Why are the churches that receive tax exemptions such a bad thing to atheists?
As a counterpoint to those who are saying that the tax-exempt status of churches represents a breakdown of the barrier between church and state, there does exist a compelling argument to the contrary.The power of a government to tax something is meaningless without the power to enforce those taxes. For example, if you, as an individual, don't pay your income taxes, you can be imprisoned.Similarly, if the government were empowered to tax churches, they would also have to be empowered to take some kind of punitive action against churches that failed to pay. This might take the form of forceful seizures of property or imprisonment of church officials.Even if we assume that the IRS is perfect, and were to apply its enforcement fairly and equally toward all religions, there's still a serious image problem with having the government seize churches (or synagogues or mosques) and imprison religious leaders. Especially when seen in a historical context. America, after all, was at least partially founded as a religious refuge, and there are very ugly historical associations with governments imprisoning Jews and destroying Jewish places of worship. (And not just Quakers and Jews, almost every religion has, historically, experienced persecution in one form or another.)But that's just assuming that the IRS is perfectly fair, and while it might try to be, and while every individual working there might be a selfless public servant, ultimately it has all the flaws of every human bureaucracy. And eventually decisions will have to be made about which cases to pursue and which to drop, and in those decisions the line between perceived persecution and actual persecution will be blurry at best. (Wikipedia: List of allegations of misuse of the Internal Revenue Service)I, myself, am an atheist. And purely from the standpoint of tax policy, I agree that a tax break for churches is probably not the best way to distribute U.S. taxpayer dollars. However, from the standpoint of history, and the United States' commitment to a separation between state and religion, I think the taxation of churches is an extremely dangerous and morally dubious prospect.