Nineteenth Century Baphomet Illustration. Public Domain
Maybe you heard (or maybe you didn’t): the IRS recently recognized the Satanic Temple as a tax-exempt church.
Before you react to the news, that first sentence requires some unpacking. Specifically, we need to know what the Satanic Temple is, and we need to know what it means to be recognized as a tax-exempt church.
To the extent you’ve heard of the Satanic Temple, it’s likely in one of two contexts. They both have to do with its Baphomet statues.
Texas State Capitol Ten Commandments Monument. Public Domain
Last August, Arkansas legislators approved the installation of a Ten Commandments monument on the state capitol grounds; the Satanic Temple held a rally in which they unveiled an 8-foot-tall statute of Baphomet. If the state provides space for a Ten Commandments monument, they argued, it also has to include its Baphomet statue.
A couple months later, the Satanic Temple sued Netflix for copying its statue in its The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
The Satanic Temple isn’t limited to Baphomet statues, though. It has worked to give invocations at legislatures that open with prayer. In response to a public school that allowed Evangelical Christians to pass out Bibles, they requested permission to pass out the Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities.
Basically, the Satanic Temple is an Establishment Clause watchdog group.
And now, the IRS recognizes it as a church.
Does that recognition represent an endorsement of the Satanic Temple’s beliefs? Absolutely not. The IRS and courts have established 14 criteria that it looks at to determine whether an organization is a church. Those criteria are:
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Distinct legal existence
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Recognized creed and form of worship
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Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
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Formal code of doctrine and discipline
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Distinct religious history
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Membership not associated with any other church or denomination
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Organization of ordained ministers
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Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study
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Literature of its own
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Established places of worship
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Regular congregations
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Regular religious services
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Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young
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Schools for the preparation of its members
To qualify as a church, an organization doesn’t have to have each of these things. And there’s no particular weighting that the IRS applies to the various criteria. But generally speaking, an organization that has a bunch of these characteristics will be recognized as a church.
Does the Satanic Temple meet these criteria? Probably; I’m planning on requesting their exemption materials from the IRS to see how it says it meets these criteria, but it could take two months or more for the IRS to respond to my request.
And why would the Satanic Temple want to be treated as a church, rather than a different kind of 501(c)(3) charity? A whole bunch of reasons. Churches don’t have to file annual information returns with the IRS. Which means they don’t have to disclose a lot of information that other tax-exempt organizations have to provide. (Technically, they don’t even have to apply for their exemption.) It’s harder to audit a church. The Trump administration has, at various times, proposed to water down (or even eliminate) the prohibition on tax-exempt organizations campaigning, but only for churches.
And this is what makes the tax exemption of a part with many of the other activities the Satanic Temple does. The Satanic Temple, I suspect, doesn’t really care if its Baphomet statue is displayed at state capitols. It takes time and effort to distribute literature. But when the religious establishment involves Satan, majority legislators may understand the harm that endorsement does. Or, even if they don’t, they may back down from the proposed endorsement just so they don’t have to let the Satanic Temple act.
And there has reportedly already been at least one outraged legislator. If enough become outraged, will Congress change the rules that treat churches differently from other tax-exempt public charities? That, it seems to me, is likely the Satanic Temple’s endgame.
But until that happens, from a federal tax perspective, the Satanic Temple is the same as the Mormon, Catholic, Methodist, or any other church.