When is the line between church and state crossed?

The NY Times is running a series on the growing union of church and state. Today’s issue speaks of the church and taxes – avoiding them and benefiting from them.

Churches that are engaged in commercial ventures are able to avoid paying property taxes on the buildings housing these ventures. The churches claim that the ventures benefit the church’s religious mission. But I find it hard to see how some of these ventures are really religious-based. It’s easy to see how they compete with secular ventures as their costs are automatically lower.

Here are some church businesses that are not paying property taxes:

• A fitness center in Minnesota
• A theme park in Florida
• Faculty housing in Alaska for day school teachers
• Regent University in Virginia
• An up-scale retirement community in Indiana
• A parking lot in Pennsylvania
• A transmission tower.

It’s even worse as many of these ventures are financed with tax-exempt bonds. More than $20 billion in tax-exempt bonds have been issued in the past fifteen plus years to benefit religious institutions.

What about that stuff about rendering to God and rendering to Caesar?