Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
Nadine Hoover
I think I’m a little late to this party, but it only now showed up on my radar.
Conscience Studio is a Quaker-oriented group that focuses on living life conscientiously.
They have a service program centered on development and human rights issues in Indonesia, and a strong war tax resistance focus.
Among the war tax resistance-related pages on their site are:
A declaration you can sign to complain that, against our deeply-felt values, “we are all ultimately compelled to pay taxes used for military purposes, and that we have a continuing liability to do so in the future. We have thus been obliged, and are being obliged, in direct violation of our consciences, to be complicit in the funding and waging of war.”
Of which there is one, apparently: “Can I still write a statement of conscience while in the midst of the internal debate [over how far I’m willing to go]?”
In , Quaker Meetings were still wrestling with whether to go on the record in support of war tax resistance, and, if so, whether to do so in an explicit, uncompromising way, or one that played it safe and left a lot of wiggle room.
In an op-ed in the issue of the Friends Journal, Nadine Hoover urged Quaker Meetings to take a concrete stand opposing the payment of war taxes:
Should War Tax Resistance be a Corporate Testimony?
At New York Yearly Meeting in , I was given a message: The Spirit calls Friends to claim a corporate testimony against the payment of war taxes and participation in war in any form.
Of course, we have had a testimony against war since George Fox’s declaration to Charles Ⅱ in :
Our principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek peace, and ensue it, and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.
All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world.
Yet there is what British Friends in Quaker Faith and Practice call “Dilemmas of the Pacifist Stand” (24.21–24.26), which opens with a quote from Isaac Penington, :
I speak not against the magistrates or peoples defending themselves against foreign invasions; or making use of the sword to suppress the violent and evil-doers within our borders — for this the present estate of things may and doth require, and a great blessing will attend the sword where it is borne uprightly to that end and its use will be honourable — but yet there is a better state, which the Lord hath already brought some into, and which nations are to expect and to travel towards.
There is to be a time when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”
When the power of the Gospel spreads over the whole earth, thus shall it be throughout the earth, and, where the power of the Spirit takes hold of and overcomes any heart at present, thus will it be at present with that heart.
This blessed state, which shall be brought fotth [in society] at large in God’s season, must begin in the particulars [that is, in individuals].
New York Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, under which I currently reside, advises (p. 60–61):
Friends are earnestly cautioned against the taking of arms against any person, since “all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons” are contrary to our Christian testimony.
Friends should beware of supporting preparations for war even indirectly, and should examine in this light such matters as noncombatant military service, cooperation with conscription, employment or investment in war industries, and voluntary payment of war taxes.
When their actions are carefully considered, Friends must be prepared to accept the consequences of their convictions.
Friends are advised to maintain our testimony against war by endeavoring to exert an influence in favor of peaceful principles and the settlement of all differences by peaceful methods.
They should lend support to all that strengthens international friendship and understanding and give active help to movements that substitute cooperation and justice for force and intimidation.
NYYM
corporately advises against taking up arms against another person, yet more vaguely warns to “beware of” voluntary payment of war taxes.
The yearly meeting calls Friends to examine their own actions and “accept the consequences of their convictions” (emphasis is mine).
This is about individual conviction, not the corporate conviction we have against bearing of arms. We are squarely in the Penington tradition of advising Friends to testify against war by “endeavoring to exert an influence in favor of peaceful principles.”
We commit to the conversion of hearts and minds, one at a time, “seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.”
Patience and persistence are employed in our participation with government.
As late as , it even seemed that our experiment would come to fruition.
Larry Apsey of New York Yearly Meeting called out, “the time is at hand.”
The Gandhian, civil rights, and women’s movements made it clear that patience and persistence were about to pay off; we were about to come into this blessed state, not just as a people, but as a nation.
What a far cry we are from that now!
Fruits of the Spirit are a significant test of discernment for Friends, a test that our path has failed.
We cannot put new wine into old wine flasks.
We cannot be in that blessed state and support a military for those who have not yet arrived.
We are called to choose, we are called to choose now, and we are called to choose as a people.
When we get quiet, every Friend I know says that payment of war taxes violates their conscience.
It’s been a long time since we acknowledged a new corporate testimony; this practice has fallen away.
So let us remember.
Friends experience a Living Presence among us and commit to being taught, guided, and shaped by the Living Spirit, placing great reliance on spiritual discernment.
Meeting for business was organized to test the spiritual discernment of its members, affirm or suggest further laboring, and support those suffering for conscience’ sake.
If a Friend’s testimony were affirmed, the question was, “Is this true for them alone, for others as well, or for all of us?”
If it were true for everyone, then it was a corporate testimony.
If we are quiet and ask the question, “Does the payment of war taxes violate my conscience?” and the response is yes for all of us, then, Friends, this is no longer a personal act of conscience but rather a corporate testimony of the meeting.
I am not suggesting we all do any particular thing.
I am asking a question of faith.
What we do about it will only be sought once we are clear on what we believe.
We may pay in protest, become vocal, or resist payment, but whatever we do, we do, not only as an individual, but also as a religious body.
The Spirit is calling us to unite in the Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace, and prosperity in the world through love, integrity, and compassionate justice among people and to acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
It will be a long, hard, humble road, but it is the only road that promises a future for humanity.
Life will go on with or without us.
Let us stand up for our children and grandchildren and say we chose peace.
The response to Hoover’s plea — at least from the record of it we have in the Journal — was muted.
There was a single letter-to-the-editor from William Ashworth (who describes himself as a former war tax refuser) in the issue that began: “Friend Nadine Hoover asks us if war tax resistance should be a corporate testimony among Friends.
The answer is ‘no.’ ” Ashworth argues that because taxes are mixed, and not specific war taxes, there’s no grounds for refusal to pay; furthermore if we did refuse to pay, Congress would probably cut beneficial spending before military spending; and in addition there’s the familiar slippery slope argument wherein other churches might apply the Quaker precedent to refuse to pay for “family planning, education, environmental protection, and a host of other government services that we value.”
A feature on Lillian Willoughby in the issue mentioned her war tax resistance as follows:
By the time of [the] Vietnam [war], Lillian, a lifelong tax resister, had become well acquainted with the Internal Revenue Service; she liked to speak of herself as “educating the IRS.”
In one celebrated incident, after the IRS seized the Willoughbys’ car, the couple raised sufficient funds to redeem it at auction.
Indeed, they raised much more than enough, and so they could claim their car and a refund as well.
Lillian had brought a cake and lemonade to the IRS offices on the day of the auction.
Once their bid had been declared the winner, she staged a party outside the auction room; one or two of the agents shared refreshments with [PDF cuts off here].
When she was summoned to trial, she and another Quaker wrote a letter to the judge advising him that they would not rise at a judge’s entrance, although they meant no disrespect.
The bailiff instructed everyone to remain seated when the court came into session and the judge seemed predisposed to leniency.
When he asked Lillian to account for her actions, she gave what had become her standard statement, that “we [the United States] should not be making war on people, and we [Lillian and like-minded taxpayers] should not have to pay for it.”
The judge levied a $250 fine; she announced that she had no intention of paying it; he gave her 30 days to think it over.
As George put it many years later, “She’s still thinking about it.”
The article ends with Willoughby, at 89, facing trial for a civil disobedience action in protest of the Iraq War and contemplating how she would confront the system: “One thing was certain, she told her family as they sat in daughter Anita’s New York apartment : she would not pay the fine.
None of them seemed surprised.”
A review of Robert Turner Shaping Silence: A Life in Clay in that issue calls it “the story of a conscientious objector, a tax resister, a generous donor of his time, skills, and possessions,” among other things.
An obituary notice for Susumu Ishitani in the same issue noted that “[i]n , Susumu introduced tax refusal into Japan, and was one of six plaintiffs who sued the Japanese government over the issue of military spending.… , he was a member of Citizens Group of Conscientious Military Tax Refusers, sometimes serving as clerk.”
The annual gathering of the Northern Yearly Meeting approved a minute giving its interpretation of the Peace Testimony, which included this statement:
We will continue to stand and work for peace and justice.
We will continue to support those who for conscience’ sake refuse to participate in the military.
We support those who, for conscience’ sake, refuse to pay taxes for war.
We support those who are involved in nonviolent peacemaking.
A minute approved in by the South Berkshire (Massachusetts) Meeting quoted from the New England Yearly Meeting’s “Advice on Peace and Reconciliation,” which said:
Friends are urged to support those who witness to their governments and take personal risks in the cause of peace, who choose not to participate in wars as soldiers nor to contribute to its preparedness with their taxes.
Though the context in which this was quoted did not concern taxes, but merely an expression of “appreciation” for those Canadian Quaker organizations who were helping Americans who had fled to Canada to avoid military service.
A retrospective on the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s Peace Conference the previous year — which had been entitled “Friends Peace Witness in a Time of Crisis” — mentioned “ ‘Conscience and War Tax Witness’ with Rosa Packard” in a long list of “Other workshops.”
The issue included a review of Henry Climbs a Mountain — a children’s story based on Henry David Thoreau’s night in jail for tax refusal.
That issue also included an article about Mary Stone McDowell, who is the only person I know of who was a war tax resister through both World Wars (she was fired from her job as a teacher in part because she would not participate in urging her students to buy “Thrift Stamps” — a sort of junior version of the Liberty Bonds the U.S. government was using to fund its participation in World War Ⅰ).
Unfortunately, the brief paragraph about her war tax resistance is cut off in the PDF in the archives, but it ends “…income taxes each year and, according to Vernon Martin [a conscientious objector McDowell had helped], the IRS dutifully ‘attached part of her pitifully small teacher’s pension, out of which she also gave to charity.’ ”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Some Quaker war tax resisters of the past and present made appearances in the Friends Journal in .
Another article on George and Lillian Willoughby, in the issue, mentioned how early American Quakers had been sensitive to the issue of war taxes:
In colonial America, tremendous pressure was exerted on Penn and other Quakers to support militias, to provision the British army, to pay taxes for unexplained uses that might well turn out to be military expeditions.
Governing a large colony (Pennsylvania) in which Quakers were a minority, and in which the majority wanted protection from Indian attacks, forced further compromises.
Only with the advent of John Woolman, who with others sent a letter to the Pennsylvania assembly concerning a royal levy, [a portion of the PDF is illegible at this point] -tion of Christ and Fox.
As reported by Peter Brock in his The Quaker Peace Testimony, , it states in part:
And being painfully apprehensive that the large sum granted by the… Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony, we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directly by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.
Despite the influence of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, Friends remained divided on the question of “rendering unto Caesar” that which “Caesar” claimed.
The Willoughbys, the article said, “have acted on their beliefs — through war tax refusal” and other means.
An obituary notice for Louis E. Jones in that issue noted that among the ways he “championed Friends causes” was by “for many years avoiding paying federal income tax, instead contributing to charitable causes.… He served as Downers Grove Meeting’s treasurer for many years, giving him the opportunity to witness against war taxes in the form of refusing war/excise tax for phone service.”
A retrospective on the life and work of the pacifist activist A.J. Muste in the issue noted:
Throughout , he often faced jail and prosecution for refusing to pay income taxes (he constantly followed the dictates of the Quaker John Woolman, who insisted that “The spirit of truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods, rather than pay actively”)…
That same issue also noted that the Quaker Council for European Affairs planned to “present a resolution, under Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights on Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, to the Council of Europe” that would enshrine a “right for individual taxpayers to direct a portion of their taxes away from military uses and towards peace-building, international development, and other alternatives to war.”
The note mentioned the difficulties with the resolution: “1) the state’s need to maintain a uniform tax system is deemed more important than designing a tax system through which some taxes are diverted for conscientious objection, and 2) in the absence of legislation that allows for the diversion of taxes away from military purposes, the courts have no power to rule in favor of peace tax protestors.”
That issue also noted that the American Friends Service Committee had nominated Ghassan Andoni for the Nobel Peace Prize, and mentioned that “[d]uring the First Intifada, , Andoni was an active participant in Beit Sahour’s tax resistance.”
An obituary for Glenn S. Mallison in the issue noted that “[d]uring the Vietnam War, he refused entry to IRS agents who confronted [his] family’s refusal to pay phone taxes.”
The issue reported that “New York Yearly Meeting approved a statement against paying for war.”:
The following minute was approved at their Spring Business Sessions on : “The Living Spirit works to give joy, peace, and prosperity through love, integrity, and compassionate justice among people.
We are united in this Power.
We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
We will witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.”
This statement reflects Quakers’ steadfast testimony that any participation in war, including payment of taxes for war, is a violation of our faith.
By compelling support of war-making through taxation, our government and political leaders have forced many people of faith to subordinate God’s Word to the dictates of the state.
The statement seeks to uphold a foundational principle of our nation that freedom to practice our religious faith is a matter of moral imperative, and is not dependent upon the grace of rights or privileges granted by the legislature.
For nearly 350 years, members of the Religious Society of Friends have upheld a testimony of peace and nonviolence that embodies the belief that God’s spirit, present in every person, empowers all of us to resolve disputes without resorting to the machinery of war.
Quakers, Mennonites, and people of other faiths came to the New World to escape persecutions in Europe for their religious convictions.
The work of these “peace churches” in the United States eventually led to the legal recognition of the right of all persons not to be forced into military service in violation of their conscience.
To date, however, the United States government has failed to respect the right of religious conscience, recognized by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, not to be compelled to support war through the collection of taxes.
The U.S. Congress has before it legislation introduced by Congressman John Lewis of Georgia and supported by 35 Representatives… (the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill”) that would provide conscientious objectors [subject] to military taxation with an option.
Individuals who establish a sincere religious objection would have their tax payments directed towards nonviolent and life-affirming means for protecting and promoting national security, consistent with their faith.
Until that time, many Quakers and others are being forced to choose between being faithful to their religious convictions and being in compliance with our federal tax laws.
“As a religious body, we cannot in good conscience support war, and we have borne that witness for over 350 years,” said Christopher Sarnmond, general secretary of New York Yearly Meeting.
“We are clear that violence only begets more violence, in a neverending cycle of horror that diminishes all humankind.
Being required to pay almost half our taxes to support war-making is a violation of our religious convictions, and we will be seeking ways to redress this, individually and corporately.”
In an op-ed in the issue, Stan Becker used his column inches to present the dilemma of Quakers paying for the Iraq War and other such militarism.
He asserted that “[V]ery few Friends have been able to conscientiously refuse to pay the military portion of their income tax and succeeded in doing so” because “[t]he Internal Revenue Service simply does what is necessary to get its monies.”
The option of “living below the taxable income level,” he insisted, “is nearly impossible as well.”
To the rescue is “the Peace Tax Fund legislation that would allow pacifists to have their taxes used only for nonmilitary purposes.”
Meanwhile, he suggested that Friends calculate how much of their time and money is going to pay for war and try to counterbalance this with some peace-minded donations.
Nadine Hoover had an article in the same issue in which she mentioned her frustrations at trying to forward the cause of war tax resistance in the New York Yearly Meeting:
In , a member of Peace Concerns Committee of New York Yearly Meeting approached me outside the auditorium at yearly meeting: “We were talking in committee today about how we are being prepared for something, something historic.
We don’t know what it is, but we feel ready!
We thought of asking people and your name came up.
What do you sense we are being prepared for?”
The answer was laid upon me in that instant.
I replied: “Don’t ask the question if you’re not prepared to yield.
Our dear Friend Sandra Cronk warned us of the dis-ease that settles in when we think we are ready but, when the Light comes, we refuse to yield.
You really do not want to know the answer.”
“Yes, yes!
We do.
We really do.
We’re ready.”
“Okay.”
I said, “It’s a corporate conviction against paying for war.”
He paled and said, “Oh, no.
That may be a bit too much.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.
You wanted an historic action that would not change your life.
Well, let me see…”
He smiled.
That was the end of that conversation…
But…
Seven years after that conversation, New York Yearly Meeting approved a statement of faith testifying to the Power of the Living Spirit and acknowledging that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
This statement not only reaffirms our Peace Testimony, but shifts from supporting or encouraging individual acts of conscience to claiming a corporate testimony laid upon all of us.
U.S. courts have rejected cases on war tax resistance saying they cannot accommodate individuals, but the courts may not say no so easily to an entire religious body.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
After noting several years of dwindling coverage of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the magazine devoted its issue to the topic.
Robert Dockhorn wrote the opening editorial.
Excerpt:
Historically, many Friends have refused to participate in armed forces, and occasionally Friends, in an organized way, have refused to pay taxes to finance military activity.
But mostly, especially in recent years, only a few individuals, acting on the basis of individual conscience, have refused to pay taxes that are “mixed” — i.e. where one cannot determine which monies are funding which functions of government.
These individual Friends have sometimes received endorsement from their meetings, and on occasion, meetings (including yearly meetings) have gone so far as to encourage individual Friends generally to think seriously about tax resistance.
In this issue of Friends Journal, we offer several
articles that address this subject. At the center of them is a moral dilemma:
how can those of us who are clear that our government is pursuing an immoral,
militarist course live with our consciences in the knowledge that we are
funding this activity? What is required of us? What are our
real choices? What is our most effective response? And, at
another level: are we required only to be faithful to our
consciences, and to leave the consequences in God’s hands?
For — my wife, Roma, and I refused to pay the military portion of our federal income tax, as calculated by Friends Committee on National Legislation.
We donated the refused amounts to various causes that we felt were appropriate.
During these years I was employed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Eventually, the IRS came to my employer and sought to levy my wages for the owed amounts.
Much searching resulted, and the yearly meeting, while declining to turn over the funds, placed them in a separate account and did not hide them.
Eventually, they were attached.
And in , Roma and I prayerfully considered our course, sensed that we were no longer led to this resistance, and settled with the IRS, paying a substantial amount of interest and penalties.
We followed a leading, and the leading changed for us.
In the entire process, we were supported and nurtured by my monthly and yearly meeting (I am a Friend, Roma is not) — but it was our leading, supported by meetings, not the meetings’ leading.
And that is part of the question in these articles. It is not just about what
individuals can do, and should do. It is also about what all
Friends can and should do — together. How are Friends led today?
The first war tax resistance article in the issue came from Nadine Hoover, who told the story of Dan Jenkins’s attempt to get the courts to recognize conscientious objection to military taxation as a right of individual conscience that American citizens had before the enactment of the U.S. Constitution and that they had deliberately not relinquished by means of that document (see ♇ ).
The courts weren’t buying it, and in fact found the argument so far-fetched
that they upheld a $5,000 fine against Jenkins for using legally-frivolous
arguments. Hoover thought the arguments were good enough to be worth
repeating in the Journal, however.
She noted that “nearly three dozen Quakers and other supporters” joined Jenkins when he was arguing his appeal, and she argued:
To pay war taxes or to purchase from or invest in corporate structures that profit on war or use military might in order to secure wealth, in violation of our religious conviction, plants a dis-ease among us.
Friends’ witness is letting our lives speak — not that we will be protected but that we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable — knowing our faith will sustain us, set us free, and give us joy.
I have experienced this joy when I live in accord with my conscience and faith, regardless of the apparent, temporal consequences.
She invited “Friends who will stand before the courts and proclaim our faith… [or] write their statements of conscience and share them with others… [or] make the commitment to represent and/or support any Friend who is called to this witness” to write a war tax resistance committee of the New York Yearly meeting.
She hoped that if enough Quakers began to resist, they might make a change in the country the way the women’s suffrage movement did.
The change Hoover was hoping this would bring about was that the government
would legally acknowledge conscientious objection to military spending by
passing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, or something along those
lines:
Quakers, Mennonites, Shakers, and others have maintained this testimony throughout U.S. history.
Still many people today, of a wide variety of faiths, do not pay taxes for military purposes because this action violates their essential religious beliefs and moral convictions of conscience.
Passage of this bill by Congress would facilitate the payment of all taxes owed by these principled people.
Perish the thought.
Hoover shared a minute from the New York Yearly Meeting, dated
:
The Living Spirit works in the world to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.
We are united in this Power.
We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
We will seek ways to witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.
Then she listed off some possible “ways to witness”:
encourage your congregation to write and deliver a statement of
conscientious objection to paying for war
write a statement of conscience to include with your tax return and to
send to various other people
redirect some or all of your taxes “to an escrow account to be held in
trust for the
U.S.
government”
file more lawsuits using Jenkins’s 9th
Amendment argument
live on a below-the-tax-line income
divest from “corporations that profit from war” and invest and spend more
responsibly
“Pursue local ordinances that deny corporations recognition as persons,
and that deny recognition of corporate charters as contracts”
It was a long, rambling, repetitive, sometimes vague and random-seeming (what did corporate charters have to do with any of this?) argument.
It represents one weird extreme of the Peace Tax Fund idea, which had come to be seen by some supporters as an end in itself, rather than a means to a more important end.
Why do we resist paying war taxes?
Because that might help us get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed!
The following article, edited by Karen A. Reixach, tried to account for how
enthusiasm for conscientious objection to military taxation had taken hold in
the New York Yearly Meeting in recent years. It began by identifying a
“movement of conscience” in much the same way that voluntaryists describe
ideal noncoercive politics, with a quote from
Jim
Corbett:
Nonviolent civil initiative by covenant communities is… the way human beings preserve and develop society based on consent, in which the rule of law, as distinguished from the rule of commanders, is necessarily grounded… Civil initiative must be societal rather than organizational, nonviolent rather than injurious, truthful rather than deceitful, catholic rather than sectarian, dialogical rather than dogmatic, substantive rather than symbolic, volunteer-based rather than professionalized, and based on community powers rather than government powers.
The article hoped to describe how when individuals articulate and share their conscientious yearnings, by means of a “statement of conscience,” they can find like-minded souls to form a “movement of conscience” that can work together to “act on our collective beliefs of conscience,” using the recent activity in the New York Yearly Meeting as an example.
She described some of the minutes and reports from the Meeting that had touched
on peace and justice issues in recent years, and on the Meeting’s support for
Dan Jenkins in his court cases. Then:
In the yearly meeting’s Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War sponsored a series of conferences in support of this growing movement of conscience.
The first conference was held at Purchase Meeting the weekend following the oral argument of Jenkins in the Second Circuit in .
The court hearing and the conference were attended by about 35 Friends and others from the metropolitan area and the northeast region.
Out of that conference arose two strands of action: exploring the possibility of group legal action, and expanding the movement of conscience [PDF illegible] step of writing a statement of conscience.
The second conference, in at
Rochester Meeting, featured a public forum on the failure of violence that
included Robert Holmes, professor of Philosophy at University of Rochester;
Derek Brett, of Conscience and Peace Tax International; and Frederick
Dettmer, the attorney representing Daniel Jenkins. During the following day
and a half, Friends continued to consider action steps individually and in
concert with others.
The third conference was held at Flushing Meeting in … It focused on international venues for raising freedom of conscience issues as they apply to paying taxes for war.
A fourth conference , is being planned; and as momentum builds, we envision more every few months, inviting ever-widening circles of participants.
I don’t see many details there about what, if any “action steps” the conferees decided on.
Jens Braun is quoted in the article as suggesting some possible next steps:
to develop a better theoretical understanding of pacifism and the failure
of violence, so as to share this vision more convincingly
to “explore, develop, and improve the many ways Friends can work towards
not paying for war” —
get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed
try new court challenges along the lines of Dan Jenkins’s
develop and use workshops and other outreach material
to join with counterparts in other countries, for instance at international
conferences
The Yearly Meeting then issued this Minute:
To Conscientious Objectors to Paying for War Everywhere,
New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends invites you to
join us in acknowledging that paying for war violates our conviction in the
Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through
love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.
We call on all conscientious objectors to paying for war to state in writing 1) your belief against paying for war and the preparations for war, 2) major influences in forming your belief, 3) how it is demonstrated by the way you live, and 4) a request that our government recognize and accommodate our convictions.
We ask anyone who prepares such a statement to send it to
NYYM
Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War… We ask Friends to
send your statement to your monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings to record
in the minutes having received your testimony.
The thing that unnerves me is that it’s possible to read the whole article without seeing a single reference to one of these newly enthused New York Yearly Meetingers actually refusing to pay their taxes (except for Jenkins himself, who put his taxes in escrow with a promise to pay them into a government “Peace Tax Fund” once one was established).
There’s lots of talk about writing statements of conscience and holding gatherings and planning legal strategies and contacting legislators and all that, but where is the actual not-paying-for-war part?
Of “the many ways Friends can work towards not paying for war,” you’d think some of them might involve not paying for war.
Hopefully this just went without saying, but I worry.
A sidebar from David R. Bassett and Karen Reixach concerned the status of the
Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, and where one could look on-line to
find information about it. Another, by John Little Randall, described his
work with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and with Conscience and
Peace Tax International.
The following article, by Jens and Spee Braun, wrote about war tax resistance as part of (and contributing to) a larger project of living a life of integrity, and how not-straightforward it all is.
It’s a good overview of what a typical modern American war tax resister is in for:
Are you frustrated thar the war goes on and on?
Has your conscience brought up with you the subject of not paying for war?
Be careful; your conscience can make you do things (albeit for a good cause) that can turn your life upside down!
You don’t really want to think of refusing to pay part of your taxes to the
government, do you? For starters, no matter how you calculate the percentage
to refuse, there will always be some frustrating other formula that makes
just as much sense. You can use the FCNL percentage of the budget
going towards war, but the War Resisters League has another calculation and
number. You can refuse to pay a token amount, or you can simply not pay the
estimated 50 percent or so of the tax burden that goes to war-making, past
war debts, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons work, and all that
spying we do. How to decide?
And then, to top it off, you have to figure what to do with the money not going to the government!
Give it to charity?
Put it in an escrow account?
Use it for peaceful and life-affirming purposes at home or overseas?
Of course this problem can be avoided by living under the taxable-income level — if you don’t mind life without all the great stuff we have nowadays.
After you make these decisions of how to go about not paying for war, have
fun telling your employer that you don’t want any funds withheld from your
paycheck and not to send any money directly to the government for you!
If you get really serious, you can take the government to court, try to change the laws, or try to change the lawmakers.
So many options!
And that is not all. Deciding to be a conscientious objector to paying for
war and setting up the mechanisms by which you put action into your
intentions is the easy part. Once you do that, you know your conscience will
have taken a few strides into your being. And with that foothold (not to
mention the knowledge and understanding you have been given for having taken
those steps), your conscience will begin to demand all manner of other
deviations from a normal daily way of living!
Here is where life gets really dicey.
The problem is integrity.
As your conscience integrates one part of your life with your belief structure (and who says they need to be integrated — people have believed one thing and done another for as long as there have been people!), the process can turn into a domino effect with all sorts of other areas likewise wanting to be integrated.
It becomes a terrible sacrifice.
And don’t believe those who say it is actually liberating! It is like putting
your house in order: once you start organizing the mess, you keep finding
other things to clean up that you didn’t even know were out of place. Take
finances. It turns out that we could all pay less in taxes,
i.e., buy fewer bombs, if we took all the deductions coming to
us. What? Well, for example, if you keep track of all that travel to Quaker
committee meetings and write down the mileage in a little book to document
the expenditure, it may be deductible.
Businesses deduct driving and lunches (and even golf games), but Quakers seldom do.
That is so because we Quakers generally are not hagglers; we want to pay our full share of taxes to support our government as it builds roads, keeps up national parks, and pays politicians’ salaries.
We just don’t like that uncomfortable part that goes to war.
In the house-in-order analogy we want to share our cake, but not have part of it be eaten by our neighbor the landmine manufacturer.
You might think about something as useful and simple as your credit cards.
Who really wants to question those little pieces of plastic that make renting
cars or buying great books over the Internet so easy? Even (especially) if
you pay off your bill in full every month, there can’t be anything wrong, you
think, in using a system that would collapse if everyone were responsible,
saved their money before making purchases, paid off debts promptly, and
weren’t willing to pay usurious interest charges. In particular, don’t think
about how, if you do pay off your bill each month, the credit company
tolerates your borrowing money free of charge only because others don’t pay
up and you might not in the future. See? If you get started, who knows what
trouble you will make for yourself Now you have to think about going inside
to pay cash and talking to the gas station attendant rather than swiping the
plastic card out at the pump!
Can we retain integrity in our relationship to money?
Forget it!
You know very well that money is not important enough to spend precious time keeping track of, even if some folks call it a representation of our life force.
Better to spend time on that street corner protesting the lousy war.
And heaven forbid the government would audit our finances, since we have been occupied with the real spiritual tasks of speaking truth to power in public places.
They say money talks, but not like we can!
We’ve been told that early Friends opened their financial books to their
meeting communities. We can’t do that anymore — it’s hard enough to talk
about sex, but to talk about our money? Who can trust others that far — well,
except if the others are insurance companies, brokerage firms, or retirement
planners? We sure can’t trust our spiritual community to have the power and
scale of resources to support us in need or relieve the fears of what would
happen to us without money!
Yes, money is scary, so don’t bother pondering the irony of why fear of getting out from under its control ends up being even scarier then being part of a war-based society where you can believe whatever you want, as long as you pay up.
It’s not worth it — and besides, a messy house is so much more comfortable!
The next article was by Elizabeth Boardman.
She laid out the problem this way:
Among Friends, there is not much debate about whether war taxes are problematic.
Depending upon the federal budget for the year and how you count the line items, about half of our income tax dollars will be used for the outrageous costs of war.
Thousands of our personally earned dollars will be used to enrich the military-industrial complex, to make killers of young men and women,. and to cause death and destruction in the world.
Letting our own money be used this way is not consistent with good stewardship, with right sharing, with Quaker testimonies, or with Christian teachings.
The question of whether and how we can resist is much more complex. Standing
up to Goliath is possible only for the most confident David.
She mentioned a different set of anxieties than the Brauns had covered in their piece: worries that tax resistance or protest might trigger an audit (and then worries that such an audit might uncover math mistakes, or worse, “convenient” errors)… worries that the accountant who helps her with her tax forms will disapprove of her stand and maybe drop her as a client… difficulty reconciling willingly racking up IRS penalties & interest with her otherwise frugal and practical economic practices… difficulty finding the time to research and plan her tax resistance strategy… reluctance to break the law (or to be known as a law-breaker).
In the face of things like this, Boardman recommends that prospective war tax
resisters start small: maybe with phone tax resistance, or some sort of
symbolic protest like withholding $10.40 from your taxes or supporting the
Peace Tax Fund.
She also recommended that people who resist quietly, by slipping below the taxable income line, start making some noise about what they’re doing — otherwise “we accomplish nothing but a sense of personal righteousness.”
Following this were an excerpt from John Woolman’s journals
(see Excerpts from the Journal of John
Woolman) and from the letter Woolman and twenty other Quakers sent
to their fellow-Friends in to explain why
they could not pay taxes being raised for war expenses
(see ♇ ).
The next article in the set was by Steve Leeds.
He described becoming a war tax resister in and then drifting away in discouragement after the IRS garnished his salary for the taxes, penalties, and interest.
Then:
Fifteen years later, through renewed spiritual commitment and membership in a Friends meeting, I was led to take action with other Quakers on war tax resistance.
It began among a few of us, and that’s all it takes.
, my meeting began cohosting
war tax resistance gatherings with Northern California War Tax Resistance. We
urged Friends in our meeting to engage in symbolic war tax
resistance — refusing federal phone taxes, paying under protest, withholding
symbolic amounts, or living below the tax line — and letting our legislators
know about it. We found that a number of households in the meeting partook in
some form of war tax resistance, symbolic or otherwise.
Philosophically, it’s a slam dunk.
No more war.
Not with my dollars.
Logistically, though, it’s easy to become fixated on the mechanics and legal
aspects of war tax resistance. There’s a lot to learn and consider. My
journey, through discernment, prayer, and the support of others, led me to
focus on complex social and financial issues. Mostly, I have been confronting
my fear of the
IRS and
the insecurity of not knowing where this will lead.
For I have held back $1,040 from the IRS (symbolic of the IRS 1040 form).
Living with multiple feelings — fear, joy, and liberation — makes life whole.
My faith as a Quaker, striving to be nonviolent and to oppose all wars, has led me down this path.
I am sustained by the knowledge that many Quakers throughout history have resisted paying taxes for war.
When I think that we as a faith community need to do more, I know that the we starts with me.
So!
Quite a bit of material and many perspectives there — and a great deal of contrast in approaches between the pursuit of legal accommodation from the New York Quakers and the cautious but deliberate war tax resistance of the California Quakers (Boardman and Leeds were both from the San Francisco Meeting).
It had been years since the Journal devoted that much attention to the topic, and they haven’t done so since.
The series of articles prompted a lot of discussion in the
letters-to-the-editor column of subsequent issues — some of it quite hostile
to war tax resistance.
Dennis P. Roberts noted that the Bible is full of stories of war, and that
it “establishes beyond any doubt that the performance of an army in the
field is directly correlative to the quality of the faith and spirit of
the society or nation that put it there” and that because “the heart,
faith, honor, and spirit of a nation” is best represented by “the fighting
soldier, the fighting sailor, the fighting marine, the fighting airman,”
he finds that “this nonpayment of war taxes can indeed be carried to
frivolous extremes.”
Lucinda Antrim thought that war tax resistance “contradicts the Testimony
of Community… We are, here in the
U.S., members
of the community of the United States.… I find myself agreeing, somewhat
to my surprise, with the judge’s imposition of a ‘frivolous” fine on Dan
Jenkins.” (Naomi Paz Greenberg responded that she could not understand how
this vague and unarticulated “Testimony of Community somehow nullifies our
historic Peace Testimony”.)
Perry Treadwell responded that he did not recognize the
U.S. government
as his “community.” “Thirty-six years ago I was led to refuse to pay war
taxes… I currently send the small amount that I calculate this warrior
nation wants to agencies that support the families of wounded military
personnel. I have followed Thoreau’s warning:
‘What I have to do is to see, at any
rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.’”
David Zarembka wrote in to correct “the impression that the
IRS
is as omniscient as God, all seeing, all knowing, never making a mistake
in getting the last farthing out of the helpless tax resister. Nothing
could be further from the truth.” He recounted some
IRS
blunders in his own case, and said, “I have always made sure that the cost
of the
IRS
getting funds from me exceeded any penalties and interest that they might
charge. In my 37 years of war tax resistance I am certain that I (and all
the other active war tax resisters I know as a group) have withheld much
more funds for government war-making and given them to peace organizations
than the
IRS
has ever collected, including penalties and interest. I don’t think that
this excuse should be used by Quakers as a group as a cop-out for refusing
to pay for our wars. In fact, if all Quakers in the United States were war
tax resisters, the
IRS
couldn’t even cope with our collective resistance.”
George Levinger, who said he’d been a phone tax resister in the Vietnam
War era, had soured on war tax resistance, considering it ultimately
counterproductive largely because the government succeeded in seizing the
taxes from him with penalties and interest. He suggested channeling the
resources you might otherwise use in war tax resistance “to contribute to
various sorts of peace-promoting organizations” instead.
Ruth Hyde Paine wrote in to promote the “penny poll” idea.
Gary Shuler wrote in to sing jingo bells: “As a retired military man, I
take exception to anyone who wants to use the privileges of this country
and not help to foot the cost. Many of my forefathers and yours died for
this freedom and you don’t want to pay taxes to keep it? Move! Cuba is
nice!” (Isn’t it cute that in someone
was still using the idea of tyranny in Cuba as a contrast to the
U.S. rather
than an example of it?)
For Pamela Haines, the challenge presented by war taxes seemed largely to
be a challenge to come up with good excuses not to resist them. Excerpts:
I don’t think the problem is just lack of courage, at least I hope not!
Part of the difficulty, I believe, is the extent to which we are embedded and enmeshed in a deeply violent world.
It’s not just the portion of my tax dollars that goes to deadly warfare.
It’s my computer, the disposal of which poisons poor people in Africa and Asia.
It’s my everyday purchases from invisible corporations that destroy lives and habitats far from mine.
It’s my energy consumption that threatens the very viability of future generations.
If war tax resistance seems too hard for most of us, what do we do if
that’s just the tip of the iceberg? Some Friends are not deterred by the
seemingly impossible and set out to disentangle themselves from the
whole mess — living below taxable level, with only the bare necessity of
purchases and a minimal carbon footprint. This may be a true calling for
some, and certainly a courageous one, but I know it’s not mine. To me
the focused goal of living a life free from complicity with
institutional violence would involve participating in another sin, that
of separation from my neighbors.
Is it better not to do a right thing, if by doing a right thing you would
be being inconsistent in not doing all possible right things?
In the issue, Jamie K. Donaldson explained why she gave up on trying to change the United States and left it rather than continue to be part of its war machine.
She’d contemplated tax resistance at one point, but decided it wasn’t for her.
Here’s how she describes that decision:
I was haunted by the quote attributed to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig: “Let them march all they want as long as they pay their taxes.” Suddenly the television shots of millions of people in the streets protesting the start of war lost their inspiration for me, and I wallowed in our powerlessness to prevent it.
Haig’s cynical remark exemplified my inner struggle as well as a wrenching
and age-old moral dilemma for all Friends. Some bear it as a cross, enabling
them to continue the Lamb’s War on behalf of love, truth, and justice. Could
I, too? Alas, the contradiction of working for peace while paying for war, of
being complicit by mere participation in the
U.S. “system,”
became untenable and intolerable. I explored war tax resistance, but rejected
it because I hold the assets of my incapacitated mother and could not allow
the government to garnish money for her care to recuperate my taxes withheld.
An obituary notice for Stephanie Kennedy in the issue mentioned her work on war tax resistance.
An obituary notice for Charles Richard Johnson in the issue called him “a dedicated war tax resister.”
an ad from the Friends Journal in
pitches the Monteverde community in Costa
Rica, which was founded by American Quaker taxpatriates, as an ethical
investing opportunity and also a potentially attractive tax-break junket
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the current period of Quaker war tax resistance — what I’m calling “the second forgetting.”
The Second Forgetting ()
After an enthusiasm for war tax resistance that had grown to a near-mania by there was an astonishing and swift drop in interest in the subject.
I can’t with any great confidence say why this might be, but here are some theories:
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting end of the Cold War made people more optimistic about the chances of avoiding nuclear war and ushering in a more peaceful international order.
Even hawkish politicians were crowing about the “peace dividend” that would come from reduced military spending as a result.
War tax resistance may have slackened because peace work in general was seen as less urgent.
The “peace tax fund” idea had gained traction in Quaker circles.
Some Quakers who were concerned about their taxes paying for war may have chosen to refrain from taking action in the hopes that such a law would eventually give them an easy-out, or in the misapprehension that the absence of such a law made the Quaker taxpayer’s dilemma really a problem for the legislature and not for the Quaker.
It may have been simple demographics:
Those Quakers who were so confident in their war tax resistance stand that they were willing to start resisting when very few Friends were, and who as a result were the leaders and pioneers of the war tax resistance Renaissance, were reaching the ends of their lives at this point.
The younger resisters who joined up during the Renaissance may have been less self-sustaining, less confident, and less persuasive — following a trend more than they were following a compelling conscientious leading.
(This was a worry among Friends as far back as , when John Churchman wrote “Such build on a sandy foundation who refuse paying that which is called the provincial or king’s tax, only because some others scruple paying it whom they esteem.”)
In the Friends Journal, feeling it had reached the end of its legal appeals, threw in the towel and paid the IRS levy on the salary of its editor, Vint Deming.
Two German Quakers were prosecuted for war tax resistance, and their court hearing was attended by some forty Quakers.
Meanwhile in the U.S., the “peace tax fund” legislation got its first and only congressional hearing.
Several Quakers attended and a few testified in favor of the bill.
In a stage dramatization based on the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner was part of the program at the Friends General Conference Gathering.
The Canada Yearly Meeting, after years of debate, adopted a policy of refusing to withhold taxes from the salary of war tax resisting employees.
In U.S. President Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which seemed to offer some hope for a new court challenge against the government’s insistence on taxing religious conscientious objectors to pay for military spending.
In Quaker Priscilla Adams began a case using this argument; Quakers Rosa Packard and Edith & Gordon Brown filed similar suits soon after.
These suits didn’t make any headway.
In , Adams filed a final appeal to the Supreme Court, with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting contributing a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf, but the Court turned down the case.
By this time, sad to say, a superstitious, blinkered, panglossian take on the “peace tax fund” has become the norm, and on the rare occasions when war taxes are even discussed (for example, in the Friends Journal), it is taken for granted that should Congress pass such a law, American Quakers will finally be freed from having to worry about paying for war (and implied, in the spirit of the “forgetting,” is the sentiment “and until then, well, what can we do?”).
Statements from Quaker meetings about war tax resistance are increasingly endorsing the “peace tax fund” idea not in addition to supporting war tax resistance, but in lieu of it.
As dawns, most of the mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal are found in the obituary column.
War tax resistance is presented as something that noble and honored Friends used to do; only rarely as something they are currently doing.
Nadine Hoover wrote an earnest plea for Quakers to adopt war tax resistance as a corporate testimony in , but it seems to have fallen with a thud and produced little effect or even debate.
In there were still some Quakers trying increasingly desperate legal arguments to try to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
Dan Jenkins tried a Ninth Amendment argument, which is the constitutional equivalent of a hail mary pass (the court would not only reject the case, but found it so far-fetched that they also upheld a frivolous filing penalty).
That case is notable, though, for the amount of support he got from the New York Yearly Meeting.
They used a clearness committee to help Jenkins work through his stand and his process.
The Purchase Quarterly Meeting provided some financial backing for his legal challenge.
The Yearly Meeting filed an amicus brief in the case.
Alas, this meeting too seems since to have been thoroughly infected by the magical thinking surrounding the “peace tax fund” idea, and the most active Friends there now sound almost as though they think of war tax resistance less as a logical expression of the peace testimony and more as a pressure tactic to use in the hopes of getting Congress to pass such legislation.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had held out as long as they felt able to in the Priscilla Adams case, finally writing a check to the IRS for the amount it demanded.
(They would continue to resist withholding and levies for years not covered by the exhausted legal suit.)
Martin Kelly, who would become the Friends Journal editor in , wrote bitterly of this in :
We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. …
When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway.
There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind losing their liberty or property in service to the gospel.
Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire.
Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.
In the midst of this terrible decline, the Friends Journal devoted a fourth special issue to the problem of war taxes in .
One thing it shows is a divergence of tactics between Quakers in the New York Yearly Meeting (who were concentrating on legal challenges) and those in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who were trying to spread the practice of war tax resistance by asking Quakers to take baby steps like refusing tiny symbolic amounts of tax or paying “under protest” (but who struggled even to meet these exceptionally modest goals).
In the Pacific Yearly Meeting did announce a policy pledging $100 in matching funds to any monthly meeting in its demesne that reimbursed war tax resisting Quakers for penalties & interest the IRS had been able to seize from them.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reaffirmed its policy of resisting withholding and levies on the salary of its war tax resisting employees.
But when it did so it noted that “very few Friends actively practice war tax resistance.”
, the Meeting would report that it no longer had any war tax resisting employees, and so its policy, while still in effect, had gone into suspended animation.
The Britain Yearly Meeting issued a booklet on The Quaker Peace Testimony in .
It mentions war tax resistance only once, in a list of historical examples of Quaker peace work, but does not allude to it as a current practice that is available to modern Quakers.
It encourages Friends with concerns about paying war taxes to get in contact with Conscience, a non-Quaker group, rather than suggesting that they get guidance from their own meetings or from Quaker traditions.
When British Quakers released the fifth edition of Quaker Faith and Practice in , it included some inspirational quotes from war tax resisting Quakers of yesteryear, and reaffirmed its statement on the subject from :
We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes…
We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.
But the fact that they reaffirmed this wording betrays that in , despite the “urgency,” the Meeting for Sufferings had not come up with a sufficient corporate response.
So that’s where we are today.
There are still Quaker war tax resisters, certainly, but there is no groundswell of Quaker war tax resistance, and the obituary column is still where you are most likely to find a mention of a Quaker war tax resister in the Friends Journal, which is an ominous sign.
The resurgence of war tax resistance during the Cold War perhaps would be better described as a fad than, as I hopefully did, as a renaissance.
But whether a renaissance or a fad, it represents hope that the current forgetting won’t be forever, but that Quakers may again reclaim their place at the head of the conscientious tax resistance movement.
When they do so, they will be able to draw on the experiences of Quakers from the previous eras in order to sharpen the persuasiveness of their messages and discover the best and most appropriate techniques.
And they will surely be led out of this wilderness by a few self-motivated Friends who kept the faith through the forgetting period.
