Democrats to IRS: Investigate right-wing groups that pretend to be "churches"

Non-profit groups shouldn't be allowed to call themselves churches to "avoid public accountability,” say House Dems

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More than a dozen Congressional Democrats, led by Reps. Jared Huffman and Suzan DelBene, are asking the IRS to look into why the Family Research Council, a non-profit organization that doubles as a right-wing hate group, is allowed to be classified as an “association of churches” and receive perks typically associated with houses of worship. The Democrats’ letter follows up on one they sent back in 2022.

All of this really boils down to transparency. It appears that FRC decided to call itself an “association of churches,” when it’s most definitely not a church, in order to avoid giving the government any information about their finances. The gambit was first exposed in 2020 in a piece by ProPublica’s Andrea Suozzo.

IRS Form 990 Return (image via Shutterstock)

To make sense of what’s going on, you need to know that all non-profit groups are granted a tax-exempt status by the U.S. government. That incentivizes people to donate to them for the (theoretical) betterment of society. But there’s a simple catch: The groups have to file a Form 990 report with the IRS every year explaining (among other things) how much money they took in, how it was spent, and how much their top staffers made in salaries. The 990s are public documents that allow the public to keep tabs on whether non-profits are really living up to their stated missions.

Importantly, that rule does not apply to churches, even though they’re also technically non-profits. They don’t have to fill out the 990s. They don’t have to make those details public. That means we don’t always know how much money big-name megachurch pastors make—or how much of the congregation’s money goes right into their pockets. We don’t know who the biggest donors are to those churches or if the money goes where the churches claim it goes.

Even beyond that, churches are less like to be audited by the IRS; any investigation can only begin with the approval of a “high-level Treasury official.” They also don’t have to provide as many benefits to employees as other non-profits; churches are exempt from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).

That’s why, over the past few years, several Christian non-profits—usually the kind that promote anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-women beliefs—have declared themselves churches, at least as far as the IRS is concerned. It’s not that hard to do! The IRS has a list of characteristics that define what a church is… but they’re just guidelines. If a group can check off most of those items, even in ways that make no sense at all, it can be classified as a church.

That list includes things like having an established place of worship, regular religious services, ordained ministers, etc. But, as John Oliver famously explained on Last Week Tonight in 2015, it’s extremely easy to fall within those guidelines depending on how you define everything.

In 2018, we learned that two Christian groups that are not churches, Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel, had designated themselves as churches anyway. How did they do it? Simple. They lied. Or at least stretched the truth beyond any conceivable reality.

Focus on the Family said its employees were “ministers,” and its members were the “congregation,” and its cafeteria was a “place of worship,” and its board of directors were the “elders,” and its president was the “head deacon,” and its radio shows were an “extension of its congregation.” The IRS bought it. They approved the change in 2016 and details leaked to the public two years later. (While Focus still releases its annual 990 forms on its website, Liberty Counsel has been a lot more secretive; they haven’t publicly released a 990 since 2017, according to the non-profit database GuideStar.)

Those two groups aren’t alone. The watchdog website MinistryWatch said in 2020 that this is a growing trend:

Among the fifty largest Christian ministries in the country who have made this election [to designate themselves as “churches”] include: CRU/Campus Crusade for Christ, The Navigators, Gideons International, Willow Creek Association, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Joyce Meyer Ministries, and Ethnos360/New Tribes Mission. In addition, many megachurches and their related radio and television ministries. These organizations and individuals include: Joel Osteen, David Jeremiah, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, and Kenneth Copeland.

Some of those leaders defended the decision by saying the change allows them to avoid “government interference” with their work… even though the government was never getting in the way of their work. It’s not like the government tells churches what to do or how to spend their money. These church leaders just don’t want people knowing about their finances.

In the case of Family Research Council, they said they fulfilled 11 of the 14 guidelines to be a church by relying on their 40,000 “partner churches” to carry the load. In other words, a Christian non-profit group that works with churches… was using that partnership to declare itself an “association of churches.” As if it’s an umbrella group overseeing churches rather than a stand-alone organization that works with churches.

Very shady. Very unethical. Very right-wing Christian.

It’s exactly what you’d expect from conservative religious groups that don’t give a damn about honesty.

That’s why, in 2022, Democrats in Congress (again led by Huffman and DelBene) asked the IRS to take a closer look into the fake churches. 40 House Democrats sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig urging them to review their own rules about which groups could be declared churches—and then enforce them.

… FRC claiming to be a church strains credulity: they do not hold religious services, do not have a congregation or affiliated congregations, and do not possess many of the other attributes of churches listed by the IRS. FRC is one example of an alarming pattern in the last decade—right-wing advocacy groups self-identifying as “churches” and applying for and receiving church status.

We understand the importance of religious institutions to their congregants and believe that religious freedom is a cherished American value and constitutional right. We also believe that our tax code must be applied fairly and judiciously. Tax-exempt organizations should not be exploiting tax laws applicable to churches to avoid public accountability and the IRS’s examination of their activities.

Given that the FRC is primarily an advocacy organization and not a church, we urge the IRS to swiftly review the tax-exempt status, and whether there are other political advocacy organizations that have obtained church status, but do not satisfy the IRS requirements for churches, integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations of churches. Further, we urge the IRS to improve the review process for organizations seeking church status to ensure that organizations that are not churches cannot abuse the tax code. Finally, we request the IRS determine whether existing guidance is sufficient to prevent abuse and what resources or Congressional actions are needed to ensure adequate implementation and enforcement moving forward.

It was all extremely sensible.

And yet, like clockwork, FRC chimed in saying this was all an attempt to silence them. (Because when you’re used to Christian privilege, neutrality is seen as oppression.)

“This is nothing new for Democrats,” FRC Co-Founder and President Tony Perkins told Fox News Digital in an interview. “They want to silence all religious organizations. They really ought to get their facts straight because the facts that are advanced in this letter are inaccurate.”

“We’re not a church,” he continued. “We’re what is recognized as an ‘association of churches’ because we work with churches. We’ve got about somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 active churches that we work with; we have a number of ordained members of our staff. So, we work with churches.”

Perkins added that Democrats are trying to use “any lever they can to silence Christians.”

Perkins was playing semantics instead of addressing the substance of what ProPublica reported. The distinction between church and an “association of churches” is meaningless when it comes to what FRC has to fill out with the IRS. So pretending that Democrats were calling them a “church” way a way to throw people off the scent.

The Democrats received a response months later telling them the IRS promised to enforce its own rules. It was essentially a form letter that didn’t address any of the very serious concerns they had.

That’s why the letter Huffman and DelBene sent this week, to Yellen and current IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, calls on the IRS to give them an updated response with answers to specific questions.

In short:

• What changes has the IRS made when it comes to groups applying for church status to make sure non-churches don’t sneak through?

• How does the IRS investigate whether a potential church qualifies as such? Do some characteristics count more than others?

• What other tools does the IRS rely on in assessing whether a supposed church is, in fact, a church?

• What other groups, like FRC, have claimed to be a church and then stopped filing their Form 990s?

• Do the current IRS rules for churches prevent abuse of the system? If not, what changes need to be made for the sake of public accountability?

Those are thoughtful questions that deserve thoughtful responses. The point isn’t to shut down Christian groups or punish them in any way. It’s about making sure all non-profits are playing by the same rules and assuring the public that Christian ministries aren’t getting an unfair advantage.

The Democrats also say:

We understand the importance of religious institutions to their congregants, and we believe that religious freedom is a cherished American value and constitutional right. We also believe that our tax code must be applied fairly and judiciously. Tax-exempt organizations should not be exploiting tax laws applicable to churches to avoid public accountability and IRS examination of their activities.

This letter, just like the previous one, simply asks the IRS to do its damn job and go after all the non-profit groups that are reclassifying as churches for no reason other than to avoid accountability to their own donors as well as the taxpayers.

Whether the IRS will do anything, though, is questionable. The agency has famously looked the other way when it comes to punishing conservative churches that endorse Republican candidates from the pulpit, something non-profits are explicitly forbidden from doing as a condition of their tax-exempt status.

As it stands, a certain group of tax-exempt organizations are lying about who they are and what they do in order to dodge questions about how they spend the money they take in. The irony is that these are conservative Christian organizations that constantly claim to have moral superiority over everybody else. But the U.S. government shouldn’t be afraid to take action against religious organizations that break the rules just because Republicans would throw a fit over it.

All non-profits know the rules. Certain Christian ones like Family Research Council are breaking them. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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