Court Was Wrong To Strip Tax Exemption From Christian Group

It’s an astonishing proposition at first glance: the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that the social service ministries of Catholic Charities are not “churchy” enough, as though that is any business of the courts (or government in general) to decide. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are apparently skeptical as well, for they have voted to review the case. On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments from lawyers for the Catholic Church and the state agency charged with administering the unemployment insurance system. The Supreme Court hears perhaps 80 cases per term, about 1 percent of those that seek review, and many of these deal with issues specific to the federal government. It’s rare, in other words, for a case from Wisconsin to draw the high court’s eye.

Yet this one has done so, and for good reason. Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Superior is an integral part of the Catholic Church in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, the organized expression of the church’s mission to serve the sick, the elderly, the poor, and the vulnerable in our communities, as Christ did and directed his followers to do. The particular subsidiary programs at issue in this case serve people with physical and developmental disabilities. Yet the bureaucrats at the state Department of Workforce Development decided that because these programs do not hand out Gospel tracts or require Mass attendance to participate, they did not qualify for the tax exemption for religious organizations.

Wisconsin Supreme Court’s Ruling

That befuddling conclusion was appealed up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which had to address the question both as a matter of state statutory interpretation (did the legislature’s enactment really mean that the department had to tax church-run social service programs?) and constitutional law (if so, does the First Amendment permit that?).

The left-leaning majority on the state’s high court amazingly answered yes to both questions. The court first found that these ministries were not “operated primarily for religious purposes,” the standard set in state statute, because the organization’s “activities” were not “religious” in nature, for instance, “worship services, religious outreach, ceremony, or religious education.” In other words, living out Christ’s call to clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned (Matthew 25:36) does not count as “religious activity” according to the court.

Justice Rebecca Bradley holds nothing back in her dissent. She charges that “the majority excessively entangles the government in spiritual affairs, requiring courts to determine what religious practices are sufficiently religious under the majority’s unconstitutional test.” The U.S. Supreme Court apparently took that dissenting opinion seriously, because its choice to grant discretionary review reveals an initial level of concern about the majority opinion (the court does not usually review opinions that are obviously correct).

A Coalition of Faith Communities Criticizes Ruling

A broad coalition of faith communities from across the religious spectrum has weighed in at the court to criticize the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling. One brief, for instance, includes everyone from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention to the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, Hindu American Foundation, and BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha. Every faith group, in other words, has an interest in ensuring the space and liberty to live out its charitable values, whatever they might look like.

Plus, as the diversity of faiths cited above suggests, evaluating whether a religious organization’s activities look sufficiently “churchy” puts smaller, less familiar faiths at a huge disadvantage. Judges and bureaucrats should not be in a place to evaluate a faith-based organization’s activities by making a judgment call based on a flexible, non-rigorous, non-exhaustive list of potential factors set forth in the majority opinion. “The rule of law is a law of rules,” as Justice Antonin Scalia once said, and the open-ended “test” set by the Wisconsin Supreme Court is an invitation to arbitrary and inconsistent decision-making. Hopefully, then, the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the opinion from the state’s high court and make sure the First Amendment rights of all ministries are protected.

Daniel Suhr is president of the Center for American Rights, a Chicago-based public-interest law firm.