How can the Church’s tax-exempt status come into question? Pundits, like Cindy Rodriguez, who I linked to earlier today, see moral issues as purely political issues. To her, if a priest or bishop states that the faithful should not vote for representatives who support abortion-on-demand, they are explicitly supporting candidates who are pro-life. Ms. Rodriguez and others see this as an endorsement of pro-life candidates rather than a statement on morality in accord with Church teachings.
She appeals to the sense of moral relativism and so-called primacy of conscience that brought the question of abortion to the courts to begin with. If questions of morality are simply issues for us to form opinions about based on sound bites and our own personal feelings, we elect representatives who will enact civil law that reflects that same moral relativism. The result in some cases is unjust law.
It’s interesting that the title of her piece is “Let bishop guide votes, tithe to IRS.” For liberals taxes are a kind of tithe because they look at the state as a god, their guardian and protector from cradle to grave. Tax money goes to the government to fund all kinds of activities and programs, some that are perfectly appropriate for the government to be engaged in and others that we as Christians know are immoral.
How do we bring the truth of natural moral law back into the public debate? Liberals can’t defend the “inalienable rights” of people without admitting that our Constitution is based in natural law. The other constitutional issue, of course, is freedom of religion, something that would be tossed out with yesterday’s news should religious institutions begin loosing their tax-exempt status because of their stance on moral issues. It seems Ms. Rodriguez surely defends the right of free speech over religious freedom. Yet the right of free speech has become, for the majority of the media, the right to foist atheistic and morally relativistic opinions on all of us, all the time. Not only that, but freedom of religion has come to mean freedom from any discourse of a religious nature in the public forum.
That leads me to another point that one of Eric’s recent posts brought to the fore. Most of the media turns to what he calls “meta-narratives” when reporting the news. Doesn’t the media have a fiduciary responsibility to report facts and data, sans spin, to the public? Editorials and opinion pieces notwithstanding, the problem is that facts and data don’t sell newspapers or ads. And they don’t generally agree with liberal notions of morality. What sells newspapers are headlines and politicized articles that galvanize the public in a partisan fashion. That’s ok for Ms. Rodriguez and the Denver Post. They pay their tithe to their god, the state.