OPINION:
The Internal Revenue Service is, perhaps, Americans’ least favorite government entity. Separating citizens from their hard-earned money, after all, is a dirty job but necessary one in a functioning nation. The Biden IRS has taken the task beyond dirty to despicable, though, by deploying its frightening authority against a Christian nonprofit organization. Unless Americans rally to the point of attack, government aggression against a common expression of civic life will likely proliferate.
The focus of IRS fire is a Texas-based group called Christians Engaged, which applied for tax-exempt status and was surprisingly denied. The organization’s tax troubles were first reported Saturday by Breitbart News.
On its website, the group claims an aspiration as wholesome as mom and apple pie: “To awaken, motivate, and empower ordinary believers in Jesus Christ to: pray for our nation and our elected officials regularly, vote in every election to impact our culture, and engage our hearts in some forms of political education or activism for the furtherance of our nation.”
Instead of good-hearted patriots harboring conservative values, Christians Engaged must look to President Biden’s IRS like a fist-shaking mob. In rejecting the organization’s application, the taxman trembled: “The Bible’s teachings are typically affiliated with the Republican Party and candidates.”
To be sure, the Bible’s admonition to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” undercuts the Biden administration’s left-wing perspective. The dominant Democratic Party embraces a faith foreign to America’s Judeo-Christian heritage — one that favors the idea popular among Marxists that social evolution requires the clash of identity politics.
Americans have witnessed the principle in action as the party’s foot soldiers march, riot and destroy in the name of “progress.” Nevertheless, the Movement of Black Lives, an umbrella organization linking Black Lives Matter with common-cause support groups, boasts tax-exempt status, despite its stated anti-American aims: “[T]he U.S. is a country that does not support, protect or preserve [b]lack life,” reads the introductory statement of Movement for Black Lives. “And so we seek not reform but transformation.”
Yet, it is Christians Engaged that the IRS fears because the group’s Bible-reading might signal the presence of patriotic Republicans. It is an abuse of power more striking than that of the Obama-era IRS, which launched unfair, tax-status inquisitions against Tea Party groups whose only “crime” was to rally in favor of prudent federal budgeting.
Fortunately, Christians Engaged is pushing back, first by appealing the IRS ruling and then, if necessary, by suing the service. Organizations similarly suffering IRS attacks for allowing biblical ethics to inform their activism should do likewise.
Samuel Adams once said: “Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote … that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.” If he were alive, the Biden IRS would denounce this Founding Father. Shame on the “Infernal Revenue Service.”
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