Canada’s atheists owed an explanation
Last week the Federal Court of Appeal upheld Revenue Canada’s rejection of an application for charitable status made by a “Church of Atheism” tucked away in Ontario’s Lanark Highlands. The idea of making a gesture like this has probably occurred to every atheist who looks around at a world of tax- exempt churches and wonders why his kind is excluded from the gravy train. (Clergymen pay tax on their income, but they have access to a generous residential deduction, and any professional expenses covered by the church go untaxed.)
The fact is that the “Church’s” efforts were a bit amateurish and confused. But they may, like a doomed military reconnaissance, have revealed weaknesses in the anomalous exclusion of atheists from religious tax exemptions.
These weaknesses cannot be any big secret. You probably remember the Supreme Court’s Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay decision of 2015 — that’s the case in which the Quebec Court of Appeal had ruled that a statue of Christ with an electrically illuminated Sacred Heart was “devoid of religious connotation.” The Supreme Court, perhaps suppressing a chuckle or two, proceeded to unanimously overturn the Quebec ruling and expound the concept that the Canadian state has a Charter- based “duty of religious neutrality” ( except, of course, where the constitution explicitly specifies otherwise, as with Catholic schools). Government, the SCC insisted, “must neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, and the same holds true for non-belief.”
Given that this is our law, what can be the problem with a “Church of Atheism”? Good question! Justice Marianne Rivoalen, writing on behalf of a three-judge Federal Court panel, confirmed the general point that there is a state duty of religious neutrality; in fact, even Revenue Canada, acting as the respondent, conceded this.
But the court simply ruled, without any logical elucidation, that “the Minister ( of Revenue)’s refusal to register the appellant as a charitable organization does not interfere in a manner that is more than trivial or insubstantial with the appellant’s members’ ability to practise their atheistic beliefs. The appellant can continue to carry out its purpose and its activities without charitable registration.”
I have to say, as an atheist, that this brusque dismissal would appear to leave the “duty of religious neutrality” lying on the ground in about a billion pieces. ( Has Revenue Canada ever let anyone off the hook because the duty to pay taxes was “trivial,” or the amounts involved “insubstantial?”) Now, of course, an enterprising atheist could always start a formally atheist charity that was devoted to the same charitable ends that traditional churches serve: feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and so forth. And a tax exemption would undoubtedly be available to such a body.
But the “Church of Atheism” tried to make the tougher argument that it should qualify for a tax exemption as a teacher and promoter of atheism per se. Under the common law, that is part of why churches are tax-exempt: the “advancement of religion” has been recognized for centuries as a charitable purpose in itself. The Saguenay principle would seem, at least on its face, to require that the advancement of irreligion be treated on an equal footing.
The Church of Atheism may have sensed that the Charter/ Saguenay part of its case might not have a hope in hell, so to speak, and so the design of the Church’s application for a tax exemption used the strategy of treating its interpretation of “Atheism” as a religion, rather than the absence or rejection of religion. The “Church” propounds the worship of “mainstream science” and claims to possess a “Ten Commandments of Energy” which were “created by a wise human being who consists of pure, invisible Energy and has acknowledged Energy’s existence.”
( Acknowledging the existence of energy? As Carlyle supposedly said when he heard Margaret Fuller’s remark “I accept the Universe”: “Gad! She’d better!”)
The Federal Court was no more impressed by any of this than you are. Yet even here there was some point-scoring by the Church: Revenue Canada had demanded evidence that the COA believes “in a higher unseen power such as a God, Supreme Being, or entity,” and the Court had to admit (when presented with the awkward example of Buddhism) that these items are not necessarily a part of any religion. All that is left of the test for a religious tax exemption is that applicants hold to “a particular and comprehensive system of doctrine and observances.”
That seems like a standard that philosophical materialists could meet pretty easily; it is hard to know how Revenue Canada, given the logic of this ruling, could turn away a tax-exempt Church of Karl Marx. ( I know, I know, we have those already and they’re called universities, very droll ...) But the real question is the Charter question: whether it is possible for atheists to receive a tax exemption for some sodality that preached and advocated atheism, as the Roman church does the sacraments, but that did not pretend to be a church and did not cook up a phoney decalogue to hornswoggle Mr. Taxman. If this is not to be possible, atheists might at least receive a proper explanation for it.
THE FEDERAL COURT WAS NO MORE IMPRESSED BY ANY OF THIS THAN YOU ARE.