Lawless Religion?
The Media Monitors Network features an article by Christopher Ketcham on the rights and exemptions that religious bodies receive under American law. Ketcham fears a growing religious lawlessness in our country, and hits the usual talking points in such debates: non-taxable church property (and how much America could benefit if we taxed churches), the right to refuse compulsory public schooling, and other issues that certain groups (on the right and left) feel erode the separation of Church and State. I’m not unsympathetic to such discussions, but I find it unfortunate that Ketcham feels the need to mock minority religions in order to build his case. Like when discussing the range of groups that can apply for and receive the benefits of a religious institution.
“Lack of oversight and disclosure coupled with timidity in regulation (or outright impotence) predictably leads to opportunity for fraud, or, at least, to generous allowances in the definition of “religious institution.” The village of Fleischmanns, New York, like all small towns a dependency of property tax, last year went bust after the majority Hasidic community declared their summer cottages “religious institutions.” Wiccan covens, brothels operating as churches of love, whole towns of New Ageists have received similar tax exemptions over the years.”
Wiccans (and other “New Ageists”) looking for the same rights as mainstream Christian organizations are just like brothels or tax-fraud operations. In other words, groups like COG, Circle Sanctuary, and The Troth are cheating our gullible government!
Ketcham doesn’t stop there, he also lays into those darn Native Americans for wanting to legally take peyote at their religious ceremonies.
“Perhaps most disturbing to proponents of disestablishment … was the passage in 1993 of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, drafted as the organized response of the religion lobby to the Supreme Court’s “peyote case” of 1990. The peyote case determined, rather reasonably, that religious motivation is no defense to illegal conduct, such as the consumption of hallucinogens (in this case by American Indian peyote cults). The interpretation pushed by the religion lobby was that the peyote case spelled the beginning of the end of religious liberty – because believers would now have to obey the same law as non-believers. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act restored the allegedly lost religious freedom by expanding the license of religion to in fact break the law.”
Ketcham then creates a “slippery slope” argument by citing a couple cases of people trying (and failing, a point he never mentions) to abuse the freedoms granted under the new act (the act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997 but it is still used as a federal guideline as seen in the 2006 ayahuasca tea case). In fact, towards the end, the article is exposed as simply a rant against the rights and powers of religious entities in America.
“…whether they are hurting township tax rolls or colluding in child rape and murder or illegally abetting the election of a criminal president (who makes war and spies on citizens as a rule unto himself), the ecclesiastical corporations, whose existence Madison so lamented, today are helping to fashion a social order that fetishizes religiosity but also has with no regrets unmoored religion from that strange old notion of loving thy neighbor.”
There are good arguments to be made on limiting the power of religious entities in our country. But by blindly slamming all faiths and religious institutions, and by making value judgments on non-Christian faiths benefiting from these laws, Ketcham has undermined his own case.
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