Render Unto Caesar

June 10, 2012

nemu2

“Let them march all they want as long as they continue to pay their taxes” – Alexander Haig, US Secretary of State, commenting on anti-nuclear protests.

While I strive to be clean of thought and word, as well as a good neighbour to my brethren and servant to my Lord, my mouth fills with the most indelicate blasphemy when my pay slip arrives and my sacrifice is made known to me. I don’t object to paying for libraries, and I understand there are unfortunate people in this world who need things like the NHS, Scotland Yard, and the Olympic games to get them through the day. But what else do I fund?

Back in 2008, when Satan hiccoughed and the stock market crashed, tokens of our labour equivalent to 50,000,000,000,000 cola-bottles were offered up to “placate the market”. Why not go the whole hog, I wonder, and offer up the blood of unbaptised children?

But of course, we already do. In 2006, a daytime drone attack on a school in Pakistan killed an estimated 69 Muslim children amongst 82 confirmed casualties, along with the target, the suspected militant teacher. Diplomacy by the drone kills ten ‘civilians’ for every ‘militant’, whatever those terms mean in such dirty wars, where statistics clearly show that drone attacks increase rather than decrease the frequency of suicide bombings. These flying death robots are called ‘Reapers’ (tee-hee!), and cost £6 million a piece. The racket they are part of is called ‘defense’ (guffaw!), and costs taxpayers £43 bn a year, because no private company would touch such risky R & D with a uranium-proof barge-pole. Private interests prefer to focus on the profits of this research, the profits of war, which are many and well-documented. As long as war is waged, there is money to me made.

One act of tax resistance makes for a good news story. A hundred refusals becomes troublesome and embarrassing for the state. A thousand people refusing to ignore their consciences, and it is starting to look like a revolt.

Should a God-fearing man of the cloth pay tax? A layman once explained how my tax maintains the government, which serves me by maintaining the roads. Money moves in a mysterious manner, but would it not be simpler just to give it to a gang of muscular Irishmen in hard hats?

There is no state tax in Biblical law, just a flat rate for upkeep of the tabernacle (Exd. 30). Tax is what tyrants do to their subjects. It was first introduced during a famine in Egypt, when the famished had nothing left to sell to Pharaoh but themselves (Gen. 47). The tax collector was, before as now, a figure of hate. He is the archetypical sinner (Mat 18:17), though we are reminded that even someone as depraved as a tax collector can be saved, if genuinely repentant of his wickedness. Matthew was a taxman, and his first act after becoming a disciple was to give up this hateful profession. When Jesus eats at Zacchaeus the taxman’s house, the people murmur in disapproval (Luk. 19), but the host decides to return half of his takings to the poor.

Jesus says, quite unambiguously, that citizens are exempt from taxation, but that, so as not to offend the taxman, Peter should go fishing, where he would find a coin in the mouth of a fish (Mat. 17). The symbology is clear. The token of debt is a lifeless metal disk, enfolded incongruously within a fish fit for the Messiah’s table, a mouthful of indigestion for the Saviour.

Generations of crooked and corpulent priests in the pay of the state preached “render unto Caesar”, but of course a butcher is going to tell you that God recommends sausages for breakfast. A closer reading reveals that the nimble Nazarene, when asked a question about tax designed to entrap him, gives a profound teaching as he dodges. He asks the priest to name the image on the coin.

Graven images and likenesses were a serious business in the Jewish world. The accusation of idolatry would not have been lost on the listeners, nor would the suggestion that they should give it up: “Give back the things of Caesar to Caesar, and the things of God to God”.

In Psalm 115, the things of God are the heavens, and the earth is for the children of men (not the property of one man). The same psalm could be describing Caesar’s coins:

“Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths but they speak not; eyes they have, but they see not. They that make them are like unto them. So is everyone that trusteth in them.”

Income tax was first introduced in England in 1798 to pay for soldiers and weapons. In the US, telephone taxes came in during the Spanish War with the War Revenue Act, and increased with military spending. King John demanded tax for a campaign against France; the revolt this provoked only ended with the Magna Carta. The Peasants’ Revolt also began with tax resistance, as did the American and French Revolutions. But the most experienced tax-dodgers this side of the channel islands are the Quakers, who refused an early request for £4000 for an expedition to Canada in 1704. Their reply noted that it was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.

Our lord, at his arrest, was charged with impersonating the Messiah and perverting the nation by preaching the non-payment of tax. He answers the first charge with a lippy “that’s what you say!”, but he has no answer for the other charge. Pilate, for whom the Messianic delusions of peculiar Jews were of little consequence, finds him guilty of something worthy of chastisement, but not the death penalty. He has no intention of crucifying him.

Now, as then, tax resistance is far from a capital crime. The worst that can happen is a short spell in jail, and this is extremely rare. The baker Nigel Wild served three weeks in 1990 for trying to pay his taxes in bread, to ensure that his money would not fund killing. Many more have gone unpunished, and a resister can always cough up when they feel that they have taken the matter far enough. 1040 movement members, named after the 1040 US tax form, deduct $10.40 from their tax returns and send them off along with a letter explaining the protest. In the US, only one person has been prosecuted in the last forty years.

Tax resistance is a noble and dignified form of direct action you can engage in from the comfort of your home. We usually give the fruit of our toil voluntarily, without even registering a protest, but we are only impotent when we choose not to exercise our power. As Henry David Thoreau put it:

“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.”

Elsewhere, Thoreau describes how:

“I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with,—the dollar is innocent,—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.”

If Caesar is concerned with war, then let us render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and quietly declare war.

 

By The Irreverent Reverend NemuIllustration by Alex Charnley