NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001

According to the Indianapolis Star:

On Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service did what a federal appeals court said it could do and what it has been saying for weeks it was going to do. It seized the property of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.

For 17 years, the church has been maintaining the government has no right to use it as an agency to collect withholding taxes from its employees, whom the church refers to as ministers.

Now, despite the IRS victory in court and federal marshals' confiscation of all the church's property under a court order, members of the congregation remain of the same opinion still and just as determined as ever to go right on doing what the IRS and the court said they cannot do – not collect those withholding taxes.

The Rev. Greg A. Dixon, pastor of the church, stated its position: "The church isn't obligated to follow the rules of the IRS."

And would his church continue to refuse to withhold taxes for its workers?

Absolutely, said Dixon: "This would certainly be an odd time to change our practices."

One member of his congregation, Ron Pollard, spoke for other followers of the church when he called the government's seizure as irreligious and contrary to lessons from the Bible.

"The lesson is what is God's is God's," he said. "Tithes and offerings are God's."

Steve Johnson, an Indiana University tax law professor, believes those church members are just as wrong as they are passionate in their beliefs.

"We're not talking about a complex area of law here," Johnson said.

He contends that IRS rules requiring employers to withhold taxes from employees' paychecks are no more onerous to a church than to any other business or organization with employees.

That means they do not infringe on a church's special protections under the Constitution, he said.

"This is slam-dunk territory," Johnson said. "The church has no argument."

He has support from Indiana's largest religious employer, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

"We follow the intent and spirit of the law," said Susan Schramm, director of communications for the diocesan churches, which withholds taxes from some 4,000 employees.

And that's as it should be, she said.

The Indianapolis church has become the informal cornerstone of a movement among a small number of unaffiliated churches around the country that share similar beliefs about not paying taxes.

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, finds that unfortunate because, he said, the overwhelming majority of churches pay their taxes.

"Quoting the Bible doesn't mean you don't have to obey the laws that the rest of the country has to follow," he said. "It can't be that simple in a constitutional system like ours."