How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
conferences & gatherings →
4th International Conference on War Tax Resistance & Peace Tax Campaigns
This is the thirty-eighth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
we work through the rest of the early 1990s.
Taxes for Life
The edition brought news of
a symbolic, dip-your-toes-in-first sort of tax resistance being organized by
Christian Peacemaker Teams:
Taxes for Life
encourages church members to divert from their
income tax returns at least $3.03, which
represents a penny per $1 billion of the
U.S. military
budget ($303.5 billion). As a symbolic effort, the project seeks to draw
public attention to the unfulfilled student needs in poor communities for
books and educational materials. Send symbolic tax refusals to
CPT…
These will be gathered at the
CPT
conference in Richmond, Va.
. One-fourth of the total will
be donated publicly to local impoverished schools. The rest will be sent back
with conference participants for similar public donations to their local
school districts.
The edition followed this up
with a brief note about a “Taxes for Life Liturgy and Study Plan,” put out by
CPT,
“which helps encourage symbolic tax resistance to the
U.S. defense
budget”.
John K. Stoner described the program in greater detail in the
edition:
My phone rang. The voice said, “Could I speak to John or Janet Stoner?”
“I’m John Stoner.”
“I’m calling from the Internal Revenue Service about the letter you sent
indicating that you are withholding part of your income tax payment.”
He and I talked for about 10 minutes as I explained why Janet and I had said
“no” to paying the full amount of our income tax. The man could not understand
why anyone would invite the collection pressures of the
IRS by
withholding some taxes. But by the time the conversation was over he was
closer to understanding that this was for us a matter of faith and a question
of the practice of our religion.
It was a
Mark
13:9 kind of experience, being called before the authorities, “before
governors and kings,” because of Jesus, as a testimony to them. By the
sound of Mark
13, Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his
followers. Mark 13 is a good text to remember when everybody around you quotes
Romans
13.
War tax keeps coming up and won’t go away because the cry of children abused
and traumatized by war doesn’t go away.
Every discussion about peacemaking must face the question of how taxes are
collected and spent. The taxpayer’s “age of innocence” ended a year ago when
Americans watched their tax dollars at work in Iraq. There our taxes killed
between 100,000 and 200,000 people in one month and left a nation of 17
million people strangled — its water polluted, its hospitals without
electricity, its homes dark, its classrooms cold. Malnutrition, disease and
destitution continue.
Americans, your
IRS 1040
form and mine paid the bill. Our withheld wages and enclosed checks purchased
yesterday’s nightmares and tomorrow’s psychological traumas for these
childhood victims of war. We also paid for the deaths of their fathers and
relatives by the thousands.
Jobs: Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of unemployed, homeless, sick
and impoverished people in the United States are not helped toward health and
self-sufficiency by the federal government, which says that the funds for
education, vaccinations, basic health care, public transportation and jobs are
not available.
Who is responsible for this? We are. It is impossible for us Christian
taxpayers to sidestep our share of the responsibility. But do we have any
choice in the matter? Of course we do.
God calls us to plead for the end of the destructive social institution of war
by refusing to pay for it. We are called to this as clearly as our forebears
were called to abolish slavery.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams organization is promoting symbolic war tax
refusal as a way to make a clear witness in the matter of war taxes. Taxes for
Life is a plan to have taxpayers redirect to education an amount equivalent to
1 penny for every $1 billion in the military budget. For this is $3.03, which can be mailed to
Christian Peacemaker Teams… Listen to your conscience when you pay your taxes
this year. Write a letter of witness to the
IRS with
copies to Congress, your pastor and local newspaper. Redirect some taxes to
education through
CPT.
If the
IRS
calls, tell them that it makes you nervous to break their law and that you do
not enjoy being harassed by the collectors. Then say you are far more
apprehensive, however, about breaking God’s law. Explain that you are afraid
to harden your heart to the cry of the victims.
Then leave the outcome with God.
Miscellaneous
The edition included some
letters concerning war taxes.
Don & Eleanor Kaufman shared their letter to the
IRS
decrying government militarism and begging for a Peace Tax Fund option. And
Charlene Epp and Duncan Smith shared their letter, in which they announced
that they were holding back a symbolic $57 of their taxes in protest.
Ryan Ahlgrim
wrote a piece for the issue
opposing war tax resistance. His main reasons: 1) to the extent resisting
taxes affects agency budgets, it does so erratically and not in a way that
affects military spending in particular; 2) it flies in the face of
representative democracy, in which we agree to permit a majority of
representatives to decide how to spend our taxes; 3) the nation still needs a
military because Jesus hasn’t yet brought peace to the world.
(Stanley Bohn penned a rebuttal for the edition, and Doug Pritchard had another in the edition.)
Beyond networking and sharing strategies, every two years the conference
participants contribute to projects promoting peace. Two years ago they gave
$15,000 to the Innu people to help their fight against low-level military
flights over their hunting lands in central Labrador in Canada. This year they
plan to donate money to Peace Brigades International for their efforts to
de-escalate the conflict in Sri Lanka.
In a MCC supplement, Mike Hofkamp reflected on U.S. support for violent military action in the Philippines, and wrote:
What does “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s mean?” I find comfort in
the interpretation of Peter Rideman, an early Anabaptist. Rideman notes the
passage says “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” not render unto Caesar
whatever and however much Caesar wants. This is a simplistic interpretation
but is truth ever sophisticated? When my government supports war against
civilians… Caesar is asking too much and war tax resistance is a faithful
Christian responsibility.
And yet, I wonder if tax resistance really goes deep enough. During the
Persian Gulf war I attended a peace rally… A loud, angry, pro-war demonstrator
entered our group and shouted at us, “You hypocrites! You chant ‘no blood for
oil’ but how many of you drove cars to get here?” Truth comes from strange
places.
Does our participation in North American economic structures give the military
its reason for being? How long will it be before our government leaders again
declare war to “protect our way of life?”
Perhaps the most authentic war tax resistance is to live below a taxable
income. Doing so would require experimenting with alternative economic
structures based on community, sharing, and conservation. If not, aren’t we
living a lifestyle that at its very core demands the wars we say we oppose?
A
list of peace “commitments” in that
MCC
supplement was very cagey around the subject of war tax resistance, hinting at
it but in a deniable way:
We will strive to show by our lives that war is an unacceptable way to solve
human conflict. This calls us to refuse to support war, or to participate in
military service. When war or war preparations lead to the conscription of
ourselves, our money, or our property, we will seek alternative ways to serve
humanity and our countries in the spirit of Christ. We support ministries of
conciliation which search for peaceful resolution of conflicts. Recognizing
the subtle ways in which our loyalties and resources can be conscripted in
modern industrial states, we will strive to continually examine our complicity
in systems which treat others as enemies.
This is the thirty-second in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
In I felt the tide start to recede. The war
tax resisting faction had gotten thoroughly distracted by the promise of Peace
Tax Fund legislation, and the conservative taxpaying faction went back on the
offensive in favor of paying taxes without concern.
One of the symptoms of the decay of the war tax resistance position (that I’ve
also seen exhibited elsewhere) was the plea for new resisters to refuse to pay
some tiny, safe token amount of taxes in lieu of more firmly-motivated and
whole-hearted resistance. From the issue:
Christian Peacemaker Teams
(CPT)
is asking U.S.
taxpayers to deduct $3.03 from their federal taxes, as a symbol of their
objection to the $303 billion Defense budget.
CPT
would like congregations to collect withheld money and send it to become part
of the offering at the organization’s conference in Richmond.
Va. The offering will go to
school districts such as the one in Petersburg.
Va., which cannot afford to
buy textbooks.
“The Peace Tax bill is not going to be passed anytime soon,” says [Marian]
Franz frankly. “Not enough people have said they care — and that includes
Mennonites.
“I see a bitter irony in that,” she continues, “because if there were such a
fund, pacifist Christians would say that it was God’s will that they use its
provisions. Yet these same people are doing little to make this fund a
reality.”
The issue printed this
syndicated short news item:
Peace activist Randy Kehler has been jailed and his family’s house confiscated
because of his decade-long refusal to pay
U.S. taxes.
Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have withheld their federal taxes since the
late 1970s. Instead, they have sent their tax dollars to nonprofit
organizations that assist war victims and the poor.
The Internal Revenue Service laid claim to the couple’s house in Colrain,
Mass., to recoup some
$32,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
Discussion by a panel of war tax resisters highlighted a Lancaster,
Pa., meeting sponsored by
the group Taxes for Life. Some 20 people attended the meeting, which also
included a showing of the video Paying for Peace.
Taxes for Life urges individuals to withhold a small, symbolic amount from the
payment of their
U.S. income taxes
and to give the money instead to a local school project. More information is
available from Taxes for Life…
The statement on “Christian Conscience and Military Taxes” says that Illinois
Conference “will seek to support our members who feel a genuine call from God
to withhold payment of military taxes.”
The statement cites examples of this support as including prayer and personal
encouragement, finances, and witness to “political and social powers.”
The resolution also calls on Illinois congregations to contribute a minimum of
$5 per household to the Peace Tax Fund campaign.
The “Taxes for Peace” tax redirection fund gave its annual report and plea for
new funds in the issue:
The U.S. Peace
Section of Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC)
is inviting contributions for the Taxes for
Peace fund. Established in , the fund gives
people who withhold war taxes a way to give their money for peaceful purposes.
This year’s contributions will go to
MCC
U.S. peace
education projects. More information is available from
MCC
U.S. Peace Section…
John K. Stoner tried to blow on the fading coals in the
issue:
The voice of the victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of children, abused and traumatized by war, will not be still.
by John K. Stoner
Last Thursday my phone rang. The voice at the other end of the line asked for
John or Janet Stoner. “I’m John Stoner,” I replied. “Hello. I am Charles Price
of the Internal Revenue Service. I am calling about the letter you sent
indicating that you are withholding part of your income tax payment.”
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said no to
paying the full amount of our income tax. The man could not understand why
anyone would invite the collection pressures of the
IRS upon
themselves by withholding some taxes. But by the time the conversation was
over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was for us a matter of
faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9
kind of experience of being called before the authorities. By the sound of
Mark 13,
Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
“Why do they have to keep bringing up this business about taxes for war?”
someone asks after a congregational meeting. “Why doesn’t this war tax
question just go away?” asks another at a session on strategies to reduce the
military portion of the
U.S. budget.
The reason war keeps coming up and won’t go away is because the voice of the
victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of the children, abused and
traumatized by war, doesn’t go away.
Every discussion about peacemaking in these times must face the question of
how taxes are collected and spent.
Americans watched their tax dollars at work in Iraq. They killed between one
and two hundred thousand people in a month’s time. They left a nation of 17
million people strangled — its water polluted, its hospitals without
electricity, its homes dark, and its classrooms cold. Today malnutrition,
disease, and destitution are the continuing results of this man-made plague of
death and despair.
Since then, an international study team on the Gulf crisis found that the
mortality rate of children under five years of age was almost four times
greater then than before the Gulf War. More than 75 percent of Iraqi children
feel sad and unhappy, worry about the survival of their family. They are
haunted by the smell of gunfire, fuel from planes, fires, and burned flesh.
Taxes paid for all this. It is for those of us who are Christians, as
taxpayers, to sidestep our share of the responsibility. We can choose to “just
say no” (how simple that sounds when we prescribe it to someone else’s moral
choice and how difficult it sounds when it is ours).
Your $3.03 Taxes for Life equivalent can be sent to Christian
Peacemaker Teams…
CPT
also suggests you write a letter of witness to the
IRS with
copies to your representatives in Congress, your
pastor, and your local newspaper. Taxes for Life funds will
be used for education purposes.
I believe God is calling us to plead for the end of the
destructive social institution of war by
refusing to pay for it. We are called to this as clearly
and inescapably as our forebears were called to
abolish slavery. The question is not whether we can achieve that
goal in a year or decade. The question is whether that is our goal — and
whether the world knows that it is our goal. It was Jesus’ goal, and it should
be ours.
One way to enhance this witness is through a symbolic war tax refusal called
Taxes for Life. Sponsored by the Christian Peacemaker Team, this plan would
have taxpayers redirect an amount equivalent to one penny for every billion
dollar of the U.S.
military budget to education. For ,
this is $3.03.
If you do this, and the
IRS
calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law. Go
on to say that you are far more apprehensive about breaking God’s law. Tell
them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the victims of war, and that
you have decided that you will not take their blood upon your hands. Then
leave the outcome with God.
For U.S.
Mennonites, one way we can work at it at this time of year is to take yet
another look at the tax question. As John Stoner reminds us…, it is our taxes
that keep the military going, that make possible aggression and belligerence.
Because of this, some choose not to pay a part of their taxes as a protest.
Others consider that overreaction.
But let us not make that our battle. While we do, more people starve. Let us
rather join hands to find all the ways possible to address the huge military
expenditures of our country, and of the world.
Members of a Newton, Kan.,
group heard reports on the
U.S. Peace Tax Fund
bill in a meeting. The Peace Tax
Group also discussed ideas for creating a local alternative tax fund. Carla
Morton and Stan Bohn reported on their visits to Washington,
D.C., in
connection with a Congressional hearing on the tax fund bill. In addition,
group members talked about starting a local fund for such projects as
environmental protection, mental health care for veterans, and retraining of
military workers.
The following disheartening news was carried in the
issue:
Friends Journal, a Quaker monthly published in
Philadelphia, has agreed to pay $31,343 to the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service.
The payment covers back taxes for the magazine’s editor, who had refused to
pay them because of religious objections to their use for military purposes.
The magazine’s board had refused
IRS
demands that it pay the taxes on behalf of the editor, Vinton Deming.
However, the Justice Department warned the board that it would face legal
action unless the matter was settled, and the magazine’s lawyer advised the
board that it could not win such a case in court.
Now that the pro-taxpaying conservatives were no longer on the defensive, they
apparently no longer felt the need to promote the Peace Tax Fund legislation as
an alternative to lawlessness for Mennonites concerned about their taxes paying
for war. Now they could attack the Peace Tax Fund as being also
scripturally unsound. Or so said
Ernest E. Mummau
in a letter to the editor
that evoked the usual Romans 13 / the government is divinely ordained to bear
the sword / Christians are told to pay taxes without complaint / the Church
should stay in its own domain and shouldn’t meddle with the state line of
argument to tell Mennonites to stop trying to tell the government what to do
with their taxes.
The fourth international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax
campaigns was held in Brussels in . The Gospel Herald article,
and especially the quotes from Peace Tax Fund activist Marian Franz, tried to
spin it as though it was more or less exclusively a Peace Tax Fund promoting
event, with very little mention of actual war tax resistance:
Conference participants came with at least one thing in common, [Marian] Franz
said: “We all find it a clear violation of conscience to pay the military
portion of our taxes; we seek statutory recognition of conscience against
paying for arms as an extension of the right to refuse to bear arms.”
The conference, which draws primarily European and North American
participants, has met every two years .
The gathering allows participants “to hear stories of resistance and to
compare our progress in gaining conscientious objection
(CO)
status to payment of military taxes within our respective countries,” Franz
said.
For instance, NCPTF
hopes to convince Congress members to pass a law permitting people
conscientiously opposed to war to have the military portion of their taxes
allocated to peacemaking.
“Most countries have a similar approach to war tax resisters,” Franz noted.
“The standard response of governments, when they do respond, is to add civil
penalties and collect the unpaid taxes forcibly. Imprisonment for war tax
resistance is rare.”
Court responses to these cases are usually predictable as well. “The issue
usually raises a ‘political’ question which the courts cannot address, or the
courts decide that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience or
religion do not outweigh the duty of the citizen to pay taxes,” she said.
[Franz said:] "Most European war tax resisters entered the scene in
. The presence of Cruise and Pershing
missiles woke them up. They suddenly realized that Europe had become a giant
football field on which the two superpowers could bounce their nuclear
weapons.”
This prompted another
letter to the editor,
this one from Russell J. Baer, which also used the Render-unto-Caesar / Romans
13 beef to complain about activists who have an issue with paying war taxes.
