Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Mennonites / Amish →
Joe Roos
In addition to refusing to withhold taxes from the salaries of tax resisting
employees (see The Picket
Line for ),
employers can also express their solidarity for such resisters by refusing to
comply with salary levies. Here are some examples:
The War Resisters League has a policy of not honoring
IRS
levies against their employees’ salaries. According to
NWTRCC’s guide to organizational war tax resistance, “though the
IRS
continues from time to time to send levies for other employees, they have
not been enforced, and there has been little interaction between the
IRS
and WRL
in recent years.”
Also according to
NWTRCC’s guide,
the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and the Friends Committee on
National Legislation have either resisted levies or established policies
to resist levies should they occur.
The “Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee,” which helped fuel the
anti-Vietnam War movement, refused to turn over to the
IRS
the paychecks of Eric Weinberger, a war tax resisting employee.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (of Quakers) has a strong and
well-thought-through policy on how to respond to
IRS
levies of the salaries of resisting employees. Excerpt:
If the conscientious, war-tax-resisting employee requests, in the event that
IRS
serves a levy on Yearly Meeting against the salary, wages or other employee
property alleged to be in the Meeting’s possession, Yearly Meeting will
follow the practice approved on and decline to submit to the levy. In refusing, the Meeting will
set forth its belief that military tax resistance is an appropriate
individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony and that Yearly Meeting
is led, consistent with its most fundamental beliefs, to resist government
efforts to coerce an employee against their conscience in such historic
Friends’ testimonies.
The New York Yearly Meeting (of Quakers) in
approved a statement in which they agreed
that the meeting would refuse to honor salary levies directed at employees
who were refusing taxes for conscientious reasons.
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends has a similar policy, and responded
to one levy by telling the
IRS:
“The levy would require the Yearly Meeting to act against our employees’
testimony and witness. The Yearly Meeting is not ready to take that
step.”
The Quaker magazine Friends Journal had a policy
against paying such levies, and initially refused to pay $31,343 in taxes,
penalties, and interest, from the salary of its editor, Vinton Deming. The
magazine eventually gave in when it became clear they could not win a legal
challenge to the levy.
The Christian activist group Sojourners has
a policy of refusing to comply with government levies of the salaries of
its employees who are war tax resisters. Sojourners managing director Joe
Roos says, “To date we have been threatened with levies, with the
confiscation of our property, with arrest and prison terms and, most
recently, with the money we refused to turn over being taken out of my
personal account since the
IRS
views me as a ‘responsible person.’ Despite all these threats, the only
action they have taken is to levy our corporate account, taking the amount
they say is still due plus interest, plus penalty.”
When some American Mennonite farmers resisted the Social Security /
Medicare tax, the
IRS
tried to seize the money owed to them by the Amish-run milk cooperatives
they worked through. According to Brad Igou, who documented such resistance
for the Amish Country News, most cooperative
officials refused to comply.
When the
IRS
ordered the First & Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven,
Connecticut, to turn over the salary of their war tax resisting minister,
Carl Lundborg, in , the congregation
voted unanimously to refuse.
The
IRS
tried also to get war tax resisting Catholic pastor Cosmas Raimondi’s
parish to turn over his salary to them in
, but the parish council refused, saying
that “[a]lthough we personally do not feel called to war tax resistance
for ourselves, we do support the right of Father Raimondi to make that
decision according to the dictates of his own conscience before God.”
Jim Wallis is the president and founder of
Sojourners, a Christian ministry and magazine
“committed to social justice and peace.” He wrote a book titled
Revive Us Again: A Sojourner’s Story
that tells of his own spiritual journey and the early years of Sojourners.
He writes that war tax resistance was an important part of the movement at its
founding, and relates a couple of amusing anecdotes about encounters with the
IRS
bureaucracy:
Non-payment of war taxes has… been a vital concern for Sojourners. When we put
out the first issue of the magazine at the height of the Vietnam War, it
became very clear that refusal of war tax payment was for us as morally
necessary as our refusal of military induction. We could not oppose war in
every other way and then help pay for it. We also refused then, and continue
to refuse [this was published in ], payment
of our telephone tax, which was instituted to help pay for the war.
The payment of taxes is the most basic, and from the government’s point of
view, most important way that we support the policies of the state. With
hardly an afterthought, American Christians in recent times have given more
money to underwrite military destruction and help build the most massive
arsenal in human history than we have given to pay for relief, service,
evangelism, missions, social action, and all the programs of the churches
combined.
The state’s demand for war taxes puts many Christians in a dilemma in which
peace claims their commitment but war claims their money. Personal and
corporate response to the payment of war taxes is a thorny and serious
question, one which must become a matter of much more public discussion and
discernment in the Christian community.
With the heightening nuclear arms race and the widening conflict in Central
America, our stand on war tax resistance has remained resolute: we cannot with
good conscience provide our government, through our tax dollars, with the
necessary means for its nuclear threats and ideological military exploits.
Our war tax resistance is both institutional and personal. A non-profit
corporation provides a legal entity for our magazine, as well as our peace and
neighborhood ministries. Everyone working in these ministries earns a
subsistence income. For most of us, subsistence is below the taxable level.
For others, a small tax liability is incurred. Like all organizations, we are
legally bound to withhold federal income taxes (including war taxes) from the
salaries of liable employees and to submit them to the government. Since we
refuse to serve as a war-tax gathering agency, we decided years ago not to
submit federal income taxes from these employees’ wages. To date, the Internal
Revenue Service has threatened to retaliate, including taking us to court. So
far, it has settled for levying our bank account.
Joe Roos and I were once called down to the
IRS
office to account for the magazine’s refusal to withhold taxes from our
employees. This was our first interview, at the lowest rung of the
IRS
ladder.
A young
IRS
worker was conducting the interview. He said he wanted to take the case to his
supervisor and would soon return.
He came back a short while later, smiled, and said, “Well, you don’t have to
pay.” Joe and I looked at each other rather incredulously, and I said to the
young man, “Either you don’t quite understand what we’re doing, or the three
of us have just made tax history.”
He had mistakenly thought that we were seeking exemption from Social Security
payments, which as a non-profit corporation we are not required to pay. I
explained to him that it was our taxes that we weren’t paying.
“Oh,” he said, “I think I’d better go back and see my supervisor.”
He returned again after a while, smiling, and said, “Well, it’s just as I
thought. You do have to pay.”
Joe and I grinned at each other, and I said, “Well, you see, we know that we
are legally required to withhold and send in all this tax. But our Christian
convictions won’t allow us to do that. So I think we have a conflict here.”
At first he seemed not to understand. But then the light of recognition came
over his face. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “Kind of
like what Muhammad Ali did.”
“Well, kind of,” I replied.
He looked around to make sure no one else was listening before he leaned
forward, clasped my hand, and said in a whisper, “Right on, man. Fight it all
the way to the top.”
We are equally committed to war-tax resistance as individuals. All members of
Sojourners Fellowship pool our incomes. Nearly two-thirds of the community
earn below the taxable income level, have no personal income, or are children.
None of these incur any war-tax liability.
The rest of the community earns taxable incomes. Where that income is not
subject to employer withholding, we have refused payment of war taxes. Some
have had less tax withheld than was due and refused to pay the remainder.
Those whose taxes are automatically withheld have employed various methods of
reducing their war-tax liability to zero, sometimes with limited success. Our
commitment is that no member of Sojourners Fellowship pays war taxes.
When you refuse to pay a portion of your income tax, you begin to get a series
of letters from the
IRS. At
first they are very polite: “Oh, so you forgot to pay all of your taxes. Well,
that’s okay, just send your check in as soon as possible.”
A few weeks go by and you get another letter a little more serious and
demanding: “You did not fulfill all your tax liability. Send it to the
IRS
immediately.”
The next letter becomes rather hostile: “Our records show that you have not
paid all the taxes due to us. If you do not pay immediately, you will be
legally prosecuted.”
Eventually, the letters become downright threatening: “We have sought a lien
on all of your property in the District of Columbia. If you do not remit
immediately, your property will be confiscated.”
Each year I have dutifully responded to each of these letters. I wrote back
and always enclosed a photocopy of the original letter I sent in with my tax
return before April 15, explaining why, for reasons of Christian conscience, I
could not pay that portion of my taxes that went to support the military. But
no matter what I did, I always got the same succession of letters.
Finally, one day I realized there was no one on the other end of my
correspondence — only a computer with programmed responses designed to get
more nasty every week the tax money didn’t come in. So I’ve come up with an
idea.
We recently purchased a small computer at Sojourners
to maintain our subscription list and print address labels. What if we could
program into our computer responses, escalating peacefully, to answer the
letters from the
IRS?
That way the computers could just fight it out.
The IRS
finally decided to pay me a visit in person and audit me as a result of my
continual war-tax refusal. I could tell that the
IRS
agent was nervous by the way he was chain-smoking. At the end of our
conversation, he admitted to me that he had been told by the
IRS that
he was going to be auditing some “radicals” and was warned to “be careful”
because “they probably have guns.”
The first thing he said, with fear and agitation, was, “Now, I don’t want to
talk about politics. I’m just here to do an audit.” Joe was there with the
records of both my personal and our community finances. We assured the
IRS
agent that we bore no hostility toward him and wanted simply to be helpful in
giving him the information he needed. He seemed to relax a little after that.
He asked to see the records of my checking account. I told him I didn’t have
one, and that all of my personal financial records were in the large community
leger Joe had brought to the meeting and placed on the desk before him. Joe
patiently explained our system of economic sharing and bookkeeping. The agent
seemed mystified.
“But don’t you get any money for yourself?” he asked.
“Yes,” I explained. “Beyond all of our living expenses that are corporately
met, each member of the community gets fifteen dollars a month for personal
spending.”
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“No,” I replied. And he dropped his pencil on the floor.
“But you’re the editor here, right?”
I nodded.
“And you make the same salary as everyone else?”
“Well, actually, no,” I answered.
“I thought so,” he replied.
“The shipping clerk makes more than I do because he is not a member of the
community and has higher personal expenses than I do.”
He looked completely incredulous as he said, “In all my years working for the
IRS, I
have never run into anything like this. Do you realize that there is
absolutely no economic incentive in your life?”
He went on to ask, “Why do you people live this way?” There was my opening. I
began to speak about the gospel, the way of Jesus, and the economic sharing of
the early church. We were just trying to make those things real in our own
experience, I told him.
A glimmer of understanding came into his eyes, and he said with a smile, “Oh,
I bet I can guess then why you aren’t paying all your taxes.”
“You’re catching on,” I said, and then explained how I had decided not to pay
taxes for war because of my Christian convictions.
“Well, can I ask you a question?” he responded. “What about the Russians? If
we laid down our arms, wouldn’t they take us over?”
“That’s a good question,” I replied. “Let’s talk about it.” For a man who
didn’t want to talk about politics, he got deeply involved in our conversation
about war, peace, and the gospel.
When it was over, he said, “You know, this really makes a lot of sense to me.
Now, I’m not ready to refuse to pay my own taxes, you understand, but…” there
he was, an agent for the
IRS, in
a serious conversation about whether he should continue to pay his own taxes
for war. It felt like quite an evangelistic conversation to me. Before he
left, he told us that we were the nicest people he ever had to audit and
wished me luck.
