Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Mennonites / Amish →
Cornelia Lehn
’s Picket Line
was all about Mary McDowell, but it also briefly mentioned three people
involved in the early years of the modern American war tax resistance movement
whom I hadn’t heard of before: Sander Katz, Edith Aldis, and Gerhard Friesen.
You’d think a name like “Sander Katz” would make for easy Googling, but in fact there is a “Sandor Katz” who is well-known today for, for instance, his fine do-it-yourself guide Wild Fermentation.
Google tends to want to assume you’re just misspelling his name if you try to hunt for “Sander Katz.”
Katz is listed as the editor of a collection of Freud’s essays “on war, sex,
and neurosis” with an introduction by
Paul Goodman.
He is also listed as one of two editors of Complex: The
Magazine of Psychoanalysis and Society (and he’d occasionally
contribute articles as well, for example: “Comparative Sexual Behavior: Is
orgasm for the human female normal?”). He was also on the editorial committee
of a magazine called Alternative that published
and was associated
with the “Non-Profit Association of Libertarians” and the “Committee for
Non-Violent Revolution.” Other members of that committee included war tax
resisters David Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, and Roy Kepler.
In , the syndicated columnist
Robert Ruark spent
several column inches denigrating Katz, who had just been sentenced to a one-year prison term for refusing to register for the
military draft (and then Ruark put out
another column’s worth when Katz was released eight months later).
“I know something about this particular rugged individualist,” Ruark wrote,
“who served 19 months in jail during the last war for refusal to report for
induction. His name is Sander Katz, and he is one of the long-hairs who stroll
the [Greenwich] Village streets, lost in reverie and a turtle-neck sweater.”
Katz was imprisoned because he said he opposed the draft on “social, political,
and philosophical grounds” and the law at that time only recognized
conscientious objection for religious reasons.
, Katz, along with several dozen
others, burned his draft card during a “Break With Conscription Committee”
demonstration in New York City. , Katz was arrested, along with several others, for picketing
at a draft registration center.
I found a few more newspaper articles about Edith Aldis, all based on the same
template. The Long Island Star-Journal of
for instance, which also
mentions Gerhard Friesen:
Topeka,
Kan.
(UP) — Kansas
Internal Revenue officials had two “conscientious objectors” on their hands
today when Miss Edith Aldis and the
Rev. Gerhard Friesen defied
federal income tax laws on grounds that “too much of the money goes for
military armament.”
Both have signed a statement issued by the Tax Refusal Committee of
Peacemakers, a pacifist movement with headquarters in New York.
Miss Aldis said she paid 10 per cent of her taxes, the amount estimated for
use for non-military spending. Friesen said he would pay only direct taxes on
the “principal of the thing,” because other levies are “a part of the plan to
destroy our country.”
I found a few more things about Friesen as well.
I even saw one mention of his war tax resistance (too brief to quote, alas) that said that he had begun resisting in !
Her father, she said, “was ahead of his time” in advocating war tax
resistance and speaking out at Mennonite conferences against profiteering
from the war economy. “His conscience would not let him support the military.”
She said her father would have approved the
action by the General Conference Mennonite Church to honor employee Cornelia
Lehn’s request to not have her income taxes withheld from her paychecks.
The Friesens practiced war tax resistance by living simply, giving generously,
and usually not earning enough to owe taxes.
Although as a youth she was embarrassed by her father’s outspokenness to
audiences unreceptive to his message, Martha embraced her parents’
convictions about Christian discipleship and peacemaking and taught them to
her children. She files tax returns but usually has a zero taxable income due
to living simply and giving 50 percent of her income to charity. She has also
advocated for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund legislation.
Bethlehem,
Pa.
(AP) — In an action primarily protesting
U.S. military
policies, the General Conference Mennonites has became [sic.]
the first mainstream Christian church to refuse to withhold federal taxes
from employees’ paychecks.
Delegates to the church’s international convention
voted 1,128 to 457 to authorize
church officials to violate federal law by refusing to withhold federal taxes.
A denomination spokesman said the church has tried for four years to secure
legislative, administrative, and judicial approval for its employees to refuse
to pay their taxes as a protest against the use of the money for military
hardware.
A group of Quakers — the American Friends Service Committee — also has
refused to withhold taxes, according to Margaret Bacon, a spokeswoman for the
Philadelphia-based group. The AFSC provides world-wide relief and works for social change.
But Dean M. Kelley, director for religious and civil liberty of the National
Council of Churches, said none of the council’s 31 member denominations had
previously refused to forward employees’ taxes to the federal government.
The 66,000-member General Conference Mennonite Church and the 93,000-member
Mennonite Church are holding their international meetings this week at Lehigh
University. The conferences are the first time the two churches have ever met
together.
Larry Cornies, news director for the General Conference Mennonites, said the
church has been considering the issue of tax withholdings for five years.
The catalyst came in , when Cornelia Lehn,
then director of children’s education for the church, asked the church to not
withhold taxes from her paycheck, Cornies said. She has since retired to
British Colombia.
, the church has decided a
U.S. Supreme Court
test case would be unsuccessful and a tax withholding bill could not get
through Congress, he said.
Cornies said a bill to let taxpayers earmark their taxes for a World Peace Tax
Fund, to be used only for peaceful purposes, “doesn’t look like it’s got much
of a chance.”
The National Council’s Kelley said the only denominations considering refusal
to let taxes be withheld are the “peace churches” — the Mennonites, the Church
of the Brethren, and the Quakers.
“Most of the mainline denominations are not pacifist,” he said.
The Mennonites decided not to approach the Supreme Court after the justices
ruled against an Amish employer from New Wilmington,
Pa., who had refused to
withhold Social Security taxes from Amish employees.
“Then it gratuitously added something to the effect that ‘if we let this take
place, people would be able to insist that they were entitled to withhold
paying of taxes on expenditures they object to, such as war and armaments,’ ”
Kelley said.
The (Lexington, North
Carolina) Dispatch carried this shorter and slightly
different version of the report:
Bethlehem,
Pa.
(AP) — To
protest funding of
U.S. military
activity, the General Conference Mennonites have voted to refuse to withhold
federal taxes from employees’ paychecks.
Dean M. Kelley, director for religious and civil liberty of the National
Council of Churches, said the
66,000-member General Conference Mennonites are the only denomination
belonging to the council ever to have taken such action.
A Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee, also refuses to
withhold employees’ federal taxes.
A spokesman for the pacifist General Conference Mennonites said the church
has tried for four years to secure legislative, administrative, and judicial
approval for its employees to refuse to pay their taxes as a protest against
use of the money for military hardware.
Delegates to the church’s international convention
voted 1,128 to 457 to authorize
church officials to violate federal law by stopping the withholding of federal
taxes.
Larry Cornies, news director for the General Conference Mennonites, said the
church began considering the issue in , when
Cornelia Lehn, then director of children’s education for the church, asked
that taxes not be withheld from her paycheck. Ms. Lehn has since retired to
Canada.
Gene Harris, spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service in Philadelphia, said
of the Mennonite’s vote: “It’s a violation of the law. If they actually do
that, they could be prosecuted in court. It’s happened before and the
IRS has
won the case. But they would have to be audited first.”
According to the Toledo Blade, it was
, not , when
the Conference began mulling over war tax resistance. Here is an article from
their edition:
Bluffton,
O. — The General
Conference Mennonite Church, holding its 41st
triennial conference here, passed a resolution
calling for “serious study
of civil disobedience and war tax resistance during the next 18 months.” The
vote was 1,178½ yes to 453½ no.
The conference Monday rejected a proposed amendment to the resolution that
would have allowed the denomination as an employer to refuse to withhold the
so-called “war portion” of an employee’s income tax, if the employee
requested it, during the 18-month study period.
The denomination employs about 50 persons at its Newton,
Kan., headquarters, Lois
Barrett, spokesman, said.
The resolution was drafted because one employee at the headquarters, Cornelia
Lehn, had requested that the
war-tax portion of her taxes not be withheld from her salary, making it
possible for her to “follow her conscience in this matter.”
The “war portion” refers to the percentage used by the Government for military
purposes, according to the resolution.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was plenty about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , but it seemed to involve tax resisting Mennonites as least as often as tax resisting Quakers.
The issue announced that the Center on Law and Pacifism was organizing a critical mass style tax resistance action:
The Center… has prepared and has available a “Conscience and Military Tax Resolution,” which may be signed by any conscientious objector to military taxes, witnessed (not necessarily notarized), returned to the Center.
When officially notified by the Center that there are 100,000 such resolutions on file, the signer may carry out his or her resolve to withhold the military portion of the federal income tax.
Alternatively, he or she may deposit the withheld taxes in an escrow account for the World Peace Tax Fund, pending passage by Congress of the WPTF Bill, deposit them in an alternative fund or donate them to some other peace purpose.
The issue was all about anti-war work, and it opened with an article on the history of Quaker war tax resistance by editor Ruth Kilpack.
Excerpts:
[W]e should not suppose that this is a new concern among Friends and members of other Peace Churches, who, by the very nature of our faith, have a conscience tender to such questionings.
For Friends, the searching extends back to the seventeenth century, when Robert Barclay, the English Quaker apologist, wrote in :
We have suffered much in qur country because we neither ourselves could bear arms, nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.
This was the so-called “Trophy Money,” that could be distinguished as such.
But common or “mixed” taxes could not so readily be dealt with, since most Quakers believed it was their duty to pay taxes, and the part allocated to the military could not be separated out from the whole.
Today, like those earlier Quakers, we find ourselves in the same dilemma.
Law-abiding citizens, we continue to find ourselves troubled by the demand that we pay taxes for purposes we cannot in conscience condone.
We cannot pretend that we accept war as a legitimate function of the civil government which we support, and, just as some of our members have refused to serve in the armed services, many are beginning to question the contribution of our money for purposes we eschew for moral, humane, and religious reasons.
Quakers struggled with all these same questionings in the mid-eighteenth century and the period prior to the American Revolution.
One of the most articulate on the subject of war taxes was Samuel Allinson, a young Friend from Burlington, New Jersey, who in wrote “Reasons against war, and paying taxes for its support.”
The Samuel Allinson essay “Reasons against war, and paying taxes for its support” can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
Thus, in words written , he deals with the question of “a remnant who desire to be clear of a business so dark and destructive, that we should avoid the furtherance of it in any and every form.”
He describes it as a “stumbling block to others, [which] ought carefully to be avoided,” and sees such avoidance as advancing the Kingdom of the Messiah, that “his will be done on earth as it is done on heaven; a state possible, I presume, or he would not have taught us to pray for it.”
Further, says Samuel Allinson,
We have never entered into any contract expressed or implied for the paym[en]t of Taxes for War, nor the performance of any thing contrary to our Relig[ious] duties, and therefore cannot be looked upon as disaffected or Rebellious to any Gov[ernment] for these refusals, if this be our Testimony under all, which many believe it will hereafter be.
And finally, Samuel Allinson points out that even though earlier Friends paid their taxes (including that going to the military), that is no good reason for our continuing to do so.
It is not to be wondered at, or an argument drawn against a reformation in the refusal of Taxes for War at this Day, that our Brethren formerly paid them; knowledge is progressive, every reform[atio]n had its beginning, even the disciples were for some time ignorant of many religious Truths, tho’ they had the Company and precepts of our Savior…
Friends, we find ourselves in the very position of the Friends being addressed by Samuel Allinson two centuries ago.
For myself, I cannot think it is by sheer accident that I have stumbled upon his words now.
Neither is it by accident that a growing “remnant” of Friends are awakening to the ambivalence we feel in what we profess and what we practice regarding our involvement in the awesome “stumbling block” of nuclear warfare in our own age.
Friends in the past responded to the threats of the age in which they lived according to the light they had.
We of our generation have been given even greater light, and we must respond accordingly.
Given our heritage, if we don’t respond, who will?
In the meantime, I ask you to think on these things and, to paraphrase George Fox’s advice to William Penn, “Pay thy tax as long as thou canst.”
In the issue, Keith Tingle told readers that they should know “how easy it is to do” war tax resistance… at least in his experience:
My own experience in military tax resistance has been rewarding thus far.
By claiming a tax credit for conscientious objection to war on my income tax form, I was refunded $260 from my taxes.
Now that the IRS has discovered its mistake, I am resisting through federal tax court the recollection of this money.
My appearance in tax court has been reported favorably in three local newspapers, providing an opportunity to publicize the Quaker peace testimony, the history of war tax resistance, the economic impact of military spending, the pacifist position on the military draft, the concept of the World Peace Tax Fund, and the legal assistance offered by the Center on Law and Pacifism.
This has been accomplished with a total expense of about $30 and about thirty hours of time.
I have enjoyed the dedicated support of the Committee on War Tax Concerns of Friends Peace Committee and the legal guidance of lawyer Bill Durland at the Center on Law and Pacifism…
The issue noted that conscientious objection to military taxation was on the agenda at the Kent General Meeting in Canterbury, England — though from the sound of it, this was mostly in a theoretical way: presenting the argument that such a thing was a logical and practical counterpart of conscientious objection to military service.
That issue also reported on the case of Cornelia Lehn, an employee of the General Conference Mennonite Church who was trying to convince her employer to stop withholding federal income tax from her salary:
There was a “neither yes nor no” vote on this request by the 500 delegates present.
Those who favored a strong tax resistance program did not Nor did those who wanted members to unquestioningly pay taxes as a Christian duty.
There was a feeling, however, that neither side really lost.
Thirty percent of the delegates were ready for the conference to take action in “some sort of civil disobedience and tax resistance” and it was hoped the number will grow.
I’m struck by this last phrase — “it was hoped the number will grow” — which makes a pretty clear editorial statement of sympathy for those who favored corporate resistance by the Conference and antipathy for “those who wanted members to unquestioningly pay taxes as a Christian duty.”
At this time, few if any Quaker Meetings or organizations were willing to go out on that limb, in spite of strong urgings from Quaker war tax resisters that they do so.
But I don’t remember the Journal betraying an editorial bias when it reported on this debate in Quaker institutions.
One case in point is a report on the New England Yearly Meeting in which the lukewarm statement is made that “We approved a minute asking New England Friends to give prayerful consideration to non-payment of war taxes.”
The New York Yearly Meeting went so far as to “discuss” a “minute on Refusal of Taxes for Military Purposes” and to note that it “was to be commended for consideration by all monthly meetings and individuals.”
The issue had a followup in which the General Conference of the Mennonite Church was proposing launching a lawsuit in which it would seek a judicial ruling to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation, while at the same time it would increase its efforts to pass the “World Peace Tax Fund” legislation.
Maurice McCracken had a piece of autobiography in the issue.
Naturally, it touched on his tax resistance:
I had decided that I would never register again for the draft nor would I consent to being conscripted by the government in any other capacity.
In contradiction to this position, each year on April 15 I was letting the government conscript my money.
Thus I was voluntarily helping the government do what I vigorously declared was wrong.…
Realizing this inconsistency, I decided that in good conscience I could no longer make full payment of my federal taxes.
At the same time, I did not want to stop supporting civilian services supported by the government.
So, in my tax returns I continued to pay the small percentage allocated for civilian use.
The amount that I formerly had given for war purposes I hoped now to give to such causes as the American Friends Service Committee and to support other works of mercy and reconciliation which help remove the roots of violence and war.
As time went on I realized, however, that this was not accomplishing what had been my hope; for year after year the IRS ordered my bank to release money from my account to pay the money I had held back.
I then closed my bank account, and at this point it came to me with complete clarity that by so much as filing tax returns I was giving the IRS assistance in the violation of my own conscience, because the very information I was giving on my tax forms was being used in finally making the collection.
There is something else that those who withhold a portion of their tax on conscientious grounds should realize.
The IRS does not practice line budgeting.
All that it collects goes where the government wants it to go, which in ever-increasing proportion goes to finance wars, past, present and future.
I have not filed any tax returns, nor have I paid any federal income tax.
On , on charges growing out of my refusal to pay this tax, I was given a six-month sentence, which I spent at Allenwood, Pennsylvania, which is run by the Lewisburg penitentiary.
Some two years my release from Allenwood, in , the Presbytery of Cincinnati, on charges quite unrelated to the real issues, suspended me as a minister.
In , this action was upheld by the General Assembly, the highest court of the denomination.
In the presbytery declared my ordination to the ministry no longer valid, making a highly questionable presumption that they could cancel out whatever spiritual grace the Holy Spirit had bestowed on me when I was ordained at a meeting of Chicago Presbytery back in .
For nearly eighteen years our congregation has been a member of the National Council of Community Churches.
I have been accepted as a minister in full standing, and whatever validity my ordination had back in , is, for them, still valid.
A note in the issue recognized 86-year-old Pearl Ewald’s persistent activism: “Pearl Ewald continued her activities for peace, civil rights and war tax resistance, despite a recurring heart condition.
She has been arrested and jailed more than once for stubbornly refusing to discontinue her witness.
On one occasion, although desperately in need of medical attention, she refused to be admitted to a hospital, because it was a segregated institution.”
That same issue mentioned the case of Mennonite war tax resister Bruce Chrisman, “who was convicted of failure to file an income tax return in , was sentenced to one year in Mennonite Voluntary Service,” to which I can only think: “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch, Your Honor!”
“I’m amazed,” said Chrisman.
“I feel very good about the sentence.
The alternative service is probably the first sentence of its kind for a tax case.
I think it reflects the testimony in the trial and its influence on the judge.”
Chrisman could have been sentenced to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
A letter from Mildred Thierman in the same issue challenged Friends:
Could we now unite this year in sending a flood of personal declarations to President Carter and our government, saying that we can no longer, in conscience, allow part of our taxes to be used for the purchase of annihilating weapons?
Can we back this up by joining together in significant numbers to withhold whatever portion of our income tax fits our circumstances, in order to make our protest noticed?
A review of Conscience in Crisis: Mennonites and Other Peace Churches in America, , Interpretation and Documents in the issue, summarized its version of the history of Quaker war tax resistance this way:
Testimony against participation in the military and refusal to pay Trophy Money — the English tax to raise money for military regalia (arms were, by law, furnished by the individual soldiers) — were traditional Friends’ observances by the beginning of the period covered by Conscience in Crisis.…
…Friends and other Peace Church members were, by and large, loyal subjects.
They paid taxes “for the King’s use” — including the royal decision to make war.
Friends began to question payment of taxes more broadly.
The essential issue, according to the authors, was that “the individual is responsible for the actions of his government in a free society.”
Israel Pemberton, John Pemberton, John Churchman, John Woolman, and nineteen other Friends petitioned the Assembly on the issue of taxes in :
…Yet as the raising Sums of Money, and putting them into the Hands of Committees, who may apply them to Purposes inconsistent with the peaceable Testimony we profess, and have borne to the World, appears to us in its Consequences to be destructive of our religious Liberties, we apprehend many among us will be under the Necessity of suffering rather than consenting thereto by the Payment of a Tax for such Purposes…
By the time of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, Friends decided not to discuss the issue of “mixed” taxes because of a significant lack of consensus.
Yet, Friends were increasingly beginning to question less direct forms of support for war not traditionally inconsistent with the peace testimony.
an illustration from the issue of Friends Journal
In the issue, Alan Eccleston wrote of his calling as a peacemaker, and how that manifested for him.
Excerpts:
For me personally, the witness to peace has led to war tax resistance.
Over the past six years of this witness I have been — and still am — strengthened by others who are not, themselves, war tax resisters.
The witness of war tax resistance is one that raises fear.
We have been conditioned to fear the Internal Revenue Service as something nearly equivalent to a ruthless secret police, in its imagined power to terrorize.
Most of us, unwilling to admit, even to ourselves, that fear alone would block us from a spiritual witness, find other reasons for willingly paying to produce weapons that can annihilate all humankind.
Based on my own experience, I would say fear imagined is greater in most people than fear actually experienced, and that this is by a factor of ten, at least — maybe 100. Fortunately, borrowing from each other’s experience and knowing others will be there to help us, we can find the courage to move ahead.
Then comes the surprise.
With dread and foreboding we make our stand.
Then, gradually, we become aware that a great weight has been lifted from us.
That nagging, cumbersome burden of blocking from consciousness our own complicity with this evil has fallen away.
We are lighter, more open, more truthful.
We are free, at last, to speak truth to power.
When this affirmation is truly clear in our lives, it will be seen and felt by the president and by Congress.
As in , when C.O. status was incorporated in the Selective Service Act, the tax laws will then be amended to create C.O. status for taxpayers and a “World Peace Tax Fund.”
That legislation, approved by the world’s leading arms supplier, will move the world one step closer to peace.
That portion of our population (approximately four percent during the Vietnam War) which is pacifist would then contribute to peace, not war, and these contributions would total in excess of $2.3 billion every single year — year after year.
For the first time in history, peace programs would have a significant budget.
The funds could be used to support: a National Academy of Peace and Conflict Resolution; research to develop and evaluate non-military, nonviolent solutions to international conflict; disarmament; retaining workers displaced by conversion from military production; international exchanges for peaceful purposes; improvement of international health, education and welfare; and education of the public about the above activities.
The Friends General Conference in drafted “A Statement of Conscience by Quakers Concerned” and collected signatures.
The statement said, in part:
We advocate conscientious refusal to register for the draft and wish young men of draft age throughout the United States to know that if, after thoughtfully considering the reasons and consequences, they refuse to register, we will give them practical and moral support in every way we can, even though our willingness to do so may result in our prosecution, fines and possible imprisonment for disobeying a man-made law that leads us in the direction of war.
Mary Bye wrote in response that although she signed the statement, it felt to her to be something “like a hollow gesture.”
[M]aybe we [adults] should make sure about the beam in our adult eyes before we concentrate on the motes in those bright young eyes of the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.
“[W]hat would be our reaction to young Quakers pointing out that since it takes money as well as men to fight a war, they encourage Friends beyond draft age to refuse war taxes?
Finally, the issue presented the case of Ruth Larson Hatcher.
Excerpt:
Not wishing to contribute tax money for war-making purposes, she managed for years to have an income just sufficient for survival but not large enough to require payment of taxes.
Then in a friend persuaded her to accept the management and bookkeeping of a children’s art center.
Conscientious and religious beliefs caused her to oppose acceptance of insurance benefits under Social Security, as well as the payment of taxes for war.
Her claims for exemption under various sections of the Internal Revenue code of as well as under the First and Fifth Amendments were routinely rejected, until a Supreme Court judge approved her use of Form No. 4361. It seems that this form (and another previously ignored by the authorities) had been used by an Amish sect to avoid the taxes (and payments) of the social security system.
Although the Court of Appeals handed down the opinion that exemptions were enacted to accommodate individuals commanded by their conscience or their religion to oppose acceptance of insurance benefits, it refused to accept that this was the exact status of petitioner Ruth Hatcher.
It’s a little unclear what took place here, but it sounds like this is saying that the courts left an opening for people who were not members of sects that qualified for an exemption from the social security system but who held similar beliefs to gain the same exemption.
Interesting if true.
I was able to find the appeals court decision that ruled against Hatcher, and the earlier Tax Court decision to the same effect, and the District Court decision that affirmed the Tax Court decision.
I was not able to find any record of Supreme Court action on the case, but I did find some other cases that cited the Appeals Court decision as precedent, which seems to suggest that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn it (as the above excerpt implies).
This is the twenty-third in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
brings us up to 1976.
The question of whether the Mennonite General Conference should stop
withholding taxes from the paychecks of conscientiously objecting employees
continued to bedevil the Conference and its various committees and commissions
in . After the American Friends Service
Committee won a District Court ruling about withholding from its objecting
employees, the General Conference was pressed to adopt such a policy. But that
ruling was swiftly overturned by the Supreme Court, and so the Conference
seemed to lose its nerve.
In the executive committee of
the General Conference’s Commission
on Home Ministries decided to put on its agenda for their full-commission
meeting in a “recommendation
that the General Conference not withhold the military portion of income taxes
from the paychecks of those employees who do not wish to pay war taxes
voluntarily. This would mean that such employees, rather than the conference,
could be responsible for the decision of whether to pay war taxes to the
government.”
That proposed recommendation
was
approved at the meeting, “but referred for further study by the Division of
Administration and the General Board.”
A article covered the slow
progress of the proposal through the Conference bureaucracy:
Should General Conference employees have the right not to have war taxes
withheld by the conference from their paychecks?
For the time being, the answer is still no, pending further study and the
securing of more legal counsel.
The peace and social concerns reference council of the Commission on Home
Ministries raised the issue of war-tax withholding by the conference. The
reference council recommended that the General Conference central offices
allow persons the right not to have taxes withheld (in line with research done
last summer by a law student), that other Mennonite institutions be invited to
participate in similar action, and that congregations and individuals be
invited to consider war tax resistance.
“Freedom of religion includes freedom from the church forced by the state to
act as a tax collection agent, particularly when taxes are used for purposes
which are in conflict with the kingdom,” said the reference council statement.
“The Anabaptist concept of separation of church and state would also suggest
that the church not perform this kind of state function.”
The Commission on Home Ministries, in its annual session in
, approved the recommendation
with some reservations. The Division of Administration had even more
reservations about the recommendation.
DA
members questioned the legal findings of last summer and asked for further
consultation with a tax attorney with more experience in this area.
Specifically they wanted to know the cost of possible litigation, whether a
revenue ruling should be requested from the Internal Revenue Service, possible
civil and criminal sanctions against the General Conference, the effect on the
conference’s tax-exempt status, and the chances of success in the event of
litigation.
“Conscience is a personal thing, and we’re not together on what we want to do
with this,” said
DA
chairman Howard Baumgartner of Berne, Indiana. “CHM
is asking that the business manager be put on the spot. What if his conscience
doesn’t permit him to break this law? My conscience tells me to pay my tax.”
In the closing minutes of its sessions, the General Board, acting on the
recommendation of the
DA,
asked the
DA to
do further study on the legal aspects of failure to withhold taxes and to
bring back some information at the General Board’s
meeting.
“I’m not willing to face the legal consequences until we’re fairly united on
this,” said conference president Elmer Neufeld of Bluffton, Ohio.
At present, the General Conference central offices withhold all state and
federal income taxes from the paychecks of nonordained employees. Such persons
cannot choose whether to pay or not to pay any war taxes they owe because the
government already has the money, or most of it.
Editor Larry Kehler, in the
issue called this a “red flag”:
Although some leaders from other denominations may be beginning to notice and
listen to the Anabaptist-Mennonite point of view as an attractive option, the
Mennonites may be losing their testimony as a peace church. One committee at
the Council of Commissions stated, for example, in its opinion there was no
“corporate conscience” within the General Conference against the payment of
war taxes.
And Peter J. Ediger summed things up in his prose-poem fashion:
It came to pass that an employee of the General Conference Mennonite Church
requested that taxes for the military not be withheld from her paycheck.
And officers of the conference said, “What shall we do?”
And the Commission on Home Ministries was asked to study the matter
and make a recommendation.
And the commission hired a student of law to research the options;
and the commission joined with other Mennonite groups in calling for a study conference on war tax questions.
And from the research and the conference came a clear recommendation
that the General Conference allow persons the right
not to have war taxes withheld.
And when this recommendation was brought to the Commission on Home Ministries
there was a consensus of support and agreement to recommend its adoption to the General Board.
And the recommendation was brought to the Division of Administration.
And lo, their response was as follows:
“Motion that the request of CHM for right not to have taxes withheld
from salaries of employees who submit such request be refused…”
and listing six recommendations asking for more legal counsel.
And so the conflicting recommendations were brought to the General Board.
And the General Board was occupied with many weighty matters.
The agenda was long and the time for discernment was short
and war taxes was the last item on the agenda
and five minutes was left for this item
and no action was taken.
And the conference goes on with business as usual
continuing collection of money for making of war
seeking its guidance more from the law of the land
and less from the law of the Lord.
Do we really want the laws and lawyers of our society
to define the perimeters of our discipleship?
The
General Board executive committee met in
and “allotted two hours at the
full board session in … for discussion of
whether the conference should honor an employee’s request that federal income
taxes not be deducted from her paycheck. Theological input on the payment of
war taxes was also requested.”
The way this was put in
an
announcement just before the board meeting was: “The Division of
Administration… wants to continue its policy of not honoring employees’
requests that the portion of their federal taxes which goes for war not be
taking out of their paychecks.”
The board met and… kicked the can further down the road.
After almost three hours of discussion by the General Board of the General
Conference, a decision is still pending on whether the conference should honor
an employee’s request that the portion of her income taxes that goes for war
not be taken out of her pay.
The board had set aside two hours at the end of its midyear meeting
in Washington, Illinois, to
consider the issue of war tax withholding. Marlin Miller of Goshen Biblical
Seminary had been invited to give biblical input, and Division of
Administration members Howard Baumgartner and Elvin Souder, both attorneys, to
give legal recommendations.
The issue was whether the General Conference business office should violate
U.S. law by
refusing to take from an employee’s paycheck the portion (almost half) of her
federal income taxes which would go for military purposes. Such action would
allow the employee to refuse to pay such taxes and would make her personally
liable for nonpayment of tax.
The law at present requires employers to withhold income and Social Security
taxes from employees’ salaries — except in the case of ordained employees, who
may legally consider themselves self-employed and are thus personally
responsible for making, or not making, quarterly tax payments. A number of
ordained employees at the General Conference offices are already refusing war
taxes in this manner.
Nonordained employees have no way of refusing war taxes except by falsifying
their tax returns or the number of exemptions they claim.
The General Board did not vote on a normal motion on the war tax matter, but
straw poll showed a slight majority in favor of allowing all employees the
right to refuse war taxes, in spite of the possible consequences to the
conference or its officers for breaking the law. But the board was not willing
to act officially until it reached greater consensus.
“We are facing an issue of our own integrity as a people and as a church,”
said board member Peter Ediger of Arvada, Colorado. “It is a situation not
unlike that of our grandfathers in World War Ⅰ. Because some of them had the
courage to say no, laws were enacted to permit conscientious objection to
military service. And it is an evangelism issue. Our world desperately needs
the good news that there is an alternative to violence and war. We can do this
with the kind of integrity that perhaps no other corporate group in our world
can.”
Some like Irene Dunn of Normal, Illinois, were not ready to decide personally
about payment of war taxes, but wanted to allow General Conference employees
freedom of conscience concerning war taxes.
Others wanted to postpone the issue. “It’s my feeling we should take a
recommendation to the triennial conference,” said board president Elmer
Neufeld of Bluffton, Ohio.
In the end the decision was postponed — probably until the
board session.
Marlin Miller, himself a tax refuser for seven years, told the board that the
legality of refusing war taxes was not the highest morality. “If we are clear
on the moral principles, we will find a way to deal with the legal matters,”
he said.
His biblical study focused on Mark 12:13–17
(in which Jesus tells those who are trying to trick him, “Render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”) and
Romans 13.
There is no unambiguous word in the New Testament on whether the Christian
should pay all taxes he said. But likewise, there is no clear statement in the
New Testament on not going to military service. “Taxes are due to the
governing authorities, but there is still a need for moral discrimination,”
Mr. Miller said.
Howard Baumgartner told the board that, if it decided to allow an employee not
to pay her war taxes, it might want to test the constitutionality of the
withholding law in the
U.S. courts. An
earlier similar case from the American Friends Service Committee had been
thrown out on technical grounds without testing the tax law itself.
Elmer Neufeld, president of the General Conference, sent
a
letter to all General Conference pastors on the subject:
Should the conference withhold taxes for war?
Some time ago I reviewed a number of the court-martial records of the
Mennonite men in the United States in World War Ⅰ who were tried for refusing
to participate in military service. These were our fathers and fathers’
fathers who had committed their lives to the way of the cross and who held
with the saints of all ages that there is a law of God which stands above the
human laws of the nation.
There was no legal provision for conscientious objection to military service
and war, so they simply took their stand in humble obedience to Christ and
accepted the consequences. Gerhard M. Baergen… guilty. Abraham Goertz… guilty.
Russell A. Lantz… guilty. John T. Neufeld… guilty. Carl A. Schmidt… guilty.
Walter Sprunger… guilty. And so on.
It is through the sacrifice of these sturdy men of conscience that the United
States came to provide a legal alternative to military service and war for
those with scruples against participation. It is through their sacrifice that
many of us were able to use this legal alternative in World War Ⅱ and again in
the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Now we face a new situation. For the first time
, except for a brief lull
following World War Ⅱ, our churches in the United States no longer face the
conscription of young men for military service. For this many have worked and
for this we are grateful. However, it is clear that conscription for military
service was not terminated because the United States has come to rely less on
military power. In fact, the United States has come to be militarily the most
powerful nation in the world and is exporting more armaments than any other
nation in the world. All of this is possible with well-paid volunteer armed
forces and a heavily financed industrial military complex. The military
complex is able to get along without our young men as draftees, but it insists
on having our finances to support its multibillion dollar operation.
More and more there are those among us whose consciences no longer allow them
freely to support this military machine. Though they realize that Christians
have usually paid their taxes through the centuries, even to strongly
militaristic governments, they believe that the vast sums required today are
too much, that it is once more time to withstand the military powers that
threaten to destroy all of humankind, that Caesar is demanding not only what
belongs to Caesar, but also what belongs to God.
I was deeply impressed as we went about the circle of General Board members
and staff [at the meeting] that
almost all had struggled with this issue of conscience and that most had in
some way protested the vast sums being required for military purposes. Though
it is appropriate for us as a people to counsel together whether it is right
in the sight of God to keep paying these war taxes, this is also an issue on
which individuals and families will make their own decisions — and we will not
all make the same decisions.
However, as a conference we face a more complex question. Not only must our
individual members and families decide what to do about war taxes, but the
conference as an employer must collect taxes, including taxes for war, for the
government. We are collecting taxes not only from those who are willing to pay
the whole amount to the government, but also from those who have Christian
convictions against supporting the military in this way. Cornelia Lehn is one
such person. (See below.) A number of ordained ministers working for the
conference are self-employed for tax purposes and thus can make their protest
in whatever way seems appropriate. But for others this is not possible.
So the issue before the General Board in
was whether the General
Conference as an employer should continue to withhold federal income tax
money, even from those employees who have conscientious objection to this, and
send that money to the government.
The Commission on Home Ministries recommends that the conference should no
longer withhold taxes from those employees who have convictions against such
payments. On the other hand, the Division of Administration has serious
concerns about the consequences for the conference in violating the laws of
the land.
The General Board in its meeting
had a long and intensive discussion, with representatives of the Commission on
Home Ministries and the Division of Administration and with counsel on
biblical principles from Marlin Miller, president of Goshen Biblical Seminary,
as well as Erland Waltner, president of Mennonite Biblical Seminary.
A larger and larger majority of General Board members have serious
reservations about serving as a tax collector from those employees who have
Christian convictions against the payment of such taxes. At the same time we
were sensitive that we were being called to make a decision not only for
ourselves but for the whole conference and that we have not yet had adequate
dialog with our congregations about this issue.
What is the will of God for the General Conference in this issue? What is your
counsel for the General Board? We did not act because it was clear that we had
not come to consensus, but the issue will continue to face us and we will
continue to struggle for the right decision.
One possible course of action is for the General Board in its
meeting to formulate a recommendation
to be sent to the congregations for study and for corporate consideration at
the triennial sessions of the General Conference in
.
I want to touch on a related question: Is this one of those conference issues
which is of concern only to the United States and not to Canada? Will our
brothers and sisters in Canada feel like washing their hands of this issue? Or
is this one of those cases when one part of the body is in trouble and the
whole body struggles together? May it in fact be possible that the Canadians
can help those of us in the American churches see ourselves a bit more
objectively?
Can we possibly come to the place, in the words of the Acts of the Apostles,
that it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us together that we should
decide this issue in a certain way? Surely if we search together in openness
and honesty and in a spirit of prayer, God will not forsake his people.
A letter from Conference employee Cornelia Lehn was also enclosed in Neufeld’s
letter:
I work for the General Conference Mennonite Church at 722 Main
St., Newton, Kansas. Each month
a certain percentage of my salary is deducted for income tax purposes before I
receive it. The business office is legally requested to do so for all
employees except for those who have been ordained to the ministry.
We are told that approximately 50 percent of the income tax deducted goes to
buy armaments. When I first started working here, this did not bother me too
much, even though I believed strongly in nonresistance. After all, did not
Jesus himself pay taxes
(Mt. 17:24-27)?
Why then should I refuse to do so?
The whole question of personal responsibility began to tear at my heart and
mind, however. We held the people condemned at Nuremberg responsible for their
deeds, although they had just “obeyed the government.” We held Captain Calley
responsible for his deeds at My Lai, though he, too, thought he had obeyed the
government. Why should I not be held responsible to obeying the government
when it was asking me to do an evil thing? Though Jesus paid taxes, the spirit
of his teachings is to do good, not evil, to our fellow human beings. I became
convinced that allowing my money to be used for armaments could not be God’s
will and that if it was used in that way I must bear at least part of the
responsibility.
The big question then was how to get out of being involved in this crime. I
could not refuse to pay a portion of my tax, since the whole tax was already
withheld. I asked our conference office not to withhold from my paycheck that
portion of the income tax that goes for war, but they could not grant that
request. I considered the options, such as reducing my paycheck to the point
where I would not need to pay any taxes or reducing it to the point where I
would need to pay only half the taxes I do now.
Finally I decided to give half of my income to relief and other church work
and thus force the Internal Revenue Service to return that portion of my tax
which they had already slated for military purposes.
I realize, of course, that this is not the perfect answer. Of the 50 percent
that IRS
still has of my income tax, half will again be used to meet the military
budget. It is, however, the best answer I know at this time. Finally I could
no longer acquiesce and be a part of something so diabolical as war. I had to
take a stand against it.
I wish that my church, which believes in the way of peace, would as a body no
longer gather money to help the government make war. I wish all the members of
our church would stand up in horror and refuse to allow it to happen. Then the
conference officers would be in a position to say to the government, “We will
not give you our sons and daughters, and we will not give you our money to
kill others. Allow us to serve our country in the way of peace.”
Don
Kaufman wrote in to the magazine on to praise Neufeld’s letter and to say that the dialogue about the
issue had been beneficial to the community, but also to criticize the church
for its timidity in the face of the law:
[A]s Christians we seem to be far more accountable to the government than we
are to the church. I have sometimes wondered why it is that we are more
willing to allow the secular authorities to shape us and to “keep us in line”
than we are to receive guidance from our brothers and sisters in Christ. The
major exceptions to this in the General Conference Mennonite Church appear to
be the intentional communities of faith like Fairview Mennonite House and the
New Creation Fellowship, where economic discernment is more obviously a part
of the Christin commitment.
This is the twenty-fourth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today brings us up to 1977.
In our last episode we watched various executive committees and commissions and boards in the Mennonite General Conference pass the buck back and forth as the Conference impatiently waited to learn whether they would or would not continue to withhold taxes from the paychecks of their conscientiously objecting employees.
The board [General Board, I think ―♇] was sharply divided on whether to grant the employee’s request and thus risk violating tax regulations.
Board members also could not agree on whether the issue should be decided by the board or wait for action by the entire conference at the triennial sessions in .
Cornelia Lehn, the employee bringing the request, met with the board for the first time and told them, “It was also a very difficult decision for me over a long period of years.
Finally I gave up seeing through the difficulties; for me, I simply had to obey God and leave the consequences up to him.”
The resolution reviews the history of General Conference discussion of the war tax issues from a sentence in the statement “The Way of Peace” [see ♇ 22 July 2018] to General Board deliberations on an employee’s request that war taxes not be taken out of her paycheck.
The resolution asks that congregations and regional conferences “commit ourselves to a serious study of civil disobedience during , that the Commission on Home Ministries help facilitate such a study… and that a midtriennium miniconference be convened for congregations to report on their study and to recommend actions related to civil disobedience and war tax resistance, including the question of Mennonite institutions serving as war tax collectors for the state by withholding these taxes from employees.”
In three separate votes, the delegates first turned down, 1,190 to 336, an amendment which would have adopted an interim policy for eighteen months “instructing the conference to honor the requests of those employees who ask not to have withheld from their salaries that portion of federal income tax they believe helps the government prepare for war.”
The next evening, delegates adopted, 1,178½ to 453½, the main motion.
Its effect is to delay any action on the request of conference employee Cornelia Lehn that federal income taxes that would go for war not be taken out of her paycheck.
It also calls for a midtriennium official delegate conference to recommend actions related to civil disobedience and war tax resistance, including the question of Mennonite institutions serving as war tax collectors for the state by withholding these taxes from employees.
A second resolution that evening gave General Conference endorsement to the World Peace Tax Fund Act in the U.S. Congress and encouraged similar legislation in Canada, if appropriate.
The act would allow conscientious objectors to war to designate the military portion of their taxes into the peace fund.
The resolution also “continue(s) to support individuals who feel compelled by Chrisian conscience to adopt other methods of witness against payment of war taxes such as voluntary reduction of income or nonpayment of war taxes.”
Cornelia Lehn tells of her struggle with war taxes.
Discussion of the war tax withholding issue began with a testimony by Ms. Lehn, who writes and edits children’s curriculum for the Commission on Education, who first came to the conference business manager two years ago with a request that she be allowed to resist payment of war taxes.
Presently the business office is following federal regulations that estimated taxes be withheld from each employee’s paycheck.
The regulations do not apply, however, to ordained persons employed by the conference, some of whom are resisting voluntary payment of war taxes without implicating the conference as a whole.
“It is a long journey from the little Mennonite village in the Ukraine, where I was born, to Newton, Kansas,” she began.
“It was a long pilgrimage until I came to the conviction to resist war taxes and was able to act on it.”
Ms. Lehn told of her struggle with the command to pay taxes, on the one hand, and the knowledge that her tax dollars were being used for killing.
“I can’t extricate myself from the system, but I finally have to take a stand against a demonic armaments race,” she said.
“I do not know where this will lead, but… for my part, I must obey the Spirit of God as I understand it to be revealed in the Bible and leave the consequences to God.”
Delegates kept coming to the microphones to speak to the resolution until debate was cut off.
“As a pastor, I could not advocate civil disobedience,” said Dan Dalke of Bluffton.
“The taxes Jesus said to pay were to the Roman Government,” said a former IRS employee.
“I have proper respect for laws, but I also recognize that if Felix Manz, Conrad Grebel, and Menno Simons had had greater fear for the law than for God, we would probably not be here today,” commented Lauren Friesen, pastor from Seattle.
“This morning we passed a resolution supporting missionaries for acting faithfully in oppressive situations abroad,” said Steve Linscheid of Goessel, Kansas.
“We should not expect more from our missionaries than we are willing to do ourselves.”
“Many people are concerned about our tax dollar, but we should work much harder trying to come to a common mind with other Mennonite groups,” said Henry A. Fast of North Newton, Kansas.
“We should keep on pushing the World Peace Tax Fund Act.”
Donovan Smucker of Kitchener, Ontario, cited many Christians throughout the ages who have obeyed God rather than man and said, “The problem is, When do you stop the democratic process that is pushing you into something that is evil?”
“It’s best to work through the system and use the privileges we already have,” said Art Waltner.
“Our right to conscientious objection to military service did not come through petition in Washington,” Ted Koontz of Boston reminded the delegates.
“It came because our forefathers spent years in prison in World War Ⅰ.”
The World Peace Tax Fund resolution, which supports legislation to allow people to resist war taxes without breaking the law, passed later in the evening by voice vote without audible opposition.
Most of the U.S. district conferences had already adopted resolutions supporting the proposed legislation.
In a way, this was more of a triumph than a defeat for the promoters of war tax resistance.
If the triennium had voted the other way, one employee, and maybe a handful more, would have benefited somewhat from the new policy.
But by voting this way, the triennium prompted discussions in every Mennonite congregation about whether or not war tax resistance was the right thing to do.
There was… lengthy deliberation about the midtriennium civil disobedience conference called for by a Bluffton resolution.
One of the main concerns was whether Canadian churches would see the issue of civil disobedience and war tax as relevant to them.
Would they send delegates?
Another worry was whether delegates would carry a large number of proxy votes.
The constitution of the General Conference allows for a quorum with 50 percent representation, and since one delegate can carry up to twenty-five votes by proxy, it would be possible for forty persons to make a decision affecting the whole conference.
About 1,000 votes are needed for a quorum.
The hope was expressed that the study process being initiated would create good interest and also broadly based, informed representation.
Beginning in an attitudinal survey on civil disobedience is scheduled.
A study guide is to be ready by for use in Sunday school sessions and other study groups.
A definite place and time for the midtriennium conference will be decided later, though is a strong possibility.
Already the executive committee is faced with a question of civil disobedience.
Only a few days prior to the meeting the Newton office received notice from the Internal Revenue Service of the United States to pay personal income taxes owed by Heinz Janzen (general secretary) and his wife, Dorothea Janzen.
Since Heinz is ordained, it is legal for him to categorize himself as self-employed, and hence, his salary check from the General Conference has no income tax deductions.
he has been refusing to pay the military portion of his income tax, placing it in a bank account, and informing the IRS of his reasons.
Until this levy arrived the IRS has simply confiscated the bank accounts of such persons and withdrawn the unpaid portion from the accounts.
Now the IRS has demanded that the General Conference employer be responsible for paying Heinz’s unpaid tax out of Heinz’s salary check.
The executive committee decided to delay a decision on the IRS levy until the meeting of the General Board.
They were concerned that any action in the current case is not to be seen as a predetermination of the issues which by Bluffton conference resolution are to come before the midtriennial conference.
They did, however, see the levy as different from the request of General Conference employee Cornelia Lehn to have the military portion of her tax not withheld from her salary check by the General Conference.
The Janzen case is seen as civil disobedience by individuals and not by the incorporated body, the General Conference.
This is the twenty-fifth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today I’m going to try to cover 1978.
I say “try” because there was a frenzy of war tax resistance activity reported in The Mennonite .
Maybe I can try to sort it thematically…
A New Call to Peacemaking
“A New Call to Peacemaking” was an initiative coordinated by Mennonite, Quaker, and Brethren activists that began in and would eventually culminate in a statement urging people, Christians in particular, to refuse to pay taxes for war.
The Mennonite General Conference’s Peace Section,
U.S. division, met
and its executive secretary, John K. Stoner, reported that the Call
“has
gained widespread support.”
Invited to the meeting are 300 persons — Brethren, Friends, and Mennonites.
Named the New Call to Peacemaking, this coalition of historic peace churches
believes that “the time has come for all Christians and people of all faiths
to renounce war on religious and moral grounds.”
During the last year twenty-six regional New Call to Peacemaking meetings, involving more than 1500 persons, took a new look at the teachings of their churches.
They gave special attention to war and violence which they continue to see as denials of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Not surprisingly the groups agreed to urge upon all governments “effective
steps toward international disarmament.” However, none of the regional
meetings expressed the hope that politicians, soldiers, and diplomats would
put an end to war. Rather, the thought was that people at the grass-roots
level must demand a change in the system. Further, the idea was often
expressed that tax resistance and civil disobedience are necessary tactics in
convincing governments that a new order can bring security in place of the
present insecurity.
A New Call to Peacemaking conference which convened at Old Chatham, New York, last April, asked itself rhetorically, “Are we going to pray for peace, and pay for war?” A similar conference in Wichita, Kansas, gave its encouragement to “individuals who feel called to resist the payment of the military portion of their federal taxes.”
When the national conference convenes in Green Lake it will be receiving
requests from the regional meetings for a strong position on tax resistance
proposals. It will also be asked to give guidance to individuals and church
organizations on approaches to tax resistance. Theological, economic, and
social justice issues are also on the agenda.
“Citizens should organize themselves and act without waiting for government, especially the major powers, to take positive action,” says Robert Johansen in a paper being studied by the Green Lake delegates.
In another document prepared for the Green Lake meeting, Lois Barrett, a
Mennonite journalist from Wichita, Kansas, notes that the peace churches have
long “recognized refusal to pay war taxes as one of many valid witnesses
against war.”
In the Church of the Brethren recommended “that all who feel the concern be encouraged to express their protest and testimonies through letters accompanying their tax returns, whether accompanied by payment or not.” In the General Conference Mennonite Church said, “We stand by those who feel called to resist the payment of that portion of taxes being used for military purposes.”
The number of persons within the peace churches actually withholding a portion
of their taxes is still thought to be small, but it is growing. The Internal
Revenue Service will not release figures on the number of tax resisters in the
United States.
Members of the Green Lake planning group include John K. Stoner, Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pennsylvania; Lorton Heusel, Friends United Meeting, Richmond, Indiana; and Chuck Boyer, Church of the Brethren, Elgin, Illinois.
Coordinator for the New Call to Peacemaking is Robert J. Rumsey, Plainfield, Indiana.
After the gathering, The Mennonite seemed surprised at how tame and nonconfrontational it ended up being (they titled their article “Peacemakers shy away from shocking anyone”).
Excerpts:
The Green Lake conference is part of a cooperative effort by the historic peace groups to do five things — stir up rededication to the Christian peace witness, clarify the biblical basis for it, extend a call to the larger church to see peacemaking as a gospel imperative, propose actions the U.S. Government can take for peacemaking, and determine contemporary positive strategy for peace and justice.
Planning for the consultation began in and has included 26 regional meetings in 16 different areas of the United States.
Over 1500 people were involved in these meetings.
[Church of the Brethren theologian and professor Dale] Brown said one new way of expressing a peace witness was to protest the country’s military expenditures by withholding income taxes.
Tax resistance, he reflected, is an important symbol because it involves our pocketbooks and enlarges the peace witness beyond what 17- and 18-year-old youth do in response to conscription.
[T]he findings committee created a final document satisfying the diverse peaceniks.
For the conservative the final statement was too radical; for the activists it was too limp.
There are two main thrusts to the document — actions that are directed inward
among the peace churches to enhance the integrity of the peace witness, and
actions that are directed outward to enlarge the visibility of the peace
witness.
At the end of the national New Call to Peacemaking conference delegates urged all Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, and Brethren to firmly oppose militarism and to become personally involved in the struggle for justice for the oppressed.
Included in the final paper approved is a call to the 400,000 members of the three peace church
traditions “to seriously consider refusal to pay the military portion of their
federal taxes as a response to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.” This
statement is as strong as the 300 delegates could jointly affirm.
Other parts of the war tax statement are equally muted.
In the first draft of the paper, church and conference agencies were asked to “honor” the requests of employees who do not want the military portion of their taxes remitted to the government.
In the final draft, however, “honor” is changed to “enter into dialogue with.” Several evangelical Quakers were especially antagonistic to even including a reference to war tax resistance in the final document.
Yet tax resistance received new encouragement from the conference.
About 60 persons attended a Saturday afternoon workshop which detailed tax resistance strategies.
Studying the War Tax Issue and Christian Civil Responsibility
The Mennonite General Conference had been asked to stop withholding taxes from the paycheck of one of its conscientiously objecting employees.
This led to a long debate over the advisability of such a policy that caused arguments about war tax resistance to echo throughout the Conference in .
A special General Conference delegate session was scheduled to convene in just to respond to this single issue.
In preparation for that session, congregations had been encouraged to put some
serious effort into understanding the subject, and some studies were written up
to help guide these investigations.
A Christian’s response to civil authority will be given concentrated emphasis by the General Conference during .
The study is an outcome of a resolution at the triennial conference in Bluffton, Ohio, .
That resolution called for a thorough study of civil disobedience which is intended to state an official position of the General Conference with respect to that portion of income taxes which are used for funding military expenditures, and in general, to research the whole question of obedience-disobedience to civil authority.
Responsibility for the study has been given to the peace and social concerns
committee of the Commission on Home Ministries. They, however, requested that
a special obedience-civil disobedience committee be formed to give general
direction and leadership. This latter group consists of Palmer Becker, Ted
Stuckey, John Gaeddert, Harold Regier, Perry Yoder, and Heinz Janzen.
To date three major aspects of the study have been planned — an attitudinal survey, an invitational consultation in , and a study guide to be ready by .
Included in the survey are twenty-eight questions with responses varying from
“strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” chosen to provide an inventory of
congregational attitudes towards the authority of the church, and of the
state. It will also indicate attitudes to particular issues such as abortion,
capital punishment, and payment of taxes for military purposes. A copy of the
questionnaire will be sent to every congregation to be duplicated locally.
A second major happening is scheduled for at Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana.
An invitational consultation will bring together about thirty participants, including persons not committed to civil disobedience.
The gathering will include administrative personnel from the General Conference, lawyers, biblical scholars, as well as representatives from Mennonite Central Committee and the Mennonite Church.
It is expected that the study guide will evolve from the proceedings of the
consultation. Five of the thirteen lessons in the guide will focus on
peacemaking in a technological society. What sort of peacemaking should
Mennonites be about in an age of nuclear warfare and worldwide arms shipments?
The remaining eight lessons will center about the meaning of civil
disobedience. Was it practiced in the Bible? Is nonpayment of taxes a case in
point?
The study process will culminate in the special midtriennium conference scheduled for .
That gathering will be an official decision-making conference to which congregational delegates will come.
At that point a decision on the meaning and practice of civil disobedience will be made.
After the conference the questionnaire
will again be used to determine whether the churchwide discussion on
obedience-civil disobedience has generated any changes in attitudes.
A few more details came after the Commission on Home Ministries met in , and, according to The Mennonite:
Perry Yoder, part-time CHM staff member, outlined the process planned for dealing with the war tax or civil responsibility issue raised at the Bluffton conference.
Because of this issue’s “divisive and emotional potential in the conference,” a survey instrument has been designed to get congregational input; a consultation at the seminary will work toward a study guide, and congregations will be encouraged to use the study in preparation for a special General Conference delegate session at Minneapolis, called solely for the purpose of responding to the Bluffton resolution on tax withholding.
Another article said this study guide would be “available [and] will look at present militarism in North America, previous acts of dissent by Mennonites, and biblical texts on dissent, payment of taxes, and corporate action.”
During the first session on , board members locked onto the planning for the midtriennium conference on war taxes and civil responsibility.
Uneasiness about the process erupted quickly.
The structure of the invitational consultation on the issue was strongly faulted, as was the conference itself.
Board member Ken Bauman, pastor of First Mennonite Church in Berne, Indiana,
galvanized his colleagues with his allegations. “The consultation is not
structured for dialogue — it is monologue. The way it has been set up upsets
me deeply.” Later he declared that the Commission on Home Ministries should
not serve as the launching pad for the study and the planning leading to the
conference in . “Why ask
CHM?
The image of
CHM
is stacked. It should be the responsibility of the General Board.”
His assessment was the beginning of a fruitful debate which occupied several more sessions of the General Board, one session of CHM and hallway discussions.
The debate crystallized about several key questions. What is wrong with the
study process initiated by the obedience-civil disobedience committee of
CHM?
Is the issue of war taxes so divisive that a schism in the General Conference
is inevitable? Is the delegate
conference viable?
By , perhaps symbolically, the hard-hitting process of charge and countercharge had evolved into understanding and affirmation of the original plans.
On paper, little had changed, but in the minds of those who spoke for the “unheard,” — the “conservatives,” the “common person,” and the Canadians — there was a restoration of confidence in the process.
Tenseness was dissipated.
The mood became one of working together.
The consultation will meet at Mennonite
Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana. About twenty-five persons are invited.
These include theologians and biblical scholars, attorneys, administrative
staff of the General Conference, several
MCC
staff, and representatives from the Mennonite Church and the Mennonite
Brethren Church. The proceedings of the consultation are to serve as the basis
for a study guide on civil disobedience.
The committee planning the consultation and the midtriennium conference was called in to justify its ideas.
One member, Perry Yoder, observed, “Getting people to participate is very difficult.
People are very tense about this.”
“We thought the trust level would be quite high,” said another member, Harold
Regier. “Requests for speakers were made on the basis of scholarship and the
purpose is biblical. It is not a matter of pro or con.”
“We don’t know where the scholars will come out,” declared Don Steelberg, chairperson of CHM. (A complete list of scholars invited is not yet available — some are still considering the invitation.)
It was noted that since the concern on abortion had been handled insensitively
at the Bluffton conference, there was fear that the same thing would happen
with the issue of war taxes. So why should those who oppose withholding war
taxes bother to participate? They won’t be heard anyway.
Another fear was that the Canadians would also stay away. “My gut reaction is that it is a U.S. issue,” said board member Loretta Fast.
She was challenged on that.
“Don’t Canadians also pay military taxes?” queried Ben Sprunger.
“Yes,” replied another Canadian board member, Jake Klassen, “but we have not gone through the trauma and frustrations of the Vietnam War."
Hence, if both the Canadians and those opposed to withholding war taxes stayed
away from the delegate
conference, the gathering would be a farce. The conference would not be viable
if large blocs of delegates simply weren’t there.
For a brief time the board lost nerve.
Should the conference be canceled?
However, chairman Elmer Neufeld injected reality by reflecting, “The issue is not going to go away.
So, what is the next step?"
Over the board
recovered confidence in itself, in the planning already done, in the
possibility of bringing the dissenters into dialogue, despite differences in
theology and nationality, and in the voice of the discerning church. “I came
to the Mennonite church because of discerning congregations. If we cannot
discern in a process like this, then we have missed the boat,” reflected Don
Steelberg.
That was the next step.
They reminded themselves that the Anabaptist movement grew out of several
forms of civil disobedience.
They decided to adjust some of the personnel for the consultation.
They decided to promote serious study of the civil responsibility issue among congregations so that delegates would be conversant with it.
They decided to book the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis as the place for the midtriennium conference.
The General Board also affirmed the action of its executive committee when they refused to pay a tax levy from the Internal Revenue Service.
The personal income taxes are owed by Heinz Janzen (general secretary) and his wife, Dorothea Janzen.
Under U.S. tax laws an ordained minister is self-employed, is not subject to normal payroll deductions, and hence, Heinz has refused to pay the military portion of his income tax.
Normally the
IRS
simply confiscates the amount owed from the bank account of the person
protesting. But with the levy the
IRS is
attempting to collect directly from the General Conference as employer. The
General Board agreed with the executive committee that the Janzen case is
civil disobedience by individuals, and not by an incorporated body, the
General Conference.
Editor Bernie Wiebe, himself based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, wrote an editorial for the edition expressing his unease about the direction Canada was taking, at how blasé his fellow-Canadian Mennonites were about it, and at how comparatively little concern there seemed to be there about the war tax issue that was roiling the Conference:
I am uneasy because I don’t hear my brothers and sisters protest against Ottawa.
Somehow we manage to wash our hands and keep pointing at the Pentagon…
At Bluffton, the majority voted for a midtriennium conference on the war-tax
issue. Every discussion I have since heard on this subject turns to the fear
that the Canadian third of the General Conference may refuse to participate;
after all, that’s a
U.S. question.
The conference was meant to bring in experts on the question who could help better inform the upcoming debate.
Participants in the General Conference Mennonite Church invitational consultation on civil responsibility have been named and the schedule outlined.
The consultation will convene
at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, Elkhart, Indiana.
Beginning , Ted Stuckey and Reg Toews, representing the business administration arms of the General Conference and Mennonite Central Committee respectively, will present information on the administrative dimensions of the war tax question.
The question, Is there a biblical case for civil disobedience? will be the
focus of scholarly input Friday morning. Millard Lind, professor at AMBS,
will speak from an Old Testament perspective; confirmation from the scholar
asked to provide a New Testament analysis is still pending.
A more specific look at the issue of war taxes is scheduled for .
Is civil disobedience called for in this specific case?
David Schroeder, professor at Canadian Mennonite Bible College, Winnipeg, and Kenneth Bauman, pastor of First Mennonite Church in Berne, Indiana, will speak to the question.
Erland Waltner, president of Mennonite Biblical Seminary, will respond.
Corporate action and individual conscience is the theme for
. Speaking to this are J.
Lawrence Burkholder, president of Goshen (Indiana) College, and William
Keeney, professor at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas. Another person has
yet to confirm acceptance. Peter Ediger, pastor of the Arvada Mennonite
Church, will respond.
Elvin Kraybill, legal counsel for Mennonite Central Committee, will talk about legal questions related to civil disobedience.
Responding to his presentation are Duane Heffelbower, a member of the Division of Administration of the General Conference, and Ruth Stoltzfus, an attorney living in Linville, Virginia.
In addition to the formal input, various church leaders and administrative
staff will contribute to the consultation. These people are Heinz Janzen,
general secretary of the General Conference; Harold Regier and Perry Yoder,
cosecretaries of peace and social concerns of the General Conference; John
Gaeddert, executive secretary of the Commission on Education; William Snyder,
executive secretary of
MCC;
Urbane Peachey, executive secretary for
MCC
Peace Section; Hubert Schwartzentruber, secretary for peace and social
concerns of the Mennonite Church; Ed Enns, executive secretary of the
Congregational Resources Board of the Canadian Conference; Peter Janzen,
pastor, representing the Canadian Conference.
Six persons will form the findings committee.
They are John Sprunger, pastor, Indian Valley Mennonite Church, Harleysville, Pennsylvania; Palmer Becker, executive secretary of the Commission on Home Ministries; Elmer Neufeld, president of the General Conference; Hugo Jantz, chairperson of MCC (Canada); John Stoner, executive secretary for MCC Peace Section (U.S.); and Larry Kehler, pastor of the Charleswood Mennonite Church, Winnipeg.
Kehler is also the writer for the study guide which is to be published by fall.
[T]he issue was how Mennonite institutions should respond to those employees who request that the military portion of their income taxes not be withheld by the employer.
Several Mennonite organizations are facing the issue. The General Conference
is seeking the will of its 60,000 members in answering such a request from one
of its employees, Cornelia Lehn. The consultation in Elkhart was one part of
the discerning process leading to a delegate assembly, and a decision in
.
Bible scholars, theologians, pastors, administrators, attorneys — twenty-nine persons in all — presented papers, exchanged insights, and probed the issue.
Much of their analysis will be incorporated into a study guide to be published by .
There was general agreement that militarism and the nuclear arms buildup are a
massive threat to human existence. “We are in pre-Holocaust days,” asserted
John Stoner, director of Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section.
How does one change the direction of society?
How does one influence government policy so that it is prohuman?
Some individuals claim that the witness of taxes withheld from the military could do much to change American priorities.
Is civil disobedience biblical?
Is there a biblical case for civil disobedience?
Seminary professor and Old Testament scholar Millard Lind said the question was wrong.
He declared the question assumes that the government provides the norm for the person of faith, and asks whether there may be a religious basis for sometimes disobeying it.
On the contrary, he counseled, the biblical accounts emphasize the absolute
sovereignty of the God of Israel. Biblical thought challenges the sovereignty
of the civil authorities, calling it rebellion. Not only individuals, but
above all, the state, with its self-interest and empire building, are against
the rule and order of Yahweh.
Is civil disobedience called for in the specific instance of taxes spent for military purposes?
Two papers were presented on this question, one by David Schroeder of Canadian Mennonite Bible College, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the second by Kenneth Bauman, pastor of First Mennonite Church in Berne, Indiana.
“It is clear,” said Schroeder, “that the New Testament speaks for civil
disobedience, but it is difficult to determine the form.” Interpreting the
will of God must be done in the community of believers. The Scripture must not
only be searched to know the will of God, but also to bind ourselves to doing
it.
He observed that the issue of taxes for military purposes is often seen in isolation from other options.
He counseled that the church needs to look at all avenues which would lead to peace, and then choose those options which would be effective at the individual and corporate levels.
A noticeable reaction of surprise was evident after Schroeder indicated that
as a Canadian member of the General Conference he would abstain from voting at
the mid-triennium conference in .
“Those (Americans) who must take the consequences of tax withholding must take the responsibility,” he opined.
When questioned on this Schroeder said he held the position because he would not, as a Canadian national, be able to effectively support an American practicing tax resistance.
Later in the conference, however, he appeared to modify his position.
Bauman’s paper was a careful overview of the tax situation in the time of
Christ, of Jesus’ stance relative to the authorities, and of Anabaptist
practice.
He indicated that Jesus’ political stance was not with the ecclesiastical nor with the social establishment.
Nor did Jesus identify himself as a radical social revolutionary.
Rather, Christ was a representative of the kingdom of God with a prophetic call to repentance, faith, and righteous living which transforms society through the transformation of the individual.
“It is amazing,” he reflected, “to see the early church and the Apostles show
such respect and subordination to a political system that crucified their Lord
and killed their leaders.”
When asked at what point he would practice civil disobedience, Bauman said, “For me it would be more than taxation; it would be when government becomes an object of worship.”
Mennonite practice he noted has been to pay taxes. Only the Hutterites have a
consistent pattern of resisting taxes.
Kings and prophets
In a humorous manner, J. Lawrence Burkholder, president of Goshen College, illuminated the tension between individual conscience and management responsibility.
“The Bible is stacked against managers,” he remarked. The managers (kings)
were always getting critiques from the prophets. Burkholder confessed that
before becoming a college president (a “king”) he had often been prophetic in
his utterances.
But now as a manager he values continuity, order, and making life possible.
Decisions often have ambiguity built into them.
Further, although individuals are free to order their lives as they wish, a corporation incarnates the many wills of its supporters into a limited function.
Is it right to expect a corporation to respond in the same way as an individual?
Burkholder did conclude though that a corporation must be willing to die for
the sake of principle. For a Mennonite school he suggested such a case would
be required ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps).
In his paper on the same topic, William Keeney of Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, warned that biblical and Anabaptist history illustrate that the voice of the majority is not necessarily the voice of God.
He also noted that for many people there is a double ethical standard, one for the Christian, and one for the state.
Keeney said Christians should have a bias in favor of loyalty to the prophets, and to the way of the cross and costly discipleship.
From this he concluded that corporate action needs to respect the individual conscience.
In his response to the above papers, Peter Ediger, pastor of the Arvada
(Colorado) Mennonite Church, cried out, “I would hope that management could be
prophetic. Can leadership in institutions not give evidence of faithfulness to
God? Why do we see this question (tax withholding) as a threat to our
institutions? We need more faith in the powers of resurrection. Do we foster
fear or faith? Spread the rumor that the Lord is going to do wonderful
things.”
The attorneys present provided a legal framework, as distinct from a biblical rationale, for approaching the issue of not withholding taxes used for military purposes.
The General Conference could, if it wished, simply stop remitting taxes and wait for the government to take action.
A long process of litigation might ensue in which the church could argue that
using the corporate body to collect taxes violates the conscience of tax
objectors, and also violates the principle of separation of church and state
because the church is held hostage by the state, under penalty of fines or
imprisonment of its officers. The attorneys also observed that the
IRS
(Internal Revenue Service) could decide to avoid litigation and its attendant
publicity, and simply go to the individual to collect.
In essence the attorneys said there were ways of working on the issue through legal, legislative, and administrative channels.
Findings
A findings committee — Palmer Becker, Hugo Jantz, Elmer Neufeld, John Stoner, Larry Kehler — drafted a statement.
After hours of discussion and subsequent changes the persons at the consultation agreed that the statement fairly represented their thinking.
Some excerpts:
“Our Christian obedience has to find new and creative responses to the
proliferation of military weaponry and technology…
“Christians respect the governing authorities… which leads to a broad
range of activities in support of the public good. Nevertheless, at times
our call of prior obedience to God’s sovereignty leads us to disobey the
claims of the state…
“We… have differing convictions about refusing to pay taxes for the
military.
“Let us be open to the possibility that the Spirit of God may lead some of
us in a direction that is both prophetic and full of risks.
“We agree that a way should be sought which will facilitate the expression
of the convictions of conference employees who request that their taxes
not be withheld.
“We need to seek the counsel of and work with other Mennnonite groups and
denominations, particularly the historic peace churches, in developing the
most appropriate response to this issue.”
Two multi-part articles and two additional stand-alone articles stretched
across multiple issues of The Mennonite and also
served to summarize some of the points of debate:
“The North American military” by Harold Fransen (part 1 and part 2)
These articles begin with an unflattering look at U.S. military personnel, suggesting that even if you put the violence of war off to one side, the drunkenness, ignorance, and sexual immorality found among those in uniform is enough not to recommend the institution to Mennonites.
The first part ends: “If we have come to the realization that we can not go to war, maybe the time has come to… say that no one can go to war on our behalf either.
As we fill out out income tax forms this year, so that the military can do the job which we refuse to do, let us remember what effect it has on the lives that are bound up in its powerful grip, and be in prayer as we move toward the General Conference’s midtriennium session to deal with this issue.”
Part two looked at this issue from the Canadian perspective, noting that
Canada was deeply involved in the international arms trade and was boosting its
own military spending. “Can we any longer brush off war taxes as a
U.S. issue?”
“Is this our modern pilgrims’ progress”
This article summarized the recent history of the General Conference in grappling with the issue that would come to a head at the session:
If the conference delegates decide that nonpayment of military taxes is justified the decision is binding on the administrators of the General Conference.
Impetus for such an assembly began in when employee Cornelia Lehn requested the General Conference
business office not to remit the military tax portion of her paycheck to the
IRS.
Prior to 1974 the issue of “war taxes” had been discussed, and as early as
, delegates at the triennial sessions in
Fresno, California, passed a statement protesting the use of tax monies for
war purposes. The delegates also said, “We stand by those who feel called to
resist the payment of that portion of taxes being used for military purposes.”
However, the General Board did not think that directive from the delegates
authorized them to stop remitting Lehn’s military taxes. Her request was
refused.
Three years later… [at] the next conference… delegates called for education regarding militarism, reaffirmed the 1971 statement, and agreed that serious work be done on the possibility of allowing General Conference employees to follow their consciences on payment or nonpayment of military taxes.
Educational materials have included the periodical God and
Caesar and two study guides, The Rule of the
Sword and The Rule of the Lamb. In addition
to these efforts two major consultations were convened in
and in
. At these consultations scholarly
papers were presented on militarism, biblical considerations for payment or
nonpayment of military taxes, and Anabaptist history and theology related to
war tax concerns.
Despite the protracted input the General Board could not reach a consensus on the issue.
Consequently the problem was brought to delegates at the triennial… [where] the delegate body committed itself to serious congregational study of civil disobedience and war tax resistance during .
The delegates also decided to discuss the issue in detail at a midtriennium conference in .
In an effort to implement the Bluffton
resolution an eight-member civil responsibility committee was formed. Several
actions were taken by it to encourage serious study.
an attitude survey on church
and government was conducted. Approximately 2,500 responses were received,
including 463 from a select sampling in 31 churches. A scholarly consultation
was held in . One of the key ideas
which came out of this consultation was whether those who feel strongly about
not paying military taxes should be encouraged to form a separate corporation
within the General Conference. To assist churches in their study of the issue
two study guides were published. The Rule of the
Sword deals primarily with facts and concerns related to militarism.
The Rule of the Lamb centers about the sovereignty
of God and biblical texts on taxes and civil authority.
Each of the more than 300 congregations in the General Conference is being encouraged to prepare a statement to bring to the conference.
It is evident from the sale of the study guides that a minority of congregations are actually making an effort to study the issue, although all congregations have received sample copies of the guides.
Many Canadian churches feel the issue is strictly an American problem, and there is a considerable diversity of conviction and thought among American congregations.
Some congregations do not intend to send delegates.
What this means for the Minneapolis conference is difficult to assess, except
for one feature. There will be a lot of stirring debate. After
will there be some
resolution of the withholding question? No one is predicting the outcome.
“Countdown to Minneapolis”
This article tried to put the debate into a larger context of what it meant for the congregations in the General Conference to be deliberating together in this way.
It also seemed to be trying to drum up more attendance; there seemed to be some worry that Canadian Mennonites, and more conservative congregations, might just not turn up.
“Our Christian civil responsibility”
This article, by Larry Kehler (author of The Rule of the Lamb), attempted to put all of the pieces together for readers ahead of the conference.
Excerpts:
General Conference churches have the opportunity of either growing through the process of working on the war-tax question or of stagnating and splintering.
I am somewhat more confident now than I was even six months ago that we will mature through this experience, and in the process perhaps reassert some of our Conference’s flagging leadership in the field of peace.
Perhaps it is only because I have been talking to more optimistic persons.
But I do have the impression that General Conference people are more ready now to participate in the struggle for an answer than they were even as late as last winter.
The easy answer of letting this debate be the occasion for some congregations to sever their ties with the General Conference seems to be more of a “cop-out” than a reasonable response to a difficult question.
Will your congregation have delegates at the midtriennium sessions in Minneapolis?
If it won’t, both the conference and the congregation will be the poorer for it.
You see, the question is not only how we will respond to the issue of tax-withholding as a witness against war, but how we go about dealing with questions on which we have not yet achieved clarity or unanimity.
The process we go through may well be much more vital to us than the answer we finally come up with, and that is not to diminish the seriousness of the problem of militarism.
Coming to Minneapolis without advance preparation, however, could be almost as
destructive as not coming at all. Each congregation should do some serious
struggling within its own setting on the various dimensions which this issue
is raising for us.
The war-tax issue offers the General Conference one of its best opportunities in many years to work seriously at Bible interpretation on a question about which we have widely differing views.
How do we make decisions when we disagree?
The tax texts
What does the New Testament say about taxes?
Here are the four primary passages:
Mark 12:13–17
is a description of the Pharisees and Herodians trying to entrap Jesus with
the question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesus responds by
taking a coin and showing them Caesar’s image on it and saying, “Render to
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
Luke 23:1–5 recalls the accusations made against Jesus before Pilate.
Among them is the charge that he has forbidden his people “to give tribute to Caesar.” In response to Pilate’s question about his kingship over the Jews, Jesus replies ambiguously, “You have said so.”
Matthew 17:24–27
talks about the temple tax. Some Bible interpreters feel that the tax question
is a secondary issue in this passage. The writer’s main purpose in telling
this incident, some scholars say, is to underscore Jesus’ sonship.
Romans 13:6–7 urges followers of Christ to be subject to the governing authorities and to pay taxes where they are due.
A straightforward reading of these passages has led many persons to conclude
that taxes are to be paid regardless of the use to which they might be put.
“How can you argue against such clear, simple statements?” they ask people who
suggest that there may be more to these comments than can be seen on the
surface.
It is the tension between these two approaches to the Bible which lies at the heart of the problem which the General Conference is now facing in its attempt to come up with a biblical response to the “war tax issue.” How do we interpret and understand the Bible?
Is the easiest reading of a biblical passage always to be taken as the most likely intention of the writer?
Some Bible scholars say that it is sometimes quite deceiving to accept the easiest reading.
Others wonder if that sort of remark doesn’t simply underscore the Bible’s assertion that some truths will confound the wise and yet be very clear to more down-to-earth and average persons.
Well, maybe.
But doesn’t it cheapen the Bible if we think that a book which has come to us from another millennium and a decidedly different culture can be read on the surface — much like one reads a twentieth-century pop-psychology book — and applied to situations in our day without adaptation?
Can any statement in the Bible be taken by itself without first testing it
against the background from which it came and against related statements
elsewhere in the Bible?
Modern, easy-to-read paraphrases of the Scriptures and our general attitude toward the Bible have led us to believe that “hermeneutics” (the interpretation of the Bible’s message) is not a difficult task.
In some cases it isn’t, but in others it is.
In places the Bible is so inscrutable that we can seemingly never be quite sure about its full intention.
So we have to launch out in faith on some questions, hoping that more clarity will come as we proceed.
We may discover as we go that we have started off in the wrong direction.
Then we need the humility to admit our error and change our direction.
The major agenda item at the midtriennium sessions in Minneapolis may turn out
not to be “war taxes” at all. This issue may be God’s way of prodding us into
becoming more of a “hermeneutic community”…
The tax texts need to be studied intensely at the congregational level, each participant bringing an open mind and heart to the discussion.
If clarity and unanimity do not come immediately let us not be discouraged.
Other groups have had similar difficulties before us.
That is all the more reason why we should continue to struggle with this question.
The summary statement prepared by the people who attended the
war tax conference contained this paragraph:
“After considering the New Testament texts which speak about the Christian’s
payment of taxes, most of us are agreed that we do not have a clear word on
the subject of paying taxes used for war. The New Testament statements on
paying taxes (Mark 12:17 and Romans 13:6–7)
contain either ambiguity in meaning or qualifications on the texts that call
the discerning community to decide in light of the life and teachings of
Jesus.”
For Canadians too
The war tax issue is a U.S. issue and should be decided by them.
Right?
Wrong! It’s an issue for the entire General Conference.
But Canadians wouldn’t be taking any of the risks if the U.S. Government should bear down and hand out some jail sentences or fines for the Conference’s not withholding its employees’ income taxes.
Too much emphasis has been put on the possibility of fines or jail terms.
These consequences might come, but they’re not likely. The fear of a
confrontation with the law has taken the focus off the main point of this
whole exercise. The purpose is to give a firm, clear, and prophetic witness
against the diabolic buildup of the machines of war, which is occurring at an
ever-increasing pace in the United States and in many other nations. Are we
going to sit back and allow this escalation to continue without at least
giving our governments some sort of message that we cannot any longer go along
with this race toward self-destruction?
The arms race and the manufacture of war goods is very much part of the Canadian scene too… I have not yet been able to discover any tax resisters in Canada, but this does not mean that militarism is not a front-burner issue in Canada.
It is, and it should be.
I don’t know why there aren’t tax resisters in Canada. There are certainly
other forms of objection to the military buildup. “Project Ploughshares” is an
interchurch witness against militarism. Mennonites are actively involved in
its program of research and information-sharing. Thus, even though tax
resistance isn’t part of the Canadian experience now, Canadian Mennonites
shouldn’t withdraw from the General Conference discussion. They can
legitimately be fully involved on the basis of principle.
If the General Conference is going to say, “Yes,” to those of its employees who don’t want their income tax withheld, that should be the decision of the entire Conference, not just a portion of it.
The decision, whichever way it goes, will carry much more weight, I believe, if all the congregations in the Conference have participated in it.
Canadian involvement is important.
Some have indicated that the present set of options offered to the
delegates — that is to vote either yes or no on the withholding question — is
not sufficient. Other alternatives must be developed. If not, the Conference
may become polarized, and it might even split.
The question therefore is: How can the General Conference, as an international body, make a clear-cut witness against militarism without splintering the Conference?
Some U.S. Mennonites have stated that Canadian participation is crucial to the process.
After the conference in Bluffton in it
appeared that there would be minimal Canadian involvement at Minneapolis.
There is still no guarantee that participation from Canada will be adequate,
but good efforts are being made to encourage Canadian churches to send
delegates.
The General Board of the Conference of Mennonites in Canada at its last meeting went on record urging Canadian participation.
It will communicate this concern to the churches.
Several congregations are making special efforts to prepare for the convention.
Bethel Mennonite Church, Winnipeg, Manitoba, held a weekend seminar on this topic.
Grace Mennonite Church, Regina, Saskatchewan, arranged a similar event.
The Winnipeg meeting was covered in a later issue.
About fifty people met and came up with a set of recommendations as they prepared to select their delegates to the conference.
Sharon Sawatzky of the Canadian Conference staff in Winnipeg prepared a Canadian supplement for the study booklet The Rule of the Sword by Charlie Lord.
Copies of the supplement have been sent to all Canadian congregations who have ordered the five-lesson study booklet on militarism.
Faith and Life Press, Newton, reports that to date (I write this on
) more orders for the study
materials (The Rule of the Sword and
The Rule of the Lamb) have been received from Canada
than from the United States.
The prophets and the managers
The tension created by the war tax question in the General Conference is heightened by people’s disparate understandings of what it means to be good stewards of our church-related institutions.
Some have seen it as a tension between the “prophets” and the “managers.”
Who shapes the direction and philosophies of our churches and their agencies?
Is it the people who have a “prophetic” vision of biblical responsibility? Is
it the administrators who have been charged with “managing” these
organizations and creating as few waves as possible? Both? Partially? Neither?
Questions related to this apparent tension are included in the study guide The Rule of the Lamb…
J. Lawrence Burkholder, who is himself the “manager” of a major Mennonite
institution (Goshen College), has frankly described the predicament in which
leaders of institutions find themselves.
Here is a summary of his observations…
An efficient and well-trained corps of managers has emerged to run the
Mennonites’ growing number of institutions. The “constituency” of each of
these institutions insists that it is to be run in a businesslike, fiscally
responsible, and basically conservative way. Actions which might jeopardize
the welfare of an institution are not likely to be looked upon with much
favor.
The war tax issue, said Burkholder, is a problem of personal ethics as opposed to corporate ethics.
Our way of understanding the Bible is based on a one-to-one decision-making process, where the individual can respond quickly and simply to a situation.
A corporation’s response to an ethical question, on the other hand, involves
many wills. A number of “publics” make demands on the institution to decide
the issue their way. This does not mean, the Goshen College president
emphasized, that moral demands cannot be made of corporations. Nor should it
be said that all institutions are alike.
Corporations tend toward the status quo.
They emphasize different values than “prophetic” Christians.
Corporations tend to take a positive view of the broader culture in which they operate, they recognize the ambiguity of the situations in which they are making their decisions, and they look less judgmentally on people than do the “prophets.”
On the other hand, prophets have the luxury, according to Burkholder, of being
able to speak abstractly, of idealizing certain things from the past, and of
talking about perfection and ideals in an imperfect society.
Managers of church-related institutions have a clear line of accountability to their constituency, he said, “but who holds the prophets responsible?” Prophets are usually judged to be true or false in retrospect.
A prophet, therefore, doesn’t have to take responsibility for actions, words, and decisions in the same way that a manager does. “Sometimes,” said Burkholder, “present-day prophets come off ‘cheap.’ ”
He emphasized that Mennonites should continue to identify with the prophetic
tradition. They should be aware, though, that this means they will have to be
willing to remain somewhat on the edge of society.
“We will also need to develop a theology of corporate life,” he added. “We already have a theology of fellowship, but we don’t have a theology of the institution.”
Debate in the Letters Column
There was plenty of debate about the propriety of war tax resistance itself in the letters-to-the-editor column, sometimes explicitly prompted by the debate over withholding and the upcoming conference, other times more general.
John K. Stoner said that if the Conference were to fail to endorse war tax
resistance, “I would like to be able to have the confidence that they made
their decision in full awareness and with truly informed knowledge of the
dimensions of the nuclear abyss into which we are staring. At this point I
do not find it possible to have that confidence.” In short, they seemed to
be unaware of just how bad things had gotten.
I do not wish to imply that tax resistance or some other form of civil disobedience is the only kind of response which faithful Christians should be making to the unprecedented evil of the nuclear arms race. (It is my judgment that the situation confronts us with more than adequate grounds for civil disobedience.) However, I do wish to imply that those who counsel against tax refusal and civil disobedience would be much more convincing if they were leading out in other visible kinds of response to the nuclear crisis.
Carl M. Lehman wrote in to again remind readers that there was no such
thing as a “war tax” and that such nomenclature comes from “a less than
completely honest persistence in using labels to create a straw man to
attack.”
Money is only a convenient medium of exchange and not a real necessity to conduct war…
I have no quarrel with the person who simply wants to refuse to pay
taxes as a protest technique. As an attention-calling device it may very
well be effective. It is not exactly the kind of role I would feel led
to play, but I would not want to condemn anyone who felt they must use
such a tactic. I would, however, strongly protest any attempt to make
such a tactic mandatory for all Mennonites, and this is exactly what is
being attempted. Not mandatory, of course, in the sense that it would be
a test of membership, but mandatory in the sense of a normal commitment
expectation for a nonresistant Christian.
I maintain that tax resistance is a deviation from our heritage of faith.
The fact that it is a deviation in no sense makes it wrong and certainly does not mean that we pay no heed.
It does, however, very much suggest that the burden of proof is on the deviant, and that the deviant ought not to equate obedience to God with conformity by others.
John Swarr called on Mennonites to repent for war and in true repentance
to “change our ways.” He disagreed with Lehman’s dismissal of the moral
import of money. “Money is indeed a medium of exchange, but as Christian
stewards of God’s gifts we must be concerned about the things for which
that money is invested, donated, or paid.” He also disagreed that war tax
resistance was a deviation from Mennonite tradition, pointing to examples
from history in which Anabaptists took the issue seriously and came down
on both sides.
Karl Detrich took a hard Romans 13
line on the question, saying that the question of whether Christians
should or should not pay taxes had long ago been closed by that chapter.
While the New Testament also contains examples of civil disobedience, “in
each case these men were following the dictates of a higher law, namely,
that we should have no other gods besides our Lord.”
Jesus tells us that in the last days there will be, among other tribulations, wars and rumors of war.
Rather than going against the teaching of God’s word in a vain effort to forestall the inevitable, should we not give our time and energies to the worship of God and the proclamation of his gospel, so that we can do our part to hasten the day of his coming?
Paul W. Andreas saw simple living as a key to avoiding war taxes, and
resisting war taxes as a key to avoiding despair:
The submission to evil (no government has been free of it) produces despair.
I believe that love of my fellow humans is fundamental to not only
Mennonite faith but to Christ’s message. If I am compelled to violate
that message by hiring killers and providing weapons, I despair. For me,
no charitable contribution undoes the evil I unleash by paying taxes
that are used for such ends. Fortunately the practitioner of the simple
life can reduce his wage and thus avoid the income tax used for evil.
James Newcomer, in the course of taking Mennonites to task for the
“red-baiting” he’d found in their midst, took some time out to praise war
tax resistance:
I am deeply moved… by the witness of Peter Ediger at Rocky Flats, Colorado, and by many others who through war tax resistance and protest are trying to focus their own understanding of the modern Christian experience at the risk of losing middle-class luxuries and future security.
Miscellany
And if that weren’t enough, there were several other news items that discussed war tax resistance without relating directly to the upcoming conference or the specific debate to be dealt with there.
For example:
“A weekend seminar on war tax resistance” organized by Philadelphia Mennonites at which “[s]pecific strategies for implementing war tax resistance were discussed,” and the usual biblical verses were hashed out.
A four-point resolution on peacemaking called the Eastern District to: (1) serious Bible study on peace and a General Conference resolution on “The Way of Peace” (2) involvement in disapproval (through congressional representatives) of national actions promoting war, poverty, and terror; (3) support of those who feel led to withhold portions of their taxes; and (4) a midyear assembly to promote peacemaking.
After vigorous discussion, point three was stricken from the resolution
and point two was amended to include encouragement for righteous actions.
The amended resolution was adopted.
The Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section (U.S.) met. But in spite of all that was going on around them, it merely “reaffirmed its recommendation to Mennonite institutions ‘to study the conflict between Christian obligations and legal obligations in the collection of federal taxes…’ ” When they would meet again “a resolution on militarism, the future of New Call to Peacemaking, and the question of alternatives to the payment of taxes for military purposes” would be on the agenda. At that meeting, they took a stronger stand:
We support those who resist the payment of taxes for military purposes and call upon all members of the church to seriously consider refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes.
While Mennonite church institutions continue to struggle with an administrative response to the issue of “war tax” withholding, individual Mennonites are voicing their convictions through refusing to pay the portion of their taxes designated for military use.
About $4,000 has been received by the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section’s “Taxes
for Peace” fund, contributed by Mennonite war tax refusers.
Nonpayment of taxes violates national laws, but tax refusers are convinced that paying taxes is disobedience to God when slightly over half of that tax money is allocated for the past, present, and future military expenditures of the United States.
Most of these tax refusers paid only 47 to 50 percent of taxes owed to
the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS),
forwarding the remaining amount to
MCC
and other Mennonite agencies. Statements to
IRS
clarified that the withheld tax money was not for personal profit but
rather for meeting human needs, promoting peace and reconciliation, and
supporting life instead of death.
James Klassen, Newton, Kansas, who claimed a Nuremburg Principle tax deduction in an amount sufficient to result in a 50 percent refund of the amount of taxes due, recently received the refund in full and forwarded the check to MCC. (The Nuremburg Principles, unanimously affirmed by the United Nations after World War Ⅱ, specify that crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are crimes under national law.)
“This is the first time we have deliberately broken the law of our
country,” say tax refusers James and Anna Juhnke, North Newton, Kansas.
“It is not an easy decision. We love our land and we respect the
authority of the government. We want to show our respect by making our
civil disobedience a public act and by accepting the penalties which may
result from our action.”
“As a Christian who accepts the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament as normative for life and ethics, I am a ‘conscientious objector’ to participation in war and to the resolution of human conflict by violence,” concludes Marlin Miller of Goshen, Indiana. “It is my conviction that the financial support of war and military expenditures cannot be reconciled with this stance any more than actual military service itself.”
They and other Christians feel that Christ’s calling to a life of love,
nonviolence and reconciliation supersedes demands of the state.
Thirty-three persons and families thus far have identified themselves as “war tax resisters” after God and Caesar in its issue provided the opportunity for people to do so.
The respondents represent eleven denominations as well as those with no church affiliation.
One recent case of a non-ordained employee at a Mennonite institution
hoping to resist paying war taxes involved Esther Lanting, a teacher at
Western Mennonite School
(WMS),
Salem, Oregon, who on
wrote a letter to the
WMS
board requesting that her income tax not be withheld from her check.
On , Lanting was invited to meet with the board to explain her reasons.
The board decided to seek the counsel of the conference executive committee, and secure study papers on the tax issue.
Finally, on , after
extended study, the peace and social concerns committee of the conference
recommended that the
WMS
board grant Lanting’s request and discontinue withholding her taxes.
On , the WMS board considered the committee’s recommendation.
By a vote of six to two they decided not to follow the recommendation, but to continue withholding all tax as legally required.
At this same board meeting three other WMS teachers or staff members acted as follows: Ray Nussbaum submitted a letter requesting that the board stop withholding his tax; Floyd Schrock made a verbal request that his tax not be withheld; and Cindy Mullet asked that the board decrease her salary to the level where she will owe no tax.
The board granted Cindy Mullet’s request for a reduction in salary. The
board is willing to reconsider the issue if more faculty members should
make the same request to have the board refrain from withholding taxes.
MCC has taken no official position on the refusal to pay taxes for military use, but MCC Peace Section (U.S.) adopted a statement in which in part recommended “that Mennonite and Brethren in Christ continue to work toward reduction of military spending, not resting content with special provisions exempting us from payment of taxes for military purposes.” It affirms “those in our midst who feel compelled by Christian conscience to refuse payment of all or some federal tax because of the large percentage of such taxes used for military purposes.”
In concluding his war tax talk Yoder said church members are generally more ready to disregard what the church has to say than what the government says.
Issuing a direct challenge to those who believe war tax resistance is wrong he counseled, “It would be more credible if those who are in favor of paying all their taxes would show through some other action what they are doing to love our national enemies.”
This is the twenty-sixth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
I’m going to try to cover 1979.
Preparing for the Minneapolis Conference
In , there was a special
general session of the Mennonite General Conference especially to discuss war
tax resistance, and in particular, to decide whether the Conference would
support its tax-resisting employees by refusing to withhold taxes from their
paychecks.
In our last episode, the heat was
rising, with opinion pieces and study guides and letters to the editor
addressing the issue. Now, with the session approaching and the decision
imminent, things really began to boil.
The issue hosted
a
long letter to the editor from Albert H. Epp (dated
) in which he accused
The Mennonite and the Commission on Home Ministries
of putting their thumbs on the scale in favor of war tax resistance. Excerpts:
Some of us… are part of the “silent majority” that feels inundated by the
tax-resistance mail arriving almost daily.
The Kauffman-Harder profile () stated, “A
member of our churches ought not to pay the proportion of his income taxes
that goes for military purposes.” Only 15 percent of our denomination agreed;
and no more than 8 percent among the Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in
Christ. Even fewer actually withheld tax. Eighty-five percent disagreed!
Now Minneapolis looms ahead. Many of us feel we are being swept helplessly
downstream toward an ill-advised showdown. I was one of the 453 delegates at
Bluffton () who voted “no” on resolution 11.
But it carried. There seems to be a wide gap between delegate-action at
conference and constituency-opinion at home. How did “the few” persuade “the
many” to agree to a February session that will cost about $100,000?
We are witnessing one of the strongest attempts at shaping conference-opinion
in 20 years, and possibly our entire history. Long-held views on civil
responsibility are being challenged by brethren who are crusading for tax
resistance and civil disobedience. Neither Scripture nor history are normative
in the ways they used to be. “We have something new,” we are told, “in the
present nuclear threat.”
Behind this ideological shift stands our Commission on Home Ministries. Three
years ago
CHM
began publishing a war-tax newsletter, God and
Caesar. In the fifth issue they report on a two-day war tax conference
they conducted at Kitchener, Ontario. “The evidence suggests that most
Anabaptists did pay all their taxes willingly…,” the report avers; but
CHM
leaders pledged themselves “to raise consciousness about war tax and
militarism issues…” Highly significant is the fact that two scholars. Miller
and Swartley, emerged at that session as men willing to say that the Scripture
does not give us a clear command to pay taxes used for military purposes.
It is my impression that Mennonite stalwarts of recent decades, H.S. Bender,
Guy F. Hershberger, Erland Waltner, and John C. Wenger, to name just a few,
all taught the full-paying of taxes on scriptural grounds. Their general view
agreed with Paul, who taught the paying of taxes in Romans 13
and was fully aware that Rome had crucified Christ, had subjugated many
nations, and was now ruled by the despot Nero.
H.S. Bender, writing on “Taxation” in ,
claims that “few if any Mennonites” were presently refusing to pay the portion
of income tax calculated to go for military purposes, which he estimated to be
about two-thirds of the total.
Guy F. Hershberger, in his classic on nonresistance, discusses the answer of
Jesus in Matthew 22:
“…the situation here is almost precisely like that in Romans 13.
Jesus’ questioners were not men who would be interested in service
in the Roman army. If anything, they would be interested in a military
rebellion against the Roman authority. There Jesus says, ‘Give to Caesar that
which is Caesar’s.’ That is, do not rebel against him, not even to the extent
of refusing to pay the tax.”
The current tax-resistance movement requires a major shift in biblical
interpretation. This is something new.
It appears to me that today’s tax-resisters are hard put to proof-text their
views. Swartley admitted to Kitchener ()
“…there is no New Testament text which either explicitly or clearly implicitly
tells us not to pay taxes.” Yet some go from text to text progressively
untying the knots of normal interpretation. But the knot of
Romans 13.
will not easily yield.
Donald Kaufman (What Belongs to Caesar, page 48) chides Oscar Cullmann for “his lack of moral discernment” when he insists that disciples of Jesus pay tax, no matter to what government.
John Howard Yoder, well-known for his personal tax-withholding procedure, nevertheless, in his oft-reprinted masterpiece The Politics of Jesus (page 211), approvingly quotes C.E.B. Cranfield, “taxes and revenue, perhaps honor, are due to Caesar, but fear is due to God.”
In sketching the limits of subordination, Yoder stops short of using Romans 13 for tax resistance.
Not so Larry Kehler in The Rule of the Lamb.
Using his stature as editor-writer, Kehler seems to infer that Paul supports our tax resistance.
The truth of the matter is that for every scholar who teaches tax resistance from Romans 13, there might be 50 competent professors who teach otherwise.
A tax protest based on Romans 13 is an exegesis not easy to defend.
The method of promoting the new idea also deserves comment. Basic to good
human relations is the concept that issues are best discussed without the
injection of personalities. When Cornelia Lehn’s speech at the Bluffton
conference was programmed into the civil-disobedience debate by conference
officials, it almost gave the appearance of being a psychological pressure
tactic to sway votes. After all, who can speak against womanhood? Who can deny
that Nellie’s stand is courageous? But someone has to venture the tough
question “Is it fair to ask thousands of Mennonites to approve civil
disobedience because of one person’s convictions?”
Is it possible that
CHM
has moved ahead too quickly on this issue — even out of earshot? Take their
suggestion that the General Board no longer honor tax-withholding laws for
some employees (The
Mennonite, 2 November 1976, page 648). On
the constituents turned back
Resolution 12 (yes — 336, no — 1,190) on this issue. Bluffton delegates later
gave the mandate for a midtriennium conference, but even this decision process
was interlaced with
CHM
influence. The delegates, caught in the euphoria of the moment, unable to
confer with churches at home, approved the surprise resolution. Most
surprising of all, Larry Kehler, as recent as , wrote, “I have not
yet been able to discover any tax resisters in Canada…” Little wonder
CHM’s
promotion is so voluminous.
When churches in the Midwest ask
CHM
for a clarification of issues, men are readily available to give excellent
thought-out defenses for tax resistance and civil disobedience. But no one
seems willing and/ or permitted to present the traditional biblical-Anabaptist
stance and say, “That’s my view.” So we, the silent majority, feel like people
with no representation. While we collect thousands of dollars for conference
coffers, no one pleads our case — the case of the majority.
Any protest, it seems to me, needs keen discernment. Picketing a tax office,
withholding income tax, or balking at withholding laws may all be misdirected
efforts. The Internal Revenue Service is only a collecting agency. Do we
punish the newspaper boy, refusing to pay when we dislike an editorial? No, we
phone the editor. Why not spend our energy on the decision makers?
A hope seems to flicker in some minds that a domino reaction, “me too, me
too,” will bring out an avalanche of Mennonite tax resisters. Then, some aver,
a frustrated government might negotiate. However, worse things may accrue.
Attorney J. Elwin Kraybill says that evading tax is a felony (26
USC 7201) and can
result in a fine (maximum $10,000) and/or prison (maximum 5 years). At the
least most Mennonites would be subjected to the harassment of an annual audit.
At the worst they could be accused of spawning anarchy — a trend already
evidenced in teachers’ strikes and police strikes.
I wonder if tax resistance won’t trap us in a blind alley — in a stance too
negative. Why curse the darkness? Let’s plant a light. In past decades our
conscientious objector position was transformed by creative service in refugee
camps, mental hospitals, and mission schools. Today we again need positive
solutions. Could Mennonite Central Committee possibly establish a research
center with departments like peace, pollution, and world hunger? When our
scholars really tackle these complex problems, our governments will knock at
our door. In retrospect, I was proud when President John F. Kennedy turned to
MCC
for advice on the Peace Corps.
I am a Mennonite, both by birth and by choice. I deeply appreciate our
Anabaptist theology. As a pastor I can affirm with my parish
CHM’s
conviction of (1) the limited nature of Caesar’s power; and (2) the lethal
character of its weaponry. However, we do not feel it biblical or Anabaptist
to rob government of its right to taxation, or even some national defense.
Where government abuses this right we wish to exhaust every legal channel of
protest before we engage in illegal maneuvers.
In my congregation one brother is reducing his income; another has enclosed a
protest letter with his tax return. Many of us have increased contributions to
reduce taxable income. But not one, to my knowledge, is refusing to pay taxes.
As one brother put it, “Can we be harsh on Uncle Sam while our financial
stewardship level is so low in Mennonite circles?”
A final word. I tested this letter with my Board of Deacons. All seven
present, to the man, encouraged me to send it. Editor, thanks for letting us
speak.
Richard K. MacMaster addressed the history of war tax resistance among
American Mennonites in an article that appeared in the
issue:
I read with great interest your articles about the forthcoming discussion of
war taxes at Minneapolis.
I’ve had a great concern to write some few lines on one small aspect of this
large question, but generally put it off as a nit-picking historical footnote.
Observing that “historical perspective” will play a role in the consultation
, I thought I should take
time to clarify what might possibly lead to misunderstanding.
A number of recent discussions on the war tax issue have stated that
Mennonites and Brethren paid their taxes in obedience to the biblical
injunction of “taxes to whom taxes are due.” The reader might reasonably
conclude that, unlike Friends, neither Brethren nor Mennonites were troubled
in conscience about payment of taxes levied for any purpose. The point would
be too insignificant to raise in even some nitpicking scholarly review, if it
did not have consequences for our understanding of our own heritage in regard
to a current issue of great importance.
In Peter Brock published his monumental
Pacifism in the United States from the Colonial Era to the
First World War. The scope of his subject precluded his searching into
every manuscript collection that might bear some relation to it, and he relied
heavily on printed sources. The limited number of published works on Mennonite
history is reflected in his footnotes and bibliography. Walter Klaassen leaned
heavily on Brock for his interpretation of the American scene, since his own
scholarly work has been in the European Anabaptist sources. There is a danger
in this process that, in spite of passing through the hands of two very
distinguished modern scholars, the material is no better than the sources
available to Mennonite historians 50 or 75 years ago.
The danger of allowing this recycled history to determine our understanding of
our own heritage is compounded by the fact that Brock made assumptions that
went beyond his somewhat limited sources in describing the position held by
Mennonites on key issues, notably on the payment of taxes. The first mention
of any Mennonite attitude on this question involved Mennonite settlers in the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in . Brock noted that they “were able to obtain exemption by the
payment of militia fines, against which — unlike the Quakers — they had no
deep-seated scruples of conscience,” but that they petitioned in
(sic) for relief from militia fines,
“not because of any fundamental objection to this alternative to service
(for was it not merely rendering Caesar his due?), but on account of
their poverty as frontiersmen eking out a bare subsistence.” He cited as his
only source Harry A. Brunk’s History of Mennonites in
Virginia, but Brunk does not make any of the statements I have quoted;
he is quite clear in his statement that conscience was involved.
Virginia Mennonites petitioned the authorities in Williamsburg for relief from
militia fines in and again in
. No copy of these petitions is known to be
extant and we know of the contents only from the brief minutes entered in the
Journal of the House of Burgesses. Since the
Virginia lawmakers exempted Quakers from payment of militia fines for the
first time in , it is not surprising that
Mennonites sought the same privilege, which was granted them by the House of
Burgesses in .
Their motives in petitioning for exemption were explained in a Mennonite
petition of , which asked that the earlier
privilege be restored. Militia bills passed during the Revolutionary War had
taken it away and enrolled conscientious objectors in the militia, once again
making them subject to fines. This petition, signed by 73 “members of the
Menonist Church in behalf of themselves and their religious Brethren,”
declared that their forefathers had come “to America to Seek Religious
Liberty; this they have enjoyed, except by the Infliction of penalties for not
bearing Arms which for some time lay heavy on them. But on a representation,
and their situation being made known to the Honorable the Legislature, they
were indulged with an exemption from said penalties until some few years past,
when by a revisal of the Militia Law they were again enrolled and are now
subject to the penalties aforesaid.” (The original petition is in the Virginia
State Library.)
This petition and one offered the previous
year by Rockingham County Mennonites and Brethren did not succeed in changing
the law, and the payment of fines was the subject of occasional petitions from
all three of the peace churches. What is significant about the
Virginia petition is its statement that
payment of militia fines violated the liberty of conscience that Mennonites
otherwise enjoyed and that this was true under the king as well as during and
after the Revolution. It would appear to me impossible to square this
contemporary Mennonite document with the interpretation that Mennonites paid
militia fines as merely rendering Caesar his due!
The conscientious objection to payment of a fine or equivalent to militia duty
in Virginia on the eve of the Revolution might help us in understanding the
position of Pennsylvania Mennonites. There was no compulsory militia law in
Pennsylvania prior to , so no question of
fines or other equivalent would have arisen as early as it did in Virginia.
In Pennsylvania authorities requested
voluntary contributions from those who scrupled against bearing arms and the
Continental Congress itself made a similar appeal. Records of the county
committees entrusted with collecting this money suggest that it had a mixed
reception. Objections were heard very early, however, against levying
contributions from conscientious objectors on a purely voluntary basis. In
the Pennsylvania Assembly debated
imposing a set amount as a special tax on non-associators. They read petitions
from the Quakers and from the Mennonites and some members of the Church of the
Brethren. The meaning of these petitions seems perfectly clear. A well-known
military historian understood them to mean that “not a few Quakers and
Mennonites joined to oppose not only the Association but any tax levied in
lieu thereof.” (Arthur J. Alexander, “Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography, ⅬⅩⅨ, , page 16.)
This would follow logically from the position taken by Virginia Mennonites,
who were closely related to the Pennsylvania congregations.
When a Militia Law was enacted in in
Pennsylvania, no provision was made for the exemption of conscientious
objectors, and a special tax was imposed on them in lieu of military service.
It was this tax that was under discussion among Franconia Mennonites when a
majority of the preachers opposed Christian Funk’s contention that it ought to
be paid. I am well aware that Pennsylvania Mennonites felt uneasy with the new
revolutionary regime and declined sending a formal petition to the legislature
in since it would involve addressing them as
“the representatives of the freemen of Pennsylvania.” Hostility to the new
government may well have colored the attitude of Funk’s opponents, but it does
not explain why they opposed payment of this particular tax and not
of all taxes levied by the new state. There is no hint in any
official document, newspaper, letter, or other contemporary source that any
Mennonite in Pennsylvania refused payment of any other tax. Surely there would
be some notice taken by someone of tax resistance, particularly if it were on
the quasi-political ground that the new government had no legitimate
authority. On the other hand, reluctance to pay a tax levied in lieu of
military service would square with the Virginia documents, the obvious
sense of the petition, and the minutes of
the Church of the Brethren annual meetings that refer to persons with
conscientious objection against paying for substitutes and paying the tax
(singular).
I do not know that this leads us very far on our present quest. But it is
sufficient, I hope, to indicate that Mennonites have expressed “deep-seated
scruples of conscience” and “fundamental objection to this alternative to
military service.”
The edition included this
op-ed from Harold R. Regier:
The sovereign Lord and the sovereign nation will be in tension at Minneapolis
when the General
Conference, in official session, will be “In Search of Christian Civil
Responsibility.”
Will we be ready at Minneapolis to decide issues related to paying those taxes
required of the state used for death-threatening militarism and weapons
building? Much depends on how adequately congregations study and discuss
The Rule of the Sword and The
Rule of the Lamb prior to Minneapolis. Much depends on adequate
congregational representation. And much depends on an openness to hear each
other and the leading of God’s Spirit.
What are specific questions we must answer at Minneapolis?
What is the biblical teaching on civil responsibility and civil
disobedience? Are Christians ever called to civil disobedience?
If civil disobedience may at times be a Christian response to government,
what conditions or principles guide that response? Is the payment of taxes
used for war purposes one such condition?
If “war tax” resistance is a Christian response to a government’s
militarism and to the nuclear arms race, to what extent and in what ways
should that response be encouraged and initiated? Is conscientious
objection to paying for war in today’s context equivalent to conscientious
objection to physical participation in war in the past?
Should General Conference and other Mennonite institutions honor
employees’ requests that the portion of taxes used for military purposes
not be withheld from their paychecks? Should Mennonite employers even go
beyond this and refuse to be “war tax” collectors for the state for any of
its employees?
Is the bottom line for the Minneapolis conference the question of tax
withholding? Not necessarily. Other options for faithfulness and witness may
be discovered. Our search for Christian civil responsibility must be
open-ended rather than locked into the consideration of only one kind of
action. However, the withholding question is a very important one on which we
are committed to making a clear decision.
The withholding question is significant, but not because this is the only
alternative for the employee. There are other ways to have less tax withheld.
Possibilities include refiling a tax form to include allowances for expected
(“war tax”) deductions, forming an alternative employing agency, or
contributing up to 50 percent of salary to charitable causes. The withholding
issue’s greatest significance lies with the questions of corporate
responsibility and the issue of church as an agent of the state.
I would suggest five reasons for the conference to consider honoring requests
from persons asking that their taxes not be withheld. (1) Honoring these
requests would eliminate the discrimination between ordained and nonordained
employees. In the
U.S., ordained
employees are considered “self-employed” by the tax department and are exempt
from withholding regulations. Nonordained persons have to follow a more
difficult procedure to enable resistance. Currently at least four ordained
employees of the General Conference offices are not voluntarily paying the
military portion of their taxes. (2) Honoring nonwithholding requests would
represent a corporate peace witness rather than leaving such witness and
action solely to the individual. (3) A corporate conference voice and action
would make a much stronger witness for peace and justice than lone voices here
and there. (4) Nonwithholding would be one appropriate way to initiate a test
of the constitutionality of requiring church agencies to collect taxes for the
state. (5) This corporate action builds on our Anabaptist theology of peace
and takes seriously the way our financial resources contribute to warmaking.
My hope for Minneapolis is that the General Conference Mennonite Church will
act to do something together about our nations’ militarism. This
could be corporate action regarding withholding “war taxes.” This could be a
commitment to a large-scale symbolic resistance to “war tax” payment
(e.g. “each” Mennonite withholding $10 and
explaining why). As a conference we could send a strong message to our
governments regarding militarism and the taxation which supports it. We could
issue a “war tax” statement to be shared with the larger church (other
denominations) as well as to our governments. We could make a stronger effort
to promote the World Peace Tax Fund Act in the
U.S. and instigate
other alternatives in Canada.
These are only suggestions. Delegates need to think of other options.
Minneapolis will be a failure if we conclude that “everyone do what is right
in their own eyes.” Minneapolis will be a success if we take some large or
small step toward corporate responsibility and action.
He began by noting the paucity of charity by American Mennonites is devoted to “the crucial urgency of tragic situations in the Third World” compared to how much is spent domestically.
“It appears our dedication somehow is absorbed in our words which seem to psychologically liberate us to expand lavishly on the home front.”
While I respect individual conviction, I am cool toward the effectiveness or the witness of withholding taxes.
(In recent months I have been going over old magazines and clipping articles related to war taxes.
There has been a rash of articles on this subject every 6–10 years in the past decades.)
In , the U.S. federal budget increased 48 percent for defense, space, and foreign affairs (probably not even keeping up with inflation).
The human-resources part of the budget jumped 378 percent during the same decade.
Not all these programs are effective, yet they represent an attempt to cope with areas of great need.
When we criticize government expenditures, let us remember that we Mennonites have been increasing our budgets in North American institutional and church developments rather than for that part of the “one in Christ” where poverty is indescribably great.
In short: “Until we have done what we ought we should not say too much to other segments of society.”
Furthermore, Shelly felt that there was an overemphasis on war as a source of violence.
Alcohol, reckless driving, and abortion, were also examples of violence that deserved at least as much attention.
Finally, the way to peace, he felt, was not through civil disobedience or
protest or peace witnessing, but simply through spreading the gospel and
getting more people to adopt Christian values. For example: “during the
massacre in Uganda almost all Christians refused to shoulder guns.” So
Mennonites should stop arguing about taxes and rededicate themselves to
missionary work.
Kenneth G. Bauman penned an op-ed for the edition, from the point of view of
“some of us”.
Bauman thought the Bible offered little or no support for war tax resistance.
Jesus did not counsel it, even when pitched a softball. Paul explicitly
said Christians should pay their taxes to Rome and the Roman Empire wasn’t
exactly peaceful. Those examples of civil disobedience found in the Bible never
touch on war taxes or on conscientious objection to government spending.
Mennonites, he felt, shouldn’t just skip over this on the way to making their
own independent moral judgments about war taxes.
Bauman also challenged the view articulated in Richard K. MacMaster’s essay
that war tax resistance had strong footing in historical Mennonite practice:
A good historical development of this issue is found in Walter Klaassen’s
pamphlet Mennonites and War Taxes. A summary is
found on pages 40–41 in The Rule of the Lamb. The
only groups that refused taxation were the Hutterites and the Franconia
Conference in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War. The issue was
probably not “war taxes” but rather who was the legitimate government, the
British or the United States? Recent Mennonite scholars hold the traditional view.
Check the writings of Guy Hershberger in War, Peace, and Nonresistance (page 369),
Harold S. Bender’s “Taxation” in The Mennonite Encyclopedia,
and Robert Kreider’s “Anabaptists and the State” in The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision.
Kreider states, “The Anabaptists agreed unanimously
that the Christian owes obedience to the civil authorities insofar as the
prior claims of God are not violated in those duties. The Christian gives this
obedience freely and not grudgingly. He pays taxes, tithes, interest, and
customs as required by the magistracy. No evidence can be found to
substantiate the frequently made accusation that the Anabaptists refused to
pay these obligations” (page 190).
The new threat of nuclear war, Bauman thought, was not a reason to rethink this
established wisdom. After all, the murder of one person and the obliteration of
millions are both terrible sins: “Is the biblical teaching on the sacredness of
life on a sliding scale or is even one person’s life sacred?”
Some of us respect the individual conscience as we want our conscience to be
respected, but we are not convinced that those who believe in withholding
taxes have seriously considered all the options. Several alternatives are (1)
filing suit against the government to recover taxes, (2) setting up a
subsidiary corporation, and (3) greater efforts toward a World Peace Tax Fund.
We are grieved that in this hour when we need a united witness against
militarism, with selective service a real possibility (which will also include
women), we are divided. We object to our peace position being questioned
because we do not see withholding taxes as being biblical or
Anabaptist-Mennonite.
Some of us are waiting for open dialogue on the tax issue. The other side has
not been formally presented in the General Board, nor was it given adequate
representation at the Consultation on Civil Responsibility at Elkhart, nor has
it been given a fair presentation in The Mennonite.
We question whether the midtriennium conference will change the situation.
Marie J. Janzen, in a letter
to the editor, wrote that she thought Bauman was “attempt[ing] to find a letter of the law that would justify us not to refuse taxes.”
It is true, for instance, that Peter was referring to the Jewish leaders and
not to the state when he said we must obey God rather than men, but the
principle would be the same in either case, wouldn’t it?
It seems to me that the Christian gospel speaks to the needs of each age, and
different things need to be done in different ages. There would have been no
need to warn early Christians to drive carefully lest someone’s life might be
taken in an accident. But today there certainly is. When Jesus said to his
disciples that they would do greater things than he had done, didn’t he imply
that there would be a need for greater things in later ages than there was in
the time of the early church? The common person at that time had no rights, no
influence on government. In a democracy we Christians have responsibilities
the early Christians did not have. I don’t have to pay income tax; I don’t
know whether I would have the courage to refuse if I did. But I certainly
admire the ones who do refuse to pay taxes for conscience’ sake.
…Of course, there may be other alternatives which are more effective than the
refusal to pay taxes. For instance, as my sister suggested, if we would deluge
the government with letters and with telephone calls and insist that this arms
race must stop — or at least that they give us the right to have a peace
tax — that might do more good.
On the other hand, David A. Somner wrote in to praise what he called Bauman’s “clear, biblical, historically accurate” statement.
A
letter from Gary Martin, written on but not published until , thought that the war tax issue was overshadowing the fact
that Mennonites had lost their way and were neglecting some of the foundations
of their faith and practice. This was followed by a letter from Don Kaufman,
in which he related an anecdote from a repentant soldier and thought it “could
be instructive for us too as we wrestle with the implications of the Christian
gospel concerning war taxes.”
A letter from David C. Janzen, dated , published in the
edition, said that “[b]ased on our congregational meeting on the issue, it
would appear that the [war tax] protesters are a small but very vocal
minority.” He thought the conference was a waste of time trying to relitigate
an issue that had been decided by Jesus way back when.
A letter from Eugene Klassen, dated but also not published until , also took the line that the Bible was black-and-white about
taxpaying: “Romans 13
clearly tells us to pay taxes to whom taxes are due. Yet we allow the use of
our conference time, money, and publications to debate both sides of the
issue.”
Drumroll please. The conference was held, and all of these years of kicking the
can down the road and avoiding a decision came to an end as a general assembly
of the Mennonite General Conference, after lengthy study and debate, concluded:
Moved that we request the General Board of our conference to engage in a
serious and vigorous search to use all legal, legislative, and administrative
avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption from the legal
requirements that the General Conference withhold income taxes from the wages
of its employees. If no relief can be found within a three-year period, they
shall again bring the question to the attention of the conference.
So… the can kicked another three years further down the road. Well, what were
you expecting?
Seven hundred persons came to the bitter cold and deep snow of Minneapolis,
, “in search of Christian
civil responsibility.”
…Would our General Conference grant an employee’s request to no longer
withhold from her salary that portion of the income tax which goes toward
military expenditures?
Many predicted a collision course. Minneapolis would be a showdown.
The drama has happened. And the unexpected far outdid the expected.
only a few
hundred people had registered. Polarized positions surfaced in many
congregations. There was talk of maneuvering, boycott, and schism.
The annual Council of Commissions met at Minneapolis on
to do the usual review and
projection of
GC program and
budget. Hardly a session went by without reference of concern about the
midtriennium.
By it became obvious that
God’s Spirit was again among us in unusual ways.
In faith, space had been reserved for 500 people. Over 700 came.
We found the issue is not “yes-no” “either-or” regarding war taxes. It
includes our lifestyle. Do we live in ways that share Christ’s salvation,
love, and justice to all. This is not just for a few brave radicals.
Each of us needs to choose again and again to let our light shine.
We found the issue is not Cornelia Lehn and civil disobedience. It is
obedience to Jesus in today’s world.
We found the issue is of deep concern to our youth. About 100 persons present
were under 25. And they spoke up. Their generation most directly faces the
nuclear shadow. If we want to leave them a heritage of peace we must address
our faith to this global threat.
The main resolution (above) passed 1,218 to 134.
The following issue expanded on that first draft of history. It included the
details that delegates from 176 churches were represented at the midtriennium,
that the 700 attendees included “almost 500 delegates and more than 200
visitors” who at one point broke up into “78 small groups”, and further noted:
Following the… conference the General Board set up a six-person task force to
implement the decision of the delegates. The persons for this committee have
been appointed and upon acceptance their names will be released.
A
later article named them as Delton Franz, Duane Heffelbower, Bob Hull,
Heinz Janzen, Ernie Regehr, and Ben Sprunger, and noted that “[t]he task force
had its first meeting in Columbus,
Ohio.” Later
Stanley Perisho, Chuck Boyer, Winifred Beachy, Janet Reedy, and Gordon Zook
were added to the list.
Though the conference officially started , most people arrived
in time to watch a group
from the Mennonite Collegiate Institute in Gretna, Manitoba, present
The Blowing and the Bending, a musical drama
highlighting the themes of wartime intolerance for conscientious objectors and
Mennonite struggles with the war spirit.
Some of the themes played out in the small groups and by the symposium were
the following:
the gospel is first, pacifism is secondary.
it is important to be legal.
it is better to be faithful.
a witness for peace has to have the integrity of an appropriate
lifestyle.
the government is more willing to accept conscientious objectors than the
church.
there are other social and political issues which need to be spoken
to.
a corporate witness is/is not the route to go.
militarism today is a qualitatively different problem than anything
civilization has had to face before.
the response to militarism is a theological and faith issue.
When one delegate called for a show of hands to indicate who had done some
protest against nuclear proliferation and militarism about 20 percent of the
assembly said they had.
Though most of the delegates who spoke during the afternoon plenary session
admitted they were troubled by worldwide military expenditures over one
billion dollars daily, they nevertheless said the church as a corporate body
should not engage in illegal activities in its witness against war
preparations. Instead speakers urged alternatives.
A sentiment often expressed, however, was that the church, while avoiding
illegal actions, should actively support its members who engage in civil
disobedience on the basis of conscience.
Roy Vogt, economics professor from Winnipeg, Manitoba, berated the assembly
for loading the responsibility for witness upon isolated individuals. “It is
morally reprehensible,” he said, “to give only moral support. We must provide
financial and legal support for those prophets who have arisen from our
middle-class ranks.”
In contrast to the social activists at the conference Dan Dalke, pastor from
Bluffton, Ohio, castigated the social activists for making pacifism a
religion. “We will never create a Utopia,” he said. “Jesus didn’t come to
clean up social issues. Our job is to evangelize the world. A peace witness is
secondary.”
Some of the statements were personal. A businessman confessed that while he
could easily withhold paying military taxes on the basis of conscience, he was
frightened. “I am scared of being different, of being embarrassed, of being
alienated from my community. Unless I get support from the Mennonite church I
will keep on paying taxes.”
Alvin Beachy of Newton, Kansas, said the church seemed to be shifting from a
quest to being faithful to the gospel to being legal before the government.
By the small groups were
into serious wrestling with these open-ended statements: (1) The biblical
teaching on obedience to God and its relation to civil responsibility is… (2)
Civil disobedience may be a faithful Christian response when… (3) With respect
to whether the General Conference should withhold the taxes of employees who
would rather practice war-tax refusal, we urge that… (4) With respect to the
threat of militarism in North America, we feel that the General Conference as
a Christian body should now…
By the groups were supposed to have
their consensus ready for the findings committee. Many of the statements came
later in the evening, and the findings committee of six began to sift through
the material. They spent a good part of the night at it, got up again
, had it typed (three
pages, single spaced), and by 800 copies were being distributed.
Action on the floor did not, however, center on the findings committee
statement. Immediately after the Bible lecture a ballot was distributed to the delegates. It
asked for a “yes” or “no” vote on this question: “Shall the General Conference
Mennonite Church refuse to withhold from salaries and refuse to remit to the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service a portion of the federal tax due in those cases in which this
is requested by employees on the grounds of conscience, even though such
action on the part of the conference is against the law?”
There was a flurry of action on why the midtriennium conference organizers had
brought this question to the assembly so early in the day. Conference
president Elmer Neufeld replied that the intention was to bring the question
to the delegates in a clear and forthright manner. The General Board executive
committee had decided to present the main question of the midtriennium in
ballot form as a way of helping the decision-making process. After some
discussion on the procedure Kenneth Bauman of Berne, Indiana, moved the
ballot. It was seconded and discussion began.
Shortly after the midmorning break David Habegger of Wichita, Kansas, brought
in a substitute motion. It stated: “Moved that we request, the General Board
of our conference to engage in a serious and vigorous search to use all legal,
legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving conscientious objection
exemption from the
U.S. legal
requirement that the conference withhold income taxes from the wages of its
employees. If no relief can be found within a three-year period they shall
proceed to a constitutional test of the First Amendment by whatever means
appear most appropriate at the time, including the option of honoring
employees’ requests that their tax not be withheld.”
This sparked a miniprocedural debate. Was a substitute motion the same as an
amendment? Checking their judgment against Robert’s Rules
of Order, the three-man procedural committee said it was. There was
some objection to the ruling.
It was a key ruling. From the tenor of discussion, and from the statements
which 75 churches brought to the midtriennium, it was apparent that most
GC
congregations were not willing to vote “yes” on the first motion. If the first
motion had come to a vote the decision would likely have been against those in
favor of not paying war taxes.
Hence the substitute motion was debated first. In short order it was also
amended by Herman Andres of Newton, Kansas. The amendment carried by a vote of
906-to-458. The amendment changed the second sentence to read: “If no relief
can be found within the three-year period they shall again bring the question
to the conference.” The vote was taken just prior to the
break.
Gordon Kaufman, professor at Harvard Divinity School in Boston, probably made
the key speech of the morning, thereby paving the way for delegates to be
sympathetic to the substitute motion.
Kaufman said he was puzzled by all the concern about legality. He commented,
“The early church was illegal. The Anabaptists were illegal. Illegality is not
a Christian question. We talk as if we are concerned about a massive
illegality. We are not asked to sign pledge cards. The question is are we
willing to test the law that asks the church to collect taxes? We need to test
the law of separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. In this
country it is a matter of civil responsibility to test the law.”
After a rushed noon break — “Here they come,” said one restaurateur — the
final session of two hours began. A vote was taken on the substitute motion
and it passed by a plurality of nine-to-one, 1,218-to-134 votes.
A miracle had happened. It was essentially a consensus. Longtime peace
advocate Henry Fast of Newton, Kansas, called it “an historic moment.”
At this point people made editorial comments about the findings statement. As
a summary of what people at the conference thought it attempted to cover the
spectrum of conviction. Most comments were affirmative and on a voice vote the
conference adopted it. It noted that the world is “caught in a tragic system
of threat and counter-threat, violence and counterviolence.”
“We want to be obedient citizens, but even more we want to be obedient to
Jesus Christ… We are convinced that citizens of Christ’s kingdom must choose
ways to speak and act against this suicidal race to universal destruction.”
During the afternoon session various people made capsule comments and appeals.
One of the appeals was to take an offering to assist those who are resisting
the payment of war taxes.…
The offering realized $3,030.
The magazine helpfully tallied the delegates by district.
Curiously, I thought, the Eastern District was the most well-represented, with
81% of their votes represented by either delegates or proxies. I saw some
evidence in our last episode that the
Eastern District might be particularly conservative on this issue. The least
well-represented of the United States districts was the Pacific, with only 46%
of its voters represented. Canada turned up to a greater extent than some had
worried, with 57% of voters from the Conference of Mennonites in Canada voting.
The edition gave a summary
of the report of the findings committee. Excerpts:
Never in our history have so many engaged their energies so extensively in
preparation for a conference decision.
We want to be obedient citizens, but even more we want to be obedient to Jesus
Christ. In this quest we are aware that the Bible and our people’s experience
do not give us fully explicit answers on the tax issue. At this moment,
therefore, these are our best discernments.
As Christians we must speak and act. We hope that Mennonites will support sons
and daughters in their leadings to witness for Christ — even in such acts as
refusing to pay taxes destined for war. This means prayerful, moral, and
financial support. Our tradition has been to be a quiet people. We yearn to
act and to witness in sensitive ways which exhaust every acceptable legal
process available to the constituency.
We encourage the General Board to work at developing alternative possibilities
for the handling of tax withholding and to work in collaboration with other
church bodies and institutions in seeking to extricate itself from the role of
being a tax-collecting agency.
It is easy to call governments and conference offices to faithfulness. Perhaps
the most urgent call proceeding from this conference is a call to each
other — to individual church members, to families, and to congregations — a
call to renewed faithfulness. What are we prepared to do in revising our style
of life as affluent witnessing against the powers of darkness in this world?
How does my life vocation fulfill the claims of Christ for this age?
We yearn for unity in our churches. We want to proceed together in our
pilgrimage of obedience but don’t want to tarry long in fear and indecision.
We want to affirm those individuals whose consciences are sensitive on issues
not fully shared by all.
Reactions continued to reverberate through the letters-to-the-editor column and
op-eds:
Mary Gerber,
on told the Mennonites who
weren’t resisting taxes that they were in the right and shouldn’t feel
guilty about it.
[S]everal of the church statements and many individuals expressed a
feeling of guilt that they were not following in the steps of those
“prophets” who were refusing to pay a portion of their tax. In order to
compensate for their personal unwillingness to break the law they
enthusiastically offered to provide moral and financial support for those
who did.
…[P]aying someone else to perform what is also my moral duty is
blatant hypocrisy.
If we… honestly wish to follow Christ in all, we will respond as he did
in similar circumstances. We will love and correct that brother, not aid
and abet him.
Ralph A. Ewert,
on , suggested that people
(in the U.S.
anyway) who did not want to pay a percentage of their income taxes should
figure out how much they would have to donate to charity in order to reduce
their taxable income enough to eliminate that much tax and then donate
away.
Mark Penner,
on related the temple
tax and render-unto-Caesar episodes from the Bible as slam-dunk reasons to
oppose tax resistance, as though nobody had thought of that before.
Jack L. Mace,
on found that the Bible
suggested a possible new if counterintuitive technique of tax witness:
While I would like to stop warring uses of my taxes by refusing to pay,
and giving instead to peaceful purposes, I know the
IRS
will collect the money — in spades — and my witness will be just to the
collectors and their supervisors. The government will not prosecute such
tax resistance, because that would draw too much public attention.
I want to witness to the policy enactment levels of government. My study
of the issue brought me to the words of Jesus in
Matthew 5:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil, but if anyone
strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone
would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if
anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”
These words speak of positive responses to negative problems, and of a
method to make a tax witness virtually impossible to be ignored by even
the most recalcitrant legislator; a “second mile theology of witness.”
Taking these words seriously led me to decide that with a letter of
protest to the
IRS
I will pay my full taxes. Then I will send an amount hopefully equal to
the “war taxes” to my senators and/or representative in a check made out
to the government along with a letter of witness.
I will try to find a way to give the money so that disposition on the
congressional floors might be expected — if that be possible — but even
if the legislators send the check back they have had to come to grips
with its existence and its accompanying witness. The returned check would
then call for another letter containing the check, which again could not
be ignored.
The letter will contain a brief statement of my conscientious objection
to killing and its implications to the use of my tax dollars for war.
Then it will turn to the disposition of the check. Explaining
respectfully that since they are acting against my will as a provider for
the military machine with my tax dollars, I will ask as diligent action
on my behalf for the use of the money enclosed for the
proliferation of peace. The money is to be used by the government within
the framework of not doing violence to my conscience. I will list some
uses of the money which would violate my conscience, and why — being
careful not to suggest specific uses I would desire. The whole idea is to
get legislators to dialogue with their conscience on this issue.
I will actually split the check, sending at least two letters. Our new
Kansas senator, Nancy Kassebaum, needs to be made aware of our faith
early on. On the other hand, Robert Dole is one of the most recalcitrant
senators at the point of military spending. He had the temerity to come
to our Mid-Kansas
MCC
relief sale in his campaign last year and speak on the “need” for
increased military spending. It may even be advantageous for my
congressman, Dan Glickman, to receive a letter with part of the money. He
is a Democrat, and with Dole and Kassebaum being Republicans he might
just act as political conscience to the others. In each case of a split
check, all recipients will be told that there are others and the total
amount of the checks written.
After sharing this idea on the conference floor, there was sufficient
informal response between sessions that I decided to share more in this
letter and to invite anyone else who wishes to join me in this effort. It
would be desirable to make a coordinated effort so that the letters
arrive within a relatively short time for the greatest impact. It might
even be good to split up the amount into quarterly payments to be sent at
strategic times throughout the congressional year.
If you are interested in dialogue on this idea or if you plan to try it
with me, I would appreciate hearing from you and receiving your input.
Stanley E. Kaufman,
on expressed his disappointment
at the timidity of the “too-reluctant” Minneapolis resolution. He urged
The Mennonite to publish frequent updates on the
work of the task force searching for a “legal alternative” along with
suggestions for how people could help that work, and that people who do
independent outreach to officials keep The
Mennonite informed of their actions. He also said that while the
institutional church dithers, “each of us individuals [should]
consider stronger forms of witness”.
Direct tax resistance should not be forgotten for three years but should
be actively debated in our congregations and experimented with in our
lives. One of the biggest barriers to this is not knowing who and how
many others are currently engaged in tax resistance. I am refusing to pay
voluntarily my telephone tax (being a student, I have no income), but I’m
finding even this relatively simple stance rather difficult because I
feel I’m standing alone. I suggest that The
Mennonite could provide a forum — perhaps through a special
column — in which all those resisting taxes could find each other and
communicate experiences they’ve had, arguments they’ve encountered,
statements of the bases of their actions,
etc.
In our efforts to be faithful to God in this matter — to attempt to
change U.S.
military policy through tax witness — we need to be “wise as serpents and
harmless as doves.” We need to refine our strategies, improve our
communication, and support each other’s involvements.
It appeared that our over-politeness got in our way to deal effectively
with the issue at hand. It appeared as though the issue at hand was put
on the back burner to simmer to give us Mennonites more time. More time
for what? It will give a few people more time to pursue other legal
alternatives to the specific tax issue. It will also give many of us
grass-roots people in the church more time to remain silent and not be
directly faced with a Mennonite stand on the issue. It is those long,
noncommitted silent periods which trouble me… A firm and committed voice
by the Mennonite people needs to be heard in our world now.
Gaynette Friesen,
on , wrote that though “we
still have nearly 2½ years to resolve ourselves, hopefully as a unified
body, to the question of war taxes,” that’s no reason to slack off.
The edition gave another update on
the activities of the “task force”:
Two meetings of the task force on taxes have been held. The task force has
been expanded to include representation from the Church of the Brethren, the
Friends, and the Mennonite Church. This group of 11 is expected by the
participating churches to establish the legal, legislative, and administrative
agenda of a corporate discipleship response to military taxes.
The Minneapolis resolution mandated the task force to seek “all legal,
legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector
exemption” for the GCMC
from the withholding of federal income taxes from its employees. (About 46
percent of U.S.
federal taxes are used for the military.)
At their second meeting () the
task force members rejected administrative avenues. Within the scope of
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service or Revenue Canada regulations this would involve extending
ordination, commissioning, or licensing status to all employees of church
institutions. It was a consensus of the task force that this would be an
administrative loophole. It would not develop a conscientious objector
position in response to military taxes.
However, both the judicial and legislative options will be pursued
simultaneously. Plans for the legislative option are the more developed.
For the legislative route to work, says Delton Franz, director of the
Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section office in Washington,
D.C., the
problem of conscience and taxes will have to be defined carefully. Currently a
paper focusing on the reasons the General Conference has a major problem of
conscience with collecting taxes from its employees is being drafted. After it
has been reviewed and okayed it will be sent along with cover letters by
leaders of the historic peace churches to congresspersons representing major
constituency concentrations and those on key subcommittees. Later on church
members will also be asked to write letters. It is important, says Franz, to
define the problem of conscience in such a way that it will motivate
congresspersons to work vigorously for the bill.
Another follow-up to these initiatives will be a visit to Washington of the
most influential peace church leaders to solicit support from selected members
of Congress and to obtain a sponsor for an exemption bill.
In preparation for the next meeting of the task force in November law firms
are being contacted for advice on optimum judicial procedures should the task
force decide to initiate a case as plaintiff. However, there is doubt that a
judicial process would be productive.
There is a possibility that a parallel task force will emerge in Canada. Ernie
Regehr, director of Project Ploughshares, Waterloo, Ontario, notes the
necessity of defining the question of militarism in Canadian terms for
Canadians. Regehr is attempting to gather a Canadian task force.
This mirrored a growing enthusiasm for the Peace Tax Fund legislation in many
organizations and congregations of the General Conference. This would
ultimately allow Mennonites to pass their well-worn buck all the way to
Washington,
D.C., and let
Congress take the blame for further delays.
New Call to Peacemaking
The New Call to Peacemaking initiative continued in .
Tax resistance was on the agenda at the follow-up meeting for churches in the central United States in .
Bruce Chrisman
In , a hundred participants,
mostly Mennonites, but also Quakers, Brethren “plus several Catholics and a
Presbyterian” came to
the fourth Mid-America New Call to Peacemaking.
“Conscription of Youth and Wealth” was the theme, and tax resistance was
again high on the agenda:
In the workshop on conscription of wealth Bob Hull, secretary for peace
and social concerns of the General Conference, suggested some
alternatives to paying war taxes. Others offered their own suggestions.
It was decided that resisting war taxes is a complicated affair and that
each person should decide according to their conscience. Several
expressed the desire to pay taxes for education, welfare, and other
social services, and wished there was an alternative such as the World
Peace Tax Fund. [Richard] McSorley, who has had contacts on Capitol Hill,
responded by saying that until there is a large grass-roots movement of
tax resistance the
WPTF
doesn’t stand a chance.
The latter half of the workshop included sharing by Bruce Chrisman,
Carbondale, Illinois, who is involved in a federal criminal case, one of
two in the
U.S.
involving tax resistance. His case is significant because it will provide
a precedent either for or against tax refusal on the basis of conscience
and religious convictions.
In Chrisman received draft counseling
from James Dunn, pastor of the Champaign-Urbana (Illinois) Mennonite
Church. He made a covenant with God to only pay taxes for humanitarian
purposes. Since that time he has paid no federal income taxes. It wasn’t
until this year, however, that the government prosecuted him, charging
that he willfully failed to disclose his gross income in
. “Willful” is the key term, because
Chrisman claims he conscientiously chose not to disclose his income. He
feels the government has purposely waited to build its case.
“The government wants to establish a precedent in order to prosecute
other tax resisters.” But Chrisman is confident. “We’re going to win and
establish a precedent the other way,” he said. He believes he has a
strong case. Part of that strength comes from his affiliation with the
General Conference Mennonite Church. He read from a statement from the
triennium which opposes war taxes and
supports those who resist paying them. “That’s a beautiful statement!” he
exclaimed, explaining that it has important legal implications for his
case.
In a moving conclusion to his talk Chrisman said that when he first
appeared in court this year
he was “scared to death.” “Today,” he said, “I have no fear in me. God
has given me an inner peace. I know I’m doing what he wants me to do.” No
one disagreed.
Chrisman would lose his court case.
On he was convicted
of failure to file (he filed, but the government contended the
information on the filing was not sufficient to make it legal).
During the pretrial hearings Judge J. Waldo Ackerman allowed Robert
Hull, secretary for peace and social concerns of the General
Conference, and Peter Ediger, director of Mennonite Voluntary
Service, to testify about Mennonite witness against war and
conscription of persons and money for war purposes. But the
testimony was disallowed at the trial.
Chrisman would ultimately be sentenced
to pay the taxes and court costs, to do a year of Mennonite Voluntary
Service, and to probation. He spun this as a victory of sorts:
“I’m amazed… I feel very good about the sentence. The alternative
service is probably the first sentence of its kind for a tax case. I
think it reflects the testimony in the trial and its influence on
the judge.”
Chrisman’s attorney filed an appeal of the conviction, which
was heard in , with the Mennonite General Conference filing an amicus curiae in Chrisman’s behalf.
Miscellany
A letter to the editor from Jacob T. Friesen described how he withheld a symbolic $13 from his income taxes “to gain attention and create opportunity to ‘dialogue for peace.’ ”
The issue told of the Manitoba Alliance Against Abortion, whose bank accounts had been frozen by the Canadian tax agency to pay for the taxes the organization’s president, Joe Borowski, had been refusing to pay for several years. The organization disputed that the funds belonged to the organization’s president and could thereby be seized, saying that the funds were meant for a legal battle against legal abortion. A letter-writing campaign by supporters of the group was credited for pressuring the government to abandon the seizure.
Chris Dueck, in the edition, called Mennonites out for complaining about Caesar’s war taxes while hoarding Caesar’s currency. “For us to refuse payment of taxes is to say ‘we want to keep the money we get through your military-economic policies, but we don’t want any of the guilt.’ The war tax issue is shedding guilt without shedding the selfish heart.”
In the edition, Gordon Houser looked into the New Creation Fellowship intentional community — which “was born out of the concern of a small group of people about the sad state of our society [and] a common involvement in simple living, war tax resistance, and prison reform.”
In , twenty people “from the General Conference Mennonite Church, the Mennonite Church, the Conservative Conference, and the Beachy Amish” met “to air trends within the Mennonite church and to share concerns.” Among those concerns, as expressed in a jointly-framed statement:
According to the direct command to pay taxes (Romans 13:6,7)
and according to the specific word of Christ on the payment of taxes to
“Caesar” (Matthew 22:15–22)
we believe we are under obligation to pay taxes levied by the law. We
regard taxation as the power of the state to collect monies needed for
its budget and not as voluntary contributions by citizens.
The Minneapolis conference
was given credit
for encouraging peace-minded clergy to come together and discuss the arms
race and peace advocacy.
William Stringfellow addressed the Church of the Brethren Symposium and suggested that the contemporary urban church should renounce its tax-exempt status. “since present tax privileges curtail the church’s freedom to speak out on important matters and keep it from engaging in tax resistance.”
[G]ood citizenship does not imply that we should obey our government
without regard for Christian conscience. Rather, good citizenship leads
us to work as a church and human community towards the establishment of
God’s kingdom on earth… We believe that Christ’s strength is in his
weakness and that the present aggressive stance of the world’s military
powers runs counter to our call to be peacemakers.
In the issue, Ferd Wiens
attacked “what may be called a ‘peace” cult” of
Mennonite flagellants
who, in his view, had turned the doctrine of nonresistance on its head to
make it a doctrine of civil disobedience — calling out promoters of war tax
resistance in particular.
Walter Regier agreed, writing that “[e]mphasis on world peace through demonstrations and nonpayment of taxes simply brings confusion into our ranks” and distracts from “more important issues that we face in our day… like abortion, homosexuality, and divorce”.
The U.S. branch
of
Pax
Christi (a Catholic peace movement) invited some of their Mennonite
counterparts to their annual convention in
.
Mennonites Bob Hull and Don Kaufman of Newton, Kansas, led a workshop on
tax resistance and the World Peace Tax Fund Act. Interest in this was
strong. About 40 persons, including some tax resisters, participated.
Hull is peace and social concerns director for the General Conference;
Kaufman is author of The Tax Dilemma: Praying for Peace, Paying for War.
In a private meeting with Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen, executive secretary
of Pax Christi
USA,
and Gordon Zahn, a Catholic conscientious objector in World War Ⅱ, Hull,
Kaufman, and William Keeney explained the General Conference resolution
on war taxes. Keeney, North Newton, Kansas, is director of the Consortium
on Peace Research, Education, and Development.
Although Pax Christi
USA,
supports the World Peace Tax Fund it has not responded to its members who
engage in war tax withholding and are requesting official support from
Pax Christi.
Albert H. Epp
felt that civil disobedience and other sorts of confrontation with
government “can ensnare a people in activities that make them obnoxious to
the general citizenry. It is ‘good’ deeds that earn respect and give us a
right to speak.” For this reason “It seems improper for Christians to start
at the point of urging illegal tax-resistance rather than first declaring a
church-wide month of prayer for a national crisis.”
In my congregation we took a poll on ideal ways to influence government.
We prefer to exhaust all legal means to achieve peace before we engage in
illegal maneuvers. Only 5 percent approved of refusing to pay one’s tax
as a protest. But in terms of practical, positive solutions, we found
that 65 percent approved the World Peace Tax Fund alternative; 85 percent
approved writing the President and Congress; 85 percent approved using
the ballot box to elect responsive leaders; and 89 percent approved
increased giving to decrease taxes.
But David Graber
responded that in his opinion “the demand to lay down our tax dollars
is a similar call to idolatry” as those that prompted the civil
disobedience of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. “Thank God for
Christians today who refuse to cooperate with our government’s demands
in Jesus’ name. Where is Epp’s recognition of their witness?”
And Mark S. Lawson added that the blessings of government that Epp
felt we should all be humbly grateful for weren’t all that. For
example: “My country forces me to cut my income below the taxable
level so I can obey both the laws of God and man. Religious liberty is
only for those who support the killing in wars financed by their tax
money.” He seconded the idea that only through “widespread tax
refusal” could pacifists pressure Congress into creating an
alternative for conscientious taxpayers.
C.B. Friesen
was more appreciative of Epp’s take. He trotted out the usual
Render Unto Caesar ⇒ Romans 13 ⇒ 1 Peter 2
biblical justification for submission to civil government and said
that those who counsel war tax resistance “mostly benefit their egos”
in service of their “own philosophies and pet theories”.
The Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section (U.S.)
met at . They
“formally supported the passage of the World Peace Tax Fund bill” but
“decided against sponsoring a vigorous campaign to promote Mennonite
participation in a war tax resistance campaign. Section members felt such a
resolution would not reflect the will of their constituent bodies.” So they
instead adopted the kick-the-can routine, passing “a resolution that the
section ‘is prepared to consider at its meeting a decision to promote participation in a war tax
resistance campaign.’ ” There seemed to be some acknowledgment of flaws in
the Peace Tax Fund bill:
The section said in resolution “that it is conscience that the
WPTF
legislation might not in itself force a significant reduction in military
spending, but it recognizes that it would provide funds for peacemaking
efforts and would be a witness against military spending.”
This is the twenty-seventh in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we enter the 1980s.
During the first and second world wars the Mennonite “presence” to the world was the shock of refusal to bear arms. That’s not an issue now; most military service is voluntary.
What are we refusing now?
Not many are doing it, but some Mennonites in the U.S. are refusing to pay the portion of their income tax which will be used for military expenditures.
For instance, Cornelia Lehn, director of children’s education for the General Conference, has shared this witness: “Finally I decided to give half of my income to relief and other church work and thus force the Internal Revenue Service to return that portion of my tax which they had already slated for military purposes…
“I realize that this is not the perfect answer… It is, however, the best answer I know at this time.
Finally I could no longer acquiesce and be part of something so diabolical as war.
I had to take a stand against it…
“I wish that my church, which believes in the way of peace, would as a body no longer gather money to help the government make war.
I wish all the members of our church would stand up in horror and refuse to allow it to happen.
Then the conference officers would be in a position to say to the government: ‘We will not give you our sons and daughters and we will not give you our money to kill others.
Allow us to serve our country in the way of peace.’ ”
Is Cornelia Lehn speaking as a prophet?
Does she have a word from the Lord to help us respond in a meaningful way to demonic forces?
Peter Ediger writes with prophetic urgency about what people like Cornelia Lehn are doing: “Do we know that there are hundreds and thousands of people out there waiting for a word from the church, waiting for some action from the church?
Have we some sense of the explosive evangelistic potential of this kind of action?
Do you know that the day of the police state is not only coming but that it is here in its roots, and the issue will not go away?”
Whether we follow Cornelia Lehn’s example or not, we would do well to have her sense of urgency about our own allegiance to the Prince of Peace and ask God for help in making our own faith relevant to our times.
The Commission on Home Ministries met in . Military conscription was prominent on the agenda (President Carter had recently revived military draft registration), but war tax resistance seems to have been pushed aside except for a brief mention:
Chairperson Don Steelberg asked, “How can we who are older support those facing this decision?”
[Robert] Hull replied, “If we counsel them to say no to registration then we should say no to paying war taxes.”
This was part of a “council of commissions” gathering.
Another report on that gathering mentioned the “Smoketown Consultation” rebellion of conservative Mennonites .
Three of these dissenters were at the council, and one, Albert Epp, reportedly “said the preparatory materials for the war tax conference in Minneapolis were slanted in favor of war tax resistance.”
The West Coast Mennonite Central Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation co-sponsored a “first annual” workshop on war tax resistance.
Local tax resisters told their stories.
Gray-haired Helen, a Friend, donates the amount of her military tax to organizations working on justice.
Diane works at a state institution for the mentally retarded and realized that military taxes take money away from human needs.
All hope for a mass movement by citizens but stressed the consistent commitment necessary.
They write letters of explanation to the Internal Revenue Service, editors of newspapers, their churches, members of Congress, the President.
They educate employers and bank officials of the possibility of their wages being garnisheed or a lien put on an account.
The IRS is sensitive to “principled tax refusal,” said Irwin Hagenauer [sic], retired social worker who now serves as volunteer resource person to those who would refuse war tax.
He gives advice on every method, from W-4 exemptions to war-crime deductions.
The edition carried an article by Weldon Schloneger on Biblical Authority that discussed the difficulty of interpreting even straightforward-sounding biblical passages in context, and urged charity toward other Christians with differing interpretations.
Among those verses he describes are Matthew 5:44 (“Love your enemies”) and Matthew 22:21 (“Render unto Caesar”) and he mentions how war tax resisters and their opponents each accept the authority of these verses, but interpret them differently.
The edition included another poem trying to drive home the point about taxpaying and complicity: “I fueled the fire / Pumped gas in the the furnaces at Buchenwald / Its flames have lingered within us, smoldering / Today I paid my taxes, that’s all” and so forth.
The edition included the article “Tax form for pacifists” by Colman McCarthy.
It started by pointing out taxpayer complicity with military spending, and “the hollowness of denouncing increases in the defense budget and ‘the wicked Pentagon’ [when c]itizens pay for both.”
The article took a detour into wishful thinking about the World Peace Tax Fund bill before finally returning home:
Without this kind of legislative relief conscientious objectors are left with three options: violate their moral values by financing the military, violate the tax laws by not paying, or earn so little income that it is not taxable.
Traditionally courts have had little patience with tax resisters.
Often judges mistakenly see those citizens as evaders, when actually they are pacifists who want to put their money where their convictions are.
According to William Samuel of the [National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund], cases of conscientious tax resistance have not only been increasing in recent years, but they have also been going on to higher courts of appeal.
In at Richmond the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments from three citizens claiming First and Ninth amendment rights not to pay taxes for military spending.
While Congress and the courts mull over the issue a few individuals are acting on their own.
Only blocks from the White House, Collective Impressions Printshop has been refusing for the past two years to send its federal withholding tax to the IRS.
Instead this corporation submits the money to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
The defiance of these pacifists unloosens only the smallest of screws in the U.S.’s vast military machine.
The arms-control agency politely returns the checks and eventually the IRS seizes the group’s bank account.
But it doesn’t seize its moral integrity or squash the option for dissent that is so crucial.
That issue also included an interview with Harold R. Regier and Hubert Schwartzentruber, until recently the peace and social concerns secretaries for the Mennonite General Conference and the Mennonite Church respectively.
The former, when asked what the highlights of his term had been, mentioned the General Conference resolution that had announced church support for war tax resisters, and also God and Caesar:
This little newsletter of information and dialogue about war taxes brought together a community of people struggling with the question of supporting with our money what we could not participate in personally.
We discovered increasing numbers of people responsive to the dilemma of being Christian peacemakers and their support of war with tax monies.
Working on the war tax issue as a new frontier for Anabaptist discipleship was perhaps the single most exciting highlight of my as PSC secretary.
A special Commission on Home Ministries supplement, dated , listed “some ideas we are testing” which included this one:
Just as our forefathers clarified important church-state issues in objecting to war participation, we may be able to make a significant contribution for freedom of religion and against state religion in the area of paying taxes to support war.
An outside-our-conference-budget fund could finance test cases in the U.S. and Canada to clarify the church-state issues involved in paying taxes used for war.
A creative proposal could be tested with legislators, such as one just surfacing: persons contributing “sabbatical service,” a VS term every seventh year to work for the good of others, should be allowed to designate their taxes for constructive purposes.
This idea apparently came out of a discussion between Robert Hull of the CHM Peace and Social Concerns group and a young conscientious objector facing a trial on tax charges.
The task force that had been assigned to try to find some legal avenue for the General Conference to stop withholding taxes from its conscientious objecting employees seems to have come up with its first concrete action plan:
A resolution seeking approval to initiate a judicial action to exempt the General Conference from withholding taxes from the income of its employees will be presented to delegates attending the denomination’s triennial meeting in Estes Park, Colorado, .
At a special meeting of church delegates in Minneapolis in the highest governing board of the church was instructed to vigorously search for “all legal, legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption” from withholding taxes.
Implicit in the initiative is the view that if it is wrong for pacifists to countenance the drafting of their bodies, it is also wrong to agree to the drafting of that portion of income taxes which go to the military.
The judicial action would be based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the church from laws causing it to violate its principles.
The estimated cost of a judicial action is $75,000 to $130,000. It would likely require several years to reach a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Delegates will be asked to authorize an annual church offering to fund this action and also a stepped-up drive to gain congressional support for the World Peace Tax Fund act.
The Church of the Brethren has affirmed “open, nonevasive withholding of war taxes as a legitimate witness to our conscientious intention to follow the call of discipleship to Jesus Christ.”
With respect to the payment of taxes used for war purposes, the New Call restated its commitment to urge Christian peacemakers to “consider withholding from the Internal Revenue Service all tax monies which contribute to any war effort.”
The statement of findings recommended the following as alternatives to the payment of war taxes: (1) active work for the adoption of the World Peace Tax Fund bill which, if passed by the U.S. Congress, would serve as a legal alternative to payment of war taxes just as conscientious objector status is a legal alternative to military service, and (2) individuals are urged to consider prayerfully all moral ways of reducing their tax liabilities, including sizable contributions to tax-exempt organizations, reduction of personal income, and simplification of lifestyles.
In the edition, Peter Farrar shared a letter he wrote to his senator saying that he was going beyond draft resistance “to sever all personal connection with the federal government of the United States”:
I will no longer vote in federal elections, pay federal taxes, nor use federal services, and I will do everything in my power, privately and in the press, to influence others to join me.
Ed Pearson gave an update on an “escrow fund” originated in , to which people can send the part of their taxes they refuse to pay… The government is notified that the money will be released when the World Peace Tax Fund Bill, pending in congress, is passed.
Similar efforts are under way in Canada, Great Britain, Japan, Holland, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand.
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. addressed the World Conference on Religion for Peace (Canada) in .
In The Mennonite’s description of his remarks is this note:
Finally, “The Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes” met again in .
The Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes will undertake a major effort to inform and educate members of its congregations and meetings on the implications of the payment of taxes used for military purposes.
The committee has commissioned the preparation of a packet of study materials on the biblical basis of war taxes, the World Peace Tax Fund (WPTF) bill currently pending in the U.S. Congress, and suggestions for personal and political action.
Meeting at the General Conference Mennonite Church (GCMC) headquarters here on , the task force also heard a report that William Ball, noted constitutional law attorney from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has indicated interest in representing the GCMC in its proposed judicial action on the withholding of taxes from its employees.
Among other attorneys being considered to carry the case are Alan Hunt of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; William Rich of Topeka, Kansas; and Harrop Freeman of Ithaca, New York.
The selection of a legal representative will be finalized .
Preparation of the tax study materials will be coordinated by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Peace Section in Akron, Pennsylvania, in consultation with the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund in Washington, D.C., and representatives of the historic peace churches.
These groups include the General Conference Mennonite Church, Mennonite Church, Mennonite Brethren Church, Brethren in Christ, Church of the Brethren, Friends General Conference, Friends United Meeting, and Evangelical Friends Alliance.
Several members of the task force voiced concerns over the lack of understanding on the part of lay people within these congregations and meetings of the magnitude of the nuclear and military threat, of which the U.S. is a major participant.
The decision to prepare study materials came in response to the need for greater awareness of the sizable contribution which each taxpayer makes to the “morally bankrupt” process of gigantic military expenditures.
“Our congregations need to be educated to understand the issues and the policies of our [U.S.] administration,” said Alan Eccleston of the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund.
Eccleston noted that the WPTF bill has entered a critical phase; during the elections, 5 of its 35 sponsors were lost.
Efforts to see the legislation through Congress must be redoubled, or the bill will soon have to be abandoned and energies channeled in other directions, he said.
Regarding the legal action to seek an injunction against the Internal Revenue Service concerning the collection of taxes from General Conference employees, Vern Preheim, general secretary of the GCMC, indicated that other historic peace churches have been invited to join in in the suit in some way.
Responses from other church groups however, are still in process.
The General Board of the GCMC was empowered to undertake the court challenge at the triennial meeting of conference delegates at Estes Park, Colorado .
At the meetings, task force members seemed to differ significantly in terms of their interests in war tax issues.
Committee members such as Eccleston and Robert Hull, secretary for peace and justice for GCMC, were concerned about the future of the peace witness in comprehensive terms, and specifically as it related to the war tax issue.
Others, such as Duane Heffelbower, an attorney from Reedley, California, were interested in the tax question in more professionally restricted terms. Heffelbower stated that he could face disbarment if he became an active tax resister; therefore, the passage of the WPTF is an attractive option because it involves no risk to his profession.
Other task force participants included Heinz Janzen, Hillsboro, Kansas (chairperson); Delton Franz, North Newton, Kansas; Paul Gingrich, Elkhart, Indiana; Janet Reedy, Elkhart, Indiana; John Stoner and Ron Flickinger of Akron, Pennsylvania; and James Thomas, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The entire task force will meet again on in Chicago.
This is the twenty-ninth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we continue to work through the early 1980s.
Representatives of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Internal Revenue Service failed to reach an 11th-hour compromise at a meeting in Washington on which would have averted a suit by the 63,000-member denomination against the government agency.
IRS
officials at the meeting denied that there was any administrative solution to the conference’s complaint that it must withhold the income taxes of its employees, thereby acting as a tax collector for the state.
The denomination has argued, and will argue in a forthcoming judicial action, that the IRS requirement violates the concept of separation of church and state as embodied in the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.
“The 45-minute meeting was cordial, but unproductive,” said Vern Preheim, general secretary for the conference.
“We outlined our concerns about the withholding issue as a historic peace church and described the problem which the IRS requirement poses for us.”
William Ball, the conference’s attorney in the matter, then formally asked members of the IRS’s special working group on withholding issues whether there was any way to exempt the General Conference from the problematic requirement.
Nancy Schuhmann, who chairs the special group, stated that the IRS must abide by its codes of operation and would not be able to offer an exemption on tax withholding to the conference.
IRS officials Susan Cunningham and Gail Libin were also present.
In light of the results of the meeting, attorney Ball will complete the preparation of the conference’s complaint and submit the brief to a U.S. district court after one last check to make sure all administrative possibilities have been exhausted is complete.
The General Conference’s General Board was authorized to initiate a judicial action on the tax withholding question at an international gathering of the conference membership at Estes Park, Colo., in .
More than a year earlier, on , delegates to a special midtriennium conference session instructed the GB to “use all legal, legislative and administrative avenues for achieving conscientious objector exemption” to the tax withholding requirement.
GB also heard a brief report by its general secretary, Vern Preheim, on the progress of the judicial action on the tax withholding issue.
Progress seems to be slow, as witnesses and a co-plaintiff have to be found.
Employees of the conference who are taking action of their own on the war tax issue were assured of adequate and appropriate conference support.
But by the issue, everything had come to a screeching halt:
In the light of a negative judgment rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court against an Amish employer on , the General Conference’s judicial action committee has recommended to the denomination’s General Board that a planned suit against the IRS on the issue of tax withholding “be put on indefinite hold."
The committee’s decision came at the end of a conference call with William Ball, who has been preparing the case on behalf of the church group over the past year.
During the telephone meeting.
Ball indicated that, considering the Supreme Court ruling in the case U.S. vs. Lee, the General Conference would almost certainly lose its case.
In the Amish case, employer Edwin Lee argued that his withholding of Social Security taxes was against both his own and his employees’ consciences.
In the unanimous decision of the court on the Amish question, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge tax systems because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief."
Rather than pursue a negatively shrouded course of action at this time, the General Conference committee also urged the General Board to make more money available “for additional efforts to promote the World Peace Tax Fund.”
In his letter to General Board members, general secretary Vern Preheim concluded: “With closure of the ‘administrative avenue’ during my meeting with IRS, and now closure of the ‘judicial avenue’ via U.S. vs. Lee, we are left with the ‘legislative avenue’ as our only conceivable legal avenue prior to our triennial sessions.
“If no significant progress is made in terms of additional congressional sponsorship of the WPTF legislation, we will have to report a totally negative outcome to the efforts resolved at Minneapolis in .
This will again bring us to the threshold of divine obedience/civil disobedience.”
In coming to that decision, the group weighed the importance of a number of concerns, including the timing of the GC action, the witness value of the suit if it were pushed forward, the fact that a loss in court might set a negative precedent which would eclipse favorable decisions in related cases, and whether proceeding with the action when defeat seems certain would be good stewardship.
Preheim hopes to gather together preliminary response of the General Board to the committee recommendations in the next few weeks.
A full discussion will take place at a fall meeting of the board.
The decision of the board was covered in the edition:
Realizing they had reached a critical juncture in their church’s ongoing struggle against the payment of taxes used for war, members of the General Conference’s General Board decided on to stall its impending suit against the IRS and let delegates to ’s triennial sessions decide on what course of action to take.
A resolution to proceed with the judicial action, which would have tested the constitutionality of laws forcing the church to collect taxes on behalf of the state, was turned down by a vote of six to two, with seven abstentions.
The move to put the suit on indefinite hold was based on recommendations from the church’s judicial action committee and the denomination’s attorney in the matter, William B. Ball of Harrisburg, Pa.
In a letter to general secretary Vern Preheim dated , Ball had been pessimistic about the chances of the judicial action’s success in the light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case Wisconsin vs. Yoder [sic].
As part of its ruling in that case, the court had stated, “The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge the tax system because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.”
“We regard that language as most threatening to [the General Conference’s] position, if not foreclosing it completely,” wrote Ball.
Rather than scuttle the proposed litigation completely, GB members agreed at the recent meetings to consider the suit again, “if and when more favorable conditions prevail and depending upon the response at Bethlehem, Pa.” (the location of ’s triennial sessions).
Delegates to the General Conference’s triennial sessions in Estes Park, Colo., empowered the General Board to initiate a judicial action as a follow-up to a special session on the theme of Christian civil responsibility in Minneapolis .
At that meeting, delegates resolved to “use all legal, legislative and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption from the legal requirement that the conference withhold income taxes from the wages of its employees.”
Part of the General Board’s discussions focused on interpretation of that resolution; namely, at what point each of those “avenues” would be considered to have been exhausted.
Some members felt that Ball’s advice closed the legal avenue; others said that the judicial route would not be blocked until a court ruled against a suit brought before it by the conference.
Many agreed that a legal test would be an important public witness and is, for that reason alone, worth considering further.
The administrative avenue to a solution was eliminated after a meeting between GC officials and representatives of the IRS on
, when IRS declined to make any exceptions to rules requiring the conference to withhold taxes from the salaries of its employees.
The World Peace Tax Fund legislation, currently in committee in the U.S. Congress, represents the legislative avenue.
Board members will ask the GC delegate body to answer some of these questions at Bethlehem , and to make a decision about whether or not the conference’s business office should simply go ahead and stop withholding taxes from the salaries of those employees who wish it, thereby breaking IRS regulations.
In such a case, the general secretary and business manager would be immediately responsible, Preheim reported.
The conference’s judicial action committee will prepare appropriate background materials and resolutions for presentation at Bethlehem and present these to the General Board at its meeting for review.
Level one — tax protest. Why is it that those who feel uncomfortable with tax resistance spend more time protesting civil disobedience than war taxes?
Persons filing and paying taxes each April 15 should attach a protest letter, outlining one’s opposition to how 50 percent of the tax money will be spent.
Most importantly, copies of this letter should go to your representative, senators, newspaper editor and should be posted in the church.
Openness is critical.
The IRS is fearful of those who publicize their tax protest — even if it is merely a letter — because it encourages others.
For those who feel exceptionally penitent, file back letters of protest and ask that they be attached to your previous returns.
Level two — tax resistance. This is a clear call to civil disobedience — organized tax resistance with acceptance of penalties.
Having a support group to guide you in this decision is important.
Hopefully, congregational affirmation of such a decision would be forthcoming.
One should be prepared for the IRS to use its unchecked power to collect any income or other tax owed.
Level three — tax avoidance. Legal tax avoidance — keeping one’s income below taxable levels — is certainly in line with living more with less.
Perhaps we ought to have our MCC overseas workers explain to us how half the world can live in poverty on $100 a year, when we with abundance and waste all around us cannot seem to live on less than $10,000.
Legal tax avoidance has the additional blessing of insuring that no income tax is used for war.
Minimum U.S. income levels for 1981 are $3,300 for single people and $5,400 for married couples.
Level four — tax counseling. This level incorporates any of the three levels above, but commits one to a study into the IRS, military budget and federal tax policy.
Just as draft counselors sprang up during the draft years, we need more tax counselors to aid us in responding to the draft on our money.
According to Sen. Pryor, D-Ark., the Pentagon spends more on military bands — close to $90 million — than we spend on arms control — about $20 million.
When will we hear the music?
Perhaps there is no single right answer for everyone, but surely silence is not an acceptable response.
The edition reviewed Affirm Life: Pay for Peace, a small handbook put out by the Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes, designed in a loose-leaf form so it could be updated, and meant to help classes and discussion groups explore their response to war taxes.
(There was another review of the book in the edition.)
James W. Nikl, in an letter to the editor, encouraged readers to consider cutting their income to cut their taxes.
“What
would happen if we all cut our incomes in half?” he asked.
“How would it affect the military budget?”
He did the math for a dual-income couple in the 49% tax bracket and found that they would significantly lower their taxes and gain a lot of valuable free time in the bargain.
He concluded:
We have a choice.
We can race our motors all our lives, and the government will take most of what we produce.
Or we can take time to smell the flowers along the way.
In response to a critic who thought Nikl’s tax advice was too materialistic and coldly practical, he responded:
I agree with what [the critic] said about our attitude toward material possessions.
We should put a strong emphasis on the gospel of peace which embraces the needs of those in our community who are without.
I believe, however, that Mennonites should and would prefer to use their own wealth as they see fit and would be much better stewards of God’s bounty than the U.S. government.
I doubt that willfully giving of our tax money so that a small portion will go for human resources is really attractive to many Mennonites.
I would also question whether the good effects of the human resources portion of our tax even comes close to offsetting the bad effects of the military part.
A testimony of an “outsider” in attests that Mennonites were still people of conscience at the end of their first century in North America: “It is well known that the Quakers and Mennonists were formerly some of the best farmers in Pennsylvania.
These people, from having their cattle, horses, farming utensils, etc., so often taken from them for taxes, have sensibly declined as farmers.
Many of them have sold their farms and gone to other states, whilst others of them do not raise 20 bushels of grain, where they once raised 100.”
MCC
has spent over $10,000 to purchase and ship about 1,200 shovels to Laos.
$4,000 of that amount was allocated from MCC’s “Taxes for Peace” fund [which] was established in to receive contributions from church members who had voluntarily withheld portions of their taxes as a symbolic protest against the government’s excessive spending for military purposes.
The Lutheran Peace Fellowship recently issued “A Call to Tax Resistance for Lutherans” statement committing members to tax resistance as a moral stand against the nuclear arms race.
According to Dennis Jacobsen, fellowship coordinator, 23 Lutherans from 11 states endorsed the statement, which said, “We will no longer pay for war while praying for peace.”
The St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Indianapolis made a public decision to withhold payment of the excise tax on its phone bill.
This was done, said the congregation, “in response to the gospel call to be peacemakers and to church teachings that we, as Christians, must devote ourselves to the cause of peace — and, in particular, disarmament.”
In the same edition, James W. Nikl gave some advice on seeking tax shelters and deferrals.
Most of this was fairly dry tax advice, but the article ended with a section that began thusly:
Role of our churches. Recently the Boulder, Colo., Friends Meeting proposed a position of peace secretary for the congregation.
That person would become an authority on taxes and related items and keep the rest of the congregation informed as to how to legally divert their tax dollars from military uses.
We could perhaps create a position on our various church boards and work toward this same goal.
Two members of the Methodist Federation for Social Action have found an innocent way to protest U.S. budget priorities.
John and Pat Schweibert concluded that about 41 percent of their income tax was going for armaments.
So they withheld that amount from what they owed, then handed out a $5 bill to each of 200 unemployed people they found in line at a state employment office.
The distribution, timed for , received coverage in the local paper.
Seattle Catholics gave significantly more to the annual archdiocesan funds appeal after their spiritual leader, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, took a strong stand against nuclear war, reports the lay-edited National Catholic Reporter.
“We thought the archbishop’s stand would have some adverse effect on the appeal,” said Paul LeBlanc, archdiocese assistant director of development.
“We didn’t think (the funds) would be this large… The letters to the diocese are running eight to one in favor of the archbishop.”
Hunthausen has attracted nationwide notice for withholding the portion of his federal income taxes used for the military.
A petition with 14,000 names of Old Order Amish in Lawrence County, Pa., was presented to Rep. Eugene V. Atkinson, a Democrat whose district includes Lawrence County.
The Amish are seeking a legislative remedy to having to deduct Social Security taxes from employees’ salaries.
A bill by Rep. Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.), and cosponsored by Atkinson, would exempt members of religious faiths opposed to the program from paying Social Security taxes.
Hanno Klassen sent the Internal Revenue Service two checks this year — each for half the amount he owed.
One was made out to IRS; the other (to cover the military share of his taxes) was made out to the American Friends Service Committee.
Klassen explained his action in a letter to IRS: “The check made out to AFSC is to show that I want to pay what I owe.
But I cannot let my life or my substance be used for killing.
You see, I was a member of Hitler’s destructive forces in World War Ⅱ.
I was used once; I will not be used again.”
This is the thirtieth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we continue to work through the early 1980s.
War tax resisters’ hour comes round at last in Bethlehem
On the ongoing issue of tax withholding, GB agreed to submit a resolution to delegates at Bethlehem to “authorize the officers [of the conference] to test the constitutionality of [the tax withholding] requirement… by refusing to serve as tax collectors in cases where individual employees have asked that their federal income taxes not be withheld from their wages, in order that they may conscientiously refuse to pay for war.”
The church which seeks to save her security by following only “legal, legislative and judicial avenues” to salve its war tax conscience will lose her life; the church willing to lose her security in supporting non-registrants for the sake of Christ will find life.
At the triennial sessions, the conference authorized the General Board to initiate a judicial action seeking exemption for the General Conference Mennonite Church from withholding taxes from the income of its employees.
James Gingerich, Duane Heffelbower, Larry Voth, Robert Hull, and Vern Preheim were appointed as a judicial action committee to implement the resolution.
William Ball was engaged as legal counsel.
In , Ball advised the conference that the general climate in the United States, the attitude of the present government administration, and the attitude of the Supreme Court as evidenced by some recent decisions dealing with religious conviction or conscience and taxes were such that the likelihood of the General Conference accomplishing its objectives through a judicial action was virtually nil.
The committee recommended and the General Board concurred to put the judicial action on hold and to bring the matter once again to the conference for further discernment and decision.
A more detailed report and a recommendation from the General Board to the conference that we honor the requests of employees to not withhold taxes on their wages will be sent to the congregations in advance of the triennial sessions.
Throughout , while pursuing judicial action, we also continued to encourage the enactment of World Peace Tax Fund legislation.
An editorial in the edition described the upcoming decision thusly:
At a special midtriennium conference in Minneapolis in , GC delegates voted 1,218 to 134 in favor of urging their General Board to “use all legal, legislative and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption from the legal requirement that the conference withhold income taxes from the wages of its employees.”
If no solution could be found within three years, the GB was to bring the matter back for further action.
At Estes Park in , a judicial test case on the issue was okayed by a vote of 1,156 to 353.
Bethlehem will bring GC delegates face to face with the fact that all three avenues, at present, look like dead ends.
As a result, the GB is proposing that the conference stop withholding taxes from salaries of employees who request such action in order to “assert the higher claim of Christ’s law of love.”
If approved, the resolution would take the conference one small but significant step into the sphere of divine obedience/civil disobedience.
It could become the most formidable — and challenging — business item for GCs, despite the fact that several other organizations have already taken the same action.
In advance of the Bethlehem gathering, the text of the proposed resolution was released in the pages of The Mennonite:
Among the resolutions for consideration by delegates at the General Conference Mennonite Church Triennial Sessions… is a formal action authorizing conference officers to stop withholding taxes from the salaries of its employees as required by U.S. law.
It also encourages Canadian Mennonites to obtain relief from the same requirement by Revenue Canada.
The conference’s General Board… will bring the "Resolution on Faithful Action Toward Tax Withholding" to Bethlehem delegates as their recommendation for resolving the moral dilemma which church officials feel they are facing.
If approved, the resolution could take the conference into divine obedience/civil disobedience.
Thus we urge our governments to sharply reduce military spending and use our resources for life-affirming purposes.
Furthermore, just as conscientious objectors have received exemption from military service, we also seek legislation exempting conscientious objectors from paying taxes for military purposes.
Thus we continue to work in the United States for passage for the World Peace Tax Fund Act and in Canada for the Peace Tax Fund, which would allow individuals to designate all of their federal taxes for peaceful purposes.
Both the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and Revenue Canada require the General Conference Mennonite Church to violate the consciences of its employees who are conscientious objectors to paying taxes for military purposes.
In the United States, we have thoroughly explored all legislative, administrative and judicial avenues for obtaining a conscientious objector exemption to these withholding requirements, as we resolved at the Minneapolis midtriennium conference.
Our explorations have convinced us there is no likelihood of relief in the near future for conscientious objectors to military taxes.
The time has come when, like Peter and the apostles, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
In Canada, equally thorough explorations of similar avenues for seeking a conscientious objection from withholding requirements have not yet been accomplished.
We commend the “Resolution on Security and Disarmament” of the Canadian Mennonite Conference in and the work of the Canadian Tax Task Force under the sponsorship of MCC Canada Peace and Social Concerns.
We encourage Canadian congregations to continue study of materials made available on the issue of military taxes.
As delegates to the triennial sessions of the General Conference Mennonite Church, we therefore:
Authorize the conference officers to test the constitutionality of the withholding requirements in the United States and to assert the higher claim of Christ’s law of love by refusing to serve as tax collectors in cases where individual employees have asked that their federal income taxes not be withheld from their wages in order that they may conscientiously refuse to pay for war preparations.
These employees will be treated similarly to the way General Conference treats ordained ministers, i.e. as self-employed persons, in that their earnings will be reported to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, but no federal income tax withheld.
We request that the Conference of Mennonites in Canada consider means to obtain relief from Revenue Canada withholding requirements as these apply to General Conference Mennonite Church employees.
We shall inform the U.S. government of this act of conscientious objection to their withholding requirements.
We shall again urge them to provide exemption from these requirements and exemption for people of peacemaking conscience from military use of their tax money.
At this moment of decision we commit ourselves to surround with our prayers the General Conference staff and government officials who will be involved in this action and all those individuals who refuse in conscience to pay taxes for war preparations, however costly their witness may be.
Jim Gingerich of Moundridge, Kan., chairperson of the conference’s judicial action committee, reported that the suit against the IRS approved at Estes Park was, in the opinion of constitutional lawyer William Ball, almost certain to fail.
Little progress was being made on the legislative or administrative fronts either.
In light of this, the General Board was recommending that the conference honor the consciences of its employees who request that their full salaries be paid to them, allowing the employees themselves to remit to the IRS what their consciences would allow.
After Robert Hull, secretary for peace and justice, had reviewed the experiences of other groups which had attempted similar actions, Duane Heffelbower of Reedley, Calif., outlined the points of the resolution in detail and spoke of their possible ramifications.
“We could scarcely devise a softer velvet glove to cast at the feet of the IRS,” he said.
“But the action does show our corporate willingness to stand beside our employees.
What will the government do?
We don’t know.”
What followed was probably the most vigorous interchange of viewpoints by GC delegates of the entire week.
Nearly two dozen speakers took their turns at the mikes before the vote was called for.
Viewpoints on the resolution ran the gamut from disassociation with it to praising God for it.
“We believe that the Bible says we ought to pay our taxes.
We want to be separated from and not have any part of this action,” said Paul Goossen, Wayland, Iowa.
“This resolution is creating an impossible situation for our government,” added John Voth of Meno, Okla. “We have emphasized that we love our enemy.
I wonder whether the government has become our enemy.
Have we adopted the same big-stick approach that we so often have criticized?”
Others, however, urged the conference to push ahead with the proposed action.
“Mennonites took a stand against slavery even though it was unpopular,” said Mark Winslow, Allentown, Pa.
“Today, the nuclear arms race is the primary social sin of our day.
We should take a stand regardless of the fact that it may be unpopular.”
Lois Barrett, Wichita, Kan., observed that “in the U.S., disobeying the law is the time-honored way of changing the law,” noting that the cause of civil rights in was advanced primarily through civil disobedience.
H.A. Fast of North Newton, Kan., prompted the only round of applause during the lengthy discussion.
“We refuse our selves in service, but we say nothing about our taxes,” Fast said.
“I have said to the government, ‘You can’t take my body to fight a war.’ I have said, ‘You can’t take my son.’ And now I am saying, ‘You can’t take my money, either.’ ”
When it was over and the ballots counted, the resolution passed by a 70 percent majority. [1,128 to 457]
One of the characteristic features of the discussion on tax withholding, as well as other debates during the week, was the sensitivity and willingness to listen with which delegates approached the microphones.
Several told of how they had come to the convention ready to vote one way, but were now moved to vote another.
Phrases such as “I want to respect your point of view…” or “I’m willing to learn more…” preceded many of the speeches.
And the tough debates of Bethlehem, during which emotions ran high and convictions deep, never seemed to overshadow the determination by participants to celebrate their common identity, their peoplehood, their unity.
After the convention, many attributed that prevailing unity to the moving of the Spirit.
Delegates at the conference were treated to a performance of The Plow and the Sword, a musical about American Mennonites during the Revolutionary War who disputed whether or not it was proper to pay taxes to the rebellious Continental Congress.
“The play’s content was powerfully pertinent to the delegates meeting at Bethlehem who discussed present-day responses to war taxes.”
Acting on the basis of a resolution adopted by General Conference delegates at Bethlehem , conference treasurer Ted W. Stuckey on issued the first paychecks on which federal income taxes were not withheld.
Seven employees of the denomination’s central offices made the request that the taxes not be withheld, so that they can remit to the IRS personally the amount of federal taxes their consciences will allow, given the U.S. government’s high rate of military spending.
Those making the request were Robert Hull, secretary for peace and justice; Lynn Keenan, Mennonite Voluntary Service associate director; Paula Diller Lehman, secretary for youth education; Fred Loganbill, assistant for peace and justice; John Sommer, overseas personnel secretary; Meribeth Sprunger, secretary for mission communications; and Elizabeth Yoder, general editor.
Several others have indicated that they may be willing to take part in the action at a later date.
Stuckey said that, beginning with the paychecks, the seven will have state and social security taxes deducted but be treated like self-employed persons as far as federal income taxes are concerned.
Under such a classification, they would be required to submit quarterly estimated tax payments to the IRS.
The seven plan to make a portion of those quarterly payments but put the balance — the amount they feel they cannot voluntarily pay because of high U.S. military spending — into a special account at General Conference central offices.
Stuckey and general secretary Vern Preheim informed Commissioner Roscoe L. Egger, Jr., at IRS headquarters in Washington by letter of the conference’s action, the motivation of employees for requesting the procedure, the reasons for the church’s granting the requests, the identities of the seven employees and the location of the account to which the IRS may initiate collection procedures.
“We’re trying to be completely open and above board with them about this matter,” he said.
Copies of the letter were also sent to IRS offices in Wichita, Kan., and Austin, Texas, as well as to state and federal legislators.
The pay period is the first opportunity for the conference to implement the “Resolution on Faithful Action Toward Tax Withholding” adopted by delegates to a churchwide convention in Bethlehem, Pa., on .
There, conferees voted 1,128 to 457 to “authorize the conference officers to test the constitutionality of the withholding requirements in the United States and to assert the higher claim of Christ’s law of love, by refusing to serve as tax collectors in cases where individual employees have asked that their federal income taxes not be withheld from their wages, in order that they may conscientiously refuse to pay for war preparations.[”]
Miscellany
A note in the edition mentioned that the Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes had decided to go all-in on the World Peace Tax Fund bill, promoting “dunamis groups which approach congresspersons in a spirit of compassion rather than confrontation… to obtain a dozen more co-sponsors for the WPTF bill in the coming year.”
The edition noted that “MCC U.S. Peace Section has put together a War Tax Packet, designed to equip individuals and groups with a variety of resources for study on the question of paying taxes for war.
Cost is $2.”
The edition included a profile of Cornelia “Nellie” Lehn, whose war tax resistance became the focus for much of the debate that overtook the General Conference Mennonite Church.
It summarized this as follows:
Nellie was… dealing personally with the perplexing issue of war taxes.
She liked to read Bible verses that say to pay your taxes, but began to wonder why she did not concentrate equally on those saying to love your enemies and put your sword away.
Finally she felt she could not pay that part of her taxes going to war purposes and asked the General Conference office not to withhold any of her salary for taxes.
“The time comes when you have to cut through all the complexity and be obedient,” she says, reminiscent of her stand earlier in life.
At the triennium she stated her views.
The conference continues to work on this issue even today.
I’m surprised I haven’t come across this amusing example of war tax resistance outreach before:
Mennonites in Harrisonburg, Va., gathered on to attach over $300 to about 75 helium-filled balloons.
Each balloon, in addition to a five- or ten-dollar bill, carried a note from a participant explaining why he or she had withheld the money from current income taxes.
“Because we are Christians who are trying to follow the peaceful way of Jesus, we cannot support this country’s military build-up,” said many of the notes.
“Instead, we have chosen to ‘waste’ our money in a more constructive way.”
Participants read Scripture, sang, danced, prayed, confessed their sins, and clowns passed out jelly beans as the balloons rose.
The shift of focus to “Peace Tax Fund” legislation would aggravate a decline in interest in real war tax resistance in the General Conference Mennonite Church that continues to the present day.
Clearly, some Mennonites perceived this danger, as Robert Hull wrote an article to defend the push for such a law:
An argument by some war tax resisters is that any peace tax fund is a means for conscientious objectors to salve their conscience with regard to diverting their own taxes, and that this provision then will encourage such COs to be quiet and passively accept the warmaking of governments which will continue more efficiently without their dissent.
When I have explored this argument, I almost invariably discover that the war tax resister speaking is drawing upon an analogy made with the 20th-century U.S./Canadian history of conscientious objection to military service.
The Civilian Public Service camps of World War Ⅱ by and large had this “quietistic” effect.
However, it should be noted that the provision for COs in World War Ⅱ came about because the government remembered the difficulties it had encountered with historic peace church resisters in World War Ⅰ.
Similar spokespersons on the eve of World War Ⅱ stated their convictions to “draw the line” again if acceptable provisions were not made.
But even during World War Ⅱ, the legal criteria for CO classification in the United States were broadened by the Supreme Court to include all religious objectors, then during the Vietnam War to include people holding a belief equivalent to that in a Supreme Being (Seeger, ), and later to all people morally, ethically or religiously opposed to all war (Welsh, ).
In the draft registration debate in , projections by the Selective Service of future CO claimants extended to 40 percent of all registrants.
It seems reasonable to conclude that at least one cause for this large increase in the potential CO population is a result of the public visibility of thousands of young men performing alternative service during the Vietnam War.
The recent response of the U.S. Selective Service to its own projections has been to develop plans for CO alternative service which seek to once more “contain” the CO visibility by centralizing the program under direct Selective Service administration in order to meet military mobilization priorities.
This policy is in turn quite likely to produce non-cooperators who will have registered but then find that such an alternative service program is unacceptable to their conscience.
A significant number of such non-cooperators would increase the already more than 500,000 draft-eligible young men who have not registered.
Twentieth-century CO history has lodged anomalous laws within the government structures.
That is, if these laws are interpreted by relatively tolerant regulations, the CO population may grow uncontrollably large; if the laws are interpreted by repressive regulations, the number of non-cooperators may grow uncontrollably.
Now let’s pursue this analogy with regard to peace tax legislation and war tax resistance.
I am convinced that Parliament or Congress will never enact peace tax legislation until the war tax resistance movement grows so large that such laws come to be viewed as an expedient accommodation, as Civilian Public Service was viewed on the eve of World War Ⅱ.
But several differences between the two are significant.
Bear in mind that peace tax legislation provides for the taxpayer to claim he or she is a CO and that the burden of the challenge and rebuttal lies upon the government.
Additionally, peace tax legislation’s provision for income tax forms and information materials to describe the military proportion of the federal budget in some detail will ensure that a far greater percentage of the taxpayers become aware of the peace tax alternative than the percentage of draft-age men who were made aware by the government of the CO alternative from World War Ⅱ through Vietnam.
Finally, the peace tax legislation provides for the diversion of CO taxpayers’ “military taxes” into a trust fund.
This is intended to result in a direct drain out of the general treasury available for war preparations.
Thus the peace tax legislation further raises people’s consciousness.
If peace trust funds in the United States and Canada are administered as the legislation intends, many millions of people will choose to support peacemaking alternatives to conflict rather than supporting warmaking preparations, and a “democracy of defense” may develop: those who rely on military weapons can pay for them without coercing the contributions of those who place their reliance upon other alternatives.
If the CO eligibility criteria are interpreted too restrictively, or inaccurate portrayals of the military proportion of the federal budget are published, or CO taxpayers’ funds are demonstrably rechanneled into the warmaking treasury, then increased numbers of informed citizens may respond with direct tax resistance.
The government will thus have on its hands another significant anomalous law, one by which millions of citizens can measure the government’s tendency to override their democratic rights in its clearing of the path toward war.
This then is the educational strategy behind the peace tax effort as I see it.
The legislation will reach millions of people with the message that there are alternatives to paying for the war system.
It will provide a step which millions of citizens can take, and whose aggregate pressure for peacemaking will be enormous, without overwhelming risk to the individual taxpayer.
After all, it is at least in part the risk involved in war tax refusal which keeps it an infinitesimally small protest movement in the total population.
I hope that thousands of active peacemakers will heed the call to war tax refusal and that the pressure for peace upon the warmaking tendencies of government will grow.
As it does, I believe it will prove disastrous if the peacemaking community has no legislative proposal to put forward which will secure as much of the “democracy of defense” goal as possible, and to which the government can turn as an accommodation.
The Church of the Brethren has long supported members who conscientiously object to the payment of war taxes.
Some members wish to refuse to pay taxes but are unable to because the taxes are withheld by their employers.
The delegates approved a paper that gives guidance to church institutions whose employees request, for reason of conscience, that their taxes not be withheld.
The annual conference recommended that all legal possibilities be explored first but affirmed civil disobedience for both individuals and institutions when it is a matter of conscience.
A United Methodist congregation in New Haven, Conn., backing their pastor’s right to refuse paying federal taxes for military use, has declined to turn over his salary to the Internal Revenue Service.
Carl Lundbord [sic], pastor of First and Summerfield United Methodist Church, has withheld federal income taxes in both and , telling the IRS his “obligations as a Christian and as a citizen are no longer reconcilable.
The 50 percent of my taxes that support the military I cannot pay.” IRS ordered the church to withhold the pastor’s salary until the amount was paid.
But church members voted on to reject IRS’s demand.
Our ancestors migrated to the United States so that they would not be forced to participate in European wars.
Eventually this government respected their deeply held beliefs about peacemaking and granted them the right to register as conscientious objectors.
Today we find ourselves in a technological age in which our money is more useful to the military than our bodies.
So we are being forced by law to participate financially in the preparation for war, which violates the biblical command to love our neighbors as ourselves.
When Caesar’s demands conflict with God’s, we cannot blindly obey our government.
These words from John S. and Sara L. Wengerd’s letter to the Internal Revenue Service echo the convictions of nearly 60 individuals and families who chose to contribute to Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Peace Section in lieu of paying a portion of their income taxes that would have been used for military purposes.
For some, the contribution was a symbolic amount, such as $7.77.
For others, it equaled the 36 to 54 percent of their tax dollars that would have financed military activity.
That portion is commonly referred to as a “military tax” or a “war tax.”
In another case, a couple’s taxes had already been withheld by the Internal Revenue Service, so they donated an amount equal to their military taxes, which they had already paid.
In all cases, these individuals felt that silent compliance with the tax collection process would be a violation of their consciences and religious convictions against killing and participating in war in any way.
Many noted that their dilemma of conscience could be ameliorated by passage of the World Peace Tax Fund (WPTF) Act…
Meanwhile, the federal government is attempting to crack down on various types of tax protests.
People who object to paying taxes for military purposes may face stiff penalties designed to deter those trying to evade tax collection or destroy the tax system.
The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of instituted an automatic $500 penalty for individuals filing “frivolous” tax returns.
The penalty can apply to people who take unallowable deductions, credits or exemptions or give incomplete information on their tax returns.
Those taking “war tax” deductions or credits or claiming an excessive number of exemptions to reduce their tax liability could be subject to the new fine.
Several conscientious military tax resisters have received notices from the Internal Revenue Service that the penalty has been imposed, according to the May–June issue of Center Peace, the news journal of the Center on Law and Pacifism.
Robert Hull, peace and justice secretary for the General Conference Mennonite Church, suggests that conscientious objectors to military taxation take steps to distinguish their non-payment of military taxes from secular tax protests and evasion schemes.
If taxpayers correctly compute and report the amount owed and indicate in an attached letter that they cannot with a clear conscience pay the military-related portion, their tax returns will go directly to the Internal Revenue Service Collection Division instead of to the overloaded Audit Division.
Hull suggests that this action be accompanied with letters to legislators to communicate the religious and moral grounds for such action, and to demonstrate the need for remedial legislation such as the World Peace Tax Fund.
Bill Samuel, member of the WPTF steering committee, suggests that taxpayers write a contract on the back of their check to IRS stating that deposit of the check constitutes a legally binding agreement (contract) that the money will not be used for military purposes.
Courts have held that contractual checks involving private parties are legally binding, but it is uncertain whether or not IRS would abide by the contract.
John R. Dyck
A article profiled Canadian war tax resister John R. Dyck.
Excerpts:
All his life, John R. Dyck of Rosthern, Sask., has been a law-abiding citizen.
He’s never been to court.
But he expects that to change when Revenue Canada catches up with him for non-payment of taxes.
Dyck is one of a small but growing band of Canadians who are refusing to pay the portion of their income taxes they feel is designated for the military.
Instead, they are calling for an alternative “peace tax fund” which would use their tax money for peaceful purposes.
Since that alternative does not exist and Dyck withheld 10.5 percent of his taxes for and for , he expects a court order to arrive eventually.
John R. Dyck is not a young radical defying authority.
Officially he is retired (though not willingly or inactively) and has given the better part of the past two decades to service with the Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Foundation and the MCC Food Bank.
A sudden stroke forced him to slow down over a year ago, but he has recovered and calls it “a real miracle.”
Now he can go on serving, and he places military tax resistance in that category.
The decision did not come easily or hastily.
“I don’t know where it (a conviction) began,” he commented during an interview at this year’s annual meeting of MCC Canada in Saskatoon.
He had come to listen to the discussion and spend time with his brother and fellow peace-seeker, Peter J.
He remembers that “Cornelia Lehn made us sit up and think” in .
John began with his tax return, filed while the Dycks were in Jordan under MCC and able to observe firsthand the effects of military exploitation.
He sent two checks to Revenue Canada, asking that the smaller one be used only for peaceful development work.
He heard nothing further and assumed that both checks flowed into government coffers.
Along with his tax return he sent only a letter of concern.
But with his return he again enclosed two checks, one for Revenue Canada and a second made out to the Peace Tax Fund.
Revenue Canada replied that such a fund did not exist (legally) and demanded payment in full.
Dyck then sent the check to the Victoria, B.C.-based Peace Tax Fund and began correspondence with government officials to explain why.
“I want to do things correctly and openly,” he says.
Now Dyck is expecting a day in court.
It is bound to come, since Revenue Canada wants his money and must obtain a court order before garnisheeing his account at the Rosthern Credit Union.
The sooner the better, he adds, since it may help establish a right of conscience that would allow other people to divert their hard-earned tax money from bombs to working for peace.
He also hopes to find a sympathetic lawyer to handle the case.
“I think a lot of people would rather not talk to me about it,” he says, summing up the reaction to his protest.
So far, any criticism has been muted, though one friend told him, “I admire you for it, but you’re wrong.”
Paula, his wife, is supportive, but most fellow members at Rosthern Mennonite Church are either uninformed or indifferent.
John R. Dyck firmly believes, “We don’t need the military.”
The threat of nuclear war hanging over the world means Christians must resist militarism with renewed vigor.
“I see this (nuclear holocaust) coming and we’re accountable.
The handwriting is on the wall.”
Dyck adds that there is a growing network of people asking about the peace tax fund, though the actual number withholding taxes is still small.
(Ernie Hildebrand, a teacher at the Swift Current (Sask.) Bible Institute, is another Mennonite who is doing so.)
“But people must think this through carefully,” Dyck concludes.
“You can’t legislate a thing like this… I’m glad the Lord led us to this position.”
As the General Conference pushed ahead with its support of war tax resisting employees, with the blessing of the majority of conferees, the U.S. “Peace Section” seemed more reluctant to take a stand, at its meeting. From the edition:
While agreeing that the church has an important role to play in saying no to preparations for [nuclear war], the members struggled with the place of military tax resistance as a method of saying no.
Several members observed that the constituency is “not of one mind on this matter,” while Darrel Brubaker of Philadelphia, Brethren in Christ representative, urged that “here is one place we need to be leaders more than representatives.”
After the matter was tabled overnight for further reflection, the group affirmed a recommendation commending the General Conference for the serious attention it has given the issue and urging churches to work more diligently at the process of prayerful discernment of their response to this issue.
The resolution also strongly encouraged constituents to initiate further action in support of the World Peace Tax Fund bill, which would provide a legal alternative to the payment of taxes for military purposes.
War tax resister Don Schrader wrote in on to insist that Mennonites can best criticize revolutionary and other violence if they are careful not to support violence with their taxes:
Until our nonviolence becomes revolutionary, revolutions will be violent.
[A]s long as well-fed U.S. pacifists pay war taxes to support the imminent nuclear terror and mass murder of our planet and the dictatorial repression of Central America, what integrity do we have in questioning or condemning those peasants’ use of violence for survival.
To be peacemakers in this perilous age, we must refuse to pay war taxes, we must renounce all materialism which breeds militarism, and we must denounce foreign policy regardless of the risks for our community standing and employment.
Over four years ago I confronted the question “How can I speak for peace and pay for war,” and I became a war tax resister.
This is the forty-sixth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
we find ourselves in our own decade.
Her father [Gerhard Friesen], she said, “was ahead of his time” in advocating
war tax resistance and speaking out at Mennonite conferences against
profiteering from the war economy. “His conscience would not let him support
the military.”
She said her father would have approved the
action by the General Conference Mennonite Church to honor employee Cornelia
Lehn’s request to not have her income taxes withheld from her paychecks.
The Friesens practiced war tax resistance by living simply, giving generously
and usually not earning enough to owe income taxes.
Although as a youth she was embarrassed by her father’s outspokenness to
audiences unreceptive to his message, Martha embraced her parents’ convictions
about Christian discipleship and peacemaking and taught them to her children.
She files tax returns but usually has a zero taxable income due to living
simply and giving 50 percent of her income to charity. She has also advocated
for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund legislation.
Daniel Riehl, in a letter to the editor printed in the
edition, invited readers to visit a
website where they could learn how much they were contributing to war by
entering their taxable income:
If one adds up the taxable income of every Mennonite in the land, how much is
the Mennonite church contributing to destroying other countries for the
benefit of our corporations? Is this really what we want to do with our
wealth, the wealth of “Die Stille im Lande,” the
capital of Anabaptists, the sweat of the brow of the meek and the nonviolent
peacemakers?
[M]y mind and heart increasingly made connections with the inherent
contradiction of praying for peace and paying for war via “war taxes.” How
could I, a follower of the Prince of Peace, justify paying for militarism and
the building of weapons with my tax dollars? Indeed, these weapons might be
used to harm or even kill my friends in the Middle East and people in other
places. Increasingly my conscience was bolstered by biblical convictions.
I struggled with others who were also trying to find clarity on this issue.
Later I worked in a Mennonite church in Pennsylvania where my role included
teaching the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7)
to ecumenical women’s groups and to young people.
Thus, while living in the state of the Quaker William Penn and delving deeper
into the Scriptures as well as the
Anabaptist witness, the path became clearer. For me the way to go was to live
below the war-taxable level.
After considerable discernment, the church’s education committee proposed to
the church leadership that I would continue in my position but would be paid
as a person in Mennonite Voluntary Service so as to keep my salary under the
taxable level. There was some resistance by the church leadership to my
becoming a voluntary service worker. Even though there was strong verbal
affirmation for our Anabaptist peace position, it was not acceptable to church
leadership for me to take this stance and commit to living more simply while
still holding the same position.
My resignation meant that I had six months before my two-year contract was up.
I continued wrestling with the question, How can we Mennonites continue being
the quiet in the land when the world is full of violence?
The edition carried
a
brief article about the Everence Sharing Fund, which distributed nearly a
million dollars in financial assistance to thousands of needy families
. It noted that the fund grew
out of the Everence Federal Credit Union, from which, “[b]ecause of the
organization’s unique tax status, money that would be paid in federal taxes is
instead distributed through mutual aid programs like the Sharing Fund.”
Mennonite World Conference asked a question of Mennonite Church
U.S.A.
(the U.S. branch of
the successor of the merged Mennonite Church and the Mennonite General
Conference): “How are we doing as a peace church?”
In the edition, André Gingerich
Stoner (“director of holistic witness for Mennonite Church
U.S.A.”)
wrote up an answer (“after taking counsel from area conference leaders and
testing [his] response with a wider circle of pastors, teachers, denominational
leaders, and practitioners and others”). Here’s the part that touched on
taxpaying:
For some of our congregations and members, “peace” is still primarily a matter
of not going to war. In a time when there is no draft, engagement in peace
witness wanes.
Our tax monies are conscripted, and each year our church members pay for
cruise missiles, smart bombs, and unmanned drones — with barely the slightest
tinge of conscience, let alone a whimper of protest.
April 15 is tax day in the United States. But while most people pay their
taxes by that date, a group of us at Community Mennonite Church in
Harrisonburg, Va., take a
different route. Concerned with the high percentage of our federal tax money
that goes to the military while we pray for peace, we witness to our Christian
faith through how we deal with this dilemma. This often includes redirecting a
portion of our military taxes to life-giving causes.
We are not against paying taxes. In fact, some of us would willingly pay
higher taxes if they supported education, health, infrastructure, sustainable
and clean energy sources, bike paths, or efforts to learn nonviolent ways to
address complex domestic and international conflicts. That’s why we prefer a
term other than “tax resistance” to describe what we do.
And we don’t think we have necessarily figured out the best way to exercise
our constitutional freedom to live by our conscience when it comes to taxes.
We’re ordinary people on a journey. We offer here a summary of what we do in
the hope that it will encourage others who take similar actions to share their
experiences in their congregations and communities. We also hope it will
inspire more people to consider this type of witness.
Nathan and Elaine Zook Barge
Nathan and Elaine Zook Barge, restorative justice specialist and STAR
(Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) director.
How long have you engaged in an act witness through your taxes?
Over 30 years
Why do you do it?
Living and working in a Catholic and Mennonite community in Colorado
Springs, Colo., in
, we became aware of the
dissonance between saying we were conscientious objectors to war while
paying for war. Our commitment deepened during the 14 years we worked in
El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala with Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC).
Many friends or their family members had been killed or wounded by
U.S. weapons,
and many people suffered hunger, homelessness and illness because money
was used for weapons rather than for food, health and education.
Ironically, it was on tax day, , that we experienced too closely the fear and trauma of war.
Along with the Salvadorans on the bus, we prayed for safety as guns from
10 U.S.
helicopters strafed the area around us. That day, we became tax resisters
for life.
How do you do it?
It’s a journey, finding the way that works for our stage of life. Early
on, we withheld 50 percent of our taxable income and redirected it to
MCC.
Then for many years, we lived below the taxable level, first as a couple
and then as a family of four. The past number of years, we have withheld
a symbolic 10 cents for every $1 billion in the
U.S. military
budget and redirected that money for life-giving efforts rather than war.
We also reduce our taxable income through charitable donations and
deductions.
David Jost
David Jost, ESL Instructor
How long have you lived under the taxable level?
One year
How do you do it?
By making a small reduction in my pay-check to ensure that I owe no federal income tax.
Why do you do it?
Because I want to avoid financially supporting the
U.S. military
any way I can, and I believe that church institutions (such as Eastern
Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, to which I contribute by reducing
my paycheck) are better stewards of my money than the government.
Ray and Wilma Gingerich
Ray and Wilma Gingerich, retired peace and justice professor and retired hospice nurse
How long have you redirected a portion of your taxes?
Why do you do it?
We are Mennonites (inheritors of a nonviolent way of life); we are
followers of Jesus, who taught us to practice love toward our enemies.
This is the explanation we give to the
IRS.
But our primary reason to resist the payment of military taxes is to
witness to our church, to our Mennonite brothers and sisters. We are
simply seeking to live lives consistent to the faith we profess. If we,
the church, all those who profess Jesus as Lord of our lives, lived more
like Jesus, faithfully refusing to pay for war, our country would not go
to war. (That is a political fact.) How can we pray for peace while
paying for war? On a more personal level, we taught our children (our own
sons) not to join the military. Our two youngest sons are nonregistrants.
How inconsistent then it would be for us as parents to pay others to
prepare for war and to practice violence on our behalf!
How do you do it?
We withhold payment of the military portion of our federal income tax
(approximately 47 percent) and send that amount to life-giving
organizations (e.g., our local
congregation’s compassion fund, Christian Peacemaker Teams and the
National War Tax Resisters Coordinating Committee). A letter of
explanation is sent to the director of
IRS
and included with our annual
IRS
report. Most importantly, copies of our letter to the
IRS
are sent to key Mennonite Church
USA
leaders and heads of organizations. With these letters, a handwritten
note is included — an encouragement to promote the witness against the
payment of military taxes.
Sue Klassen and John Zimmerman
Sue Klassen and Johann Zimmermann, public health nurse and structural engineer
How long have you redirected a portion of your taxes?
We have always kept our earnings low, not only for a lifestyle choice but
to pay as little tax for military as possible. About eight years ago,
when we came back from overseas with
MCC
and had taxable earnings, we started deducting taxes directly for
military reasons.
Why do you do it?
We do it in order to inform our elected officials of our stand for peace.
We send a statement to the local paper each year, and it has brought us
into conversation with many different people from many walks of life
about pacifist beliefs and peace initiatives.
How do you do it?
During the year, we underestimate our tax payments. Then when we have
to pay what is due at the end of the year, we withhold a symbolic amount
of 10 cents for every $1 billion that is annually spent on military
funding, which adds up to approximately $80.
Jennifer and Kent Sensenig
Jennifer and Kent Davis Sensenig, lead pastor at Community Mennonite Church and EMU adjunct professor
How long have you redirected a portion of your taxes or minimized what you
owe?
About 15 years
Why do you do it?
It is a small witness for peace, a part of our life of discipleship to
Jesus Christ and a way of expressing that we seek a more just, peaceable
and sustainable
U.S. public
policy. Kent’s parents lived in Vietnam for a decade during the
U.S. military
intervention into that civil war and saw firsthand the destructive
consequences
U.S. foreign
policy can have.
How do you do it?
For some of the early years of our marriage we withheld a symbolic
portion of our taxes (less than $100), which provided a reason to send
letters to our Congressional representatives, the President, and the
IRS,
expressing our faith-based resistance to
U.S. budgetary
priorities vis-a-vis discretionary federal spending.
We’re not always consistent. Some years we have withheld the entire
percentage of federal taxes for military expenditures, and some years we
have withheld a symbolic portion. Some years we have filed under protest
and written letters. For the last five years, we have managed to not owe
any federal taxes (beyond Social Security) by maxing out a variety of
legal tax-break options, such as charitable giving,
IRA
investments and mortgage-interest deductions. One of us also only has
part-time paid employment, which keeps taxable income lower.
Dorothy Jean Weaver
Dorothy Jean Weaver, seminary professor of New Testament
How long have you engaged in an act of witness through your taxes?
Thirty years or so
How do you do it?
I got this idea years ago from an
MCC
info sheet. I split my tax monies and write two checks: 55 percent to the
U.S. Treasury
and 45 percent to the
U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. I mail both checks to the
IRS
along with a letter, copied to my legislators, explaining why I am doing
this. I also send a symbolic sum of $45 to
MCC
for their “taxes for peace” fund.
Why do you do it?
In the letter I say that as a follower of Jesus Christ I cannot in
conscience pay the portion of my federal taxes that goes to military
purposes. I note that I have no intention to avoid paying the money I owe
to the federal government. I simply wish to designate that these funds go
to a cause that is life-giving, not death-dealing. And I submit these
checks as an expression of my freedom of religion, protected by the
constitution, the freedom not to have to take an action that is
contradictory to my Christian beliefs.
Anna and Ben Wyse and family
Anna and Ben Wyse, public health nurse and owner of Wyse Cycles, with their children Martha, Desmond, and Sam.
How long have you been living below the taxable income level?
Since we got married, 13 years ago — with the exception of one year when we accidentally made a little too much money.
Why do you do it?
Living below the taxable income level is at some level an act rooted
in helping us sleep at night.
One component of American militarism has to do with protecting our
consumptive lifestyles. The uneven distribution of wealth and uneven
consumption of resources are one factor that drives conflict both in some
localized conflicts and some international conflicts. As Americans, we
cannot help but participate in and benefit from the violent structures
that underpin our economy and society. By living under the taxable level,
we at least are attempting to reckon with the dissonance we experience
between what we believe and the broken world in which we all live.
We often feel like this is sort of a token act that will never really
make a difference. We also know there are still numerous ways that we are
complicit in the machinery of violence that our society relies on.
Despite all that, this is one of the important choices we have made about
how to express faithfulness and a longing for a different kind of
world.
How do you do it?
By bringing home one income. When Anna had a job, Ben did a lot of
volunteer work, and when he worked for folks he asked them to donate to
various nonprofits in lieu of payment for services. Now Anna is a
full-time stay-at-home parent, and we live on Ben’s income. We have to be
careful with our budget, but we still live a far more abundant lifestyle
than many of our neighbors in Harrisonburg and many of our global
neighbors.
Rick and Carolyn Yoder
Rick and Carolyn Yoder, retired business and economics professor/semiretired international health systems consultant and psychotherapist
How long have you redirected a portion of your taxes?
Since we were married 38 years ago
Why do you do it?
Our work has taken us to many countries where we have seen both the
positive and negative effects of our tax dollars. Carolyn’s work in
psychosocial trauma healing often involves dealing with the fallout of
violent conflict. We believe it’s a moral issue that nearly half our
taxes go to military spending and that we spend more than the next
highest 15 countries combined on the military while cutting domestic
spending on programs such as health care, education, and the social
safety net. Redirecting a portion of our taxes to life-giving causes
helps reduce the gap between our stated values on peace and nonviolence
and our actions.
The research on bystanders says that silence in the face of harm or
wrongdoing emboldens harmdoers, leading them to assume others support and
agree with them. Doing something, even something small, puts them on
alert that someone has noticed and doesn’t agree. We’re not under the
illusion that our letters and voice will change things, but it does
change us. And knowing what we know, how can we be silent
bystanders?
How do you do it?
We first take steps to ensure that we owe the
IRS
on April 15, rather than having a refund due us. Then we redirect a
symbolic amount, a couple hundred dollars, from our federal income tax
payments to the National Peace Tax Fund and
MCC.
We enclose a letter with our tax returns, stating what we are doing and
why, with copies to the
U.S. President,
our legislators and our congregation. We also enclose a copy of the formal
action taken by Community Mennonite Church to offer its support morally,
financially and otherwise to its members.
A question many people have for those of us who redirect our taxes to
life-giving causes is about the consequences from the
IRS. Sue
and John’s experience is typical: “We receive quarterly letters from the
IRS each
year, informing us that we owe them money. We respond to them with a letter
restating our reasons. If in a given year we have prepaid too much tax, the
money that we have withheld gets subtracted from our return. We do not really
mind that this happens, because we find that we have already achieved the goal
of bringing attention to our stance on military spending and war.”
Rick and Carolyn have had a lien placed on their bank account for the amount
owed plus interest and a small penalty. They have also had the
IRS get
the amount due by electronically taking their state tax refund. Ray and Wilma
have been audited numerous times, likely due to the high amount of deductions
they have for contributions.
H.A. Penner applauded
that article in a letter, putting in a word for the “$10.40 For Peace” project
along the way. In
a
later letter () he added:
Now, in the interest of peace, must we demand an arms embargo against all
armed actors in Iraq and Syria, including the United States?
Paying for war is a form of participation in war…
But here alas, he decided to plug the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund instead
of full-throated war tax resistance.
This is the forty-eighth and last in a series of posts about war tax resistance
as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today I’m going to try to sum up what we’ve seen.
Disclaimers first:
I relied on some naïve text searching through the
optical-character-recognition versions of archived documents that were not
always well-scanned or legible, so I probably missed some things.
I wasn’t able to review complete copies from
.
The Mennonite was published by an arm of the
General Conference Mennonite Church (now Mennonite Church
USA)
and so was biased towards the viewpoint and activities of that branch,
and so these findings should not necessarily be extrapolated to
Mennonites as a whole. (I’m sure you’re looking forward to my upcoming deep
dive in to the Gospel Herald, organ of the
Mennonite Church.)
I ignored a lot of “Peace Tax Fund” legislation boosting. If you consider
that to also be a form of war tax resistance, you shouldn’t be misled by
how little of it I’ve included in my excerpts.
My concentration on war tax resistance can make it seem like the magazine
must have been full of talk of peace, love, and understanding and kind of a
liberal peaceniky sort of place. But Mennonites are by and large a pretty
conservative breed. To get the full flavor of the war tax resistance
conversation in the pages of The Mennonite it may
be useful to imagine the articles I’ve excerpted salted in a context full
of anti-Papism, anti-Masonicism, temperance, rants about gambling and
dancing and the movies, disgust at homosexuality, and fervent anti-abortion
views.
The General Conference Mennonite Church began to coalesce in Iowa in
. It was a mix of
more-or-less assimilated second-or-later generation American Mennonites of
Swiss and South German descent, and more recent Swiss and Russian Mennonite
immigrants, largely from the Midwestern United States, Pennsylvania, Ontario,
and Manitoba. (I’m summarizing a bigger story told in
An Introduction to Mennonite History,
, edited by Cornelius J. Dyck, who also wrote
the chapter on the General Conference Mennonite Church.)
The Mennonite began publishing in
as a publication of the Eastern District of
the Conference, and became the official
paper of the Conference itself (official English language paper, anyway; there
was also a German language one — Der
Bote — which I haven’t reviewed). I found very little evidence in the
early decades of its publication of any scruples about paying war taxes or
buying war bonds. If taxes were scrutinized at all, a quick glance at the
“Render unto Caesar” anecdote was enough to make stillborn any doubts.
(The “Render unto Caesar” verses would get a dead-horse beating throughout the
years of the publication that I read, with little consensus on the riddle’s
real meaning even from within the camps of opponents or proponents of
war tax resistance.)
As World War Ⅰ comes on and war taxes rise along with ostensibly voluntary
contributions to the war in the form of “Liberty Bonds,” there is almost no
push-back to be seen in the pages of The Mennonite,
even as American Mennonites in other branches are indeed suffering for their
refusal to participate in the Bond drives.
Indeed, reports of Liberty Bond sales are reported matter-of-factly or even
enthusiastically in The Mennonite, and Mennonite
institutions unashamedly report that they have accepted donations in the form
of such bonds. The Eastern District went on record both reaffirming its peace
and non-resistance policies and recommending that its members stock up
on bonds.
It isn’t until that I see a mention of
Mennonites refusing to buy war bonds (and that’s in the context of an editorial
mocking such Mennonites for their peculiar scruples).
In the period between the world wars a little more nuanced discussion began to
take place, but still the typical opinion was that Jesus said “Render Unto
Caesar” and that’s all you need to know.
While there was some backwards-looking hand-wringing about the Mennonite
enthusiasm for buying war bonds that had occurred during World War Ⅰ, I saw
little sign that anyone was willing to step boldly out from that foundation and
discourage Mennonites from buying war bonds in the future or from paying war
taxes in the present.
As World War Ⅱ approached, latent Mennonite guilt about war bonds clashed with
Mennonite reluctance to go up against public opinion and actually resist paying
for war. This eventually led to “Civilian Bonds” in the United States and
“Victory Loan Bonds with a sticker attached” (the sticker ostensibly indicated
that the subscribed funds were meant to be spent exclusively on relief work) in
Canada. These fig leaves allowed Mennonites to buy war bonds without buying
“War Bonds” and thus to assuage their consciences somewhat while keeping them
in the good graces of the support-the-troops crowd.
It’s not even the case that Mennonite conscientious objection to military
service was particularly well practiced at this time, though Mennonite
organizations continued to pay lip service to nonresistance and peace. One
report said that only 27% of General Conference Mennonite men who had been
conscripted had been classified as conscientious objectors.
However, this time around there is a lot more evidence to be found in the pages
of The Mennonite that Mennonites were seeking
alternatives to the phony let’s-pretend bonds. Some instead purchased “Peace
Certificates,” “Relief Certificates,” and other methods of supporting
non-military relief work in lieu of bonds. But the orthodox opinion in
The Mennonite was still all in favor of the fig-leaf
war bonds. Readers were meant to understand that purchasing such bonds
represented a sort of “witness of conscience against war financing” even while
they were also, ahem, a source of war financing.
After the war, when it was safer, The Mennonite
permitted outsiders — a Dutch Mennonite, Ernest Bromley and others in the
“Peacemakers” movement — to broach the topic of war tax resistance in its
pages. When Jacob J. Enz took over as acting editor for
he took
the opportunity to strongly hint, frequently, that Mennonites should reconsider
their unconcerned attitude toward taxes. By the issue was finally out in the open enough that actual
General Conference Mennonites were debating it front-and-center.
Continued murmurs about war tax resistance continued through
, and Mennonite and
Brethren institutions responded by considering how they should adopt
corporately to these concerns.
A letter to the
IRS
from Don Kaufman, who would be prominent in discussions of this issue for
decades to come, appeared in a issue, and a
first stab at “Peace Tax Fund” legislation was proposed in order to give
Mennonites a similar fig leaf to the “Civilian Bonds” of World War Ⅱ.
By paying war taxes was seen
as a definite problem that had to be addressed. People reached out to the
government, to various boards and committees, and tried also to come up with
individual solutions — such as income-reduction, charitable contributions, and
refusal to pay some portion of the tax due.
For the first time also, a backlash emerged of people who still held to the old
orthodoxy that one ought to unconcernedly render unto Caesar what Caesar
demands. They at times patiently, and at times with exasperation, tried to talk
Mennonites out of this newfangled foolishness, and their campaign would
continue for the next few decades.
The idea that one could refuse to pay “the military portion” of one’s tax
(usually defined as a portion equivalent to the portion of the national budget
spent on warstuffs) caught on in this period, and became a mostly-unquestioned
article of faith. The anti-resistance skeptics didn’t see any logic to it, but
the resisters largely regarded it as self-evident.
The hope of a Peace Tax Fund law also became a rarely-questioned dogma among
Mennonites who were troubled by paying taxes for war.
If asked why war tax resistance could be such a crucial issue of Mennonite
faith today when Mennonites of the past seemed not to be so troubled, war tax
resisters might respond in two ways: 1) they might find a few exemplars in
Anabaptist history who could be shown to have indeed had sympathy with war tax
resistance or something close to it, or 2) they could assert that the nuclear
age, in which expensive technology was more threatening to the peace than
masses of soldiers, had changed the rules of the game such that the only
meaningful conscientious objection was one that included war tax resistance.
The Mennonite began to put concern about paying taxes
for war at the forefront by , and it became
commonplace to assert that Mennonites should at the least be troubled
by paying taxes that support such a gargantuan military establishment, even if
they didn’t feel they could go all the way to resistance.
Influential Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder came out as a war tax
resister in the pages of a issue. Four
members of the Church of the Brethren issued “A Call to Income Tax Protest”
that appeared in a issue.
The Vietnam War started becoming more of a focal point than the nuclear sword
of Damocles by . In
the Peace and Social Concerns Committee
of the General Conference issued a statement, which was adopted by the
Conference’s Council of Boards and presented at the Mennonite World Conference
and that asked Mennonites to “counsel together” about a new war tax surcharge
and ask if “the Christian [should] object to payment of these taxes on the same
grounds as he conscientiously objects to military service”. It also asked
congregations to support war tax resisters among them.
The first corporate backlash resulted, with the Eastern District Conference
passing a resolution censuring the Council of Boards for suggesting such an
“unscriptural” thing. Still, the same resolution did back-handedly acknowledge
the tension between Mennonite beliefs and taxpaying when it recommended that
Mennonites take full advantage of charitable deductions to lower their tax
bill.
In , 673 delegates to the General Conference
triennial were polled about Vietnam-oriented activism. Only 27% agreed that
war tax resistance was appropriate (51% disagreed). In an additional survey
conducted at the “youth conference,” 51% agreed, so there was some generation
gap stuff at work here too.
In the Mennonite Central Committee’s Peace
Section created a mutual aid fund to help conscientious objectors, and
explicitly listed conscientious objectors to military taxation as among those
who were eligible.
also, the Western District Conference
passed a resolution in favor of war tax resistance, indicating a West/East
split to rival the young/old split.
Phone tax resistance also started to catch on around this time.
A hundred people met to discuss war tax resistance at Bethel College Mennonite
Church in in a conference sponsored by the
Western District Conference and the Commission on Home Ministries (a subgroup
of the General Conference). Mennonite, Quaker, and secular war tax resisters
spoke, and participants signed a joint pledge.
In 73.4% of the delegates to the General
Conference triennial ratified a statement saying that “The levying of war taxes
is another form of conscription… We stand by those who feel called to resist
the payment of that portion of taxes being used for military purposes.”
That year also, a Mennonite church in Arvada, Colorado decided to stop paying
the tax on its phone — the first example I saw of a Mennonite institution
refusing to pay taxes.
There was another 100-person-strong war tax conference in
, this time in the heartland. Another
50-person conference on the subject was held in Kansas. Mennonite intentional
communities began to develop with war tax resistance as an explicit focus.
Mennonite bodies began coordinating war tax redirection efforts.
Nonetheless, results from a Church Member Profile survey showed that 55% of
those Mennonites surveyed opposed war tax resistance.
As the Vietnam War wound down, Mennonite war tax resistance continued. Even
those who weren’t brave enough to resist were eager to stand up and say that at
least they were paying under protest. Redirection of war taxes to
Mennonite institutions and projects increased.
In a second Mennonite church began resisting
its phone tax corporately. “The World Peace Tax Fund Act” was introduced into
Congress, raising hopes that a legislative solution might make the problem go
away for Mennonite taxpayers.
In a Christian war tax resistance group
kindled in Japan for the first time thanks to Mennonite pastor Michio Ohno.
Sixty people would attend its first meeting and for a short while there would be an enthusiastic response in
Japan to the movement, with eighty or more people in Japan refusing to pay war
taxes.
The Mennonite General Conference triennial sessions in
“ask[ed] all General Conference members to
question prayerfully whether they want to pay war taxes voluntarily” and
pledged that the General Conference itself would work to provide its employees
with (vaguely-specified) support in war tax resistance.
In another 100+-person
conference on war tax concerns was held, this time in an Ontario Mennonite
Church.
The Commission on Home Ministries created a war tax redirection fund, and
started a newsletter for war tax resisters, but stopped short of refusing to
withhold taxes from its resisting employees’ paychecks.
That question — whether Mennonite institutions should honor their employees’
requests not to have war taxes withheld from their paychecks and submitted to
the government — began to really bubble in .
An encouraging (but short-lived) court decision gave some hope that such
institutions could legally get away with refusing such withholding, and then
the idea became hard to shake.
Several years’ of bureaucratic pass-the-buck followed:
The Commission on Home Ministries’ Peace and Social Concerns Reference
Council recommended that the General Conference stop withholding such
taxes.
The Commission on Home Ministries’ executive committee put that on its
agenda and approved it “but referred [it] for further study by the Division
of Administration and the General Board.”
The Division of Administration wasn’t enthusiastic, thinking that many
possible consequences hadn’t been fully considered. So the General Board
asked the Division of Administration to come back to them later with their
ideas.
When the General Board met again, they decided to wait to decide until
their next meeting.
At the next meeting, the Council on Commissions asked the Commission on
Home Ministries to prepare a study process in advance of the next triennial
conference so everyone would get a chance to vote on it. And the General
Board agreed that the Conference triennium should decide as a body.
The triennium decided to commit itself to 18 months of “serious study” on
the matter, followed by a special midtriennium conference at which they
would decide once and for all.
Educational materials were prepared and distributed, and an invitational
consultation on civil responsibility was held to help prepare people for
the responsibility that had been put upon them.
The midtriennial conference was held, and they decided “to engage in a
serious and vigorous search to use all legal, legislative, and
administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption
from” withholding, and to come back for another try if they couldn’t figure
anything like that out within three years.
The General Conference established a board to implement this, which later
expanded to be a multi-sectarian task force on war tax issues.
The task force quickly ruled out administrative avenues as being frankly
unavailable and began to explore legislative ones (Peace Tax Fund
schemes).
That seeming just as unlikely, “a resolution seeking approval to initiate a
judicial action to exempt the General Conference from withholding taxes
from the income of its employees” was prepared for the next triennial,
which passed it 1,156:353.
None of this was in the abstract. A General Conference employee named Cornelia
Lehn asked for war taxes not to be withheld from her paycheck, and her request
caused everything to go haywire for a good long while in the General Conference
bureaucracy. On the one hand, not much got accomplished for many years, but on
the other hand, the dust Lehn kicked up rained down as ink that filled several
columns of The Mennonite for many an edition, and the
buck-passing by the Mennonite bureaucracy meant that everybody got a chance to
get their hands dirty trying to figure out their position on the issue. All of
the heat and light at the midtriennium also kindled a nonsectarian Christian
war tax resistance group in the city where it was held. Lehn gets a lot of
credit for keeping war tax resistance at the forefront of Mennonite
deliberation for years, simply by making her request, explaining herself, and
holding firm.
The “A New Call to Peacemaking” initiative began in
and would for several years advance the cause
of war tax resistance particularly in the “traditional peace churches”
(Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers).
Meanwhile more Mennonite institutions were refusing their phone taxes, new
Mennonite intentional communities were forming with tax resistance as part of
their charters, other religious denominations and secular groups were jumping
on the war tax resistance bandwagon, Mennonite conservatives were becoming more
and more frustrated with liberal innovations like war tax resistance, and hopes
for the World Peace Tax Fund legislation continued to drain support from war
tax resistance proper.
Robert Hull began in to circulate plans for
a “Sabbatical Service” program in which conscientious objectors would devote
one year in seven to volunteer service, and in exchange the government would
grant them conscientious objector to military taxation status. This was
elaborated at length, but never seemed to get off of the drawing boards and
into an implementation or a legislative proposal.
Individual Mennonites created a vast variety of symbolic withholding ideas,
choosing particular small amounts to withhold based on numerological symbolism
or on correspondences with the amounts or percentages of federal budget
spending on offensive items. In general it seems that there was very little
consensus about how to resist war taxation among those who had decided
that resistance was appropriate, instead a thousand different techniques
bloomed.
The IRS
began responding to certain varieties of tax protest by issuing “frivolous
filing” penalties. This increased the fear and uncertainty around the decision
of whether or not (or how) to resist. Secular and Mennonite institutions
responded by creating mutual aid insurance funds to help penalized resisters,
such as the “War Tax Witness Relief Fund” established by the
MCC
(U.S.) Peace Section
in .
A conservative backlash to the advance of war tax resistance (and other
innovations), largely in the conservative Eastern District, led to the
“Smoketown Consultation” which would eventually lead to a rupture in which the
Alliance of Mennonite Evangelical Congregations split off from the General
Conference to go on their own. (Today the issue of same-sex marriage is
causing a similar exodus of conservative congregations.)
Having been given the green light by the assembled delegates at its last
triennial, the General Conference prepared to file a lawsuit against the
IRS to
assert its right to stop withholding taxes from the salaries of conscientiously
objecting employees. They began by meeting with the
IRS to
try to work out an 11th-hour administrative
compromise, but had no luck. Then they began to assemble witnesses and
co-plaintiffs with standing. But then the
U.S. Supreme Court
handed down its decision in
U.S. v. Lee — a
case in which a man from the Old Order Amish conscientiously objected to
participation in government social insurance programs. That unanimous ruling
firmly indicated that the Supreme Court had zero tolerance for arguments about
conscientious objection to taxation (“The tax system could not function if
denominations were allowed to challenge the tax system because tax payments
were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.”). The General
Conference decided to put its suit on the back burner.
Having been blocked in its search for administrative and judicial remedies,
and with the legislative remedy (some sort of Peace Tax Fund law) languishing
in the back-alleys of Congress, the board of the General Conference prepared to
tell its congregations that the ball was back in their court as to how to
proceed: should the Conference throw in the towel and continue to withhold
taxes from objecting employees, or should it refuse in outright civil
disobedience? The Conference would decide, as a body, at the Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania triennial in . A
70% majority of delegates there opted for corporate civil disobedience.
Seven employees registered their objection with the Conference, which on
stopped withholding
federal income taxes from their paychecks. (By the number of such employees had dropped to five; by
, to four; by
, to three.) The
IRS
doesn’t seem to have taken any action against the Conference for this, though
there is some indication that the employees in question paid all but “symbolic”
amounts of the tax themselves.
The Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes narrowed its focus to the
legislative avenue, going all-in to lobby for the World Peace Tax Fund bill.
A small group of Canadian Mennonite war tax resisters began to emerge in the
early 1980s. One, Jerilyn Prior, tried to get a court to grant her the right
to conscientious objection to military taxation, to no avail. There were also
reports of Mennonite war tax resistance from the Netherlands. The First
International Conference of Military Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Campaigns was
held in West Germany in , with
support from Mennonites there.
Meanwhile, the war tax resistance bug was spreading through other Christian
denominations, including those not found under the “traditional peace churches”
banner. This put additional pressure on the Mennonites, who had to ask
themselves if they still qualified as a peace church when other churches seemed
at times more willing to take the lead on such conscientious objection and
activism.
In the Mennonite Central Committee decided
not to follow in the General Conference’s footsteps and stop
withholding taxes from its objecting employees’ paychecks. None of the
individual conferences they consulted with were supportive of them opting for
civil disobedience. This is somewhat surprising, given the 70% support for
civil disobedience at the triennial,
and may suggest that was the high-water mark
for war tax resistance in the General Conference.
The Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church opted to
begin the process of merging in , and
simultaneously the Mennonite Church decided to also adopt the policy of
refusing to withhold taxes from its objecting employees. (The vote though was
narrower than the vote of the General
Conference delegates — 59% in favor this time — and the General Board of the
Church would later stall on implementing the decision.)
The urgency of the war tax resistance question had deflated by the
. Christian Peacemaker Teams tried
to breathe some life back into it through a “Taxes for Life” symbolic
redirection campaign, beginning in .
The years when hardly an issue would come out that didn’t have some
war tax resistance content in it were behind us. Now in some years there might
be a single tax-season issue that profiled some steadfast Mennonite war tax
resisters, and in other years the topic would hardly be mentioned at all, or
would only be mentioned in passing. The
triennial endorsed Peace Tax Fund campaigns but did not issue any shows of
support for war tax resistance.
The Commission on Home Ministries decided in
to extend its Student Aid Fund for Non-Registrants so that it would also cover
students who were denied loans because of their war tax resistance.
An informal study of 17 Mennonite and Brethren in Christ institutions found
that few had official policies concerning war taxes, and that even of those who
did have a policy of honoring requests from employees not to have taxes
withheld from their paychecks — “[m]ost institutions surveyed had not fielded
such requests within the past 10 years.”
Some Mennonite institutions adopted the policy of gently pushing back against
IRS
attempts to levy the salaries of resisting employees, for instance by writing
the agency a letter explaining their reluctance to participate in violating
their employee’s conscientious act.
Mennonites continued to evolve new ways of reducing, refusing, or resisting
paying for war with their taxes as the new millennium dawned. But the new
“Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund” bill got most of the press. Editorial
mentions of war tax resistance became increasingly vague and noncommittal.
The stories of individual Mennonite tax resisters of the past and present were
occasionally told in the pages of The Mennonite in
the early years of the 21st century, but the idea
that this was a subject of fiery debate and collective concern in the Church
was gone. Instead readers learned of individual prophets, protesters, eccentric
heretics, or hopeless idealists (depending on your perspective).
Desperate war tax resistance evangelists increasingly were reduced to begging
people to withhold tiny symbolic amounts from their taxes, such as in the
“$10.40 for Peace” campaign.
Most distressingly, as the War on Iraq raged, Mennonite discussion of war tax
resistance seemed to diminish even further (at least in The
Mennonite). Had the Mennonite Church come to be “at peace with war” as
one editorialist put it? One sober assessment of “How are we doing as a peace
church?” in concluded that “[E]ach year
our church members pay for cruise missiles, smart bombs, and unmanned
drones — with barely the slightest tinge of conscience, let alone a whimper of
protest.”
In the Mennonite Central Committee
(U.S.) announced a
war tax redirection effort — “Turning toward peace” — with a goal of helping
aid programs in Afghanistan, and this program would continue to operate for
several years.
It’s an extraordinary arc. War tax resistance built slowly and steadily until
it had become a frenzy of debate, activity, and corporate commitment, and then
astonishingly rapidly it mostly dissolved.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of this, or of
the similar “forgetting” that took place
in the Society of Friends around the same time. To a cynic, this might just
look like a craze — with war tax resisters being the Cabbage Patch Kids of the
historic peace churches.
Some other possible explanations that occur to me:
The end of the Vietnam War and then the Cold War took the wind out of the
sails of the peace movement in general, dampening the general interest in
war tax resistance that the Mennonite war tax resistance movement was
drafting off of.
The drive to pass “Peace Tax Fund” legislation displaced interest in war
tax resistance among people who shared a concern about taxpayer complicity.
Potential tax resisters or war tax resistance advocates devoted themselves
instead to letter-writing, lobbying, and fundraising for this doomed and
increasingly counterproductive legislative effort.
Those who were sympathetic to the arguments for war tax resistance quickly
converted to some form of resistance by the peak of Mennonite war tax
resistance activity in or so. Once these
low-hanging-fruit had been collected, it was an uphill battle to get anyone
else interested because they did not find the arguments as compelling, and
so outreach and evangelism stalled.
The “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s was in part inspired by conservative
anger at high taxes and conservative politicians’ promises to lower taxes.
This might have made the more liberal Mennonites, from which war tax
resisters were drawing most of their support, less eager to be associated
with a tax-resisting cause.
Some resisters may have had exaggerated hopes for what war tax resistance
would accomplish, and as those hopes faded with time and experience, so did
enthusiasm for war tax resistance.
This is the eighteenth 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.
The returned us to the new
war tax resistance movement in Japan:
Conscientious Objection to Military Tax, a Japanese war tax-resistance
organization, has published five issues of a four-page publication called
Plowshare.
The latest issue includes an account of Ishihara Shoichi of Shimizu City, a
newspaper dealer who withheld the 6.39 percent of the tax for his shop that
would have gone for military expense in the national budget. While he was
appealing to the tax tribunal, saying that the levying of military tax was
unconstitutional, his bank account was seized. This was the first legal action
against any of the dozen people who have withheld their tax money.
The periodical also includes a report of a speech by Professor Kobayashi Naoki
of Tokyo University, in which he says that “military forces do not defend the
land or the people. What the former Imperial Army really shielded was a
handful of military executives and the imperial family. The present
Self-Defense Forces are deficient for a nuclear warfare or even a conventional
war.”
Another article by Otomo Michio attacks poverty as one of the reasons people
enlist in the military.
Other information includes a guide for filing tax returns and publication
notice of an 80-page booklet “A Shoot of the Olive” on the history of tax
resistance, philosophical and biblical questions, how to file tax returns, and
how to appeal.
The publication, in Japanese with an English summary, is available from Michio
Ohno, 2‒35‒18 Asahigaoka, Hino, Tokyo 191, Japan.
A compilation of Mennonite responses to world hunger, printed in the
issue, included
this one:
“Enclosed find a check for $40 for world hunger. Rather than paying income
taxes, we are sending this check so that we may help to build peace and
support causes that help our troubled world.” (A letter from Colorado to
MCC)
A packet of resources on war taxes has been published by the Commission on
Home Ministries of the General Conference Mennonite Church. The majority of
articles in the packet are speeches given at the inter-Mennonite and Brethren
in Christ war tax conference… in Kitchener, Ontario. Also included are a
report of legal research by Ruth Stoltzfus on institutional withholding of the
portion of income taxes going for war purposes, brochures explaining the World
Peace Tax Fund Act now before the
U.S. Congress, and
statements about war taxes adopted by the Mennonite Central Committee Peace
Section and the Church of the Brethren annual conference. The packet is
available for $1.50 from the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section…
In the issue
Sem and Mabel Sutter
shared the letter they sent when they paid their taxes under protest.
More than 150 persons from Iowa peace churches met on
at William Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, to consider the theme
“Peacemaking: Living Heritage and Living Challenge.” The main purpose of the
conference, sponsored by Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren, was
to introduce materials and ideas that congregations could use in promoting
peace.
Donald D. Kaufman, of Newton,
Kan., gave the keynote address:
“Our Taxes Buy Wars? The Peace Church Heritage.” He traced the history of the
three denominations’ struggles over whether Christians can pay for war when
they refuse to participate in it.
Some early church leaders in America advocated not offending the government,
and thus paying all taxes. In others groups, especially among Friends, members
were disciplined for supporting war in any way. The decision not to support
war was not easy, and it was often accompanied by persecution.
[Disciples] will stand up for the rights of all people. My father and others
have refused to pay war taxes, willing to pay a fine instead when
IRS came
to collect.
A television segment about Mennonites hit British television, and the
issue
described it this way:
The Mennonite segment begins in Europe with episodes from Martyrs
Mirror, then switches to modern Mennonite events… [such as] a Sunday
school debate on church-state issues with such topics as war taxes, Vietnam,
and growing up as a conscientious objector in a public school.
The delegates took action on two statements presented by the Bishop Board, one
on “Funeral Practices” and another on “The Christian Conscience and Tax
Dollars.”
More controversial was the statement on taxes which included two proposals: 1)
increased giving to the church with the resultant increased tax deductions; 2)
seeking an alternative tax provision similar to alternative military service.
The second statement included a reference to the World Peace Tax Fund, which
made some persons uncomfortable and so this was eliminated from the text. The
statement was passed with some negative votes. In addition to those who felt
the statement went too far were several who thought it was simply not radical
enough in dealing with the “problem of wealth.” “It amazes me,” said one,
“that though we can make money, we have trouble getting rid of it.”
Paying war taxes seems to be a problem for some. In Romans 13, after giving
some of the duties of the “powers that be” including the use of the sword, it
follows, “for this cause pay ye tribute.” To be consistent, those that
withhold war taxes must withhold all other taxes, including local, that are
not spent right. I do not believe at any time we have to break one Scripture
to keep another one.
The war tax issue generated the most lively discussion. Cornelia Lehn, a
Foundation Series writer, gently forced the issue when she asked headquarters
not to withhold that portion of income tax she felt helps the government
prepare for war. An amendment to the resolution, “A call for congregational
study on civil disobedience and war tax issues,” would have permitted
headquarters to honor her request. But the conference turned down the
amendment 1,190 to 336. The issue will continue under study for the next 18
months.
Phil M. Shenk, student at Eastern Mennonite College, has been awarded first
prize in the C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical contest with an oratorical essay
entitled “The World Peace Tax Fund and Faithfulness.” He challenges the fund
as a means of faithfulness. He says the fund would not reduce the military
budget and may lull the consciences of nonresistant persons. … The C. Henry
Smith Trust, named for a leader of another generation, makes prize money
available, and the Peace Section of
MCC
arranges for the judging of entries.
Shenk’s essay was reprinted in the issue (it is given there in roughly the same form as it appeared in The Mennonite — see ♇ 28 July 2018 for the text).
Elmer Borntrager threw some cold water on things in an off-handed way when
he wrote
in the issue:
In answer to a question regarding the paying of taxes, Jesus said to the
Pharisees, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caeser’s; and
unto God the things that are God’s”… There have been some questions raised as
to the propriety of paying war taxes by those of us who do not believe in war.
I suppose there is no easy answer to this question, but it seems the majority
of the people of the non-resistant faith quite literally pay all the taxes
required by Caesar.…
This is the nineteenth 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.
The Mennonite Church Peace Section
(U.S.) met on
. I found
this cryptically-worded note
in a Gospel Herald report about the meeting:
The arms race and war tax questions remains a vital one. Its focus seems to be
shifting from tax withholding to the issue of civil disobedience for
conscience and God’s sake.
A Christian’s response to civil authority will be given concentrated emphasis
by the General Conference Mennonite Church during . The study is an outcome of a resolution at the triennial
conference in Bluffton, Ohio, . That
resolution called for a thorough study of civil disobedience leading to a
special conference , which is
intended to state an official position of the General Conference with respect
to that portion of income taxes which are used for funding military
expenditures, and in general, to research the whole question of
obedience-disobedience to civil authority.
Responsibility for the study has been given to the peace and social concerns
committee of the Commission on Home Ministries. They, however, requested that
a special obedience-civil disobedience committee be formed to give general
direction and leadership.
To date three major aspects of the study have been planned — an attitudinal
survey, an invitational consultation in ,
and a study guide to be ready by the fall quarter.
Included in the survey are 28 questions chosen to provide an inventory of
congregational attitudes toward the authority of the church and of the state.
It will also indicate attitudes to particular issues such as abortion, capital
punishment, and payment of taxes for military purposes. A copy of the
questionnaire will be sent to every congregation. If the congregation decides
to use the survey it will be duplicated locally to save on costs. After the
conference the same questionnaire will
again be used to determine whether the churchwide discussion on
obedience-civil disobedience has generated any changes in attitudes.
A second major happening is scheduled for at Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart,
Ind. An invitational
consultation will bring together about 30 participants, including persons not
committed to civil disobedience. The gathering will include administrative
personnel from the General Conference, lawyers, biblical scholars, as well as
representatives from Mennonite General Committee and the Mennonite Church.
It is expected that the study guide will evolve from the proceedings of the
consultation. Five of the 13 lessons in the guide will focus on peacemaking in
a technological society. What sort of peacemaking should Mennonites be about
in an age of nuclear warfare and worldwide arms shipments? The remaining eight
lessons will center in the meaning of civil disobedience. Was it practiced in
the Bible? Is nonpayment of taxes a case in point?
The study process will culminate in the special midtriennium conference
scheduled for . That gathering
will be an official decision-making conference to which congregational
delegates will come. At that point a decision on the meaning and practice of
civil disobedience will be made.
There was a followup in the
issue. From the coverage, I get the impression that the Mennonite Church was
playing spectator and taking a wait-and-see attitude:
If debate among members of the General Board of the General Conference
Mennonite Church is the litmus test of what it means to be a discerning
church, then the denomination is pointed toward an exciting future. The two
issues, war taxes and fundraising, were the preeminent concerns during
meetings in Newton, Kan.,
.
Although thorough reports were heard by the 16-member board on all aspects of
programming — overseas mission, education, home ministries — and dozens of
decisions were made, the two keynote issues were civil disobedience and how to
communicate the need for increased giving.
During the first session on , Board
members locked onto the planning for the midtriennium conference on war taxes
and civil responsibility. Uneasiness about the process erupted quickly. The
structure of the invitational
consultation on the issue was strongly faulted, as was the conference itself.
Board member Ken Bauman, pastor of First Mennonite Church in Berne,
Ind., galvanized his
colleagues with his allegations. “The consultation is not structured for
dialogue — it is monologue. The way it has been set up upsets me deeply.”
Later he declared that the Commission on Home Ministries should not serve as
the launching pad for the study and the planning leading to the conference in
. “Why ask
CHM?
The image of
CHM
is stacked. It should be the responsibility of the General Board.”
His assessment was the beginning of a fruitful debate which occupied several
more sessions of the General Board, one session of
CHM,
hallway discussions, and coffee confabs.
The debate crystallized about several key questions. What is wrong with the
study process initiated by the obedience-civil disobedience committee of
CHM?
Is the issue of war taxes so divisive that a schism in the General Conference
is inevitable? Is the delegate
conference viable?
By ,
perhaps symbolically, the hard-hitting process of charge and counter-charge
had evolved into understanding and affirmation of the original plans. On paper
little had changed, but in the minds of those who spoke for the
“unheard” — the “conservatives,” the “common person,” and the
Canadians — there was a restoration of confidence in the process. Tenseness
was dissipated.
The consultation will meet at
Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart,
Ind. About 25 persons are
invited. These include theologians and biblical scholars, attorneys,
administrative staff of the General Conference, several
MCC
staff, and representatives from the Mennonite Church and the Mennonite
Brethren Church. The proceedings of the consultation are to serve as the basis
for a study guide on civil disobedience.
Asked about his personal goals for the peacemaking initiative, the pastor
listed: 1) a more radical community in all three denominations that will break
down barriers in talking about peace with other Christians and non-Christians,
2) a radical change in our attitudes toward material things, and 3) a unified
position on the problem of war taxes.
Fahrer has recently finished work on a four-unit war tax Bible study guide. He
anticipates its publication by Ohio and Eastern Conference.
The Lancaster Conference had its own war tax study guides in the works, as
shown in these excerpts from the
and
issues:
Mennonites and War Taxes is a 28-page booklet by
Walter Klaassen which traces the history of the war tax issue in Anabaptism
and suggests how Mennonites might relate to that history. It was first
published by the Lancaster Conference Mennonite Historical Society but is now
published by the Commission on Education of the General Conference Mennonite
Church. Copies of the booklet may be ordered from Faith and Life Press…
“Honoring God with My Tax Dollars” is an excellent little pamphlet that deals
with some big questions. Produced in (and
revised in ) by the Peace Committee of
Lancaster Mennonite Conference, this piece was prepared as “a study guide to
be used in congregational or group discussion settings.” A bibliography of
related resources is included at the end. Available at no cost from Lancaster
Mennonite Conference…
The world arms race, nuclear threat, and militarism were the backdrop for a
discussion of war tax resistance. The Section reaffirmed its
recommendation to Mennonite institutions “to
study the conflict between Christian obligations and legal obligations in the
collection of federal taxes, especially when employees request that war taxes
not be withheld from their wages, and that institutions be encouraged to honor
such requests.”
Some disappointment was expressed that, with a few exceptions, constituent
conferences and congregations of
MCC
have not wrestled with the war tax question.
A cross-organizational consultation on how Christians ought to behave in
relation to the governments they live under was held in
:
Five themes — the nuclear menace, taxes for military purposes, the lessons of
biblical and Anabaptist history, faithfulness, and effective
witness — dominated a consultation on civil responsibility in Elkhart,
Ind.,
. In its sharpest focus the
issue was how Mennonite institutions should respond to those employees who
request that the military portion of their income taxes not be withheld by the
employer. Under current law employers must deduct income tax from payrolls and
remit the tax to the government.
Several Mennonite organizations are facing the issue. The General Conference
is seeking the will of its 60,000 members in answering such a request from one
of its employees, Cornelia Lehn. The consultation in Elkhart was one part of
the discerning process leading to a delegate assembly, and a decision in
.
Bible scholars, theologians, pastors, administrators, attorneys — twenty-nine
persons in all — presented papers, exchanged insights, and probed the issue.
Much of their analysis will be incorporated into a study guide to be published
by .
A findings committee — Palmer Becker, Hugo Jantz, Elmer Neufeld, John Stoner,
Larry Kehler — drafted a statement. After hours of discussion and subsequent
changes the persons at the consultation agreed that the statement fairly
represented their thinking.
Some excerpts from the statement are listed below:
“Our Christian obedience has to find new and creative responses to the
proliferation of military weaponry and technology…
“Christians respect the governing authorities… which leads to a broad
range of activities in support of the public good. Nevertheless, at times
our call of prior obedience to God’s sovereignty leads us to disobey the
claims of the state…
“We… have differing convictions about refusing to pay taxes for the
military.
“Let us be open to the possibility that the Spirit of God may lead some of
us in a direction that is both prophetic and full of risks.
“We agree that a way should be sought which will facilitate the expression
of the convictions of conference employees who request that their taxes
not be withheld.
“We need to seek the counsel of and work with other Mennonite groups and
denominations, particularly the Historic Peace Churches, in developing the
most appropriate response to this issue.”
While delegates from nearly every government in the world met at the United
Nations to debate whether they should continue the arms race, some 30
Mennonites representing North American conferences met at the Associated
Mennonite Biblical Seminaries to debate whether they should continue to pay
for it. Most Mennonite delegates likely knew something of the
U.N. Special
Session on Disarmament although probably none at the
U.N. knew about
the Mennonite meeting. The two groups had in common a deep concern about the
crushing momentum of the arms race which places in jeopardy the very survival
of the human race.
The Consultation on Civil Responsibility was initiated by the General
Conference Mennonite Church with the support of the Mennonite Church and
MCC
Peace Section
(U.S.) for
discussion of paying taxes used for military purposes. Christians living in
nations with nuclear weapons face a crisis of faith and morals. Such
Christians live amidst wealth that is heavily generated and protected by
military/economic systems whose focus is the perfecting of weapons for
massive, indiscriminate global destruction. How can the church give a faithful
and credible witness that its trust is not in these powers of death but in the
life-giving power of Jesus Christ?
Mennonite Central Committee was represented at the consultation by four staff
persons — William Snyder, Reg Toews, Urbane Peachey, and John Stoner.
MCC’s
interest in the war tax question grows out of (1) Peace Section’s assignment
to explore issues related to the historic Mennonite and Brethren in Christ
testimony of peace and nonresistance, (2) MCC’s administrative problem with
war tax withholding, and (3) the relationship between the arms race and world
hunger. Janet Reedy of Elkhart,
Ind., attended in a dual role
as a member of
MCC
Peace Section
(U.S.) and as a
representative from the Mennonite Church.
The question of tax collection came up as a part of the report from Peace and
Social Concerns secretary, Hubert Schwartzentruber. In increasing numbers,
workers in church institutions have asked that their federal income taxes not
be deducted from their paychecks so that they may refuse voluntary payment of
the part of their taxes that goes for military purposes.
The Board reacted to this possibility with caution. For one thing, to fail to
collect taxes is a federal offense. All persons responsible for such refusal
are liable to prosecution, from the lowest to the highest in terms of
responsibility. Also there was expressed a strong opinion in favor of positive
instead of negative witness for peace, a position separated from civil
disobedience on the one hand and civil religion on the other.
The question of tax withholding was designated for further study.
We readily pay our taxes. In paying our taxes, we not only pay for the many
services we receive from the government, but we also pay to help care for the
needy among us and beyond our borders. In willingly paying our taxes, we still
have the opportunity to be critical and communicate our concerns about how the
money is being used such as in military spending. We remember it is through
paying our taxes that good is promoted and evil restrained.
And in
an interview with John Howard Yoder
in the same issue, he complained that the church had been lagging on coming to
a sensible consensus about war taxes:
Where is our Mennonite peace testimony in danger?
We are not any clearer than before on the old problems such as separatism,
civil disobedience, and tax resistance. We have made no progress in
fashioning creative responses to these issues. They are talked about but
there is no united action.
War tax resisters in Japan were back in the news as well. Michio Ohno spoke at
the Mennonite World Conference, Peace
Interest Group, giving his talk a provocative title:
Over 80 Japanese citizens did not pay all or part of this year’s income taxes
or asked for refunds, says Michio Ohno, Japanese minister who spoke on war tax
resistance in Japan at the MCC-sponsored
Peace Interest Group at Mennonite World Conference. Ohno is chairman of the
Mennonite and Brethren in Christ Evangelical Cooperative Conference.
Ohno was introduced to pacifism while studying at the Mennonite Biblical
Seminary in Elkhart, Ind., in
. He was pastor of a church in
Kyodan for six years and for the past year has taught English and led Bible
studies in his home.
Ohno says he became involved with war tax resistance in
when he owed the
U.S.
[sic] $4.40 in taxes. “I was troubled by the table on the
back of the income tax form which stated that 6.5 percent of the tax money had
been used for the military’s so-called “Self-Defense Forces” during the
previous year.
“Shortly before, I had read in The Mennonite
periodical about the World Peace Tax Fund Bill, a
U.S. legislative
measure, which if approved would allow conscientious objectors to rechannel
their tax money to nonmilitary purposes. This idea impressed me because I knew
that as a pacifist, I could not pay for war and war preparation.
“The next day I visited Gan Sakakibara, one of Japan’s leading Anabaptist
scholars, to discuss this. I remembered his answer to a high school boy who
had once asked him why Christians were not persecuted like the early
Anabaptists had been.”
He answered, “That is because we are not true Christians. We are not good or
bad. We are not the medicine or the poison. If we were, we would be
persecuted.”
Ohno said he visited the tax office and explained why he could not pay the
tax. “I told them I didn’t mind if they took my possessions.”
A group of people favoring conscientious objection to war taxes began meeting
in Sakakibara s home.
When a civil lawyer sued the state for repayment of his tax money, believing
that conscientious objection to war taxes was legal, he was invited to speak
to the group. The lawyer’s visit resulted in the formation of Conscientious
Objection to Military Tax
(COMIT),
a citizens’ group of 250 members including Mennonites, Quakers, Catholics,
Buddhists, and nonbelievers.
COMIT
now holds summer study seminars and publishes “The Plowshare,” a bimonthly
paper.
The 80 people who have not paid their taxes for this year have received
notices demanding payment, but none has been arrested and no property has been
seized. Additionally, 120,000 members of the General Conference of Trade
Unions in Japan have asked for a tax refund to express their desire for peace.
“A huge olive tree grows up from a tiny pit,” he concluded. “We are sowing
olive pits and tending seedlings. Someday there will be a stout olive tree,
and one of the big branches, I hope, will be conscientious tax objection.”
The “New Call to Peacemaking” initiative was ramping up, with Mennonite
participation:
During the last year, 26 regional New Call to Peacemaking meetings, involving
more than 1,500 persons, took a new look at the teachings of their churches
with special attention to violence, war, and peace.
The Wichita, Kan., group gave
its encouragement to “individuals who feel called to resist the payment of the
military portion of their federal taxes. The Wichita meeting also asked its
churches and agencies to discontinue collecting taxes from its employees so
that “they can have the option to follow their consciences in war tax
resistance.”
When the national New Call to Peacemaking conference convenes in Green Lake,
Wis.,
,
it will be receiving requests from the regional meetings for a strong position
on tax resistance proposals. It will also be asked to give guidance to
individuals and church organizations on approaches to tax resistance.
The Green Lake Conference, which will be attended by some 300 members of the
three sponsoring Peace Churches (Brethren, Friends, and Mennonites), will look
at theological issues as well as matters of economic and social justice,
including respect for human rights.
The New Call to Peacemaking conference is just around the corner. It is
scheduled for
at Green Lake, Wis. Invited
to the meeting are 300 Brethren, Friends, and Mennonites. Leaders of the
conference have called for effective steps toward international disarmament
and support for the United Nations,” saying that “mutual trust and cooperation
are the only bases for long-term national and international security.” Citizen
action, refusal to pay war tax, and other measures will be considered as ways
of undercutting war. The Green Lake meeting, according to Dale Brown, Brethren
theologian who will open the conference, will issue a call to the peace
churches and those who sympathize with their aims to take new risks.
Two films on television commercials and a slide/cassette set on war taxes have
recently been added to MBCM
Audiovisuals, the rental library of Mennonite Board of Congregational
Ministries… “Conscience and War Taxes” is an excellent 20-minute color slide
set/cassette presentation produced by the National Council for a World Peace
Tax Fund. It traces the history of the
U.S. income tax,
gives information on the military budget, and examines some of the economic
consequences of military spending. The World Peace Tax Fund is discussed as a
legal alternative to paying for war which could provide more than two billion
dollars for funding peaceful solutions to world problems and at the same time
provide more jobs for peaceful pursuits than are currently provided by
war-related industries. The “Conscience and War taxes” slide set, cassette
tape, and a resource packet can be obtained from MBCM Audiovisuals…
“New Call to Peacemaking generated 26 regional meetings in 16 different areas
of the U.S. during
,” reported Maynard Shelly to the conference in a summary paper, “A
Declaration of Peace.” The records showed that more than 1,500 people were
involved in those meetings and they generated 170 pages of reports,
statements, and resolutions.
When asked what he expected to come out of this conference, before the
sessions began, Peter Ediger, of Arvada,
Colo., said, “Words, plenty
of words.”
A number of delegates, for instance, were calling for “dramatic action,”
whatever that might have been. As it turned out, because of the task
orientation of the conference, the “action” was a statement agreed upon by the
assembled, which covered the waterfront, but probably pleased only a few.
One of the central themes which stirred the most emotions turned out to be
war-tax resistance. This was an issue the Mennonites felt strongly about.
Those presenting the issue wished for action that would have given them a
context for action. As in the case of the “dramatic action,” so much desired
by some, this desire was also frustrated.
Organizers and conference leaders had projected the Green Lake meetings to be
a working conference. The meetings were set up to assure some kind of action
and/or product. Finally, after much careful shifting on the part of the
findings committee, and public discussions that were sometimes hotter than
illuminating, the conferees agreed to approve a revised statement of the
findings committee. This heavy emphasis on task fulfillment almost restricted
the creative work of the conference too much, according to some observers.
But, of course, the conferees had been informed of the nature of the
conference beforehand.
The findings statement was accepted by most participants, yet could count on
ownership by few. Besides the document, inspiration, fellowship, and sharing
that went on, there was little to show for everyone’s efforts. Nevertheless,
“We see this not as the end of our journey but as the beginning stage of a
continuing pilgrimage,” read the statement.
A world alternative to taxes for the military was endorsed and encouraged. And
while the “children of the sixties” worried about war taxes, the younger set
was most concerned about conscription, which seems to be looming over the
horizon.
“We’re releasing a new focal pamphlet in
titled The Tax
Dilemma: Praying for Peace and Paying for War. Peace is central to our
theology, not an option added on.”
The issue gave a preview of
the upcoming General Conference Mennonite Church midtriennium meeting which
they had convened especially to hash out the war tax withholding issue:
The program for the midtriennium conference of the General Conference
Mennonite Church (GCMC) has been finalized.
As an official meeting of the denomination delegates will discuss the nature
of a Christian’s civil responsibility, particularly the question of a
Christian peace position in a militaristic society. For some participants the
question is whether the withholding of payment of the military portion of
their income taxes is justified. If so, then several employees of the GCMC
would like the denomination to stop remitting the military portion of their
taxes to the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS).
For , the
issue will be debated in the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis,
Minn. If the conference
delegates decide that nonpayment of military taxes is justified the decision
is binding on the administrators of the GCMC.
Impetus for such an assembly began in when GCMC
employee Cornelia Lehn requested the General Conference business office not to
remit the military tax portion of her paycheck to the
IRS.
Prior to , the issue of “war taxes” had been
discussed, and as early as , delegates at the
triennial sessions in Fresno,
Calif., passed a statement
protesting the use of tax monies for war purposes. The delegates also said,
“We stand by those who feel called to resist the payment of that portion of
taxes being used for military purposes.” However, the General Board of the
GCMC
did not think that directive from the delegates authorized them to stop
remitting Lehn’s military taxes. Her request was refused.
Three years later, St.
Catharines, Ontario, was the location for the next conference. There delegates
called for education regarding militarism, reaffirmed the
statement, and agreed that serious work be
done on the possibility of allowing GCMC
employees to follow their consciences on payment or nonpayment of military
taxes.
Educational materials have included the periodical God and
Caesar and two study guides. The Rule of the Sword and
The Rule of the Lamb. In addition to these efforts two major
consultations were convened in
and in . At these consultations
scholarly papers were presented on militarism, biblical considerations for
payment or nonpayment of military taxes, and Anabaptist history and theology
related to war tax concerns.
Despite the protracted input, the General Board could not reach a consensus on
the issue. Consequently the problem was brought to delegates at the
triennial conference in Bluffton,
Ohio. At this juncture the delegate body committed itself to serious
congregational study of civil disobedience and war tax resistance during
. The delegates
also decided to discuss the issue in detail at a midtriennium conference in
.
In an effort to implement the Bluffton
resolution an eight-member civil responsibility committee was formed. Several
actions were taken by it to encourage serious study.
an attitude survey on church and
government was conducted. Approximately 2,500 responses were received,
including 463 from a select sampling in 31 churches. A scholarly consultation
was held in . One of the key ideas
which came out of this consultation was whether those who feel strongly about
not paying military taxes should be encouraged to form a separate corporation
within the General Conference. To assist churches in their study of the issue
two study guides were published. The Rule of the Sword deals
primarily with facts and concerns related to militarism. The Rule of the
Lamb centers in the sovereignty of God and biblical texts on taxes and
civil authority.
Each of the more than 300 congregations in the GCMC
is being encouraged to prepare a statement to bring to the
conference. It is evident from the sale
of the study guides that a minority of congregations are actually making an
effort to study the issue, although all congregations have received sample
copies of the guides. Many Canadian churches feel the issue is strictly an
American problem, and there is a considerable diversity of conviction and
thought among American congregations. Some congregations do not intend to send
delegates.
What this means for the Minneapolis conference is difficult to assess, except
for one feature. There will be a lot of stirring debate. After
of searching will there be some
resolution of the withholding question? No one is predicting the outcome.
My job is managing public communications for a large organization. In simple
terms, I’m a propagandist — one who, according to my dictionary, spreads
ideas, facts, or allegations deliberately to further a cause.
Interestingly, the root of this widely misunderstood word is in a division of
the Catholic Church established to propagate the faith,
i.e., to ensure that the church membership
continue to be convinced of the church’s teachings and that others might
become so convinced. Church-owned periodicals, such as this one, can thus
rightly (and proudly) be said to be propagandistic.
As a propagandist, I am writing to point out some of the things I see in the
current reporting by the Mennonite press of the war-tax-resistance movement.
Not surprisingly, the reason I am writing is because I do not agree that
resistance, nonviolent coercion or force,
etc., are highly
ethical strategies for Christians or that, specifically, war-tax resistance is
an effective tactic in achieving peace.
Please understand that, while I personally think that war-tax resistance is
getting considerably more than equitable coverage in the Mennonite press, that
is not my point of concern. Rather, it is the aspects of that coverage that I
believe Mennonites should question. These are:
First, source. The articles seem overwhelmingly to originate in the several
information offices of Mennonite boards and agencies. Like me, the authors are
propagandists who, it can be assumed, for whatever reasons, are producing
releases representing their own biases or those of the persons employing them.
Second, style. The articles on tax resistance are written as news stories, not
as expository pieces which are the common vehicle for the expression of both
majority and minority opinions in the Mennonite press.
The last concern, and closely related to the second, is perspective. By
adopting the news-reporting style, the tax-resisting position is presented as
a given, accepted method of Christian witness. This style boldly assumes that
not paying one’s taxes is widely held among Mennonites as Christ’s way, as
well as that tax resistance is a rational means of bringing peace to the
world.
Am I suggesting that Mennonite papers quit giving space to the tax-resistance
movement? Definitely not. Nor, even that such coverage be necessarily reduced.
For, despite my personal feelings, I am interested in the faith of my brothers
and sisters who feel Christ is calling them to resist taxation.
Rather, I’m suggesting that coverage continue, but in the form of exposition,
advocacy, and response; that brothers and sisters who are tax resisters be
invited, even urged, to present the scriptural and other bases of their
convictions and actions. And the same goes for other practitioners of
nonviolent direct action: marching, sitting-in, disruption.
While the rest of us are waiting for these articles to emerge, brother editor,
I would not want to be guilty of demanding that this or any other subject be
suppressed. But, I know at least a few of us wonder sometimes if
demonstrations and acts of resistance are really the most newsworthy events
going on in the Mennonite subdivision of Christ’s kingdom.
Hubert Schwartzentruber with
a commentary
in which he wrote:
It is no secret that our nuclear capabilities have brought the whole world to
the brink of suicide and murder. Yet only a few people are blowing the
trumpets of warning. There is still strong resistance by most Christians even
to think of becoming war tax resisters. There seems to be little urgency to
adopt a lifestyle which would model peace for all the peoples of the earth.
The courage to confront the principalities and powers seems to be lacking.
Was it true that the growing war tax resistance movement in the Mennonite
Church was beginning to lose its momentum?
This is the twentieth 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 , the Mennonite Church had the luxury of
being by-standers as the General Conference Mennonite Church wrestled with the
war tax issue, and in particular about whether to continue to withhold income
taxes from the salaries of their employees who were conscientious objectors to
military taxation (the Mennonite Church would get its own chance to wrestle
with these issues a bit later on), at a special mid-triennium conference on the
issue. Meanwhile, disgruntled conservative Mennonites met at the Smoketown
Consultation, Peace Tax Fund advocates ramped up their campaign, and the New
Call to Peacemaking pushed the Peace Churches to step up their game.
As a result, there was a plethora of war tax resistance-related content in
Gospel Herald that year.
“The federal income tax is the chief link connecting each individual’s daily labor with the tremendous buildup for war,” Donald D. Kaufman observes in his new book, The Tax Dilemma: Praying for Peace, Paying for War (Herald Press: ).
“Preoccupied as some citizens are with paying too much tax, I suggest that the crucial issue has to do with the purpose for which tax monies are used,” Kaufman maintains.
“While a young person can be exempted from personally serving in the Armed
Forces, no one is easily exempted from making contributions to the military
leviathan.” In his book, Kaufman considers issue of the two kingdoms. After a
brief examination of the biblical background, he traces the history of
conscientious objection to war taxes. He discusses a dozen viable options
which concerned Christians can use “to register our faithfulness to Jesus
Christ as Lord and our opposition to corporate war making by the state within
which we live.”
[W]hat words can we say to our brother in his new responsibilities? Lawrence
Burkholder in the consultation on
taxes and war initiated an intriguing discussion on the manager (or the
administrator) and the prophet and corporate responsibility. He observed that
with only a few incidental references, "the Bible is almost solidly against
those who assumed responsibility for institutional life" (a distressing word
for a biblical scholar on his inauguration).
Ray Horst reported that two staff members have said they would want to
consider a personal response on war taxes should Mennonite Board of Missions
seek alternatives to such withholdings. The directors acted to continue
discussions with other Mennonite groups and Mennonite Church agencies on the
war tax question.
There has been much discussion about the appropriateness of paying for war as
we pray for peace. Some have sought ways in which they can refuse to pay
federal income taxes and thus give a concrete witness against the militarism
which plagues the
U.S. and many other
countries of the world — even, alas, poor countries.
The focus on income taxes may obscure the fact that there are many other
federal taxes which are also used to support the national defense
establishment. In fact, in the personal income tax provided only about one half of the
non-trust fund U.S.
federal revenue. The other half came from a variety of sources such as the
corporation income tax, excise taxes (on many items such as telephone service,
air travel, automobile tires, gasoline, and especially alcohol and tobacco),
estate and gift taxes, and customs duties.
Can we avoid paying these taxes? Not completely, but we can reduce the amount
we pay by the simple device of not buying at all the things which are harmful
and by reducing our expenditures for all other items by holding down our
standard of living. The United States tax law is very generous in allowing
deductions for making contributions to churches and charitable institutions.
(The Canadian law is less generous.) Up to 50 percent of income may be
deducted.
These charitable gifts will first of all reduce sharply the amount of federal
income tax we pay — in some cases even avoiding the tax completely. But in the
second place, since the gift to charity will reduce our remaining disposable
income we will have reduced our standard of living and thus will have to pay
less of the hidden taxes which also support the defense establishment. The
corporation income tax, for example, is one third the size of the personal
income tax.
Although the check to pay the corporation income tax is sent to the government
by the corporation, rest assured the corporation will, if they possibly can,
pass on the tax to the consumer in the form of higher prices for the things
the corporation sells. If we don’t buy the product, we aren’t paying this tax.
Reducing our standard of living as a means of avoiding federal taxes has an
important additional benefit. It is a powerful witness that we are disturbed
by the disparities in wealth and income throughout the world. Our lives should
demonstrate that we can get along without buying the multitude of things an
affluent America deems important.
A report on an protest at Titan Ⅱ missile base
noted that “Also scheduled for the same day will be a nonviolent protest at the
Wichita offices of the Internal Revenue Service, designed to draw attention to
tax money being used for military expenditures…” And
a separate report on a protest at Rocky Flats said that
“On ,
tax resisters made statements about their refusal to pay for war in a press
conference outside the
IRS
office.”
The issue brought news of the
Quaker war tax resisters Bruce & Ruth Graves’ court battle:
A Quaker couple from Ypsilanti, Michigan, attempted to claim a “war tax”
credit on federal income tax returns, but has lost an unusual case before the
U.S. Supreme Court,
the Associated Press reports. The court left intact lower court rulings that
Bruce and Ruth Graves, as conscientious objectors, may not claim such a
credit. The couple had sought a refund of the portion of their taxes used for
war materials.
, the Graves have converted the
“foreign tax credit” on their federal tax forms to a “war tax credit” and
entered only 50 percent to the income tax otherwise due. Each year they have
asked a refund but not received it. So after failing to get the couple to sign
corrected tax statements, the government initiated action to collect the
“deficiency” even though it had already collected the correct amount. The
appeal argued that the government’ s action violated the Graves’
constitutional right to freedom of religion.
Catholic priest John M. Garvey also fought the law and the law won, a bit. The
Gospel
Herald had the scoop:
Father John M. Garvey gave up his car for Lent. Actually, the Internal Revenue
Service hauled it away on Ash Wednesday. It now sits amid big, drab army
trucks behind a fence topped with barbed wire 20 miles away in Mobridge,
S.D. It is there
because the Roman Catholic priest has not paid income taxes as a protest
against military spending and the federal government’s treatment of Indian
people.
Without a car on the South Dakota prairie, the priest has been walking more,
hitchhiking, and riding buses. “It’s been inconvenient,” he said, and when he
does he gets some puzzled looks. “But it’s no big dramatic thing. I’m not
standing out there shivering to death.”
John K. Stoner, in the issue,
imagined
the conversation
between a taxpayer and his or her Maker in the aftermath of a nuclear
holocaust:
There was a blinding flash of light, an explosion like the bursting of a
million bombs, and in an instant everything was burning in a huge ball of
fire.
The first time it was the Flood.
But next time the fire… It was the End.
Afterward a prominent evangelical leader was being quizzed by his Maker.
“You say you were taken by surprise. But didn’t you know it might happen?”
“Well, yes, Sir. I guess I did, Sir. But You see, Sir, they…”
“Wasn’t anybody talking about the fantastic risks involved? But not risks
really. It was a certainty. As predictable as death and taxes.”
“Well, Sir, I can see it now. But hindsight is always better…”
“What do you mean, hindsight? Couldn’t you discern the signs of the times?”
“Well, Sir, we were kind of busy…”
“Doing what?”
“Well, Sir, some of us were searching for remnants of Noah’s Ark. We thought
if we found it maybe they would believe in You…”
“But surely you weren’t all hunting Noah’s Ark?”
“Well, Sir, not exactly. But a lot of people who weren’t hunting it were
watching movies about the search. And then we were busy defending the Bible.”
“Why didn’t you know it was going to happen? Surely there were people warning
you. In fact, I had assigned a few Myself to sound the alarm.”
“Well, Sir, You see, Sir, those people… I don’t know quite how to say this…
er… they didn’t believe the way we… er… I mean I…”
“Did you think you could go on building three more bombs a day forever and not
blow things up?
“Well, Sir, You see, I thought You would look after those things. I didn’t
think it would happen unless You wanted.
“Women nursing infant babies? Children swinging on the side porch, playing in
the lawn sprinkler? An old man reading his Bible? Millions of people, burned
up?”
“Well, sir, in retrospect it does look rather overwhelming. I’m not sure it
was really fair. But then, things were getting rather bad, what with
communism, homosexuality, welfare, big government, pollution…”
“And capitalism, national security, the good life, nuclear deterrence.”
“Well, Sir, I hadn’t thought of those things as…”
“Why not?”
“Well, Sir, You see, the people who talked about those things were not… er…
Bible believing. As an example, they talked about resisting war taxes, even
though the Bible says, ‘Render unto Caesar…’. Things like that…”
“You paid your taxes?”
“Well, Sir, yes, Sir, I did.”
“Every penny?”
“I think so, Sir.”
“Are you saying that I am responsible for this fire and your tax dollars were
not?”
“Well, Sir, I… er…”
“Next!”
Allan W. Smith responded in a
letter to the editor,
saying that Christians should beware of inadvertently putting themselves under
an Antichrist who promises worldly peace at the expense of abandoning Biblical
truth:
In Stoner’s depiction of the scene of judgment day, it is to be observed that
Jesus dictum, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” is
contradicted. It is not to be supposed that Jesus and Paul, who both told
people to pay their taxes, were ignorant of the way that Rome got and held its
power. Taxes are, after all, not freewill gifts to the state, and we may well
be grieved with the way the state uses them. However, we must all live by our
Word-enlightened consciences.
A proposed Mennonite Church statement on militarism and conscription,
originally drafted by MBCM
staff members Hubert Schwartzentruber and Gordon Zook in consultation with
several other persons, was presented. The Board gave the statement extensive
discussion and some refinement, and unanimously approved the document for
submission as a recommendation from MBCM
to the General Board for presentation to the
Mennonite Church General Assembly. The statement contains sections on peace
and obedience, use of material resources, Christian service and conscription,
and militarism and taxation.
That article also noted that the Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries
met and approved a “task force to represent the Mennonite Church in cooperation
with the General Conference Mennonite Church committee on conscientious
objection and tax exemption.”
Sensing the radical nature of his comments on the theme, “The Way of Peace,”
Schwartzentruber said that he could be taken to jail if he put into action his
beliefs on such issues as war taxes and conscription. If he had to go to jail,
he said, it would be easier to go with brothers and sisters in the faith.
Peacemaking is the way of Jesus, but it has to be the work of the church and
not of individuals alone, he said.
Representatives of the Mennonite Church gathered in Waterloo,
, and
war tax resistance was on the agenda
but was overshadowed by other concerns about draft registration:
Debate over the proposed statement on militarism and conscription was centered
in two subpoints. One counseled Mennonites not to comply with any military
registration law that might be passed by the
U.S. Congress if
the Department of Defense and not civilians would be responsible for the
registration program. The other point counseled administrators of church
schools not to comply with any legislation which might be passed that would
require them to provide information about their students for purposes of
registration.
Noting that passage of any such registration bill is very much in doubt,
Linden Wenger, Harrisonburg,
Va., told fellow delegates,
“It seems to me we’re being a bit premature in making an issue of these two
items.” Wenger also said that he “will not hinge my decision” on whether to
support compliance with a registration law on whether it is administered by
civilian or military personnel.
Other delegates, including John E. Lapp of Souderton,
Pa., responded that it
was important that the items in question not be deleted.
In the amended statement which was finally approved, the two items were
combined and weakened slightly, but were retained. A subpoint urging “careful
biblical study” on the issue of war tax payment was added. In addition, the
statement was upgraded from “guidelines” to a full statement of position.
The eventual statement on militarism and conscription that came out of the
Waterloo conference on was
reprinted in Gospel Herald. It included the following
section:
We recognize that today’s militarism expresses itself more and more through
expensive and highly technical weaponry and that such equipment is dependent
upon financial resources conscripted from citizens through taxation.
Therefore,
We encourage our members to pursue a lifestyle which minimizes such tax
liability through reduction of taxable income and/or increase of tax
deductible contributions for the advancement of the gospel and the relief
of human suffering.
We endorse efforts in support of legislation which would provide
alternative uses for taxes, paid by conscientious objectors to war, which
would otherwise be devoted to military purposes.
We encourage our congregations to engage in careful biblical study
regarding Christian responsibility to civil authorities including issues
of conscience in relation to payment of taxes.
We recognize as a valid witness the conscientious refusal to pay a portion
of taxes required for war and military efforts. Such refusal, however, may
not be pursued in a spirit of lawlessness nor for personal advantage but
may be an occasion for constructive response to human need.
We encourage our congregations and institutions to seek relief from the
current legal requirement of collecting taxes through the withholding of
income taxes of employees, especially those taxes which may be used for
war purposes. In this effort we endorse cooperation with the General
Conference Mennonite Church in the current search for judicial,
legislative, and administrative alternatives to the collection of
military-related taxes. In the meantime if congregational or institutional
employers are led to noncompliance with the requirement to withhold such
taxes, we pledge our support for those representatives of the church who
may be called to account for such a witness.
On ,
Robert C. Johansen
(“president of the Institute for World Order”) spoke at Goshen College and
boosted war tax resistance:
Johansen encouraged his listeners to become part of a “new breed of
abolitionists,” to take a more active stance, even if this included refusing
to pay war taxes and refusing to be drafted. He reminded his audience that
those in opposition to slavery had also defied the law in order to bring about
change.
Gordon Zook, in the issue,
wrote that the whole economy was distorted towards militarism, and took a
sort of sideways look at tax resistance in that context:
One current issue of obedience is the militaristic mentality which keeps
producing new weapons systems at the expense of basic human needs. So much of
North American “abundance” results from the distorted values and priorities of
our militaristic economy. Many are wondering, how to repent of such
involvements including questions of responsibility for the use of tax
revenues.
In the same issue, John K. Stoner was back to urge
conscientious objection to nuclear deterrence
which necessarily meant action before the nuclear war, not just
options to be held in reserve for after the war started:
Mennonites who believe that the Bible teaches conscientious objection to
military service should also be conscientious objectors to the concept and
practice of nuclear deterrence. We have expressed conscientious objection to
military service by refusing military service, whether by refusing to put on
the military uniform, going to prison, doing alternate service, or emigrating.
We should express our Conscientious objection to the concept and practice of
nuclear deterrence by publicly rejecting the myth of nuclear deterrence,
denouncing the idolatry of nuclear weapons, refusing to pay war taxes, and
identifying with resistance to the nuclear madness.
Mennonites should do this because the concept and practice of nuclear
deterrence is a form of military service in which the entire population has
been conscripted. The concept of nuclear deterrence epitomizes the spirit of
war. The practice of nuclear deterrence is to war what lust is to adultery,
and whoever engages freely in lust should not consider himself innocent of
adultery. As E.I. Watkin has said, it cannot “be morally right to threaten
immoral conduct.” To plan and prepare for the annihilation of millions of
people is a culpable act in the extreme, and whoever does not deliberately and
explicitly repudiate the concept and practice of nuclear deterrence
participates in the act.
The U.S. branch of
the international Roman Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi
USA,
initiated informal contacts with General Conference Mennonite peace
spokespersons .
Rural Benedictine College at Atchison,
Kan., provided the setting for
the sixth annual convention of Pax Christi
USA,
at which Mennonites Bob Hull and Don Kaufman of Newton,
Kan., led a workshop on tax
resistance and the World Peace Tax Fund Act. Interest in this was strong.
About 40 persons, including some tax resisters, participated. In a private
meeting with Sister Man Evelyn Jegen, executive secretary of Pax Christi
USA, and
Gordon Zahn, a Catholic conscientious objector in World War Ⅱ, Hull, Kaufman,
and William Keeney of Bethel College, North Newton,
Kan., explained the General
Conference Mennonite Church resolution on war taxes. Mennonite Central
Committee Peace Section’s Christian Peacemaker Registration form received
active interest at the convention, particularly during a workshop on
“Militarism in Education.” The possible resumption of registration and perhaps
the draft in the
U.S. is stimulating
regional Pax Christi groups to promote conscientious objection to war by
Catholic youth.
Resolutions concerning the
Iranian-U.S. crisis,
SALT
Ⅱ, and the proposed World Peace Tax Fund were passed at the fall meeting of
Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section
(U.S.),
Nov.
30–Dec. 1 at Akron,
Pa.
Section members also agreed to postpone a decision on a resolution to support
war tax resistance campaign until they could have further dialogue with
constituent members…
The World Peace Tax Fund
(WPTF) bill
now before Congress also received an endorsement from the Peace section group.
The bill would provide a legal means for conscientious objectors to channel
the portion of their tax dollar which now goes for the military budget to be
used in a special fund for projects to promote world peace.
The section said in resolution “that it is conscious that the
WPTF
legislation might not in itself force a significant reduction in military
spending, but it recognizes that it would provide funds for peacemaking
efforts and would be a witness against military spending. The section
continues to support other forms of witness against military spending,
including persons who refuse to pay war taxes.”
Although Peace Section has given staff time to the promotion of a better
understanding of
WPTF in its
constituency, it had not before been a formal sponsor of the bill.
Peace Section has also established a bureau of Christian speakers available to
address congregations and other groups concerning
WPTF.
Federal court convicts Mennonite in Illinois war tax resistance case
Bruce Chrisman, 30-year-old General Conference Mennonite, was convicted on
by U.S. District
Court in Springfield, Ill.,
of federal income tax evasion.
Chrisman, who lives in Ava in southern Illinois, was charged with failing to
file a tax return in . Actually Chrisman did
file a return in and other years for which
the government said he failed to file. But the returns did not contain the
financial data the Internal Revenue Service contends constitutes a legal tax
return.
Chrisman attached letters to his returns saying he objected on religious and
moral grounds to paying taxes that support the
U.S. military. His
defense lawyers said the government had to prove that he “willfully” failed to
file a return — that he knew what the statute required and purposefully
decided not to comply.
At a three-day criminal trial Chrisman said, “The returns I filed with the
IRS were
in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and religious beliefs and the
IRS
code.”
He testified that his father never hit him and that “guns, even cap guns, were
never allowed in our home.”
The prosecuting attorney read Romans 13, Luke 20:20–26, and Matthew 17:24–27
and asked Chrisman, “Don’t you believe in the Bible? Doesn’t it state here you
should pay taxes?”
Chrisman said, “The government is not the supreme authority in my life, but
Jesus Christ is.”
In the closing arguments to the jury the prosecution said Chrisman’s “joy” and
“peaceful composure” exposed his lack of deeply held religious beliefs.
James Dunn, Mennonite pastor in Urbana,
Ill., observed the trial. He
said evidence of Chrisman’s character and of his pacifism were not allowed as
testimony by the judge, J. Waldo Ackerman.
During the pretrial hearings, Ackerman allowed Robert Hull, secretary for
peace and social concerns of the General Conference Mennonite Church, and
Peter Ediger, director of Mennonite Voluntary Service, to testify about
Mennonite witness against war and conscription of persons and money for war
purposes. But the testimony was disallowed at the trial.
One of Chrisman’s attorneys, Jeffrey Weiss, in addressing the 12-member jury,
argued that Chrisman’s religious beliefs and his conscientious objector status
during the Vietnam War should exempt him from paying that portion of his
federal income tax that supports the military. “He did not try to hide behind
the shield of religion to rip off the government but honestly believes he is
exercising his constitutional rights to religion.” he said.
Chrisman, married, with a two-year-old daughter, faces up to one year in
prison and a $10,000 fine The verdict will be appealed to the
U.S. Court of
Appeals in Chicago.
A pair of articles advertised seminar on war tax resistance that would be held
at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center in
:
Does Caesar ask for only what belongs to him?
Should there be a Mennonite consensus on paying or not paying war taxes? These
and related questions will be the agenda for a seminar at Laurelville Church
Center, .
The seminar is entitled “War Taxes: to Pay or Not to Pay?” It is jointly
sponsored by the Church Center and Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section.
Persons on both sides of the issue are encouraged to participate. More
information is available from Laurelville Mennonite Church Center…
“War Taxes: To Pay or Not to Pay?”
is the title of a seminar cosponsored by
MCC
Peace Section and Laurelville Mennonite Church Center. Persons on all sides of
the issue are encouraged to participate as such questions will be raised as:
What belongs to Caesar and what to God? What are these taxes buying? What are
the alternatives? More information is available from Laurelville Mennonite
Church Center…
The GCMC Mid-Triennium
This was the first Gospel Herald report from the
General Conference Mennonite Church special mid-triennium conference on war
taxes:
Debate was vigorous and heated as more than 500 delegates from the General
Conference Mennonite Church and some 200 visitors met
to discuss how Christians should respond to the nuclear threat and to massive
expenditures for defense. War tax resistance, or the refusal to pay for the
military portion of the federal budget, was among possible responses discussed
at the meeting, held in Minneapolis.
A few delegates present at the first day of the conference said the church
should not act as tax collector for the state through withholding taxes from
employees’ paychecks. But most of the delegates present the first day said
that while they were troubled by worldwide military expenditures of over one
billion dollars daily, the church as a corporate body should not engage in
illegal activity in its witness against war preparations. Instead, speakers
urged alternatives such as pressuring congressional representatives to reduce
defense expenditures, eliminate the arms trade, and to increase aid and trade
to Third World countries. A few observed that Mennonites contribute to the
disparity in living standards around the world through their affluent
lifestyle.
A sentiment often expressed, however, was that the church, while avoiding
illegal actions, should actively support its members who engage in civil
disobedience on the basis of conscience.
Roy Vogt, economics professor from Winnipeg, Manitoba, berated the assembly
for loading the responsibility for witness upon isolated individuals. “It is
morally reprehensible,” he said, “to give only moral support. We must provide
financial and legal support for those prophets who have arisen from our
middle-class ranks.”
In contrast to the social activists at the conference are Mennonites like Dan
Dalke, pastor from Bluffton, Ohio, who castigated the social activists for
making pacifism a religion. “We will never create a Utopia,” he said. “Jesus
didn’t come to clean up social issues. Our job is to evangelize the world. A
peace witness is secondary.”
Some of the statements were personal. A businessman confessed that while he
could easily withhold paying military taxes on the basis of conscience, he was
frightened. “I am scared of being different, of being embarrassed, of being
alienated from my community. Unless I get support from the Mennonite church, I
will keep paying taxes.”
Alvin Beachy of Newton, Kan.,
said the church seemed to be shifting from a quest to being faithful to the
gospel to being legal before the government. Echoing this view, J.R.
Burkholder of Goshen, Ind.,
said, “The question is not who is most faithful, but what does it mean to be
faithful?”
A follow-up article in the
issue filled in some blanks:
General Conference Mennonites voted
to launch a vigorous campaign to exempt the church from acting as a tax
collector for the state.
Five-hundred delegates, representing 60,000 Mennonites in Canada and the
U.S. passed the
resolution by a nine to one margin. Charged with responsibility to implement
the decision is the highest policy-making body of the General Conference
Mennonite Church, the General Board.
Heinz Janzen, executive secretary for the denomination, said the decision will
increase political activism among Mennonites, a group which has traditionally
kept distant from legislative activities.
Delegates met
in a special conference to discern the will of God for Christians in their
response to militarism and the worldwide arms race.
Some Mennonites are practicing war tax resistance — the refusal to pay the
military portion of federal income tax. This was a central focus of debate
during because one of the
employees of the General Conference has asked the church to stop withholding
war taxes from her wages. In , Cornelia Lehn,
who is director of children’s education, made the request on grounds of
conscience. Her request was refused by the General Board because it would be
illegal for an employer to not act as a tax collector for the Internal Revenue
Service.
Although delegates to this convention affirmed that decision, they instructed
the General Board to vigorously search for legal avenues to exempt the church
from collecting taxes. In that way individuals employed by the church would be
free to follow their own conscience.
The campaign to obtain legal conscientious objection to war taxes will last
three years. If fruitless the question is to be brought back to another
meeting of the church.
Activists in the church were not completely satisfied with the decision. They
would prefer that Cornelia Lehn’s request be granted. These delegates spoke
for an early First Amendment test of the constitutionality of the church being
compelled to act as a tax collector.
Nevertheless, Donovan Smucker, vice-president of the General Conference and
from Kitchener, Ont., said of
the decision, “Something wonderful is happening. We are beginning to bring our
witness to the political order.”
Vernon Lohrenz, a delegate from South Dakota, observed, “We must proceed in
faith, and not in fear. If this is the right thing to do, God will take care
of us.”
From the discussions on taxation, it seemed the issue will not easily be
resolved.
Implementing the decision of the General Conference Mennonite Church “war tax”
conference in Minneapolis has
not been easy.
The Minneapolis resolution mandated a task force on taxes to seek “all legal,
legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector
exemption” for the General Conference Mennonite Church from the withholding of
federal income taxes from its employees. (About 46 percent of
U.S.
federal taxes are used for the military.)
Two meetings of the task force have been held. The task force has been
expanded to include representation from the Church of the Brethren, the
Friends, and the Mennonite Church. This group of 11 is expected by the
participating churches to establish the legal, legislative, and administrative
agenda of a corporate discipleship response to military taxes.
At their second meeting () the
task force members rejected administrative avenues. Within the scope of
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service or Revenue Canada regulations, this would involve extending
ordination, commissioning, or licensing status to all employees of church
institutions. It was a consensus of the task force that this would be an
administrative loophole. It would not develop a conscientious objector
position in response to military taxes.
However, both the judicial and legislative options will be pursued
simultaneously. Plans for the legislative option are the more developed.
For the legislative route to work, says Delton Franz, director of the
Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section office in Washington,
D.C., the
problem of conscience and taxes will have to be defined carefully. Currently a
paper focusing on the reasons the General Conference has a major problem of
conscience with collecting taxes from its employees is being drafted. After it
has been reviewed, it will be sent along with cover letters by leaders of the
historic peace churches to members of Congress who represent major
constituency concentrations or sit on key subcommittees. Later on, church
members will also be asked to write letters. It is important, says Franz, to
define the problem of conscience in such a way that it will motivate Senators
and Representatives to work vigorously for the bill.
Another follow-up to these initiatives will be a visit to Washington of the
most influential peace church leaders to solicit support from selected members
of Congress and to obtain a sponsor for an exemption bill.
There is a possibility that a parallel task force will emerge in Canada. Ernie
Regehr, director of Project Ploughshares, Waterloo,
Ont., notes the necessity of
defining the question of militarism in Canadian terms for Canadians; for
example, arms export revenues. Regehr in attempting to gather a Canadian task
force. Heinz Janzen, general secretary of the General Conference Mennonite
Church, is convener of the war tax expanded task force. Mennonite Church
members are Winifred Beechy, secretary for peace and social concerns under the
Board of Congregational Ministries; Janet Reedy, member of the Mennonite
Church committee on tax concerns; and Gordon Zook, executive secretary of the
Board of Congregational Ministries.
A New Call to Peacemaking
The “New Call to Peacemaking” campaign continued.
Another conference
was announced for :
workshops will deal with conflict
resolution, tax resistance and the World Peace Tax Fund, economic conversion
and the arms race, and resources for peace education.
Campaign organizers assert that interest in the “issue of conscience and war
taxes” has been growing recently. It was given a “high priority” by the New
Call to Peacemaking national conference in Wisconsin.
Results of the conference
(which had apparently been pushed back a few weeks) were reported by Winifred
N. Beechy:
More war-tax opposition
A group of 30 to 40 church people met on , at City Church
of the Brethren, Goshen, Ind.,
to consider the moral dilemma faced by Christians who are opposed to war as a
method of settling disputes but who involuntarily contribute to war by payment
of taxes.
Participants in the one-day seminar came from 12 area congregations and
represented four denominations. The focus of the meeting was on that portion
of the federal income tax which goes to support the military and weapons
production. This group felt that the increasing militarization of our society,
the escalation of the arms race, and production of highly technological
weapons of destruction posed the problem of priorities and stewardship, and
the contradiction of “paying for war while praying for peace.”
Willard Swartley, professor of New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical
Seminaries in Elkhart, spoke on “Biblical imperatives,” emphasizing the
Christian’s mandate for responsible use of the earth’s resources. Cliff Kindy
of Goshen then outlined what we pay for war, giving a breakdown of the federal
budget with percentages of expenditures going to current and past military and
war-related items. He computed current military spending as roughly 25 to 30
percent, while a more comprehensive figure, taking into account veterans’
expenses and interest on the war-related portion of the national debt, reaches
as high as 50 percent of the national budget. Kindy also estimated that
members of Mennonite and Church of the Brethren churches in Elkhart County pay
more for war taxes than they contribute to their churches.
A survey of the history of war tax resistance among the historic peace
churches since the Reformation was presented by Leonard Gross, archivist of
the Mennonite Church. Current responses to the problem of war taxes were given
by a number of people. Janet Reedy of Elkhart and Jim Sweigart of Goshen
discussed possible options such as refusal to pay that portion of the income
tax which goes to support war, payment made with an accompanying letter or
protest, or voluntarily limiting income below the level of tax liability.
Following the presentations the group broke up into three workshops for
further discussion. From these emerged a consensus on the need for a
continuing support group such as this. Participants expect to draft a
statement which can be presented to their respective congregations for
consideration.
The seminar was planned by a New Call to Peacemaking Committee made up of
members from six Church of the Brethren and Mennonite Churches in Goshen, with
Virgil Brenneman from The Assembly (Mennonite) serving as chairman.
Bruce Chrisman told a New Call to Peacemaking Workshop of his war tax resistance.
The workshop on national service and voluntary service discussed a proposal by
members of Rainbow Boulevard Mennonite Church, Kansas City,
Kan., regarding a legal tax
alternative which would involve cooperating with a national service plan.
In the workshop on conscription of wealth Bob Hull, secretary for peace and
social concerns of the General Conference Mennonite Church, suggested
alternatives to paying war taxes. Others offered their own suggestions.
Several persons expressed the desire to pay taxes only for nonmilitary
programs, and said they wished there was legal provision for this, such as the
World Peace Tax Fund. McSorley, who has had contacts on Capitol Hill,
responded by saying that until there is a large grass-roots movement of tax
resistance the
WPTF doesn’t
stand a chance.
The latter half of the workshop included sharing by Bruce Chrisman,
Carbondale, Ill., who is
involved in a federal criminal case, one of two in the
U.S. involving tax
resistance. His case is significant because it will provide a precedent either
for or against tax refusal on the basis of conscience and religious
convictions.
In Chrisman received draft counseling from
James Dunn, pastor of the Champaign-Urbana
(Ill.) Mennonite Church. He
made a covenant with God to only pay taxes for humanitarian purposes. Since
that time he has paid no federal income taxes.
It wasn’t until this year, however, that the government prosecuted him,
charging that he willfully failed to disclose his gross income in
. “Willful” is the key term, because Chrisman
claims he conscientiously chose not to disclose his income. He feels the
government has purposely waited to build its case.
In the conclusion to his talk Chrisman said that when he first appeared in
court on
this year he was “scared to death.” “Today,” he said, “I have no fear in me.
God has given me an inner peace. I know I’m doing what He wants me to do.”
The Smoketown Consultation
The Gospel Herald covered
“the Smoketown Consultation”
of , in which conservative
Mennonites organized against innovations like war tax resistance. It noted that
“All 25 persons invited were white males,” but also reproduced the statement
that came out of the conference.
Several letters to the editor reacted to this news:
“I… wondered about the inclusion of the specific war tax issue. Were
individuals who sincerely hold to an alternate point of view asked to take
part in the discussion? Again, I am not questioning the conclusions of the
group so much as to ask whether any ‘by-invitation-only’ meeting can speak
for the church with any more integrity than can existing boards and
commissions of the church.”
“It is very easy to pick a Scripture verse to use to prove or disprove
almost anything. The group at one point (Statement #2) speaks about total
commitment to Jesus Christ but then uses quotations from the Apostle Paul
(Statement #5) to validify payment of all taxes. If Jesus Christ is
central, let’s use His example and specific words to guide us! I can
imagine the Pentagon people jumping for joy upon hearing such a statement
about taxes. I’m sure they are glad for this voluntary assurance (from
‘peace church’ members) that money will continue to roll in so that the
military can increase its nuclear arsenal. Because of the apparent
unquestioning payment of taxes by German Christians, Hitler was able to
annihilate millions of persons. We
(U.S.) will be
able to do it with nuclear weapons Neat, eh?”
“At Smoketown Ⅱ, when we assume the sisters of the church will take the
opportunity to share their thoughts, we suggest that a fuller range of
statements be reported. Issues, the unavoidable places where doctrine
meets practical decisions, should be identified and addressed to give
definition to the positive reaffirmation of the authority of Scripture and
a renewed zeal for personal and church evangelism. And, for the grass
roots, a minority report on the nonpayment of war taxes could be
included.”
Verburg didn’t think much of all this talk about war taxes, saying that
the peace witness was about more than opposition to military, so the war
tax emphasis was sign of an imbalance. “We are not the flower children of
the sixties. We are Jesus people and there is a big difference.”
[Gordon] Zook [executive secretary of the Board of Congregational Ministries]
noted the difference between the Smoketown statement “that we should pay all
taxes” and the statement on peacemaking passed by the General Assembly at
Waterloo. The Waterloo statement recognizes the withholding of war taxes as a
valid option. Which statement represents the church? he asked.
Peace Tax Fund Legislation
The edition included an
article by Dan Slabaugh laying out the case for the World Peace Tax Fund bill.
An editor’s note in that issue mentioned that “The
U.S. copies of the
issue of the
Gospel Herald carried a center insert with cards that
may be used by readers to encourage
U.S. lawmakers to
support the World Peace Tax Fund. The following article provides the author’s
rationale for support of the Fund legislation. Readers who care to are
encouraged to make use of these cards or to write their own leaders on its
behalf.”
Any collection of taxes for military purposes has created problems of
conscience for those committed to the peaceful resolution of conflict. Many
members of the “historic peace churches” have viewed war taxes as a denial of
religious freedom since such payments forced them to engage in personal sin.
The question has been put this way: “How can I, as a follower of the Prince of
Peace, willingly provide the government with money that’s needed to pay for
war?”
The most recent war tax in the United States, aside from the income tax, has
been the federal telephone tax. This levy was initiated originally to support
the Vietnam War, but is still continuing for a few more years. Many people
have refused to pay this tax to the federal government. Instead, they have
been sending the equivalent amount to the [“]Special Fund for Tax Resisters”
of Mennonite Central Committee’s Peace Section, or to similar designated
organizations.
To a smaller percentage of individuals the payment of the federal income tax
(approximately 50 percent of which they know goes to support wars and military
activity) also has been considered a matter of personal sin. They therefore
have informed the government that in good conscience they cannot voluntarily
pay that portion of their tax. In some cases persons have deposited the amount
in a local bank where the Internal Revenue Service comes and “steals” it from
them. By so doing these persons are freeing themselves of personal
responsibility for the money’s eventual use and also providing a visible
protest against the evil.
To most of these law-abiding, peace-loving people continual confrontation with
their own government has been an unhappy prospect. So nearly a decade ago a
small group of Christians at Ann Arbor, Michigan — with considerable faith in
the American legislative process — came to believe that it might be possible
to draft a bill and eventually convince the federal government to legalize
“peace” for those citizens so inclined.
A faculty member and a few graduate students at the University of Michigan’s
Law School drafted such a proposal. It provides, for the individual requesting
it, a setting aside of that percentage of the federal income tax which the
U.S. Attorney
General would determine to be earmarked for military purposes. This amount
would then be placed in a trust fund to be administered by a board of trustees
to fund peaceful activities, as approved by the
U.S. Congress.
This legislation, which has become known as the World Peace Tax Fund bill, was
introduced into the
U.S. House of
Representatives by Ronald Dellums of California in
. In the
National Council for a
WPTF was
invited to present its case in the House Ways and Means Committee. The bill
was introduced into the Senate in by Senator
Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon. In the last Congress it had 25 sponsors in the
House of Representatives and the three in the Senate (The legislation was not
enacted and so must be reintroduced to be considered by the present Congress.)
The World Peace Tax Fund bill is often misunderstood. It does not call for any
tax relief or special favors benefiting anyone financially. The bill, if
passed, probably will not affect the
U.S. government’s
military activities. In all likelihood it will not cut the military budget, or
of itself, stop wars. And it will not diminish the need to continue peace
teaching or peace activities.
But it will allow a citizen to legally refrain from contributing to the cost
of war and violence. It will provide a fund to finance peace programs and
support efforts to eliminate the causes of violent conflict.
The biggest obstacle to getting this bill passed in the
U.S. Congress is
the large number of people who say they are committed to peace, but who
seemingly feel no responsibility regarding the government’s use of their tax
money. As a result, legislators tell us that they can’t see the payment of war
taxes as much of a problem because they get very few letters expressing
concern about the matter.
To a large degree, Congress is “problem-oriented.” An alert young Congressman
told us personally that “this bill probably will not be passed until enough of
you refuse to pay war taxes — even if it means going to jail. In other words,”
he was saying, “create a problem that Congress must deal with.”
I am convinced that the conscientious objector provision of the Selective
Service act of never would have been
included had it not been for the “problem” created by
C.O.’s who
refused induction during World War Ⅰ. As the
U.S. was mobilizing
for World War Ⅱ the government did not want another “problem” on its hands, so
it agreed to make provisions for the C.O.’s — not
necessarily out of concern for religious liberty, but in order to keep the
boat from rocking too much.
We should remember that God’s prophets and even His own Son were seen as
“problems” in terms of natural human tendencies toward power, selfishness and
greed. Few of us like to “cause problems” for others. We like to work at
solving them — and be successful in our efforts. But in matters of conscience,
we haven’t been called to be successful, we have been called to be faithful.
“Conscience and War Taxes” is the title of a slide set produced by the
National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund. A resources packet accompanies
the 78 color slides, 20-minute cassette. “Conscience and War Taxes” can be
obtained from MBCM Audiovisuals…
The first issue the class tackled was the payment of war taxes. In
U.S.
Rep. Edward Mezvinsky
was invited to church for Sunday lunch and a discussion of the war tax issue.
“He sidestepped every issue,” said Jim Yoder. Mezvinsky promised to vote for
the World Peace Tax Fund Act if it ever made it to the floor of the House, but
declined to help the bill out of committee.
“He spent most of his time expounding upon his efforts to kill the
B-1 bomber,” recalled Nyle.
When the Fourth of July rolled around that Bicentennial year, the class
sponsored an alternate celebration for the church. Guy Hershberger was asked
to chair the meeting. He interviewed some of the local
“veterans” — conscientious objectors Henry Miller, Henry Brenneman, and Sol
Ropp — who had been badly mistreated by the
U.S. Army during
World War Ⅱ. He also discussed the war tax issue.
Later in the year the class presented a proposal to the congregation, asking
the church to lend moral support to people who did not pay the portion of
their taxes going for war. After initial misunderstandings and further
discussion, the congregation approved the proposal.
Nyle [Kauffman] and Jim were the only class members making enough to have to
worry about paying any taxes at all in . Both
withheld 33 percent of their estimated tax and sent a check for the amount to
Mennonite Central Committee.
