Posted on by Perry Dane

The Parsonage Exemption and Constitutional Glare

The organizers of this blog were kind enough to ask me to do some guest-blogging here last month.  They’ve now been even kinder in letting me post some more over the next couple of weeks.

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A few days ago, a federal district court judge in Wisconsin struck down the so-called “parsonage exemption,” under which practicing clergy get to exclude many of their housing expenses from taxable income.  Judge Barbara Crabb held that the exemption, included in § 107 of the Internal Revenue Code, violated the Establishment Clause as, among other things, an unjustified special favor to organized religion.  Now, I’m generally a “strict separationist” on Establishment Clause questions.  But this decision is quite wrong.  And it misunderstands an important piece of our church-state dispensation. Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Death of Tory Anglicanism

That’s the title of this very interesting piece by Eliza Filby (h/t Sam Bray). There is some interesting historical discussion which frames the political and religious issues helpfully for outsiders. It also struck me that the terms in which religion is now considered as a political matter seem to reflect some considerable Americanization. Note as well the influence of libertarianism, also an ascendant feature of American politics of the right. A bit:

In the divorce between Conservatism and Anglicanism, the blame was put on the church. But the truth was that the party had changed too. Even in the 1980s, Anglican Conservatives were a dying breed. The new generation of Conservative MPs were more libertarian. Future Tory MPs would be sourced from a much wider pool both socially and religiously.

True, the Tory party today is not completely secular. While the High Anglican contingent may have dwindled (or converted to Catholicism), there are still prominent Conservative evangelicals. But they tend to hold a more individualistic and moralistic faith and care little for goings-on in the Synod.

Paradoxically, though, the Conservative party has become more secular at a time when religion has become an increasingly prominent issue. But faith is now spoken of in terms of the rights of the religious individual rather than the privileges of the established church.

While the Tory leadership may still sometime say that Britain is a Christian country and send out copies of the King James Bible to schools, there is little sense of a religious underpinning to current Tory thinking. If David Cameron has sought to hark back to a pre-Thatcherite tradition of Tory paternalism, he has done so without reference to its Anglican roots. Indeed, the confusion surrounding his ‘Big Society’ agenda may in part be due to its secular articulation (especially odd given that faith groups are expected to do so much of the work).

Until recently, this secularisation had gone unnoticed, concealed under the broader process of Cameron’s modernisation of the party, but the pushing through of gay marriage has changed all that. If the debate reveals anything, it is that the tables have turned; the Conservative party appears to have out-liberalised the Church of England.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ron Colombo on Yesterday’s Cert Grants

At Constitution Daily, Hofstra’s Ron Colombo, a past guest here at CLR Forum, has a helpful essay on the contraception mandate cases on which the Court granted cert yesterday. Ron argues that for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby, the respondent in one of the cases, have standing to raise a free exercise claim:

Hobby Lobby … is owned and operated by a family deeply devoted to its Christian faith.  The company’s statement of purpose commits it to “[h]onoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.”  Unlike so many companies today that put profits over people, Hobby Lobby pledges to “[s]erving [its] employees and their families by establishing a work environment and company policies that build character, strengthen individuals, and nurture families.” . . .

So the question becomes:  does the First Amendment provide the protections necessary for businesses such as Hobby Lobby to exist?  Or, to frame things differently:  are individuals free under the U.S. Constitution to follow the dictates of their consciences into the private sector, and to start businesses with practices that are religiously informed?  Businesses around which workers, customers, and investors with shared religious values and beliefs can coalesce?

As should become readily apparent, the recognition of “corporate free exercise rights” ultimately redounds to the protection of individuals.  For it is through religiously expressive corporations that many people wish to live out their faiths.  Can it really be the case that the Constitution effectively consigns these individuals to careers and options only in the world of non-profits?  Is the most significant modern means of harnessing private initiative, the business corporation, somehow carved out from the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections?

You can read Ron’s essay here.