A week or two ago I stood before the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris, enjoying once more both the superb skill of the builders and the joyous cynicism with which they had mingled piety and impiety in the sculpture. Paris always has surprises for me but the most singular was that a French woman of mature years, apparently normal intelligence, an fair education came to me and asked: "Can you tell me, sir, what church this is?" I had just been explaining to a friend how the large island in the Seine in which the cathedral stands was once Paris; how half of it had been occupied by the spacious palace and the soaring cathedral, and the citizens had Just tucked their dark little homes into such odd corners as God and the king did not require. Sixty years ago the French booted their last monarch across the frontier, and now, it seem some of them have so far forgotten religion that they have to ask foreigners the name of a church for which America would probably pay a billion dollars.
Few countries have advanced as rapidly as France, which is one of the least sentimental and most logical of nations, but we have all advanced so far that one-half of our life is anachronistic to the other half. The exemption of churches from taxation is one of the worst anachronisms. It meant originally that the church was a state within the state, having its own law and deciding itself when and in what measure it might, in times of pressure; contribute to the public treasury. When this arrogant claim was disallowed, church property still evaded taxation on the ground that it served a high public purpose, like, charitable or educational institutions, which were then entirely voluntary, and it ought therefore, to have at least this subsidy of an exemption from taxation. There was no need in those days to inquire very closely into the soundness of the public service. Practically the whole community used the churches and, if a tax were imposed on them, the community would have to pay it. The church was exempt on pretty much the same grounds as the civic hall. It was like transferring your money from one pocket to another. Now considerably less than half the adults of any Community use the churches, and the last argument for exempting them from taxation is quite discredited.
Rich And Empty Churches
Church property in the United States is said to be worth about four billion dollars, and it is increasing rapidly in value. Drive round the fringes of any growing town or City and see how eligible sites have been secured for the building of new churches; how old sites that have risen ten or twenty fold in value are quietly sold; how the clergy can hang on to city sites until the value is colossal, while any other concern doing so little business would have been driven out long ago by the fair incidence of taxation. In the inner ring of large cities there are churches with fifty or a hundred worshipers while business men pay appalling prices for the land all around them. And the majority of us are supinely protecting the business. Of the majority of church-users the great bulk are women and children, and of the genuinely religious male taxpayers the enormous majority live in the country or small towns. We do not much miss the taxes on their Little Bethels. The anachronism is that city property of immense value is used by only about a tenth of the taxpayers of this city, yet the nine-tenths lazily subsidize it by remitting taxation. Even business men seem never to reflect that in remitting, say, a million dollars in taxation on buildings which nine-tenths of them do not want they are paying out of their own pockets a million dollars a year to the people who do want them.