State and local tax exemptions for church property were left standing by the Supreme Court in one of its first actions after the new term opened this month. The high court refused to hear appeals of Maryland decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the exemptions in that state.
The court set no legal precedent; it merely refused to get involved in the issue for its own undisclosed reasons. However, the practical effect will be to discourage other efforts to challenge church tax exemptions.
Complaints were brought by the Free-Thought Society of America, Mrs. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, former president of the society, who got the high court to overthrow official school prayers, and Mr. and Mrs. Lemoin Cree (Cree is president now). FTSA is publisher of the American Atheist.
O’Hair Cuts
“There is not one shred of historical evidence outside the Bible that attests to even the existence of such a person named Jesus Christ,” said atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair in a three-hour radio debate with the Rev. John Streater, of San Francisco’s First Baptist Church, last month.
With studied restraint, Streater aimed historically oriented refutations at the wild charges. His opponent’s standard reply: “I simply can’t accept that.”
When a telephone participant entered the talk show on KCBS, reporting a radical transformation of his life after conversion from atheism, Mrs. O’Hair replied, “Nothing but mental gymnastics.”
Mrs. O’Hair showed mild surprise when Streater agreed with her opposition to “government-forced prayer edicts” and tax exemptions for church businesses.
“I don’t think you really mean it,” she retorted. While the cleric shook his head in bewilderment, the announcer switched to a life-insurance commercial.
They contended exemptions are an indirect subsidy to religion and are thus prohibited by the First Amendment to the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). But the Maryland court said that “a major part” of church work is charitable and that sixty other types of charities hold tax exemptions.
A related case, also from Maryland, awaits U. S. Supreme Court action. It seeks to reverse a lower-court ruling that public grants to church-related colleges are unconstitutional, even though the money is used for secular purposes.
In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, about a dozen church properties, mostly parking lots, were recently returned to the city’s real-estate tax rolls. Under Pennsylvania’s constitution, church property is tax exempt if it is used for worship.
Another tangled church-state issue is the Johnson administration’s war on poverty. Current disputes involve appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity and treatment of a church-related project in Mississippi.
Such groups as the Inter-Religious Committee Against Poverty, the National Council of Churches, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference appealed to President Johnson and Congress to increase OEO’s budget during the current fiscal year.
But the House of Representatives passed an appropriation of $1.75 billion for OEO—no increase over the previous year. At one point, the Senate’s OEO bill went as high as $2.4 billion; but this was cut down in committee, and the House version won out.
During debate, Rep. John Buchanan of Alabama, a Baptist minister, failed to get an amendment stating that OEO “shall make no grant to, and shall not contract with, any establishment of religion, church, or other religious body.”
Meanwhile, churchmen less worried about church-state cooperation were waging war on the war-on-poverty office over its suspension of funds for a “Head Start” pre-school training organization, Child Development Group of Mississippi. CDGM, formed with the assistance of the National Council of Churches’ Delta Ministry, was administered through Mary Holmes Junior College (United Presbyterian).
In suspending the funds, OEO charged that about $500,000 was not properly accounted for, that parents were too involved, and that Negro control was emphasized to the point of excluding the white community. The church groups accused OEO of bending to political pressure, particularly from Senator John Stennis of Mississippi.
A United Presbyterian news release quoted experts who said CDGM’s accounting system “does afford a complete and accurate accounting of all funds.…” The Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty—which is headed by auto-union leader Walter Reuther and includes many churchmen—commissioned a fifteen-member “board of inquiry” to investigate the fund cutoff. The board reported that “allegations of mismanagement were a thin mark for a politically dictated decision” that “represents a yielding to those forces which have stood in historical opposition to progress for the poor and underprivileged of Mississippi.”
When OEO tried to decentralize the program, five denominations that have colleges in Mississippi vowed they would not sign contracts with OEO without clearance from the National Council of Churches’ Division of Christian Life and Mission, hoping thus to make it difficult for OEO to bypass CDGM.
Unperturbed, OEO managed to scatter almost $12 million across Mississippi in just five days early this month. The Washington Post reported that Rust College, a small Negro institution at Holly Springs, was granted $1.2 million before it had even completed an application explaining how the money would be used. An OEO staffer had been dispatched to Holly Springs with orders to draw up preliminary plans and a budget within eighteen hours. The budget amounted to $600 per child more than OEO’s recommended maximum.
President Ernest A. Smith of the Methodist-supported school expressed misgivings as the din of controversy rose. “We’re sorry we got caught by a situation we weren’t aware of,” he lamented. “We weren’t aware of all these political undercurrents.”
Miscellany
Reports from the Java, Sumatra, and Sumbawa islands of Indonesia tell the same story: a surge in Christian converts and revivalism this year. Observers say the nation’s repudiation of Communism and government opposition to animistic paganism have helped.
Pocket Testament league plans to field a Vietnamese evangelist who can travel freely through Communist-held areas to distribute Scriptures.
In line with the Viet Nam build-up, more Methodists are on duty as chaplains with U. S. armed forces (540) than at any time since World War II, and the Army has increased Methodist chaplain requests for 1966–67.
The departure of U. S. troops from France has caused closing of nearly all that nation’s English-language Baptist churches.
In Ceylon, a union proposal involving Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and the Church of South India failed to pass at the annual Methodist conference.
Methodists in Sydney, Australia, have established the nation’s first treatment center for drug addicts.
A wide-ranging ecumenical magazine sponsored by the United Church of Canada will begin publishing early in 1967. It will be aimed at theologically trained readers ranging from Pentecostals to Unitarians. No editor has been named.
Kentucky’s Western Recorder proposed a master file on Baptist preachers known to be adulterers and homosexuals, to protect unsuspecting congregations.
Presbyterians raised $10 million for a 310-bed hospital in Dallas and another $10 million for a 300-unit apartment house for persons over 62, now under construction in San Francisco.
Financial problems have forced the National Council of Churches’ Broadcasting and Film Commission to close its Hollywood office.
A merger between two Newark, New Jersey, congregations produced the nation’s first predominantly Negro Episcopal cathedral.
Roman Catholics and Protestants joined in a psychological counseling center opened in New York City’s Harlem last month by the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. The center is directed by the Rev. Frederick E. Dennard, a Baptist.
Twelve Protestant monks from the famed Taizé, France, community and five Roman Catholic monks from Canada and the United States will open a “reconciliation” center in Chicago’s West Side Negro ghetto.
Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute plans to build a new twenty-story dormitory and other facilities.
Surveying Surveys
An Ohio State University study of rural towns shows churches have less effect on community decisions than Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. And the Gallup Poll discovered for Catholic Digest that the number of persons who say religion is “important” in their lives is declining.
Census Bureau samples show that of the 5.3 million new American households since 1960, only half are headed by a married man and wife.
United Nations figures indicate there are 200 million more illiterate persons in the world now than in 1960.
A study by Moderator magazine estimates that 1,000 college students will commit suicide during 1966 and that ninety times that many will attempt it.
San Francisco’s death rate from liver cirrhosis is nearly six times that of the United States as a whole, its health department reports; the disease is the city’s fourth leading cause of death.
After comparing church-growth figures, the daily Australian predicts Roman Catholics will surpass Anglicans as the largest group in that nation’s population within a few years.
Personalia
New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, 77, offered to resign under Pope Paul’s new policy of retirement after 75 (Sept. 30 issue, page 14). But the Pope turned him down and apparently does not plan to apply the age limit to cardinals.
Sister Therese Castonguay, new nursing education supervisor for Saskatchewan Province, is reported to be the first nun to hold a Canadian civil service post.
Thousands of London, Ontario, fairgoers stared skyward as the helicopterriding Rev. Jonas Shepherd, a Presbyterian, married via loudspeaker two professional aerialists dangling on a ladder under the ’copter.
While some of the faithful walked out, comedian Dick Gregory told a Sunday congregation at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church that “Watts was legal.” Indicating the pulpit Bible, he predicted, “Kids today are going to test the Bible. It’s not going to stand up.” Glide’s pastor, who worries about “dull” worship, said Gregory was just the beginning.
Carmen Armenti, the new Roman Catholic mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, got permission for back-to-back wedding ceremonies for his marriage this month to a Greek Orthodox communicant.
Stephen Brimigion, General Electric executive, is now treasurer of Methodist home missions work.
The Rev. Beverly A. Asbury, Presbyterian minister at Wooster, Ohio, will become chaplain of Vanderbilt University.
The Rev. Art Wilson of Wichita Baptist Tabernacle was re-elected president of the Baptist Bible Fellowship International, which lists a constituency of 1.5 million.
The Rev. Ephraim Kayumba, a Pentecostal minister and member of the Congo (Kinshasa) parliament, was elected a bishop by his church council.
Finnish author Hannu Salama was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for “deliberate blasphemy” in his new novel Midsummer Dances, but the sentence was suspended because Finland’s blasphemy law may be abolished. Copies of the book were confiscated.
In Jerusalem’s Imperial Hotel on October 7 at 3 P.M., Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, 73, head of one branch of the Pentecostalist Church of God, was crowned by his followers as “King of All the Nations of Men.”
Deaths
MARQUIS LAFAYETTE HARRIS, 59, bishop of the Methodists’ Atlantic Coast Area (Central Jurisdiction) and formerly president of Philander Smith College; in Atlanta.
ALFRED ALONZO GILMAN, 88, Episcopal missionary who went to China in 1902, became an editor, educator, and bishop; active in refugee relief during World War II and a prisoner of the Japanese; in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.
WALDO FARRINGTON CHASE, 104, believed to have been the oldest Episcopal priest in the United States; in Alhambra, California.
HAROLD W. SEEVER, 54, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee who resigned as pastor of his large Alabama church this year because of near-total blindness; in Mobile, of an apparent heart attack.
