Tax Day

Some Theological Reflections

I intended to publish this article on Monday, April 15, but life intervened…

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April 15 is Tax Day in the United States, the deadline for filing income tax returns and for making any payments on taxes due. In the days leading up to Tax Day, accountants and tax preparers work around the clock, and the brave souls who do their own taxes block off their calendars and pull out a year’s worth of paperwork.

Since everyone is thinking about taxes anyway, I thought I would take the opportunity to offer some theological and ethical reflections on taxes. For such a mundane topic, it’s fascinating how much theological and ethical thought has been devoted to taxes.

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For example, a small but significant number of Christians in the U.S. refuse to pay their income taxes or find other ways to protest taxes as a means of resisting the use of tax money for military spending. These war tax resisters, who include members of the Catholic Worker movement and members of traditional peace churches like the Mennonites and Quakers, among others, do so out of a commitment to nonviolence inspired by the teachings of Jesus. Mitchell Atencio, writing for Sojourners, provides a good overview of this form of resistance.

Some war tax resisters withhold all, or at least some, of their income taxes from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), putting them at risk of fines, wage garnishment, and levying money held in bank accounts. According to Atencio, no war tax resister, however, has had their personal property seized since 2000, and only one resister has been imprisoned since 1950. To avoid such risks, however, some resisters pay their taxes, but in a way that proves inconvenient to the IRS. As Atencio reports, this could include paying in coins, or paying with several checks for small amounts, each of which needs to be processed by IRS employees. Other war tax resisters take the radical approach of intentionally living at an income level below the minimum required to pay income taxes, adopting a commitment not just to nonviolence but also to voluntary poverty.

A few weeks ago, I wrote some reflections (here and here) on two articles by theologian Julie Hanlon Rubio on the concept of cooperation with evil (usually distinguished into formal and material cooperation). In one of those articles, Rubio argues that although in contemporary Catholic discourse the use of the concept of cooperation with evil tends to be associated with “conservative” causes such as abortion or contraception (for example, the decision not to offer health insurance that includes coverage for abortion or contraception), she points to war tax resistance (and other causes, such as avoiding purchasing products made using sweatshop labor) as an example of how the concept has been used from a more “left-wing” or radical perspective. Part of the commitment of war tax resistance is a refusal to materially cooperate in supporting military spending and preparations for war, even when the practitioners do not directly participate in the actions they consider evil. As Atencio’s account suggests, however, war tax resisting is not simply a casuistical calculation of the extent to which one can participate in evil, but also a broader lifestyle commitment in which one takes on the risks of violating the law, and in some cases a life of voluntary poverty.