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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2018
On December 18, 1972, the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver handed down a decision which may be momentous not only for churches but for all organizations (hospitals, colleges, symphony orchestras, museums and other "public charities") exempt from federal income tax under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The court took away a religious organization's tax exemption because it had engaged injpolitical activity, yet the decision has gone almost unnoticed in the great metropolitan newspapers of the East.
* This case concerned property-tax exemption but is not distinguishable on the main issues from income-tax exemption.
* One option that has been suggested is that churches set up nonexempt subsidiaries for political action as some labor unions have done. This poses a theological and practical problem, however: It is a division of the unitary mission of the church into "upper" and "lower" parts, as though one were "sacred" and the other "secular." Some organizations have created a divergence, if not outright divorce, between the two (as between the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc.). Most churches would resist this kind of dichotomization