Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” → Quakers → 20th–21st century Quakers → Merrill Hallowell Barnebey

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 1990

Mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 1990 tended to either look back fondly at resisters of the past, or to look forward to a time when a peace tax fund law would magically dispel the dilemma of praying for peace while paying for war.

Paul Zorn’s article from the previous October which cast a skeptical eye on the value of Quaker war tax resistance picked up some dissent in the January issue.

• Merrill Barnebey felt that Zorn “fails to fully grasp the significance and timeliness of tax resistance. For one thing… Quakers who do not protest war taxes are establishing a credibility gap.” He also felt that tax resistance helped to pressure Congress to pass the Peace Tax Fund bill.

Also in the January issue, Elwood Cronk told a story of how a meeting that was involved “an ecumenical effort to establish a food cupboard” reacted with hostility to war tax resisters in their midst:

A couple, wishing to make a war tax witness to IRS, presented the meeting with a check for $100, the portion of tax they were withholding. Their accompanying letter stated they felt this was an appropriate gift to the meeting, in view of federal budget cuts in social services. They asked that the money be accepted as a start-up fund for the food cupboard.

…One person walked out, another questioned their motivation, and the meeting declined the check. The one positive thing which did happen occurred the next Sunday. A member of the adult class proposed that war taxes be discussed that day.

An obituary notice for Ronald E. Chinn in the February issue noted that Chinn “helped found a university endowment fund for lectures on peace issues, using money withheld by Alaskan war tax resisters.”

In the May issue, Kenneth Miller wrote in to share the exciting news that, after persistent lobbying and lots of hard work, Peace Tax Fund bill supporters had managed to convince Nancy Pelosi to cosponsor the bill. (Pelosi at the time was just starting her career as a U.S. Representative. She became Speaker of the House in 2007 and is currently the Minority Leader there. She is no longer a cosponsor of the present peace tax fund scheme.)

The June issue announced a new edition of Conscience Canada’s book The First Freedom which “reviews the legal history of conscientious objection for taxpayers in Canada and provides an overview of new charter decisions and recent court cases.”

“Honoring employees’ requests not to withhold the military portion of their federal income tax is now the official policy of Baltimore Yearly Meeting,” began a short piece in the July issue. “In taking the action as requested by individual employees, the yearly meeting emphasized its history of supporting military tax resistance through urging passage of the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill, as well as supporting other religious organizations involved in military tax refusal. In 1972, the yearly meeting minuted that it ‘stands in loving support of those moved by conscience to witness against making payments for war and preparation for war, including those who refuse to pay military taxes voluntarily.’ ”

D.H. Rubenstein penned an op-ed piece for the September issue in which he reviewed the difficulty that Friends and Friends Meetings had with the issue of war taxes, and held out hope that Congress would throw Quakers a rope by passing some sort of Peace Tax Fund plan. Excerpts:

It is a perplexing problem to be a citizen of a country whose policies include militarism and war as a means of relating to other nations and at the same time be a member of a religious society whose traditions are contrary to such policy. Conscientious objection to military service is now accepted. But what about paying taxes to support war and militarism?

When Friends gather to consider this dilemma it is often expressed that each person must decide on the basis of the individual’s own leading how to resolve the claims of conscience between being a law-abiding citizen and a faithful Friend. Rarely is unity achieved.

Another entanglement is the matter of Friends organizations and their involvement in the payment of war taxes. One of the key questions is whether or not such organizations have a “corporate conscience” and a responsibility to act in accord with traditional Quaker witness and its historic peace testimony.

Relatively few individual Friends are prepared to refuse to pay war taxes — an illegal, punishable offense — and suffer the consequences of such refusal. How could they, therefore, adopt a policy which would make the corporate body and its officers liable for such consequences? In other words, is it fair for me to expect a higher order of morality from the corporate body than from its individual members?

(Please consider a slight digression. Is it fair to assume that if a legal way of not paying war taxes existed we would take that option? If the answer is yes, we should commit ourselves to the promotion and support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill… whose aim is to provide that specific option.)

Friends are staunch in their belief that that of God within each individual should be the guiding light by which life is lived. Quaker experience, however, has verified the need for the admonition of Paul, who cautioned believers in Rome, “Do not be conformed to this world…” (Rom. 12:2). The light of the Spirit is available to each one of us: its accessibility without distortion by our own willfulness or societal influences is a hazard we do not always recognize. It is this of which Paul reminds us. This is one of the reasons our corporate wisdom has established that although the Light is available to each of us, it is essential we gather together for communal seeking and sharing in order that our findings be validated in the group, which is less likely to be misled than the individual.

If we are unable to discern God’s leading, that is a very different matter than God saying no. It means further seeking is required until clarity is achieved. It does not mean no action is required. We need to recognize that at present we are involved in actions which by implication indicate Friends support and believe in militarism and war. This is what our present tax paying and tax collecting actions declare.

What do we believe? Must our apparent schizophrenia on this subject be a permanent state, or can we thresh our way out of it?

The Peace Tax Fund would create a legal alternative. The enactment of an economic conversion bill (several now in Congress) could provide for a specific application of CO tax funds to a basic civilian need and away from the military-industrial behemoth. Our energies applied to the support and adoption of these two legislative proposals might supply some ameliorative therapy for our dilemma while we pursue some serious threshing.

That same issue included a profile of George & Lillian Willoughby that included a section on their tax resistance:

Working for Peace, not Paying for War

Another significant protest in the Willoughbys’ lives has been their ongoing tax resistance. “I object to taxes that go completely out of my hands and have no connection to me — that are supporting things I cannot tolerate, such as bombs and nuclear energy,” Lillian says.

After years of refusal to pay their federal telephone tax, IRS officers seized the Willoughbys’ Volkswagen to collect the $100 they owed. But the Willoughbys’ many friends raised more than a thousand dollars through a “peace bond” mailing so they could submit the winning bid and recover the car. The extra funds were donated to the Philadelphia War Tax Resistance Fund.

“One IRS official complained,” George recalls, “ ‘Here we seize your car to raise money for IRS, and you are using it to raise money for your cause!’ ” After that incident, there were no more seizures of automobiles of tax resisters in the Philadelphia area for the next nine years, the Willoughbys say.

Explaining their tax witness, Lillian notes, “Some sacrifice is involved, and not everyone can do it.” For George, it is a matter of integrity and empowerment. “Tax resistance is something I can do to withdraw support from the government,” he says. “Why should I give them money to do evil things I wouldn’t do myself?”

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 2009

There was a bit of an anti-war tax resistance backlash in the Friends Journal in 2009.

In the February issue, Peter Phillips came out against war tax resistance in a two-page article. Here is a summary of his argument:

• Friends’ advice against paying war taxes is sometimes incoherent. The New York Yearly Meeting suggests that friends “examine… voluntary payment of war taxes” but taxes by definition aren’t voluntary. The practice of some Quakers of refusing to pay but allowing the government to seize the amount by levy makes such war tax resistance “insignificant.”
• What do people mean by “war taxes”? If it’s the percentage of the revenue that goes to the Pentagon, even some of that money isn’t spent for war (for instance the Army Corps of Engineers work to rebuild hurricane-damaged New Orleans). What about “reparations to Iraqis whose property is damaged” or “the Air Force’s remarkable mediation program that resolves employment and procurement disputes without litigation” — or, in the other direction, what about the Interstate Highway system, which was initially designed as a defense measure: is money raised for that, too, “war taxes”? Is everyone on their own to decide what taxes are war taxes, or is there an authoritative answer, or is it okay to withhold symbolic amounts — what is the justification for withholding Elizabeth Boardman’s $10.40, an arbitrary amount that has nothing to do with war spending?
• Withholding of taxes is not a good way of withholding funds from the war machine for the simple reason that the government won’t decide how to respond to a shortage of funds by respecting the reasons why the tax resister withheld them. It is every bit as likely (perhaps more likely) to cut spending elsewhere. “Should Head Start, research on solar energy, unemployment benefits, and support for healthcare all be underfunded in the exercise of our righteousness? A consequence of my not joining the armed forces in 1971 was that someone else did who would not otherwise have had to. People were hurt because I was not there to help. This too is a consequence of conscientious objection. Are those who advocate withholding part of their taxes prepared as well to live with the consequences of their actions?”
• There is a Quaker ethic of trying to adapt to communal consensus that is expressed in many of its teachings, and the ethos of participating as equals in trying to probe a dilemma and adopt a communal consensus is one of the things Quakers have contributed to the American polis — war tax resistance turns its back on this with its ethos of individualism and rejection of the decisions of the community.

You will not be surprised to learn that Phillips’s article led to some exchanges in the letters-to-the-editor column in later issues. Here is a summary of some of the back-and-forth:

• Dennis P. Roberts thought the article was “the finest work on war taxes I have yet seen in the pages of your journal” and then told a half-remembered story about a terrible massacre in colonial Pennsylvania that could have been prevented but for the pacifism of the “strong Quaker elements within the settlement.” — “I cannot say or recall with certainty whether this story is fact or fiction. What does it matter? Either way, an important lesson is drive home eloquently and powerfully: military preparations sometimes must be made.”
• Robin Harper responded with some suggested guidelines for Quaker war tax resistance that he thought might meet some of Phillips’s criticisms (see ♇ 19 July 2013 for an excerpt from this letter).
• David R. Bassett felt that Phillips had been too dismissive of war tax resistance in general after concentrating his criticism on a few specific arguments and methods he found to be weak or ineffective. What about resisters who keep their income below the tax line? Or people like Bassett who work in the judicial and legislative arenas to try to get something like conscientious objection to military taxation legalized? Or folks who try to make sure their investments and purchases are clear of involvement in war?
• Perry Treadwell compared Phillips’s “rationalizations” to “Friends’ historical resistance to confronting their complicity in enslavement,” and thought that just as a few Friends had to break from the pack and lead Quakers to an abolitionist stand, it will take Quakers speaking out against paying for war to make their “spiritual testimony” come to life.
• Daniel Jenkins called Phillips’s argument “smooth and lawyerly” and “crafted… to lead to a foregone conclusion.” He felt that Phillips gave short shrift to occasions when “conscience may sometimes transcend the constraints of conventionality and pressures of conformity.”
• Naomi Paz Greenberg considered Phillips’s argument that by not serving or not paying taxes you are merely foisting the responsibility off on someone else to be flawed:

  The moral consequence [of Phillips’s decision not to serve in the military] is not that other people were made to serve in his stead, as Phillips suggests. The moral consequence of his not serving in war is simply that he did not violate his conscience by serving. Others could have and did make their own choices, consulting conscience or not.

  The moral consequences of not paying taxes for war are similarly direct.

  She even suggested a more radical outlook toward taxes that I have rarely seen in Quaker circles:

  Our taxes are compulsory, and in some sense they are the least desirable way to provide a constructive economic foundation for a compassionate society. They presuppose that there is no Friendly nor Christian nor Jewish nor Hindu nor Muslim nor conscientious nor atheistic nor socialist love for one another and so we must be forced. Paying taxes separates us from those with whom we might otherwise be in community, and with whom we might shake hands, share food, share laughter and tears. Paying taxes for war separates us from many of them irrevocably.

  Some Friends testify that we expect better of ourselves than that, because we know experimentally that God expects better of us.

  Greenberg also felt that there was a big difference between the Quaker ethos of consensus and conformity when “recognizing the sense of the meeting” and trying to figure out how to confront “legislation written by lobbyists and summarized by Congressional interns in a process that has been compared to the making of sausage.”

An obituary notice for Kent Larrabee in the February issue noted that “[f]or much of his life, Kent purposely lived below the poverty line in order to identify with the poor and to avoid payment of income taxes for war.”

In the May issue, Arthur Waskow offered a reading of the “Render unto Caesar…” koan that puts it into a context of thousands of years of Rabbinical debate about the passage in Genesis that reads: “God created humankind in God’s own Image.” He thought that Jesus had been intending to refer to this debate, and not intending to give any advice about taxes.

An obituary notice for Lillian Willoughby in the May issue mentioned that “Lillian felt called to refuse to pay war taxes, and the IRS seized her car in the spring of 1970.” An obituary notice for Arthur Evans in the August issue said that “[f]or 20 years, Arthur withheld the portion from his federal income tax that he believed went to war and weapons, and in 1963, he was jailed for 90 days for refusing to turn over income records to the Internal Revenue Service.” And an obituary notice for Merrill Hallowell Barnebey in the December identified him as “a war tax resister.”