Hey Mr President! I represent evangelicals, televangelists and scientology like Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, David Miscavige, etc.
We collectively call you out as a raping pedophile piece of shit living specimen who wouldn’t dare come after our tax-free status. FUCK YOU!
please do, treasonous pedo rapist, please do. sew some division amongst your band of idiots
Honestly, churches should have always stayed the fuck out of politics or lose their tax exempt status. Of course, that rule does not apply to the weepy Republicans, because the rules never do. They cry about “religious freedom”, but want their cake and eat it, too, of course: the most radically right wing churches can say whatever the hell they want regarding telling their people how to vote and we all get to fund it, effectively.
Having the cake and eating it too is not an option for liberal churches, though.
Honestly, churches should have always stayed the fuck out of politics or lose their tax exempt status.
Churches should never have had tax exempt status.
honestly im not sure anything should have. You can deduct expenses so theoretically non for profits should not pay much anyway.
Unless they can show they are providing beneficial services to the entire community they should not get it. So a church that only serves their parishioners would be a no, but one that runs a food bank open to the community would be able to get it.
Any political advocacy along the lines of telling people who they should vote for should be a permanent revocation of nonprofit status.
As we predicted! I’m a priest in the Episcopal Church and at our recent clergy conference we were made aware of a letter being issued by a large number of our bishops, to be published in one of the big papers, denouncing ICE (it was distributed to us this past Saturday, but I have no idea if it’s shown up in one of the papers or not). We discussed the possibility of Trump getting mad and revoking our tax exempt status because of it. Dude is quite predictable lol.
All religions need to be taxed like the businesses they are.
The problem with this is that there’s no profit to tax.
I hate religion as much as the next guy but taxing a non-profit charity is nonsensical.
What you actually want is:
- To discontinue any tax concessions for employees of the church.
- Ensure benefits that employees receive are taxed.
- Restrict religious organisations from conducting business-like activities: if they have a cafe then its profit should be taxed
Mega-churches make massive profits.
You mean massive cash surpluses.
All that cash is legally required to be spent in the course of the churches objectives, which in almost all cases will be the furtherance of religion.
That means, the minister is restricted from using that money for personal things like holidays or boats or whatever.
Yes, mega churches provide celebrity ministers a lot of perks. Thats why I said this area needs stronger restrictions.
That means, the minister is restricted from using that money for personal things like holidays or boats or whatever.
I assume the church can pay the minister a salary…are there restrictions on that salary?
Preachers and all other church staff members have to pay income taxes.
There is an interest-free housing stipend for preachers that works similar to an FSA (use it or lose it annually). Some military service members get a similar stipend if they live off-base for the same reason. Many preachers and service members are itenerant and may be reassigned to a different area at any time. Purchsing a house isn’trealistic if you don’tknownwhere you’ll live in 6 months, so they can’t take advantage of tax breaks like the home interest mortgage deduction. Preachers who are provided free housing (parsonage) can’t take advantage of the tax-free stipend because they don’t pay for housing.
My thought on that particular tax break isn’t to close it but to expand it to everyone who rents.
Someone knows their clergy tax code! I agree with your idea of expansion. That’s something I’d not considered and think it makes a lot of sense.
Depends on jurisdiction.
It can be taxed like any other salary. Sometimes they enjoy some tax concessions.
The point I was trying to make is that those churches that are bringing in big money may have a way to funnel that money to the minister - just make it his or her salary. Add bonuses. Sure the minister probably has to pay taxes on the income, but so what, they’re still making a lot more than most people (including members of their own church).
My comment is about taxing churches.
And unfortunately those would not be the ones targeted.
This is categorically untrue. Hiding profits doesn’t mean they don’t have them. That’s just fraud. The mormon church, for example, has trillions invested.
Same for Scientology.
Literally created as a tax dodge for L. Ron Hubbard.
This is demonstrably untrue. Swimming in literal profit pools like Scrudge McDuck is life.
No profit? They literally tell their congregation to give them 10-20% of their earnings.
Thats income, not profit.
By definition, its all spent in the furtherance of the club / churches objectives.
If you and I form a dinner club and every week we chip in $50 and go out for dinner, the club has no “profit” we’re just sharing the cost of our hobby.
Sure, but our dinner club isn’t selling anything, while a church is.
Sure it is, our dinner club is selling great vibes.
That’s pretty similar to how it is.
I used to be a preacher. I paid taxes. Any facility space or property we rented to commercial companies (we had a psychologist who used a portion of our space during the week) was taxed.
The only real break we got versus other charities was that clergy can get a tax-freee home/apartment rental stipend if they aren’t provided a personage. The idea there was that, for itenerant clergy, purchasing a home isn’t realistic because they don’t know where they’ll live in a year. They can’t take advantage of things like a mortgage interest deduction.
But my solution there is to open up tax exemption for all rent payers and to tax the living shit out of landlords to make them sell and open up housing inventory.
I said this type of thing should be curtailed. Thats not the same as teaching churches because theyre like a business.
He is correct that churches shouldn’t be exempt from taxes, just not for his reasons. They are tax shelters for political tools, and should be made into taxed businesses if they insist on being money making machines.
The churches that would call him out are likely the same few that actually do something to deserve their tax exempt status, like feeding the homeless.
No churches deserve tax exempt status. Why the hell should we rely on their kindness to feed the homeless when we can tax them and ensure the poor are fed?
By that logic, charities should not be tax exempt either. I agree that charity isn’t the ideal solution to poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc. and we should be funding social welfare to solve those problems, but in the meantime people who are working to alleviate these issues should not be tax burdened. I don’t like the religious exemption, but the 501©(3) exemption as a whole is a good thing.
There’s an argument to be made that charities and other 501c3 organizations both entrench capitalism and normalize its failures to care for marginalized people, and/or that they also mostly exist to provide the wealthy with tax breaks through which they can fund pet projects, bypassing any democratic processes and ignoring what society actually needs.
I agree, but I still think that as long as charities exist they should be tax exempt. I look at it similarly to USAID, which was a way for the US empire to project soft power, but also saved and improved lives. Ending 501c3 tax exempt status would be a disaster in the same way that the current administration ending USAID was. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Ending it suddenly without a replacement would be a catastrophe, no doubt about it. That doesn’t mean they deserve tax exempt status. The majority of charities are pretty decent and get a good portion of their donations to people in need but there are also charities that are basically a way for the wealthy to avoid taxes. I think the government will better represent the will of the people (in normal times), have lower overhead, work faster, and close the loopholes. I’d also be satisfied with closing the loopholes that allow people to take advantage and avoid paying taxes. Donating a few million to the charity you own to get a tax break, while your nephew runs the charity taking a fat check, and makes the area you live nicer; improving your real estate values should not be a thing.
I always love the assumption that the money taxed on churches will go and do the work that churches would do and not build bombs. My parishioners are already taxed to help kill people, I really don’t need their faithful contributions to be taxed again so that the US can kill more people. Maybe fix the way taxes are spent and I’ll support taxing my church. But for now, I really don’t want to see the money people give out of their sense of faithfulness to be used to pay for an extra bullet that’s going to kill someone standing in ICE’s way.
My congregation is pretty small. I know the assumption is huge megachurches and all that (and yeah, maybe those folks should be taxed because they use the religious exemptions as a loophole for some really unsavory stuff). But the 40-ish people that give what they do do so to help in what little ways they can.
You say this but in many communities churches are the only option or the primary option because government has failed its populace.
When I worked with the homeless shelters would fill immediately, like within an hour of opening doors, and they would kick you out at 7am so you’d have to come back that evening and hope you make it. Closed during the day because of no funding for staffing. but churches would have much more space, would be open during the day, would have hot food, etc.
The funding for the homeless is nothing and gets cut year after year. In my state it’s somewhat decent too, in the more conservative states my understanding is that it can be more dire.
My conspiracy theory is that this is intentional: homeless services, rehab services, etc get minimal funding that is consistently slashed to funnel people into churches when they’re most vulnerable which allows them to be indoctrinated more easily. I worked with many people who either became very religious or if they were already religious became far more conservative and evangelical. Guess who also tended to vote against their own interests based on wedge issues like abortion and lgbt rights once they got back on their feet?
At the same time liberals don’t actually want to fund mental health services. They are viciously anti taxes and viciously anti homeless. Look at California: when programs start that are positive to improve the lives of homeless and start to break the cycle the NIMBYs come out in full force
I’m all for ending the tax exemption for cults but using it as leverage not to have people speak out against you? Such a DICKtator move.
Do it, coward
He just might accidentally do one good thing.
Kenneth Copeland
Trump is evil, but this man remains the only person I’ve seen I’m convinced is an actual demon. Video of him sets off my fight or flight response so hard.
True. He does make people believe in spiritual things. Haunting, evil, possessed things.
Is there some way we can make this more likely to occur? Maybe some AI videos of clergy calling him a shitty-pantsed child molester with small hands and short skyscrapers?
Seriously. Look, the piece of shit is in the oval office already, that ship has sailed. But we might actually have a good use for the cunt in this case. Let’s make the most of it!
Seriously…
Wow 😮 Really coming full circle fucking around threatening a church’s tax exemption status because you don’t like free speech. If he wasn’t just a fucking dumbass narcissist, I would almost think he’s being clever, but there is no way.
The religious right movement was born when the federal government took away the tax exemption status of Bob Jones University for refusing to desegregate. This would become the first (but certainly not the last) major case argued in court by the new right against the federal government on the grounds of religious freedom.
I really have to wonder if sometimes his sycophants give him really bad advice on purpose because they think it’s funny that he’s always too dumb to get the joke until it’s too late to take it back.
Or maybe not and the fabric of reality has just torn. Heritage Foundation. The moral majority. Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump. Project 2025. This is literally where it all started:
The real origins of the religious right
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review.… Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening. The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Thank you. I don’t think xtian segregation academies are discussed nearly enough in the typical discourse.
Omg to this day, school voucher programs are still linked up to heritage foundation spin offs and are such a fucking racket for this fucking cult.
To be clear, by cult I mean the “religious” right movement, not Christianity. There is nothing Christian about any of this. From the very beginning it has always just been a pyramid scheme to allow people to gain power and profit from the most despicable shit while claiming they do it all in the name of Jesus.
This is the shit that Jesus warned about; Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble. Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come.
In other words, everyone stumbles and messes up from time to time. It’s an inevitable fact of life. But that is very different than being the vehicle that brings stumbling blocks to other people. The religious right movement and everybody that has ever profited or continues to profit from it, acts as the vehicle that helps intentionally spread this propaganda and misinformation to other people.
He only has one trick, bully.
Had me in the first half
Might be a good post for /c/LeopardsAteMyFace
How did religious people ever think he wasn’t just wrapping himself in the garb of piety to get elected? He was on tape talking about grabbing women by the pussy because ‘when you are famous they just let you do it’! Before the LAST time he was elected. Sheesh.
And… Scientology, on the issue of tax exempt status, really? Wow. Criminals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
The most religious of people seem to defer critical thinking to their leaders because it makes their brain too hurt to do so. They just want to be told what to do and what to think.
American Evangelicism is just fascism with wrapping paper and a bow. Their beliefs stand in stark constant to what Jesus actually taught, and they pick, choose, and misinterpret the Bible to support their pre-existing beliefs while discarding the rest. They lie to themselves and each other and speak in coded language. Since their outward appearance is simply a veneer covering their true beliefs, when Trump came along and started saying everything they felt, and doing the hideous actions they all want to do, it didn’t matter that he doesn’t hide behind a veneer or speak in coded language. He is a perfect reflection of who they truly are, and as a result they see him as a prophet or even Messiah.
It’s because the American Evangelicals are not, and have never been, who they claim to be. They’re hideous, hateful, selfish people that somewhere deep down knew they needed a cover for their horrendous nature.
Religious people (at least of the US-Christian variety) are conditioned from birth to believe what an authority figure tells them, despite what night contradict them.
Social media is a powerful tool in the post-truth world
