A number of comments on my post yesterday talked about the coercive nature of tithing. I thought I’d follow up on that idea in a new post, with two principal thoughts.
A History of Tithing and Coercion
The idea that tithing is coercive has a long and storied history. It may well predate 1870, but I know it goes back at least that far. I give more details about it on p. 139 of this paper, but the short of it is, the Bureau of Internal Revenue was trying to tax the church on its 1868 tithing revenue. One of the church’s assertions for why tithing was not taxable was that tithing represented a voluntary contribution by members.
O.J. Hollister, the Collector of Internal Revenue for the Utah territory, disagreed. He argued that Mormons’ payment of tithing was not voluntary for two reasons:
- Nonpayment could lead to excommunication. And, he said, given the special circumstances attendant to Utah, excommunication could lead to spiritual and temporal ruin, and possibly loss of life. As he said this, he acknowledged that he’d never actually heard of any Mormons being excommunicated for nonpayment of tithing. So he offered a second explanation of why tithing was not voluntary:
- Even if tithing wasn’t externally enforced, because it was called a “law,” it was “enforced upon the people at large by their own conscience, pricked thereto by the unflagging efforts of their priesthood for whose maintenance tithing was instituted of, according to the law (Mormon) & the prophets.”
In other words, tithing was coercive, either because it was enforced externally by temporal and spiritual punishment or because it was enforced internally by tithepayers’ consciences.
Honestly, the idea that tithing is coercive, and we’re subject to intense pressure to pay, doesn’t reflect my experience. I mean yes, you have to be a full tithepayer to go to the temple. But we can live very nicely without temple attendance. Moreover, the church doesn’t define “full tithepayer” beyond saying that you pay ten percent of something. That something on which you pay? That’s basically between you and the Lord.
But if you define down coercion enough, certainly I can see an argument that tithing is coercive.
Church Employment
My coblogger Peter LLC brings up the fact that, even if tithing is totally noncoercive for me, church employees don’t get that same degree of noncoerciveness. Church employment—or, at least some church employment—requires a temple recommend.
To get this out of the way first: I think that’s a pretty dumb requirements. I’m not a fan of the expanded place temple recommends have taken in church culture. A temple recommend has nothing to do with how good an organist an individual is, or how honest and capable a middle-manager, and I don’t like it being used as a proxy for all sorts of things it isn’t a proxy for.
That said, the idea of church employment being dependent on making offerings to the church isn’t unique to Mormonism. Chapter 8 of my recent book goes into significant detail on this, but in short, if you don’t pay your taxes, eventually you’ll have to pay them, plus interest and potentially penalties. If you’ve racked up a large enough tax liability, you may need to enter into a payment plan with the IRS to pay off your tax debt over time.
When you enter into the payment plan, the IRS calculates the amount you can afford to pay each month. It does that by starting with your income, then subtracting out the expense of certain necessities (food, clothing, housing, car, etc.); under your payment plan, you’re required to pay an amount equal to your income minus these allowable expenses every month until your tax liability is paid off.
One expense that is generally not allowed? Charitable contributions. You generally can’t subtract the amount of charitable contributions in calculating how much you can pay. (That’s not to say you can’t make charitable contributions while you’re on a payment plan with the IRS. If, for example, you get a $750 food allowance, but you only pay $500 one month for food, you can do whatever you want with that additional $250.)
But the Internal Revenue Manual has an exception to that general rule: where making charitable contributions is a condition of an individual’s employment, it will take those contributions into account. As an example of these types of permissible charitable contributions, the manual says:
Example: A minister is required to tithe according to his employment contract.
Note that the exception is fairly narrow: in the litigated cases I’ve seen, the courts have never forced the IRS to make this allowance. (Though frankly, the cases were all situations where the IRS was almost certainly right to deny the exception from the general rule—I suspect the IRS generally allows the payment reduction where an individual legitimately has to make charitable donations to keep her job.)
Now, I don’t know what denominations require their ministers to tithe as a condition of their employment. And I wouldn’t dream of arguing that this isn’t coercive—while I think it’s a stretch to argue that tithing is unduly coercive for most of us, this is certainly a situation where it feels a lot more coercive (though, again, there’s plenty of ambiguity in what constitutes a full tithe).
But it’s not unique to us.