c. 2003 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama law professor and former IRS attorney, is widely credited with sparking the movement for tax reform in Alabama based on Judeo-Christian ethics. In an interview with “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” the PBS television show, Hamil discusses how she came to her view that biblical principles should be applied to the tax system.
Q: What is it in your own background that drew you to this cause?
A: My professional background before coming to teach was almost exclusively in taxation _ four years of private practice in a big New York law firm, then four years in the IRS … My main area is limited liability companies. I have spent most of my professional time on the side of business, with a heavy emphasis on taxation. That doesn’t mean I was formed from the Devil; what it means is that I’m coming at this as a pro-business moderate. We get tarred-and-feathered all the time by traditional Democrats and traditional Republicans, but we like to think that we’re good folks, and we do care about justice.
We also believe that good, healthy business growth that’s ethical is very important to raising us all up. When you look at my background, I’m not some flaming liberal that came out of the Socialist movement to destroy business in Alabama. There have been accusations along those lines. I come out of the business tradition.
To be quite honest, I didn’t really notice how awful the state and local tax system was here. It didn’t hurt me very much. That’s not something I’m terribly proud of, believe me, but I’ve been very honest about it, because I can understand if I didn’t notice for seven years, then it’s not so hard to figure out how other people who are basically good folks wouldn’t notice in a big way for a lifetime. Given all the background and education I had, I certainly should have noticed earlier. There were telltale signs: the high sales tax on groceries, the ridiculously low property tax on the house. Like most people, I was busily doing my own thing _ raising a family and the like, not noticing a thing.
My initial sabbatical plans were to finish a book on the evolution of United States business organization forms for a university press. I hadn’t noticed the inequities right under my nose, but I certainly noticed that my areas _ tax and business broadly _ are in dire need of more ethics. Where do you find ethics? A seminary is one of many places. (I discussed) this with my minister _ any time you have an interesting idea or something strange, if you are part of a church and you like the minister, you may talk to him or her about it. So it was really with the minister that together we cooked up this idea: “There’s this place called Beeson. Yes, it’s a seminary. It’s different than what you’re used to. It’s very evangelical.” I wasn’t even that clued in to exactly what that meant. I was a member of a mainline Methodist church, which I still am.
That just shows you how cloistered I was in the ivory tower. How could you not understand “evangelical” and be in Alabama for so long? Well, if you’re mostly locked up in the ivory tower, there’s a whole lot you may not see.
There was a little newspaper article in our hometown paper here in Tuscaloosa about the state income tax and the fact that it reached wages at $4,600 per year. I did a double-take when I saw it. My initial thought was, “That can’t possibly be right; it has to be a misprint.” But instead of just brushing it off, I looked at it and decided to investigate. I had the library pull the source and a couple of other things. It took about five hours of my time to preliminarily conclude, with 99.9 percent certainty, that what I was sitting on was pretty darn awful. It was beyond awful. It was unbelievably awful. I couldn’t imagine that you could put together something so unfair and so inadequate and so outrageous.
Of course, naturally, I was stewing about it: How could I have missed this for seven years? I ended up talking to a couple of the teachers at Beeson about it. One in particular, the New Testament scholar Frank Thielman, who by the way is very conservative, took a resolution through the Beeson faculty unanimously supporting my work publicly. Beeson has come out front in this. They are not sitting on the sidelines. My question to Frank Thielman was: We’re in the Bible Belt. It seems to me ridiculous that we could have something so horrible in the Bible Belt, given that we have the right to vote and we’re responsible for our government. It seems to me that what we’re doing to the poor here is absolutely inconsistent with everything I have absorbed at Beeson.
He said, “You’re right” _ that I had an iron-clad case against this based on biblical ethics. I’ll never forget his next comment. Frank Thielman is a gentle man. He does not run over people. He does not tell people what to do. He said, “You should consider doing this for your thesis, because you’re the only who can.” That, in a nutshell, is how the project was born.
Q: What about the influence of your own Methodist background?
A: What kind of United Methodist was I when my minister and I were talking about sending me to seminary? I would have to answer: A pretty typical United Methodist. You go to church. You do your best _ kind of half-asleep, to be honest. Maybe I can put it in a better way. I would say that, as a practicing United Methodist, I was fairly typical of many _ not realizing my full potential as a United Methodist. Half-asleep is a colloquial way to put it, but it really means the same thing.
Many people who are faithfully part of a church have not yet realized their full potential. Part of a minister’s job is to try to further awaken the congregation. I was no more fake than many other people, but I certainly was nowhere near realizing my potential. I certainly did not fully understand the commitment to being a United Methodist. I didn’t have a clue what my commitment was supposed to be _ the moral obligations that go with being a United Methodist, being spiritually connected with them, which is the same as being spiritually connected with your beliefs. (I was) really a well-intentioned but a sleeping United Methodist.
As you can see, I was a pretty sleepy tax lawyer, too. I was pretty much stuck in my own cocoon, focusing on my own thing _ my own writings and promotion and tenure and my children. Not that these are bad things; just (that) my mind and heart and ears and eyes were not fully focused. That happened at Beeson. There’s no question about that.
I’m concerned about poor people, because tax justice has a great effect on poverty. Is the right thing for me to do to spend my weekends baking cookies for the bake sale for charitable contributions? That may be the right thing for somebody else. We all have limited time and energy. Unfortunately, the Lord has not given us more than a 24-hour day and limited years. So part of this realization is not just being aware of what you care about, but it’s being aware of how you need to put your feet to the gospel and in what form it would have to come.
Obviously, I was pretty clueless. The work being born was a way of becoming aware. Now, I didn’t become aware overnight. I was focusing on this thesis I had to do. This certainly seemed like a better use of a thesis than what I was envisioning. I was at least that much aware. I went to work and got it done. I had a research team in the library. What it took to put that together was enormous. The energy that went into it was enormous. I’m kind of amazed that I had the energy. Of course, my friends and teachers at Beeson say,“Haven’t you learned anything? It’s not your energy. It’s the power of the Holy Spirit.”
I had six research assistants. The library staff helped out. I built a case on the tax side with 10 witnesses and DNA. I mean, I have indicted big timber with statistics: I put together my own study with statistics that prove that that group pays less than 2 percent of the property tax _ meager as it is _ despite owning 71 percent of the land. That is an indictment. Then we connect those property tax trends with the most horrible of the horriblest schools in the state. Then the theology _ over a hundred biblical commentaries of the finest evangelicals.
Q: You’ve been speaking in church basements all summer and leading workshops on tax reform. What are you saying to church groups, and what are they saying to you?
A: I’ve been in all kinds of churches, probably more United Methodist churches than any other single kind by far. The United Methodists have gone out full-barrel with public resolutions on tax reform. Then they did it recently with the Riley plan (Republican Gov. Bob Riley’s tax reform plan shifting the state’s tax burden from the poor to wealthy individuals and corporations, passed by the state legislature), so I’m proud to be a Methodist at this moment. The Episcopalians have been pretty strong, too, but there just aren’t as many of them. The Baptists we’re still working on.
For civic clubs, I emphasize the scriptural basis of justice, developing it from the Old and New Testaments. I’ve come up with two fundamental principles that are relevant here. One is, “Thou shalt not oppress the poor,” and “Thou shalt make sure that the poor enjoy at least a minimum opportunity to better their situation” _ as one pastor recently put it, “a leg up.” I have developed (these) through very careful _ in biblical scholar lingo what we call exegetical and hemeneutical techniques, using the finest evangelical scholarship.
At Beeson, you’ve got conservative, very conservative, and super-size conservative. This is not liberal stuff. This is basically reading the Scripture honestly, reading it fully, using divine command ethics, which is the most conservative approach you can have, based on inerrancy of the Scripture. The question is not what does it say, because what it says is clear; the question is what does it mean to us today, which certainly has to be developed. What I develop is that these principles are ironclad _ that you can’t abuse the poor or your community is not godly; it’s something else. It’s based on Mammon, based on market values that only value money, based on values that are not Christian. If your community basically has an infrastructure where the child born poor has no chance, you are not consistent with the values in the scripture. Those are ironclad principles that cannot be disputed by any person who’s being honest. I have even the super-size conservatives at Beeson behind me.
I take those principles and apply them to what we are doing in Alabama through our system of taxing and funding. We are absolutely crushing the poor with our regressive tax system. …
Q: What’s wrong with some of the arguments being raised by members of the Christian Coalition in opposition to tax reform in Alabama? They cite Bible verses such as “Render under Caesar what is Caesar’s,” for example, and say that instead of cutting just the taxes of the poor, everyone’s taxes should be cut.
A: The Christian Coalition makes me angry because they are taking the Word (Bible) and distorting it. First of all, they have fastened on “Render unto Caesar.” All that means, basically, is that taxes are not unlawful or immoral per se. You cannot say, “I’m a person of God; therefore, I don’t have to pay my taxes.” Jesus was not commenting at all on whether the taxes were fair or unfair. That passage does not in any way obliterate the requirement to work for justice, if in fact you have anything to say about justice. So the Caesar thing is almost a red herring, or at least it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, which is, given that we have to have taxation to run our state. You cannot run a state or community based on voluntary contributions; we’re too greedy for that. The question is, okay, then it better be fair, since it’s legally compelled. Is it fair? Do we have justice? That’s the question. The Caesar thing doesn’t help you there.
Another thing the Christian Coalition has said, which has really been irritating, is that this is all about charity, and it’s up to the churches to give charity, to worry about the poor. The Bible does command charity and beneficence. Whether or not we’re doing a good job of that in Alabama, well, there’s a bit of a dispute that I’m not into, because my purpose is justice, not charity. But I will say this: Even if you get an A-plus in charity, if your churches are doing a wonderful job with the soup kitchens and everything else, an A-plus in charity does not in any way mitigate an F in justice. You can’t average the two out to be a C.
Can we use an A-plus in charity to say we don’t have to be concerned about this injustice? No. The Bible commands both. They are separate. They are equally important, and one cannot replace the other. What the Christian Coalition is doing is confusing the two. If charity could establish justice, if they didn’t have to be separate, then don’t you think with our 8,000-plus churches and all the Christians we would be the shining light of the nation, instead of at the bottom in this area?
Q: Do biblical ethics have consequences for where Christians stand on other social and political issues, too _ on universal health insurance, on the death penalty, on other issues?
A: The short answer is yes. If a person uses the Bible as his or her moral compass, then biblical ethics have something to say about everything. Many issues of the day are complicated, and biblical ethics do not render quite as clear an answer as they do in the case I’m building. Let’s take the death penalty for a minute _ you are against the death penalty, and you believe that biblical ethics back you up. You can also passionately believe that you are for it and you believe that biblical ethics back you up.
My view is that reasonable minds can disagree on that point. But not on Alabama’s taxes. I know that’s going to come across as a little arrogant, but there’s no defense to what we’re doing here. We’re not in one of those grey areas.
DEA END DANIEL
