Did the risk of losing its
tax exemption influence the church’s abandonment of its priesthood and temple
ban? It is possible, but unlikely. A small handful of accounts exist that assert
that the church did consider its tax-exempt status when reassessing its
exclusionary policy. Shortly after the policy change, for instance, church
historian Leonard Arrington posited that the “Lord might have permitted the announcement
at this particular moment” because a number of states refused to exempt church
property from tax. He pointed in particular to Wisconsin.
Arrington was right that in
the early 1970s, a Wisconsin court held that granting property tax exemptions
to racially discriminatory fraternal and benevolent societies violated the
Constitution. After that decision, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue began
investigating almost 10,000 tax-exempt organizations’ by-laws. It eventually
selected thirty organizations to investigate in more depth and ultimately decided
that several Masonic lodges had membership practices that effectually allowed
them to discriminate against potential Black members. The lodges sued, asking a
court to stop the Department of Revenue’s investigation. In November 1977, the
trial court refused, and on June 30, 1978 (about three weeks after the church changed
its policy), the state supreme court upheld its refusal, allowing the Department
of Revenue to continue looking into racially discriminatory policies at a
handful of Masonic lodges.
There is no evidence that
Wisconsin ever investigated, or threatened, the Mormon Church’s property tax
exemption. Similarly, legal databases have no record of the Mormon Church
challenging any other state’s denial of a property tax exemption based on its
racially exclusionary policies (for, for that matter, anything else).
Arrington’s assertion
illustrates the main problems with most claims that the church changed its
policy because of the potential loss of tax exemption: these claims appeared
after the fact, without any evidence that the Mormon Church was at risk of
losing its tax exemption, and without any evidence that the church leaders
considered the church’s tax exemption in deciding to do away with the racial
temple and priesthood ban. (Samuel D. Brunson, Between the Temple and the
Tax Collector: The Intersection of Mormonism and the State [Urbana: The University
of Illinois Press, 2025], 190-91)
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