Theology of Tax - Christian Aid

At out meeting on the 29th September 2010 we looked at Christian Aid's campaign to Trace the Tax

This campaign looks at the way that companies can avoid paying taxes, both legal and illegal ways. This often results in developing countries not getting the tax revenue that they should get. Christian Aid is campaigning for transparency so people can see in which countries companies are actually declaring profits.

See Theology - Christian Aid: The Gospel and the rich: theological views of tax. which looks at the theology that underpins this campaign.

We started by thinking about attitudes to tax, in general individuals and companies see tax as something to be minimized as much as possible. There is a resentment of the tax that is taken by the government. Yet when we look at what tax is taken for, what it is spent on we (generally) value those services, eg. schools, health services etc. Often we make a distinction between tax avoidance (legal) and tax evasion (illegal) but I think that CA's paper challenges us about this distinction. How far should we, as Christians, go in reducing our tax? There are no easy answers to this question.

The notion that taxation is a kind of coercive and illicit appropriation of goods (and indirectly labour) that rightfully belongs to the taxpayer plays an important part in Anglo-American political rhetoric.

For Christians, assertions of such ‘rights’ cannot provide the most fundamental level of moral discourse .... Christian ethics is in the last analysis not a matter of rights, duties and laws. The Christian life is a response to one simple fact, that what God wants for his people is ‘to worship him, to be his friends, to eat with him’. The earth does not belong to the property-owner, for human titles to wealth are relativised by the deeper truth that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it’ (Psalm 24:1). The fundamental category with which we need to understand the material world is as gift not as possession. And the purpose of the gift is communion (page 23/24).

CA's paper takes as a starting point the idea of relational theology, which is informed by the work of Karl Barth. God is a God in relationship, ie. the Trinity. God is also in relationship with us. We then are in relation with God and with our neighbour. The parable of the good Samaritan tells us something of Jesus' idea of who our neigbour is and so when we, or multi-nation companies, avoid paying taxes that we should pay we are damaging that relationship with our neighbour.

It follows from all this that the avoidance of tax, just as much as the illegal evasion of tax, constitutes a wrong or broken relationship between people and state, as does the failure of a state to collect the tax that it is owed. The fact that probably the majority of individual and corporate taxpayers do not see tax avoidance in these terms is an instance of the structural sin referred to earlier (page 6).

 The paper is very good and worth reading in full, not only for the underlying theology that informs the debate but for the examples of how this issues affects the lives of people in the developing world.