Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Mennonites / Amish →
Susan Miller (Balzer)
Some bits-and-pieces from around the web:
Susan Balzer writes about Mennonite war tax resisters for the Mennonite Weekly Review.
Some of the resisters mentioned: Tim Godshall, Willard and Mary Swartley, Ray Gingerich, Harold A. Penner, John and Janet Stoner, Albert and Mary Ellen Meyer, Don Kaufman, Titus and Linda Gehman Peachey, and Stan Bohn.
A Tax Tea Party Revolt will be the only recourse available in the wake of efforts to not provide equal treatment to all citizens under law …
This means gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people will not be filing taxes April 15th.
War tax resister NTodd Pritsky at Pax Americana takes note of the prosecution of a tax evader and wonders if this is going to be his eventual fate as well.
Pritsky is resisting both federal and state taxes (as a war tax resister, he is protesting state complicity in the military industrial complex and in the wars via the state national guard).
Fighting this battle on two fronts takes a lot of energy, and he’s not sure it’s worth it.
I’m back from the NWTRCC National Gathering in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
I’ll share some of my impressions and go into more detail in the coming days.
I flew into Charlottesville and was picked up by one of our hosts — who’d be shuttling incoming conferencers all weekend and who did a fantastic job of making sure we all got collected, assembled, fed, and then given a comfortable place to lay our heads at the end of the day.
We passed the new America tombstone on the way back to Harrisonburg where we were holding the sessions of our meeting at the Community Mennonite Church.
After the administrative committee met on morning and afternoon to grease the wheels for the larger coordinating committee meetings, night was devoted to introductions, a viewing of a video on corrupt and insufficiently-monitored government spending on the Afghanistan War, and reports from local groups about how their Tax Day actions went and what they’ve been up to.
Clare Hanrahan shared some stories from the tour she and Coleman Smith have been conducting through Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina to meet with peace & justice activists in that area, forge alliances between them, and learn about the state of the regional movement.
They’ve been blogging their adventures on the War Resisters League Asheville site.
Lots of people reported that their tax day protests had been upstaged by the Tea Party demonstrations this year, though a few groups took the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach and partied along with the rest of them.
One person noted that with more people e-filing their tax returns, the phenomenon of the last-minute post office rush has diminished, and there’s less media attention and less of an audience for leafletting and such.
Ruth Benn reported on how in New York they held a viewing of tax resistance related excerpts from Boston Legal and Stranger Than Fiction as a discussion-prompter.
Robert Randall reported that an attempt to focus messaging around the single issue of opposition to the Iraq War had seemed promising at first, as the war became more unpopular even in his red state of Georgia, but that it hadn’t seemed to lead to any noticeable uptick in interest in war tax resistance or in new resisters.
Many people noted the increasing challenge of developing interest in our message in a time when the anti-war movement is suffering from a post-election tranquilization.
Ray Gingerich reflected on the difficulty he is having in trying to reinvigorate the war tax resistance tradition in the Mennonite church.
On tax day, he sends his letter of protest to his church.
He also recalled for us that their local war tax resistance group used to be much more active and at one time they had a mutual aid fund that they used to defray the costs of penalties, interest, and frivolous filing fines incurred by individual members.
morning
After breakfast morning, we discussed what we thought of a rough cut of an upcoming war tax resistance film project, and talked about what we thought would be the best use of the available footage.
Then Bill Ramsey gave us an update on the War Tax Boycott project, and we discussed options for modifying the campaign going forward.
Here are some of the comments from my notes (these are all paraphrased and on-the-fly, so may not represent what these folks actually said or meant to say):
David Waters
I love the palm cards.
Pam Allee
It would be good to keep the campaign going on a low simmer during the sleepy times so that we would be ready to jump in with a flashier campaign when the moment is right.
Bill Ramsey
I recommend a scaled-down campaign in which we keep the website updated but reduce the budget.
Robert Randall
How can we hold on to the new resisters whom we learn about for the first time when they sign up for the boycott?
Ray Gingerich
I’m confused as to whether the boycott is meant only for first-timers or if it’s for everyone; to me it seemed gimmicky and not particularly appealing.
Susan Balzer
Some people might not want to sign on to the boycott because they don’t want to be “on a list” and they might be more comfortable if there’s a way to remain anonymous.
Jim Stockwell
I think maybe “boycott” is a threatening or discouraging word to some people.
Clare Hanrahan
The hard copy boycott sign-on sheets weren’t at all popular when we were tabling.
Daniel Woodham
We should make the palm cards less likely to go stale by removing the year and references to specific wars/issues.
Geov Parrish
The value of the campaign is mainly as a vehicle for publicizing war tax resistance as an option, not so much in getting people to sign on.
Erica Weiland
I wonder if by framing the campaign as a one-year thing we prompt people to make their resistance temporary.
Clare Hanrahan
I do low-income resistance and I redirect unwaged labor, not money.
I think the war tax resistance movement should honor that and recognize that option for boycott participants (not assume everyone has a dollar amount to redirect).
Tim Godshall (and others)
We need to have better follow-up with the people who sign on — by phone is better than by email.
Robert Randall
Maybe we could parcel out some of the following-up to people in our network list.
Next came a discussion of our finances and a report from the fundraising committee, and then we broke for lunch.
afternoon
First thing on afternoon we had a panel presentation and group discussion about the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and about NWTRCC’s relationship with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
This was the most contentious item on the agenda, and I’m going to leave you all in suspense about it by writing it up in a future blog post all its own rather than putting it here.
After this, we broke up into smaller group sessions.
In mine, a group of maybe twenty resisters just shared some of their recent experiences with resistance and with the IRS.
Sharing our war stories like this is one of the best parts of these meetings, and is also a great way of keeping our fingers on the pulse of how IRS enforcement trends are changing.
I didn’t take notes during that session since it seemed to be a more-intimate sharing of personal information than the general meeting.
I did write down one quote though that was too good to miss, from Clare Hanrahan:
“I used to say that they could boil me in oil before I’d pay any war taxes, but now that I know that they could actually do that…”
One idea I came away with was that it would be nice to have some tips from war tax resistance veterans about how to deal with “mixed marriages” in which one partner is a resister and the other one is not.
There are some tricky questions, especially when finances get tangled up together.
I’m hoping, next time I have some free time, to put some time into collecting some of these stories and tips.
The next full-group session was about “organizing strategies and outreach ideas in the Obama era.”
I didn’t take notes here either as I was facilitating and had to devote all of my attention to that.
What I mostly recall from the discussion is that people were less interested in talking about strategies, techniques, and outreach ideas and more interested in talking about what sort of messaging we should and shouldn’t use.
Before dinner was another set of small-group breakout sessions.
I joined the web team, discussing the nitty-gritty of web site maintenance and design, none of which is really worth relating here.
was our business meeting, in which decisions that require consensus approval of the coordinating committee are made, folks are rotated onto and off of the administrative committee (Erica Weiland is joining us this time), we review the budget and priorities and how the coordinator is doing, check in on the progress of ongoing projects, and plan for the next gathering.
The first half of the meeting was largely taken up by Peace Tax Fund-related discussion, which I’m holding off reporting on until a future post.
For the second half, I was the facilitator and so took no notes.
So you’ll just have to wait until Ruth Benn posts her meeting minutes for a full picture of what took place.
Notes about an especially aggressive IRS levy of Social Security payments, and about the agency’s retreat from its overzealous infliction of “frivolous filing” penalties on people who added messages of protest to their tax forms
A note about an Independence Day war tax protest at which IRS forms went up in flames, and about pioneering war tax resister Juanita Nelson’s 90th birthday
Some resources that would be appropriate for the upcoming “Nuclear Free Future Month”
News about the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering and the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters
She put in a plug for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, the latest in
a series of peace tax fund legislation ideas, and then discussed her own
resistance:
I first became a war tax resister when I connected paying the federal
telephone tax with paying for the Vietnam War. Unlike my male peers, I didn’t
need to fear being physically drafted to fight. However, by voluntarily paying
taxes designated for war, I risked complicity with the military.
When I ask people if their conscientious objection extends to paying for war,
I hear a variety of answers, all based on fear: “I can’t control what the
government does with my tax money. If I resist, the government will just come
and get my money anyway. It will get even more, if I have to pay penalties and
interest. Besides, it’s illegal to not pay my share of taxes. And I don’t want
to go to jail.”
Others say, “What difference can I make? It’s too much of a hassle. I don’t
want to face an audit. I [or my institution or business] may suffer if donors
or customers see us as radicals.” And the clincher: “We don’t want to do
something controversial that might affect our work for peace.”
Karen Marysdaughter, former director of the National War Tax Resistance
Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC),
asks, “Which do you fear most — what will happen to you if you refuse to pay
war taxes, or the effect that paying for war has on people who are dying?”
NWTRCC
publishes information helpful to anyone counting the costs of war tax
resistance. And
NWTRCC
members encourage and support each other at biennial meetings. Our church,
which values community and nonconformity to the world, can learn much from
NWTRCC.
A unique opportunity to do just that happens
. For the first time, an
international conference on war tax issues will be held in the United States.
Mennonite participation with the people and issues at this conference could
set the pace for our peace witness in the 21st century…
A concerted decision to practice conscientious objection to military taxation
will greatly advance our mission to bring Christ’s healing and hope to the
world.
This was accompanied by an info-box with details about the upcoming conference.
John K. and Janet Stoner shared their letter to the
IRS
in the issue in which they
announced their withholding of a token $10 from their taxes “as a witness to
God’s call to preserve human life and not to kill.” They followed this with
talk about the Nuremberg trials and the necessity of disobedience that strikes
me as broadly true, but so bold in its implications that a $10 token act of
resistance looks kind of pathetic next to it. Be that as it may…
An article on the Zacchaeus-the-tax-collector episode in the gospel according to Luke
by Marlin Jeschke, from the
edition, stood out to me because of the matter-of-fact way the article asserts
that “Jesus’ overall position concerning the Roman occupation” included
“rejecting tax resistance.”
Editor J. Lorne Peachey penned
a
middle-of-the-road some say this but others say that editorial that touched
on war tax resistance, insisting that “We must… become more intentional in our
actions,” but never quite intending anything specific himself beyond
“supporting each other in ways we believe the Spirit is leading us.”
Larry Leaman-Miller penned a letter to the editor that appeared in the
issue that (for effect?)
presented the taxpayer complicity dilemma as something new that Mennonites
ought to consider and try to come up with some sort of solution for:
Colombian Mennonite leader Ricardo Esquivia, as quoted in the
issue, said bluntly to American Christians, “Through your tax dollars you are
supporting war” (“Colombian Leader Challenges Churches”). He was referring to
the recently approved $1.3 billion of
U.S. aid to
Colombia, most of it earmarked for the Colombian military.
Esquivia’s comment raises anew questions about our Mennonite peace witness. In
preparation for a recent presentation on nonviolence, I discovered that the
United States spends roughly three times as much annually on its military
budget as Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria
combined — the countries usually pointed to as our greatest potential enemies.
Forty-seven percent of our federal budget in
will go to military needs.
We are spending almost as much defending the nation as we are on the nation we
are defending. Actually, this kind of spending has little to do with defending
and perhaps everything to do with political, corporate and military attempts
to dominate key areas of the world.
And all this occurs without any of us having to face a draft and the specter
of personal involvement. In this age of high-tech weapons, our bodies are no
longer needed; now it’s our dollars. I struggle to know how our peace theology
speaks to this changed situation.
I wonder if people in the future will ask, “How could they have paid so
passively?” Ricardo Esquivia has seen firsthand in Colombia the violent
results of some of our payments. I think we need to ponder his words
seriously.
Could we have chosen alternatives that are legal? Could we give more to
charity, making less tax obligation? Could we instead do educational
witnessing by handing out charts at the post office on April 15 showing that
almost half the national budget goes for past and present military programs?
Could we write legislators who make tax laws rather than to the
IRS,
which merely implements them? Yes. We have also done those kinds of
witnessing.
What were the consequences of diverting part of our income tax payments to
war relief and prevention agencies? Courteous ignoring.
After several months the
IRS may
send a letter ignoring what we said but helpfully suggesting that we can ease
the financial strain by paying in installments. We explain again that poverty
is not the problem but that we are trying to live as Christians. Months later
a reply tells us that if we pay by a certain date we can avoid more interest
and penalty charges. The correspondence continues with us sharing our deepest
convictions and
IRS
sending polite computer-generated notifications.
Finally, notification comes that the money owed will be taken from our bank
account. We are not surprised, since this is what has happened for more than
20 years.
Financially, the cost has been affordable. When penalties and interest are
added, we usually are charged about 20 percent more than what we diverted to
peace and relief groups. We accept this as a cost of witnessing and are glad
we can still afford to do it.
In earlier years,
IRS
correspondence contained warnings of unspecified severe penalties, but now
this happens less often. When
IRS
letters listed 800 numbers for further contact, we called, and staff listened
politely. Once we were allowed an interview. Contacts were courteous — once
with opposing arguments and once with sympathy — but usually patient listening
by people dealing with problem taxpayers.
Is this a worthwhile, valuable witness to the Jesus way? We believe it
is. People from other countries suffering from
U.S. policies are
encouraged when they hear there is this kind of Christianity in the United
States. Maybe our witness reduces resistance to Christian missionaries who are
identified with
U.S. self-interest
and militarism.
Paradoxically, these people also admire a government that allows this kind of
dissent, which is not permitted in their countries.
Christians who find themselves living in a superpower have a special
responsibility. Though this responsibility of ours seems an impossible task,
God has ways to heal the addicted. When people have stopped being
co-dependents and no longer support the habit, addicts have been helped to
recover.
This is the forty-fourth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
we reach the mid-2000s and the start of the war on Iraq.
Once again Caesar asks for more money to provide more weapons — this time to
launch a war in Iraq. Even the Pope and nearly all the major Christian
denominations in the United States, not just those in the historic peace
church tradition, have said this is not a just war. We know 25 to 35 percent
of our tax money will go to support the machines of war that have taken the
lives of our friends. In the current hi-tech war-making, Caesar covets our
dollars more than our bodies.
We agonize in our consciences. If a man were to run into our house and demand
we give him a knife because he wants to go kill our neighbor, would we give it
to him? Of course not.
Is it different if it is Caesar who asks for that knife? What shall we give
Caesar? Anything Caesar asks for? Or only what belongs to Caesar? What does
belong to Caesar? We try to seek the mind of a compassionate Christ in this
dilemma. Within our souls we feel we cannot willfully put that knife into the
hands of those who will bring harm and death to friends — known and
unknown — around the world.
Once again we fill out our 1040 Tax Form correctly, but again we write a
letter to the Internal Revenue Service — and government officials — to explain
why we cannot pay some or all the military percentage of our income tax. We
explain that we direct our monies instead to our church’s relief and
development programs. Such efforts, we believe, build sustainable, peaceful
lives for people around the world and probably do more to engender good will
and security for Americans than any war. Under biblical principles and under
the principles of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals after World War Ⅱ we know
we cannot hide behind the inhumane orders of an official or even a government.
Each of us is ultimately responsible to God and our fellow human beings for
our actions.
The IRS
sends us notices of “unpaid taxes.” Eventually they may freeze our wages or
bank account in order to seize the money. (Under the “aiding and abetting”
considerations, it feels different to us whether the man seizes the knife from
our kitchen or we give it to him without protest.) Sometimes the
IRS has
not followed through. We especially salute our friends who live under the
taxable income level as a way of affirming life and walking lightly on the
earth.
When our international friends hear there are Christians who withhold even a
token amount of the “military tax” as a cry for peace, many of
them — including friends of other faiths — have expressed appreciation that
Christians here are ready to witness in this way for a God of peace.
The April issue of Mennonite Central Committee’s A Common
Place reported that ,
MCC
has given more than $4.5 million to Afghanistan relief. According to War
Resister’s League, the United States spent $46 million in one hour of the war
on Iraq — more than 10 times the amount
MCC
gave to rehabilitate Afghanistan. If for no other reason than Christian
stewardship, we should refuse to pay the 47 percent of federal income, estate
or gift taxes that fund the current and past military budget. Redirect them
instead to do what Jesus asked of us: Care for the enemy, teach our children,
heal the sick, lend to the needy without interest.
I urge all who work and pray for peace to support the passage of the Religious
Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, a bill that would provide that the federal tax
payments of conscientious objectors to war be used only for nonmilitary
purposes. Until that bill is passed, I urge you to use all legal and ethical
ways to lower your taxable income and to consider redirecting the military
percentage of the tax money you owe. The Mennonite Church needs to become more
proactive, prophetic and pastoral as we address the consequences of the draft
of war taxes.
The
MCC
awarded Zachary Kurtz
top honors in a “Peace Oratorical Contest” for his speech on war tax
resistance, according to the edition.
The edition noted the ongoing
court battle between the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Quakers) and the
IRS.
“The Internal Revenue Service is threatening
PYM
with a penalty of more than $20,000 for refusing to garnish the wages of
employee and war-tax-resister Priscilla Adams.
PYM
has decided to challenge the
IRS on
all possible grounds, including constitutional and statutory religious
freedom…”
Timothy Godshall’s article on death & taxes
appeared in the edition. It
pointed out the grotesquely enormous
U.S. military
budget, and the sacrifices conscientious objectors are forced to make to
reduce their complicity with it, and used this as a launching pad to plug the
Peace Tax Fund bill.
Rex
J. Rempel and Lenae K. Nofziger wrote in to the
issue to say that because
“[r]oughly 53 percent of our current income taxes” will be spent “on soldiers,
weapons, and debt from prior wars” they had decided they would be “withholding
$53 from our payment due. Obviously this is a symbolic amount, but it is a step
toward fully following God’s call for us.”
After World War Ⅱ, a Jewish rabbi in Germany said what shocked him most was
not the terror of the Nazis but the silence of the good people in Germany.
Today what disturbs me more than the horrendous atrocities of presidents Bush,
Clinton and the
U.S. Empire for
many decades is how most
U.S. peace
activists, progressives, Quakers, Mennonites and members of Amnesty
International pay
U.S. federal income
tax for these atrocities: to rob, terrorize, blind, cripple, paralyze, make
homeless and murder our sisters and brothers worldwide. We get what we pay
for.
Nothing in life is more important than refusing to pay federal income tax for
war — no matter who is president. The best way to refuse to pay federal income
tax for war, with no fines and no threats from the
IRS,
is to live simply under the taxable level. The federal income taxable level
for for a single person who is under 65 and
not blind is $7,950. I lived on
$3,390 — less than half the federal income taxable level.
I have no right to pay tax to do to other people what I do not want them to do
to me. I have paid no federal income tax for 25 years. I pledge now, at age
58, to live simply, to own no car and to pay no federal income tax for war for
the rest of my life. This is nonviolent revolution.
There was a brief write-up
about the 10th International Conference on War Tax
Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns that happened in
, in the
edition.
H.A. Penner
wrote in to the edition to
explain his symbolic withholding formula:
To express my conscientious objection to war, I am withholding from my current
federal income tax payment an amount equal to one dime for every billion
dollars in the
U.S. military
budget. I am donating that amount — $78.30 — to the National Campaign for a
Peace Tax Fund to be used in the pursuit of peace.
For a time the Bixlers withheld the
U.S. telephone tax
but found that this decision resulted only in confused correspondence. Now
their deductions are sufficiently large to cut payment of federal taxes. “When
charitable donations go up,” says Sam, “taxes go down.” One time the
IRS
asked them to show receipts.
This is the forty-fifth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
we finish off the first decade of the new millennium.
What belongs to God and what to Caesar? It’s a riddle that has to be puzzled
over again and again by Mennonites in the context of war tax resistance. In the
edition,
Titus Peachey took a swing
at the pitch: Given all that belongs to God, he asked, “can we who follow Jesus
willingly give our tax dollars for war and killing?”
In the edition,
Scott Key
answered Everett J. Thomas’s editorial statement — “There seems to be nothing
we can do but write letters and pray that [the war in Iraq] will stop.” — with
some more practical ideas, including boycotts of and divestment from military
contractors, and war tax resistance.
Susan Miller Balzer wrote in to applaud and supplement this:
Scott Key… lists some important ways to work against war and for peace. In
mentioning war tax resistance, he expresses a common misconception that
employees cannot prevent their employers from withholding federal taxes from
their paychecks.
However, it is possible to limit or stop withholding by increasing withholding allowances on the W-4 Form (or legally writing “Exempt” on the form if you did not owe federal income taxes last year and do not expect to owe in the coming year).
See the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s “practical” publications on the Web site nwtrcc.org on controlling federal tax withholding and on low income or simple living for helpful information on ways to keep from paying for war.
On the same Web site, click on the War Tax Boycott, Withhold from War/Pay for Peace to find ways to participate in this national effort to defund war.
The “draft” of federal tax money to pay for present, past and future wars is a
fundamental issue that our church should address as it works to replace
suffering, destruction and injustice with healing and hope. The military draft
affected only young men. The current “economic draft” affects young men and
women who enter the military to try to get out of poverty. The draft of tax
money affects people of all ages as long as they have a taxable income.
If everyone in just one congregation refused to pay for war and redirected
their refused taxes to an underfunded social service, imagine the
opportunities for witness and change that could occur.
Don
Kaufman was back in the
letters to the editor column:
If enough of us withhold from war and pay for peace, we can stop the harm.
War-tax resistance is not a passive or unethical tax avoidance but an act of
conscience that everyone can do. The cross of Jesus as nonviolence and
compassion is our model for hope and change.
Individuals shoulder great responsibility for warfare and for peace. At times
the most effective way to take responsibility is refusal to collaborate, as
Franz
Jaggerstatter did in Hitler’s Austria in
. How can we take a stand against a
government that leads its citizens into committing murder? The task is to be
reform-minded, to live in an ethical way, and progressively to make
unthinkable the coercion of conscience by the majority who put their faith in
military or violent solutions.
Like Jeremiah, let us
unmask the illusions of power by being servants of hope among the vulnerable
and wounded.
Stanley Bohn
encouraged people to engage in at least a small symbolic act of war tax
redirection, in the edition,
claiming important benefits from the gesture that go beyond its likely
practical results:
Will this action make Congress and the Bush administration change their funding priorities?
Unlikely, even if millions took part in this effort.
After all, war fuels our economy, is useful in getting national unity and political support, and it focuses on the evil of others, allowing us to raise our self-esteem.
As Chris Hedges wrote in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, war provides us with purpose and a civil religion.
What happens to us: For some Christians, the motive for participating
in tax redirection may start as a protest against refugee making, the
slaughter of people as collateral damage, torture of prisoners, creating
mentally damaged veterans, ballooning war debt, ruined international
relations, and other disastrous consequences. But when we take a stand for our
Christian convictions, something else may happen.
We gain an understanding of Jesus’ way of being lumped with criminals when
choosing the community-building, caring, enemy-loving life at the heart of the
universe. We realize that Jesus did not live or teach a religion guided by
what is respectable, safe, stress-free, or that waits for a consensus. Jesus
calls us to a life that is unpredictable and vulnerable.
Tax redirection is not a criterion of who is a “real Christian” but is more
accepting life as a gift, being what we are here for, living what we see in
Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. When the
IRS
makes us pay a small percentage more than our lawful tax, we can experience
what we believe is more important than money, and the hold money has on us is
reduced.
Living this kind of trust in the Jesus way helps keep serious Christians from
attempting to be pure and withdraw from life’s realities. It keeps us engaged
in current issues and with those proposing different goals. We are engaged,
however, in the kind of peace Christians should expect when choosing an
alternative way to conquer evil.
The risk of taking a stand regardless of consequences brings an unexpected
peace. It is not a peace that makes us feel protected, free of fears, or
satisfied with ourselves. It is a peace from knowing one is on a venture of
trusting in the universe-guiding reality we see in Christ. It is an empowering
peace given us when we offer ourselves to the one who gave us this life,
trusting God for the outcome. It is an empowerment that keeps us open rather
than defensive and having to shut out the desperate cries of others. It is an
alternative to a consumer-oriented Christianity that brings an unintended
transformation that makes us vulnerable and powerful at the same time.
Possibilities after April 15: There is no telling if or how God might
use the April 15 tax-redirection event. Consequences may occur that we never
thought of, including what powers or gifts might be released in ourselves.
We should not expect the government to inform us how many participated. The
media may not be free to report it, even if it knew. If the amount we withheld
and diverted is seen by the
IRS as
worth taking action against us, we will likely receive threatening letters and
finally have those funds confiscated along with a penalty.
Yet significant tax redirection can mean some humanitarian agencies will get
more financial support, and starving people will be fed. Maybe some
legislators will hear the conscience dilemma of many taxpayers and join other
co-sponsors of
HR 1921, the
Freedom of Religion Peace Tax Fund, which would make legal the redirection of
taxes by conscientious objectors to war. And maybe a few thousand redirectors
will discover we are less bound by the expectations of others and are freer
than we thought we could be.
Most important, we may learn that choosing risky ways of living for others,
even civil disobedience, can bring spiritual healing. We won’t defund the war,
but we can be more confident of the Power that overcomes our fears and by
God’s grace enables us to be the humans God intended us to be.
One such redirection idea was announced in the edition:
“Turning toward peace.”
This Mennonite Central Committee
(U.S.) initiative
allowed Americans to “redirect[] war tax dollars to help children in
Afghanistan through
MCC’s
Global Family education sponsorship program.” Titus Peachey, director of peace
education for
MCC
(U.S.) was quoted:
According to Peachey, most who have chosen to withhold believe, “If we cannot
conscientiously participate in war with our bodies, we cannot pay for it
either. We need to give our money to causes that build up rather than destroy
the presence of God in each person,” he says.
Most inform their governments of their actions. “Given the presence of Western
military action in Afghanistan today, the opportunity to contribute to
peacemaking there is timely,” says Peachey. “Equally important is the way in
which withholding war taxes challenges our own systemic militarism.”
A joint letter from Susan Balzer, Deb & Wes Bergen, Anita & Stan Bohn, Ron Faust, Don Kaufman, H.A. Penner, Steve Ratzlaff, Mary Swartley, Willard Swartley, and Dan Leatherman appeared in the edition.
They were responding to an editorial that suggested the Mennonite Church had surrendered as a peace church and had come to be “at peace with war.”
There is a traditional, positive witness opportunity for conscientious
objectors to war of all ages. It may seem scary, but many find it almost
routine. It involves redirection of income-tax assessments used for killing
and refugee-making to ministries meeting human need.…
Our descendants and overseas Christians will wonder how Christians in a
superpower, with over 700 military bases around the world, fighting two wars
and considering a third with Iran, supporting covert wars in places such as
Colombia and Israel, could be so at peace with war.
“The church should consist of communities of loving defiance. Instead, it
consists largely of comfortable clubs of conformity,” writes Ron Sider in
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. If we teach it is wrong, why
do we support it financially?
Shame is the negative motivation. The positive is that Jesus promised his
spirit of truth would abide in us and enable us to live differently from the
world’s ways. If we love him, we are empowered to keep his commandments
(John 14:15–17).
War tax redirection is “alternative service” for dollars we earn, service that
provides hope and new possibilities for suffering people instead of endless
war.
The issue covered
John
Stoner’s “$10.40 for Peace” campaign.
This was another attempt to get timid people to take baby steps into war tax
resistance by resisting a small, token amount of their taxes. The campaign is
still going on today but has yet to
catch fire.
The article seemed to me to exaggerate the scariness of such resistance even as
it tried to assuage the fears of potential resisters. Excerpts:
Stoner says the group hears some concern from individuals about the possible
penalties and “heavy hand of the
IRS
coming down.”
Stoner’s response is threefold. First, “As disciples of Jesus, we shouldn’t
have so much fear,” he says. Second, the past experiences of individuals who
have withheld taxes for similar reasons have been minimal. Third, the tax
withholder can decide later to pay the full amount.
“The most important thing is to make that statement that calls for democratic
conversation about how federal money is spent,” Stoner said.
Others say this movement should take more risks and that
U.S. war spending
remains too large. However, if enough people join, the risks and penalties
would increase, Stoner said.
The article noted that Shane Claiborne had signed on as an endorser and would
be speaking at an upcoming public meeting on the campaign.
This is the thirty-second in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
In I felt the tide start to recede. The war
tax resisting faction had gotten thoroughly distracted by the promise of Peace
Tax Fund legislation, and the conservative taxpaying faction went back on the
offensive in favor of paying taxes without concern.
One of the symptoms of the decay of the war tax resistance position (that I’ve
also seen exhibited elsewhere) was the plea for new resisters to refuse to pay
some tiny, safe token amount of taxes in lieu of more firmly-motivated and
whole-hearted resistance. From the issue:
Christian Peacemaker Teams
(CPT)
is asking U.S.
taxpayers to deduct $3.03 from their federal taxes, as a symbol of their
objection to the $303 billion Defense budget.
CPT
would like congregations to collect withheld money and send it to become part
of the offering at the organization’s conference in Richmond.
Va. The offering will go to
school districts such as the one in Petersburg.
Va., which cannot afford to
buy textbooks.
“The Peace Tax bill is not going to be passed anytime soon,” says [Marian]
Franz frankly. “Not enough people have said they care — and that includes
Mennonites.
“I see a bitter irony in that,” she continues, “because if there were such a
fund, pacifist Christians would say that it was God’s will that they use its
provisions. Yet these same people are doing little to make this fund a
reality.”
The issue printed this
syndicated short news item:
Peace activist Randy Kehler has been jailed and his family’s house confiscated
because of his decade-long refusal to pay
U.S. taxes.
Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have withheld their federal taxes since the
late 1970s. Instead, they have sent their tax dollars to nonprofit
organizations that assist war victims and the poor.
The Internal Revenue Service laid claim to the couple’s house in Colrain,
Mass., to recoup some
$32,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
Discussion by a panel of war tax resisters highlighted a Lancaster,
Pa., meeting sponsored by
the group Taxes for Life. Some 20 people attended the meeting, which also
included a showing of the video Paying for Peace.
Taxes for Life urges individuals to withhold a small, symbolic amount from the
payment of their
U.S. income taxes
and to give the money instead to a local school project. More information is
available from Taxes for Life…
The statement on “Christian Conscience and Military Taxes” says that Illinois
Conference “will seek to support our members who feel a genuine call from God
to withhold payment of military taxes.”
The statement cites examples of this support as including prayer and personal
encouragement, finances, and witness to “political and social powers.”
The resolution also calls on Illinois congregations to contribute a minimum of
$5 per household to the Peace Tax Fund campaign.
The “Taxes for Peace” tax redirection fund gave its annual report and plea for
new funds in the issue:
The U.S. Peace
Section of Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC)
is inviting contributions for the Taxes for
Peace fund. Established in , the fund gives
people who withhold war taxes a way to give their money for peaceful purposes.
This year’s contributions will go to
MCC
U.S. peace
education projects. More information is available from
MCC
U.S. Peace Section…
John K. Stoner tried to blow on the fading coals in the
issue:
The voice of the victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of children, abused and traumatized by war, will not be still.
by John K. Stoner
Last Thursday my phone rang. The voice at the other end of the line asked for
John or Janet Stoner. “I’m John Stoner,” I replied. “Hello. I am Charles Price
of the Internal Revenue Service. I am calling about the letter you sent
indicating that you are withholding part of your income tax payment.”
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said no to
paying the full amount of our income tax. The man could not understand why
anyone would invite the collection pressures of the
IRS upon
themselves by withholding some taxes. But by the time the conversation was
over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was for us a matter of
faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9
kind of experience of being called before the authorities. By the sound of
Mark 13,
Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
“Why do they have to keep bringing up this business about taxes for war?”
someone asks after a congregational meeting. “Why doesn’t this war tax
question just go away?” asks another at a session on strategies to reduce the
military portion of the
U.S. budget.
The reason war keeps coming up and won’t go away is because the voice of the
victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of the children, abused and
traumatized by war, doesn’t go away.
Every discussion about peacemaking in these times must face the question of
how taxes are collected and spent.
Americans watched their tax dollars at work in Iraq. They killed between one
and two hundred thousand people in a month’s time. They left a nation of 17
million people strangled — its water polluted, its hospitals without
electricity, its homes dark, and its classrooms cold. Today malnutrition,
disease, and destitution are the continuing results of this man-made plague of
death and despair.
Since then, an international study team on the Gulf crisis found that the
mortality rate of children under five years of age was almost four times
greater then than before the Gulf War. More than 75 percent of Iraqi children
feel sad and unhappy, worry about the survival of their family. They are
haunted by the smell of gunfire, fuel from planes, fires, and burned flesh.
Taxes paid for all this. It is for those of us who are Christians, as
taxpayers, to sidestep our share of the responsibility. We can choose to “just
say no” (how simple that sounds when we prescribe it to someone else’s moral
choice and how difficult it sounds when it is ours).
Your $3.03 Taxes for Life equivalent can be sent to Christian
Peacemaker Teams…
CPT
also suggests you write a letter of witness to the
IRS with
copies to your representatives in Congress, your
pastor, and your local newspaper. Taxes for Life funds will
be used for education purposes.
I believe God is calling us to plead for the end of the
destructive social institution of war by
refusing to pay for it. We are called to this as clearly
and inescapably as our forebears were called to
abolish slavery. The question is not whether we can achieve that
goal in a year or decade. The question is whether that is our goal — and
whether the world knows that it is our goal. It was Jesus’ goal, and it should
be ours.
One way to enhance this witness is through a symbolic war tax refusal called
Taxes for Life. Sponsored by the Christian Peacemaker Team, this plan would
have taxpayers redirect an amount equivalent to one penny for every billion
dollar of the U.S.
military budget to education. For ,
this is $3.03.
If you do this, and the
IRS
calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law. Go
on to say that you are far more apprehensive about breaking God’s law. Tell
them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the victims of war, and that
you have decided that you will not take their blood upon your hands. Then
leave the outcome with God.
For U.S.
Mennonites, one way we can work at it at this time of year is to take yet
another look at the tax question. As John Stoner reminds us…, it is our taxes
that keep the military going, that make possible aggression and belligerence.
Because of this, some choose not to pay a part of their taxes as a protest.
Others consider that overreaction.
But let us not make that our battle. While we do, more people starve. Let us
rather join hands to find all the ways possible to address the huge military
expenditures of our country, and of the world.
Members of a Newton, Kan.,
group heard reports on the
U.S. Peace Tax Fund
bill in a meeting. The Peace Tax
Group also discussed ideas for creating a local alternative tax fund. Carla
Morton and Stan Bohn reported on their visits to Washington,
D.C., in
connection with a Congressional hearing on the tax fund bill. In addition,
group members talked about starting a local fund for such projects as
environmental protection, mental health care for veterans, and retraining of
military workers.
The following disheartening news was carried in the
issue:
Friends Journal, a Quaker monthly published in
Philadelphia, has agreed to pay $31,343 to the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service.
The payment covers back taxes for the magazine’s editor, who had refused to
pay them because of religious objections to their use for military purposes.
The magazine’s board had refused
IRS
demands that it pay the taxes on behalf of the editor, Vinton Deming.
However, the Justice Department warned the board that it would face legal
action unless the matter was settled, and the magazine’s lawyer advised the
board that it could not win such a case in court.
Now that the pro-taxpaying conservatives were no longer on the defensive, they
apparently no longer felt the need to promote the Peace Tax Fund legislation as
an alternative to lawlessness for Mennonites concerned about their taxes paying
for war. Now they could attack the Peace Tax Fund as being also
scripturally unsound. Or so said
Ernest E. Mummau
in a letter to the editor
that evoked the usual Romans 13 / the government is divinely ordained to bear
the sword / Christians are told to pay taxes without complaint / the Church
should stay in its own domain and shouldn’t meddle with the state line of
argument to tell Mennonites to stop trying to tell the government what to do
with their taxes.
The fourth international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax
campaigns was held in Brussels in . The Gospel Herald article,
and especially the quotes from Peace Tax Fund activist Marian Franz, tried to
spin it as though it was more or less exclusively a Peace Tax Fund promoting
event, with very little mention of actual war tax resistance:
Conference participants came with at least one thing in common, [Marian] Franz
said: “We all find it a clear violation of conscience to pay the military
portion of our taxes; we seek statutory recognition of conscience against
paying for arms as an extension of the right to refuse to bear arms.”
The conference, which draws primarily European and North American
participants, has met every two years .
The gathering allows participants “to hear stories of resistance and to
compare our progress in gaining conscientious objection
(CO)
status to payment of military taxes within our respective countries,” Franz
said.
For instance, NCPTF
hopes to convince Congress members to pass a law permitting people
conscientiously opposed to war to have the military portion of their taxes
allocated to peacemaking.
“Most countries have a similar approach to war tax resisters,” Franz noted.
“The standard response of governments, when they do respond, is to add civil
penalties and collect the unpaid taxes forcibly. Imprisonment for war tax
resistance is rare.”
Court responses to these cases are usually predictable as well. “The issue
usually raises a ‘political’ question which the courts cannot address, or the
courts decide that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience or
religion do not outweigh the duty of the citizen to pay taxes,” she said.
[Franz said:] "Most European war tax resisters entered the scene in
. The presence of Cruise and Pershing
missiles woke them up. They suddenly realized that Europe had become a giant
football field on which the two superpowers could bounce their nuclear
weapons.”
This prompted another
letter to the editor,
this one from Russell J. Baer, which also used the Render-unto-Caesar / Romans
13 beef to complain about activists who have an issue with paying war taxes.
This is the thirty-third 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.
By things had slowed to a crawl. It was only
a few years back that talk of war tax resistance had risen to a frenzy, and the
subject was a regular topic of debate in the Mennonite Church General Assembly.
Now: not so much.
The annual “Taxes for Peace” redirection fund update appeared in the
issue:
Mennonite Central Committee
U.S. Peace and
Justice Ministries invites contributions for the
Taxes for Peace fund. The fund, established
in , gives people who withhold war taxes a
way to give their money to peaceful purposes. Contributions will support the
creation of peace education materials and education about pastoral sexual
misconduct by the Women’s Concerns desk and Mennonite Conciliation Services.
Remnants of the old passion were preserved on videotape
():
Videos about war taxes available from Mennonite Central Committee. In “Paying
for Peace,” war tax resisters share why they resist paying war taxes and the
impact of that decision on their lives. “Compelled by Conscience” explains how
the Peace Tax Fund would allow people to designate the portion of their
federal taxes used for war to a fund for peacemaking programs. Contact
MCC…
MCC
occasional paper, “Silence and Courage: Income Taxes, War and Mennonites,
,” by Titus Peachey, explores the
connection between income taxes and war in both
U.S. and Canadian
history, with particular emphasis on the World War Ⅱ period. This is the
18th in the Mennonite Central Committee Occasional
Papers series. Available from
MCC…
That’s it for . I racked my brain for more
possible explanations for the sudden fall-off of war tax resistance content in
this period.
One possibility I didn’t consider before is that perhaps those who promoted war
tax resistance were at first an easy-to-ignore minority, but when they began to
organize and exert influence this prompted “the silent majority” (or perhaps
just a more-influential or more-politically-skillful minority) who were against
war tax resistance to begin to organize and throw their weight around too. Once
that group finally got organized and active, the war tax resisters lost the
advantage they had gained by being the first movers on the issue and ended up
getting thwarted.
I’m not convinced that’s the answer, but it’s another possibility, or maybe
part of the answer.
Magical and wishful thinking might also be a partial explanation for the
decline. There’s the Peace Tax Fund scheme, which has its own fantastic ideas
associated with it, and then there’s something like
this “dream”
Nancy Brubaker shared in the
issue:
The U.S. government
has sent Internal Revenue Service investigators to find out why so many people
no longer owe any military taxes. The Mennonites explain to the
IRS
about the fund they have created with the money they are saving by living more
simply. This money, they say, is to be used, not to defend the United States
against other nations, but to defend Mother Earth against human beings.
Already the money is being used to save endangered species of whales, to
educate people on the dangers of plastic, and to teach Christians how to put
on more sweaters when it is cold.
The Heartland Peace Tax Fund is offering grants of up to $500
(U.S.) to local
service agencies or to individuals. It invites application from organizations
or individuals who serve underprivileged people (especially those underserved
by governmental agencies), and from those who work for non-violence and for
community and environmental improvement. Application deadline is
. To receive an application, send a
self-addressed stamped envelope to Newton [Kansas] Area Peace Center…
I thought the follow-up report ()
contained a noteworthy example of reinforced helplessness. Note that the
article is describing a ceremony in which war tax resisters redirected taxes to
charitable causes right there and then but then the article goes on to
say that this is a demonstration of “what a national peace tax fund
could do if passed by Congress” (emphasis mine):
Three Heartland Peace Tax Fund grants of $250 each have been awarded by the
Newton (Kan.) Area Peace
Center. The recipients are the Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault Association of
Harvey County, Offender Victim Ministries (both of Newton), and the Samaritan
Counseling Center of Hutchinson. The Heartland Peace Tax Fund was instituted a
year ago; these are its first grants. They demonstrate locally what a national
peace tax fund could do if passed by Congress — allow people conscientiously
opposed to war to direct their tax dollars to meeting human need, says Susan
Balzer, Hesston, who chairs the Peace Tax Group (a focus group of the Newton
Area Peace Center).
Peacemaking sounds like a natural, noble expression of the gospel which
Christians of many stripes will applaud. But its modern ring may have more to
do with assuring social and ecumenical acceptance than with a willingness to
make a costly and distinctive witness for the gospel. Many Christians may be
willing to extol the virtues of peacemaking, but few are willing to sit in
jail for refusing to pay taxes for warfare.
You need to be more supportive of the laws of this great nation. We
can’t accept people making selective payment of taxes. You should be
happy to pay for your defense.
Minnie Knight:
I give to God what is God’s. My loyalty belongs to the Lord. I want no
one killed in my name.
The Clinton administration was pushing a health industry overhaul at this
point, and there was lots of buzz about the possibility of “taxpayer-funded
abortions,” and so that and war tax resistance got tangled up in each other in
a couple of letters to the editor:
It is more than passing strange that Mennonite leadership has favored
withholding taxes for the military but now supports a health care program
which may pay for the murdering of pre-born babies. If we are opposed to
this abominable aspect of the Clinton health plan, why not say so in no
uncertain terms?
This took the point of view of a Canadian looking over the proposed
U.S. health
industry law:
Yes, I do resent seeing my tax dollars help pay for abortions. However, if
the criterion is that we should avoid paying taxes which fund death, then
all of us on both sides of the border must stop paying military taxes
immediately.
This is the thirty-fifth 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 Gospel Herald would cease publication as an independent magazine at the beginning of , merging with The Mennonite as the Mennonite Church merged with the General Conference Mennonite Church.
Today I’ll show some of the final mentions of tax resistance in the magazine before the merger.
The “Taxes for Peace” redirection fund gave its annual update in the edition:
Mennonite Central Committee U.S. peace and justice ministries is again inviting contributions for the “Taxes for Peace” fund.
the fund has allowed people who withhold the portion of their taxes that would go for military purposes to contribute that money to peacemaking initiatives.
In , the funds will bolster efforts to halt the production of cluster bombs and landmines and support resources on conscientious objection to military service and taxes.
Contributions made payable to MCC can be sent to “Taxes for Peace,” MCC U.S. Peace and Justice Ministries…
A report on the “Taxes for Life” group appeared in the issue.
They somewhat carelessly redirected their taxes from the federal government to the state government, for what that’s worth:
Taxes for Life delegates present a check of diverted war taxes for health needs of low-income families to the governor’s office in Harrisburg (Pa.) on .
They are (left to right): Herb Myers, Annn Marie Judson, John Stoner, and Dave Schrock-Shenk.
Lancaster, Pa. — On , the day U.S. income taxes are due, some Mennonites here diverted a portion of their war tax money toward health needs of unemployed persons.
They presented a check of $1,000 to the office of Governor Tom Ridge in Harrisburg.
The war tax objectors are part of Taxes for Life — a group that meets to support each other in seeking biblically nonviolent responses to the government’s demand for funding of war and military preparations.
Governor Ridge had threatened to cut 260,000 persons off the medical assistance rolls in Pennsylvania, arguing that the money was not available in the state to cover those needs.
“We wanted to demonstrate that if wasteful and destructive expenditures in military systems could be redirected, life-giving programs like health care to vulnerable citizens could be well-funded,” says member Earl Martin.
Speaking to government actions.
On , in a perhaps unrelated action, Governor Ridge announced his intention to compromise on his cut-back proposal.
The $1,000 gift came both from diverted federal war tax money and “sympathy money” from supportive friends, according to Martin.
For example, Sarah and Herb Myers of Mount Joy, Pa., wrote to the Internal Revenue Service, “How can we continue contributing financially toward the madness and sinfulness of our military system when we have claimed to be conscientious objectors to serving in the military?”
The Myers, Mennonite medical professionals, each withheld $28.50 from their taxes due to the IRS.
The $28.50 symbolized a dime for each of the $285 billion the United State government spends on current military expenditures.
“We realize the above action is illegal and we do not undertake it lightly,” they wrote to the IRS.
“We have taught our children that laws are to be obeyed “unless they violate one’s commitment to a higher power than the government.”
[sic] But in a democracy, they added, “we must speak clearly toward our government’s actions or we too are guilty of complicity.”
On , members of the Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster took a celebrative “second offering” in which children and adults walked forward to contribute “sympathy money” to the Taxes for Life effort.
They added $575 with that spontaneous offering.
Governor Ridge’s representative, after an extensive discussion of the issues with Taxes for Life representatives, received the check only to pass it on to the state treasurer’s office.
Whether the state treasurer will choose to cash the check marked “diverted war tax money and contributions” remains unknown.
The issue of whether a person could be a Mennonite in good standing, and be a soldier at the same time, was still being argued out in the letters to the editor column.
Here’s an excerpt from Eldon Epp’s letter in the issue in which he tries to bring the discussion back around to war taxes:
I wonder if we often limit our nonviolent witness to refusing military enlistment.
That leaves the onus for the sins of violence on military personnel.
Our witness must include the invitation to military personnel to consider Jesus’ way.
That witness has integrity when the rest of the church is also asking how to be nonviolent Christian citizens.
Mennonites paying taxes and remaining silent about an astronomical “defense” budget are also complicit in violence.
Brother Leslie Francisco Ⅲ expressed this well in Between the Rock of Peace and the Hard Place of Outreach.
A letter from Perry Keidel () began by advocating war tax resistance, but then suggested Peace Tax Fund lobbying instead:
While no war now rages that demands our sons, people of conscience in the United States are nevertheless forced into the morally unconscionable position of underwriting the continued, unchecked growth of the largest military industrial machine in history.
Mennonites have a proud and painful history of refusing to compromise on the issue of military conscription.
But given that war revenues from Mennonites are enough to at least support the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, we cannot at the same time be called uncompromising pacifists.
Perhaps the state department concedes CO status to Mennonites because we still by and large hire the soldiers that fire the bullets.
If Mennonites are unable to take responsibility for the use to which the state allocates revenues forcibly taken from them, then Mennonite understandings of separation of church and state must expand to organized refusal to cooperate in paying war taxes.
Every Mennonite congregation should send two or three letters to their U.S. Senators voicing their concern and asking that the Peace Tax Fund bill be adopted.
This bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide that a taxpayer conscientiously opposed to war have tax monies spent for nonmilitary purposes.
That’s the first step.
In the issue “vsw” (Valerie Weaver) wrote about angels without wings (i.e. ordinary people who do extraordinary things), and included war tax resisters among them:
[I]f angels play wonderful, life-giving jokes on the world, then I’ve seen them… They play jokes of life on the government by refusing to pay war taxes and then giving more to mission and service agencies than the government would even require for itself.
And in the issue, J. Lorne Peachey wrote an editorial asking what makes Mennonites special or different.
In the process, he gave short shrift to war tax resisters and demonstrated how much their stars had fallen:
Larry Hauder’s questions are worth pondering: How are we different from the world?
What does it mean today to be separate?
My favorite answer is that, in addition to accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord, we believe in a lifestyle of peace and nonviolence.
Yet that’s hard to make visible when our country is not involved in a major war.
Those who try to do so through such means as refusing to pay “war taxes” we generally dismiss as too zealous in making discipleship practical.
The issue reprinted from The Mennonite a news brief about the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Elizabeth Gravalos and Art Harvey.
Editor J. Lorne Peachey was back in the to ask whether one reason the Mennonite Church was stagnating might be because it wasn’t being persecuted for taking bold stands:
…comfortable North American churches aren’t growing while persecuted churches in other countries are.
How do we “stand alongside [the poor, the dispossessed, and the outcasts]”?
Some of us have answered by withholding our war taxes.
Others have joined Christian Peacemaker Teams. Some sell or give away their possessions and live in community.
Others go into dangerous parts of the world and attempt reconciliation.
Yet these are mainly individual acts.
For the most part, we as a total church have not been able to agree even on these relatively simple attempts toward faithfulness.
Can a non-persecuted, comfortable church also be a growing, faithful church?
The record has not been good.
In Mennonite history, we have the examples of churches in Russia and Europe, where, as Christians grew wealthy and accepted, their message became diluted and weak.
Even in the New Testament we read much more about the “mission outposts” that were being questioned and oppressed than we do about the more wealthy and better-accepted mother church in Jerusalem.
A faithful church that’s not persecuted?
God just may be giving North American Mennonites another chance to see if that’s possible.
We are the best-read, most-educated, and probably the wealthiest Mennonites who ever lived.
Can we catch a vision to channel that knowledge and wealth into living and proclaiming the gospel rather than in spending the majority of it on ourselves?
We… try to legally avoid federal taxes because of the large portion which supports the military.
We have some tax breaks that many others do not have because John is an ordained minister.
But, as a matter of principle, to legally avoid taxes, we have placed our savings in tax-free investments, tax-sheltered Individual Retirement Accounts, and similar 401K instruments.
These savings, with tax-free compounding, have grown to $200,000 — by saving 15 percent of our annual income with interest compounding at an average rate of 6 percent over the years.
Another international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax fund campaigns was held .
Again, the Gospel Herald coverage of the event made it out to be mostly a Peace Tax Fund legislation conference, with actual war tax resistance only a footnote:
London, England — Supporters of peace tax campaigns and war tax resistance from 16 countries met here, , to discuss the progress and importance of working corporately toward a peace tax law.
Three American Mennonites attended the conference that was hosted by British members of the Peace Tax Campaign: Marian Franz, director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund; Cesar Flores, member of the Honduran Mennonite Church, and Susan Balzer, administration committee member of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Speakers reported on the peace tax legislation proposals in various countries and expressed the belief that if one country passes a peace tax bill, other countries would soon follow.
In , the United States became the first country to initiate peace tax bill proposals.
Current lobbying efforts are geared toward making the bill’s passage a religious freedom issue.
Keynote speaker Erik Hummels, from the Netherlands, defined peace as “a dynamic process of cooperation among people which includes human rights, economic justice, and the absence of situations that can lead to war.”
In addition to observing Prisoners for Peace Day and honoring those who have been imprisoned for conscientious objection, conference participants attended workshops on war tax resistance issues.
Meanwhile, on the 25th anniversary of the original introduction of the peace tax fund bill in the U.S. Congress, Representative John Lewis would try to attach it as an amendment to some bill that would actually see action on the floor, but his attempt was voted down.
A Clinton administration spokesperson testified against the amendment.
The bill would then be rewritten into something closer to its present form, under the title “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.”
How can I work for peace if I pay for war?
Is paying for soldiers to murder less evil than pulling the trigger myself?
Millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Japanese, Salvadorans, Iraquis, Koreans, and Germans begged their gods to protect them as U.S. bombers destroyed their homes and crops and massacred their families.
Some of the victims prayed to Jesus.
All this happened while Christians in the United States paid taxes to build and fly the U.S. bombers and sang every Sunday about God’s love for all people.
Half of every federal income tax dollar goes for war — past, present, and future.
Tax dollars are the lifeblood of the military beast devouring the world’s poor.
In order for the U.S. or any other empire to plunder and to massacre, two things are required from many citizens — silence and paying taxes.
For 18 years I have paid no federal income tax by living under the taxable income level, and I also am not silent.
I prize living the truth as best I see it far more than unnecessary material possessions.
I say — not with my money, not with my silence, not in my name!
“If you really care about not supporting the military with your taxes, use the full charitable donations deduction allowed,” the speaker in our young adult Sunday school class challenged.
We could deduct up to 20 percent of our income for charity.
Twenty percent — the figure echoed in my thoughts.
My husband-to-be, George, and I had chosen to follow parental patterns of tithing 10 percent and giving gifts above and beyond.
I knew no one who gave even close to 20 percent.
Yet I certainly cared deeply about using my money for life-giving purposes rather than for building up an arsenal of destruction.
Was George stirred as I was?
Through discussion, George and I soon reached agreement.
We would move toward the goal of giving 20 percent.
Thus began a joyful journey of stewardship as a married couple.
In the first year of marriage, we inched toward our goal.
We used bicycles while saving for a car.
George continued graduate studies while I started my first full-time job.
Within four years, we had a fuel-efficient car and our first child.
We had managed to reach 15 percent in donations.
Even though I stayed home with our infant and we had a tight budget, we were able to eat good, nutritious food, continue with retirement savings, and buy the things most important to us.
When George finished school, we moved to the United States for a job.
We moved at the right time — housing prices had soared in our area, and we sold our small condominium for several times the price George paid a decade before.
Our household income increased dramatically.
We had major stewardship decisions to make.
Initially, I felt disoriented in the new economic terrain.
Reducing our military taxes continued to be a high priority for us.
Since interest from mortgage payments is tax deductible, we invested in a spacious house on a wooded lot.
We committed to making our home an open place for those who needed a place of retreat from the stresses of human services, overseas work, or ministry.
Buying the house reduced the need for other stewardship decisions; after donations, mortgage, taxes, and utilities, our budget was more generous but not radically different from student days.
By the time our second child was born, we had nearly reached our goal of 20 percent donations.
We started catching up to our goals for university savings for our young ones.
And, to wrap up this series of excerpts, here is an excerpt of a letter to the editor from Jacob Hubert () which is the only example I’ve seen that takes Mennonite nonresistant / pacifist principles to a logical anarchist conclusion and determines that taxation itself is a violent act that Mennonites should not countenance:
Martin Shupack asserts that the federal government, while sometimes a “violent rebel,” can be an instrument for good when used for such causes as welfare for the poor, Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs designed to help those in need (“Violent Rebel or Valuable Servant,” ).
What Shupack does not seem to realize is that all government programs are the products of violence, regardless of who benefits from them.
Taxes can be collected only if the government backs up its taxation policies with violence and threats thereof.
The question, then, is this: are Mennonites absolutely for peace and against the initiation of force?
Or is the taking of money by means of violent coercion acceptable when the money will be spent on causes they regard as worthwhile?
If the Mennonite Church is to be consistent in its opposition to the use of force, it must be opposed to it in all forms — including the form of taxation.
