Since I preach about politics, can I get a tax exemption too?

I don’t think American churches should automatically qualify for tax-exempt status, and maybe they shouldn’t have it at all. I mean, to begin with, what is a church?

Is it a little country chapel with a steeple and 12 parishioners where the pastor and his wife live in the clapboard house next door, she plays the piano, types the weekly bulletin and cleans while he performs maintenance on the building, visits the sick, conducts weddings and funerals and drives the church bus?

Or is it the megachurch with 10,000 or more members, its own TV and radio networks, a gold-plated parsonage with a fleet of jets and staff of dozens where the minister has a political agenda and goes on CNN to support presidential candidates and earns a 7- or 8-figure salary every year?

Or is it me, sitting here in my office writing political essays and social commentaries? My wife says I’m always preaching to the choir, so I think that could make me a church.

Historically, both sides of the taxation debate have used separation of church and state, freedom of speech and freedom of religion to make their points. Advocates of tax exemption say that requiring churches to pay taxes would endanger the free expression of religion.

Opponents argue that it’s actually the tax exemption itself that violates church and state, and that a tax break for churches forces all American taxpayers to support religion, even if they oppose some or all religious doctrines.

The Johnson Amendment to the U.S. Tax Code says a pastor who talks about candidates from the pulpit in light of scripture might forfeit his tax-exempt status, but it is never enforced. The Supreme Court has upheld tax exemption for churches, but the decision was handed down in 1970. Churches have gotten much bigger and much more politically active since then.

So it’s a dilemma. I don’t know how you enforce the Johnson Amendment without wiretapping every church in America to see who’s preaching politics and who isn’t. It’s pretty easy to see when the minister goes on Fox News to support Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, but what if it’s the pastor of the small country church?

The only solution, then, must be to tax all churches. Anything else would seem to be either unenforceable, unconstitutional or at the very least, unfair.