Why We Don’t Tax Churches

We’ve all come across the content of the meme here many times.  Why don’t we tax mega-churches where their pastors live in palaces and their parishioners live in trailer parks?

The answer is not that we want to subsidize churches, but, paradoxically, it’s the opposite; we want them as distantly separated from matters of state as possible.  There is a concept that came out of a Supreme Court case called “excessive entanglement (between church and state),” by forcing religious organizations to prepare, file, and legally defend their tax returns would result in enmeshing them with our secular government.