending dropping. Churches are untaxed, not to protect the church but as a sort of historical detente between them and the state.
At least $3 annually
Not as much as Reddit atheists would like to think. Most of them are hemorrhaging money so even if you did squeeze a bit out of the big ones you'd just end up subsidizing a lot more.
You would lose money. Every non profit would head for the hills and you would lose payroll tax revenue from countless Non profits
…where do you think they would go exactly?
Not much. Remember, you're not taking ALL of the churches' money, just a taxable percentage. Plus, it wouldn't really make a dent in the ~~deficit~~ debt. I remember reading somewhere that if you took away ALL the wealth of ALL the US billionaires, it wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket. The current US ~~deficit~~ debtis about $31 trillion. [There are about 700 billionaires in the US](https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/us-millionaires-and-billionaires-you-might-not-believe-the-wealth/). Let's say they each averages about $5 billion in worth (because not all billionaires have as much as Elon). That's a total of $3.5 trillion, or a little more than 1/10th of our national debt. And that's if you took ALL their wealth, instead of just taxing a percentage. Are there 700 churches worth an average of $5 billion each? Of course not. So even if you took ALL the money of ALL churches, it would be a blip on our economy. And remember, you're not going to take all their money, just a taxable percentage.
You are confusing deficit and debt. Deficit is the difference between how much they spend and how much they take in. Debt is the accumulation of all the deficits.
You're right. Thanks for clarifying.
You only tax profit not wealth anyway, so an organisations wealth is really irrelevant
Diminishing returns is true but there is another question you are not asking. Why don't they? This goes back to seperation of church and state. Back in the day churches were expected to help collect taxes. They took even more in 'tithes' and embezzled. European countries demanded the church pay taxes but they couldent afford the taxes and help the people so the people rioted DESPITE the church Nowadays churches are tax exempt specifically BECAUSE taxing churches tends to invite political blowback. So how much would they gain? Try net loss.
The only necessary lesson from that is “don’t let the churches be in charge of tax collection, and audit them because they’d probably lie on their taxes.” That’s a totally solvable situation.
This.
Taxing the churches is like requiring a voter ID. It is a result of people enjoying the comfort of an opinion without the discomfort of having put any serious thought into it.
The average attendance at a US church is 65 people. That's probably barely enough to pay a pastor's salary and keep the lights on. The wealthy Joel Osteen megachurches are the exception rather than the rule. Look somewhere else for your windfall. I find it weird that we're talking about taxing churches when some of our largest corporations don't even pay any fucking tax.
A church is a business, a church is a non profit. Churches are incorporated. Most are operating at a loss from year to year. You can't just count their income and the value of their property. They are not the kind of gold mine of tax revenue that people like to imagine. If they have any endowments, they are usually locked up by the donors in how they can be used.
And all charities and unions?
I personally don't want to grab money from the local church running a food pantry and hand it to a government that keeps trying to cut SNAP and medicare instead of taxing the rich.
In every abrahmic religion the believers are recommended to attend prayer together.
Larger mega churches that bring in millions of dollars should be taxed. Mega churches of today are businesses and are no longer preach the actual message of Jesus Christ. Smaller churches shouldn't be taxed.
And the government would still piss it away.
Government still spends more in 1 year than all our billionaires' wealth combined. We have to dial down our spending. There's no other way to get the debt in control. Yes, I know loans are continually taken out and paid on time, I'm just curious how that would continue to happen once we get closer to 100 trillion in debt. There isn't enough taxable revenue for that in the country.
What is this question? Tax goes to the churches
Unknowable. Many churches aren’t even required to disclose their financial status. Some actively hide their assets (refer to recent Mormon church scandal where they were hiding and over $100 billion dollars in at least one secret investment fund that finally got revealed by a whistleblower, and resulted in an SEC case).
Knowing the details of our parish finances? Dozens of euro. Dozens.
Wouldn’t matter. In America at least they’d just waste it like our government does with our tax dollars currently.
Man, reddit can’t go one minute without complaining about religion.
Just churches, or mosques and temples too?
A lot less than people think, depending on the tax structure. I can only talk about the United States. Church congregations generally have legal existence as not-for-profit corporations. The truth is that most of them -- not the megachurches, but the small parishes and congregations that are most churches -- genuinely do not turn a profit. When I believed in God I belonged to a small Eastern Orthodox parish in Silicon Valley that had an open budgeting process, so everyone sees the money coming in and going out even if they're not on the governing council. Most years we'd struggle to see a budget in 6 figures, which for the area was minuscule, and nearly every year we'd spend every penny and then some on upkeep, salaries and honoraria (the rector was arguably very underpaid even considering the value of housing), utilities, supplies, and charities. If it had been converted to a for-profit corporation it still would have owed zero in taxes, as corporations are taxed on profits and not gross revenues. I have to believe this is actually typical for most small congregations, or at least not far off. For such parishes, being a for-profit corporation would result in more paperwork, but very little tax revenue, if any. If the property was taxable it still wouldn't contribute to the income of "the country" since property taxes go to states, counties, and sometimes municipalities, but in no case to the Federal government. And anyway, what proportion of all private property in an entire state is owned by churches? Not a lot. And to correct what seems a common misconception, or at least a common misstatement: clergy are subject to personal income tax just like everyone else. So this would be nothing new there. We might adjust the rules about what constitutes income, if for example the church provides luxurious facilities like private jets for use at the clergy's sole discretion, but that's a slightly different subject.
Just like 'taxing the rich more': Not enough to matter, vs a multi-trillion-dollar budget hole. Also, taxing churches while NOT taxing other nonprofits would be a 'gimmie' 1st-Ammendment lawsuit for any competent lawyer. The overwhelming majority of the US' fiscal problems are caused by a mathematical mismatch in our major social-entitlements: Social Security and Medicare were both designed and funded based on a large portion of the citizenry dying before they could claim benefits (around age 62, at the time) - AND on a 3-child-per-woman fertility rate (To supply new workers who could be taxed to pay for the over-65 population's benefits). We now have a life expectancy of 87 rather than 62, and a fertility rate BELOW 2 children per-woman. That means entitlement-driven bankruptcy unless the retirement age is adjusted (preferably indexed to life expectancy, to prevent this from happening again 2 decades down the road) and/or the payroll tax raised \*for everyone\*. And raising the payroll tax is a no-go for obvious political reasons.
ITT: A lot of people who have never even looked at the tax laws and how they apply to churches.
Probably an amount that would sound like a lot on paper but would only be a relatively small amount relative to the overall revenue. Yes, megachurches pull in a lot of money when you consider it’s all from either donations or selling crappy merch but it’s a rounding error compared to the sort of tax revenue that mega corporations are able to dodge. I would imagine that on the local level, levying a property tax would be a significant revenue source for cities and counties.
Yeah I'm with everybody else here the answer is not alot and a church is likely to do alot more good with that cash then the government ever could
Let's say you're unemployed, the rent is due and children are hungry. You could apply for food stamps. It'll take days just to apply (depending on the state) and you'll have to go through the rigamarol of the application process and hope you'll qualify. Or you could call my church which runs a small food cupboard serving about 50 people with disabilities or down on their luck. We will ask you one question - "How many people in your family?" And we will have a box of groceries to last a few days ready within an hour. Our church is very small so if you think we should be taxed you are depriving people with disabilities of food.
Firstly it depends on what country, and secondly churches are non-profit organisations. You also need to be clear on what exactly you're taxing. Tax the donations that people make to the massive US evangelical megachurches if you want but they're a tiny tiny minority of churches across the world. My local church has like 40 people, half of whom are pensioners and the pastor is our only salaried worker, and he's definitely not flying around in private jets. I also haven't asked him personally but I'd assume he pays income tax like everyone who earns any salary anywhere. I also live in the UK where the big commercial prosperity-gospel megachurches and political evangelicalism is bizarre to me.
My church is a registered charity, here in the UK meaning they have to declare their income They are audited by the government to ensure that the funds are used appropriately. This is only for the UK, not anywhere else. If stripped of their charity status and taxed as a company the tax gained would be £0, since their expenditure is greater than revenue
When the tax laws were passed in the US, I'm pretty sure they expected churches to remain community based houses of worship. They couldn't have imagined churches buying sports arenas, shopping malls, condo buildings, etc. The fact that some own billions in real estate and pay no taxes.
Probably not very much. The biggest thing most churches should do is be classified as a non-profit and have the same reporting requirements. That would generally stop the worst examples being used as private slush funds.
A lot, to put it simply
A lot. Biggest scam in the US.
Don't know, but I think it's time we found out. Eager to find out how many churches will go down as a result of tax fraud/evasion as well. My guess.. more than a few.
About...........tree-fiddy.
Enough to actually help people, rather than just helping themselves.
Christians hate this simple trick.
Billions
Tax the rich, tax the corporations, quit bailing out corporations, stop with the subsidizing.
This just reminded me to establish a church
The bigger question: how much would society lose by taxing churches? If you walk into any church of nearly any religion and say you need help getting groceries, gas, etc... They will not give you the money, but will take you to the store and gas station or even help pay rent. They use their tax exempt status to do good in most cases (Kim Kardashian's mom aside). I was poor and was able to go on an expensive ski trip funded through my church just because other members didn't want any children to feel left out they typically spend all of their revenue on local businesses and not Walmart/Amazon to help their community out... it's a way for citizens to dictate where their charitable money goes unlike the thrift store,red cross, or good will which keeps something like %80 of it in house. Churches as a whole are better charities than nearly any other charity of equal size. We have TRILLIONS of tax dollars missing in the USA but no one is asking for accountability, just more and more and more. What does the NFL do with their exempt status? They not only are exempt, but receive free tax dollars to build stadiums, lock out the general public from viewing games (blackout games), and charge you more than a car payment per person to view the game in person (snacks and beer not included!), so it's like being triple taxed just to enjoy what you were already taxed to build! It brings in $12 billion per year untaxed! But people always wanna tax churches and make sure someone doesn't sell a watermelon at a farmer's market without collecting tax while the government overspends and loses money and gives over $100 billion to fight a proxy war.
Reminder that if churches were taxed in the US, they could legally donate to political figures and preach in support of specific candidates. Yes, some do it now, but they can and do get in legal trouble for it.
They never do get in trouble though so there wouldn't be a difference.
Reddit atheists when they tax churches and then the Southern Baptist Convention Super PAC is formed in response to the violation of church and state
I don’t know about full taxation, but the parsonage exemption is absurd. There needs to be a reasonable parsonage, like maybe 150-200 % the median home value exemption. A 16,000,000 mansion is not a parsonage.
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There is another commenter here that linked to a fantastic article concerning this.
Property tax yes. They should pay for police and fire services. Income tax - a bit more problematical. For a business, they subtract their expenses of labor and materials and utilities etc from their revenues to determine net income to be taxed. For churches, surely they would be allowed to subtract salaries, utilities, repairs etc from their income. But what about charitable efforts by a church? Shouldn't those be subtracted from their income? I think a revenue tax - ie, 2% of all revenue - might be appropriate as a way to acknowledge that the government provides a useful legal structure and other services for the church to exist.
In Greece, some say that the Orthodox Church own more than 1/4 of the country. Instead of taxing them, the state even pays their wages. Such is their power
It will depend on the country. (Number of churches ) x ( average church revenue) x (tax rate).
>(Number of churches ) x ( average church revenue) x (tax rate). Presumably if you were engaging in this it would be taxation like other businesses, which would mean taxing on the profit margin at the end of the fiscal year, not on the revenue.
I stand corrected.
No worries. Common mistake with corporate taxation and how it is different from individuals.
A lot but at the cost of great societal/local benefits.
It's crazy that they're not. They should be taxed just like any other business. It's literally a business based on lies and stories. Bonkers when you spend longer than 5 minutes thinking about it.
It's something like $77B that we subsidize churches for every year in the US
TL;DR: business tax - Zero ; property tax - likely not worth it. Business tax: Literally zero. Churches operate on a non-profit model, so there isn’t any business profit to tax. Churches aren’t separated from other non profits, so you could technically get rid of all non profit organizations, but even if you did that, nothing is stopping anyone from operating with a net zero profit anyways, which means no tax. On real estate/property tax, you could raise some money, but you have to remember that it’s impossible to separate out churches from other non-profits. Charging property tax on non-profits hurts all non-profits, not just churches. There will always be good non-profits and bad non-profits, just like there will always be good churches and bad churches. All people can do is vote with their dollars.
Depends. Many countries use taxes to fund churches, so it may not be the best idea in those cases. That said, in the US, churches rake in $74.5 billion per year in total. That's a lot. Even taxing that at 5% would be a nice income boost.
A lot. Biggest corporation on earth is the catholic church. Mormans have at least 100 billion. Other sects have assets and property. They should be taxed like any other buiseness and deduct their charity if they do it. Between taxing churches and actually taxing rich people/corporations we would have more than enough money to solve every problem. Now the question is do we have enough resources to sustain a utopia?