[Whine louder...] Right-Wing Think Tank Family Research Council Is Now a Church in Eyes of the IRS

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

The FRC, a staunch opponent of abortion and LGBTQ rights, joins a growing
list of activist groups seeking church status, which allows organizations
to shield themselves from financial scrutiny.

https://www.propublica.org/article/family-research-council-irs-church-
status

The Family Research Council’s multimillion-dollar headquarters sit on G
Street in Washington, D.C., just steps from the U.S. Capitol and the White
House, a spot ideally situated for its work as a right-wing policy think
tank and political pressure group.

From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed
for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs
supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious
exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state
lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for
pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.

What is the FRC? Its website sums up the answer to this question in 63
words: “A nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to
articulating and advancing a family-centered philosophy of public life. In
addition to providing policy research and analysis for the legislative,
executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, FRC seeks to
inform the news media, the academic community, business leaders, and the
general public about family issues that affect the nation from a biblical
worldview.”

In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, though, it is also a church,
with Perkins as its religious leader.

According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and
given to ProPublica, the FRC filed an application to change its status to
an “association of churches,” a designation commonly used by groups with
member churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, in March 2020. The
agency approved the change a few months later.

The FRC is one of a growing list of activist groups to seek church status,
a designation that comes with the ability for an organization to shield
itself from financial scrutiny. Once the IRS blessed it as an association
of churches, the FRC was no longer required to file a public tax return,
known as a Form 990, revealing key staffer salaries, the names of board
members and related organizations, large payments to independent
contractors and grants the organization has made. Unlike with other
charities, IRS investigators can’t initiate an audit on a church unless a
high-level Treasury Department official has approved the investigation.

The FRC declined to make officials available for an interview or answer
any questions for this story. Its former parent organization, Focus on the
Family, changed its designation to become a church in 2016. In a
statement, the organization said it made the switch largely out of concern
for donor privacy, noting that many groups like it have made the same
change. Many of them claim they operated in practice as churches or
associations of churches all along.

Warren Cole Smith, president of the Christian transparency watchdog
MinistryWatch, said he believes groups like these are seeking church
status with the IRS for the protections it confers.

“I don’t believe that a lot of the organizations that have filed for the
church exemption are in fact churches,” he said. “And I don’t think that
they think that they are in fact churches.”

The IRS uses a list of 14 characteristics to determine if an organization
is a church or an association of churches, though it notes that
organizations need not meet all the specifications. The Family Research
Council answered in the affirmative for 11 of those points, saying that it
has an array of “partner churches” with a shared mission: “to hold all
life as sacred, to see families flourish, and to promote religious
freedom.” The group says there is no set process for a church to become
one of the partners that make up its association, but it says partners
(and the FRC’s employees) must affirm a statement of faith to do so. It
claims there are nearly 40,000 churches in its association, made up of
different creeds and beliefs — saying that this models the pattern of the
“first Christian churches described in the New Testament of the Bible.”

Unlike the Southern Baptist Convention, whose website hosts a directory of
more than 50,000 affiliated churches, the FRC’s site does not list these
partners or mention the word “church” anywhere on its home page. The FRC’s
application to become an association of churches didn’t include this list
of partner churches, nor did it provide the names to ProPublica.

To the question of whether the organization performs baptisms, weddings
and funerals, the FRC answered yes, but it said it left those duties to
its partner churches. Did it have schools for religious instruction of the
young? That, too, was the job of the partner churches.

The FRC says it does not have members but a congregation made up of its
board of directors, employees, supporters and partner churches. Some of
those partner churches, it says, do have members.

Does the organization hold regular chapel services? According to the FRC’s
letter to the IRS, the answer is yes. It wrote that it holds services at
its office building averaging more than 65 people. But when a ProPublica
reporter called to inquire about service times, a staffer who answered the
phone responded, “We don’t have church service.” Elsewhere in the form, it
says that the employees make up those who attend its services.

Answers From the Family Research Council to the IRS’ Church
Characteristics Questionnaire

<https://assets-c3.propublica.org/20220708-FRC-Q-3.png>

The organization’s claim to be an association of churches is disingenuous,
said Frederick Clarkson, who researches the Christian right at nonpartisan
social justice think tank Political Research Associates.

“The FRC can say whatever bullshit things they want to,” he said. “The IRS
should recognize it as a bad argument.”

Three experts told ProPublica that the IRS is failing to use its full
powers to determine who gets the special privileges afforded to churches.
And when a group like the FRC appears to push the limits of what charities
are allowed to do — particularly relating to their partisan political
activity — the IRS doesn’t often step in to crack down. The IRS did not
answer a list of detailed questions for this story or make anyone
available for an interview.

David Cary Hart, an activist and writer who received the FRC’s
reclassification documents via a Freedom of Information Act request, wrote
a letter to the IRS questioning the decision, saying the approval “defies
regulatory logic.”

When ProPublica relayed details of the FRC’s new church designation to
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., he decried
the loss of transparency and lax IRS oversight. “It is far too easy for
powerful special interests to hide their donors using webs of nonprofits,”
he said in a statement. “Form 990 filings provide valuable, and often the
only, insight into a tax-exempt organization’s income and spending. But
lax enforcement at the IRS and DOJ encourage more game-playing, which
leaves the door wide open for enterprising dark-money schemes to exploit
the system further.”

A Wave of Conversions
The current wave of nonprofit-to-church conversions appears to have gained
steam after 2013, when the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association accused the IRS of targeting BGEA and another charity he heads
with audits after the group took out newspaper ads supporting a North
Carolina constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and
one woman. The groups, BGEA and Samaritan’s Purse, retained their tax-
exempt status, and in 2015, they applied for church status and got it.

In 2018, Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based legal nonprofit, was
reclassified as an “association of churches” — though it had been
categorized as a “church auxiliary” affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s
megachurch since 2006, granting the organization many of the same
exemptions that churches get. The organization represents Kim Davis, the
Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue licenses for same-sex
marriages. Just days after the Supreme Court cited a Liberty Counsel brief
in its June decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a staffer for the
organization was recorded saying she prays with conservative justices
inside the court building — raising questions about conflicts of interest.
(Liberty Counsel denies that the staffer prayed with justices.) In a
written statement, founder and chairperson Mathew Staver said that the
organization’s legal work is just one part of its activity, and that it
made the change “to accurately reflect the operation of the ministry.”

The American Family Association, a Tupelo, Mississippi-based group that
runs the influential American Family Radio network, as well as a film
studio and magazine, changed its designation to a church in early 2022,
according to IRS data. The association sends out frequent “action alerts”
to subscribers asking them to sign petitions opposing government
appointees or boycott media and brands that it has identified as
supporting LGBTQ rights or abortion access. The organization declined to
respond to a request for comment.

In its letter to the IRS, the FRC argued that the classification change
would protect its religious liberty rights. As an example, it pointed to
Treasury Department rules exempting church organizations from the
mandatory coverage requirements for contraceptives.

Churches also have a “ministerial exemption” to hiring discrimination laws
for religious leaders — meaning, for example, that a Catholic church may
exclude women when hiring priests. Courts have interpreted this protection
broadly, shielding churches from claims of discrimination for sexual
orientation as well. Recent Supreme Court rulings have broadened the
umbrella of staffers who may be included under the exemption.

According to IRS data, the FRC has submitted a 990 tax return for its 2021
fiscal year, but the agency has not yet released the filing. The
organization is also a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial
Accountability, a voluntary membership organization that collects revenue,
expenses, assets and a small number of other top-line financials from its
members. The organization does not collect more detailed financial data
reported on the 990.

Over the five years ending June 2020, the FRC saw average revenues of
$15.9 million each year, and it spent an average of $15.6 million. In its
fiscal year 2021, the FRC reported to ECFA, it brought in $23.1 million
and spent $20 million. In the most recent 990, Perkins made about
$300,000.

The IRS did not answer questions about how many groups apply to become a
church and how many applications it denies. Samuel Brunson, a law
professor specializing in religion and tax exemption at Loyola University
Chicago, said the federal government, and especially the IRS, are
typically very cautious when it comes to making judgments about defining
religion.

“The First Amendment makes [defining a religion] really hard,” he said.

Brunson pointed to the Satanic Temple, which received IRS church
recognition in 2019, as an example of an organization that people may not
consider one. The group has made headlines over the years for mounting
First Amendment challenges such as suing to have a statue of the goat-
headed occult icon Baphomet placed next to statues of the Ten Commandments
in public places. The temple is now suing Texas, claiming that the state’s
abortion restrictions inhibit the liberty of the organization’s members to
practice their religious rituals.

Lucien Greaves, a founder of the Satanic Temple, said groups like Liberty
Counsel and the FRC have for years implied his organization is too
political to be a church — one of the reasons the group finally sought
official recognition. The fact that those same organizations are now
themselves churches, he said, is hypocritical.

“People act like ... we’re trying to get away with something: ‘Look, these
guys want to be a church, and yet they’re active in these public
campaigns,’” he said. “And they never apply those same questions to the
other side.”

Politics and the Pulpit
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the FRC, Liberty Counsel and
the American Family Association as hate groups for their anti-LGBTQ
stances and advocacy. But Clarkson, the researcher, said focusing on that
designation misses the larger sphere of the FRC’s political influence. In
recent years, he said, the FRC’s rhetoric and actions have influenced
politics away from democracy and in a direction that is “distinctly
theocratic.”

“Abortion and LGBT issues are not the war,” he said. “They’re battles in
the war.”

IRS rules prohibit public, tax-exempt charities including churches from
“directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political
campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective
public office.” That rule, known as the Johnson Amendment, dates back to
1954. Short of explicit political endorsements, these groups may
participate in what’s known as “issue advocacy” including voter education.
They can also lobby for political causes connected to their core missions,
as long as the lobbying activity is not a “substantial part” of their
activities.

To run its more direct political activities, the FRC has another tax-
exempt organization, called a social welfare organization, that actively
endorses candidates and lobbies for legislation — Family Research Council
Action. The arms separate out messaging on two websites, with the FRC
hosting issues-based content supporting its Christian worldview and
linking to the Family Research Council Action website for content that
explicitly endorses candidates.

Family Research Council Action is registered at the same address as the
FRC and shares all five of the part-time employees it lists on its tax
form, including Perkins. This is legal so long as the organizations are
careful to separate activities and accounting, such that tax-deductible
charity dollars aren’t supporting political work by the social welfare
organization, said Philip Hackney, a tax law professor at the University
of Pittsburgh. Experts say ideally a group like Family Research Council
Action would have at least one independent staffer to indicate that it’s
actually operating as an independent entity.

But FRC Action lists zero full-time employees on its most recent tax
filing. When Perkins — who is president of both organizations — is
speaking, he rarely makes a delineation about whether he is speaking as
the head of the FRC or the head of Family Research Council Action.

But even for charitable operations, the lines around political activities
are open to interpretation. While the FRC and other evangelical groups
have pushed for the removal of all restrictions on political speech by
churches for years, the FRC also releases guidelines encouraging pastors
to discuss political matters while staying within the bounds of the law,
noting that “there are legal limits to what churches may do, but your
hands are not completely tied. In fact, you may be surprised at how much
influence you can have.”

On Perkins’ radio show, “Washington Watch,” he hosts a bevy of pro-Donald
Trump lawmakers and political figures every day. Its annual Pray Vote
Stand Summit, formerly known as the Values Voter Summit, is one of the
largest and most influential gatherings for those on the Christian right,
where politicians, including Trump during his presidency, talk strategy
with religious organizers. In 2021, the event’s schedule included “The
Battle for America’s Classrooms: Fighting Indoctrination on a National
Scale,” “The End of Roe and Beyond: The Outlook for the Unborn in America”
and “A Mandate for Disaster: How States Are Fighting Biden’s Vaccine
Tyranny” — the last event featuring the Ohio and Arkansas attorneys
general and Perkins. The event was hosted by both the FRC and FRC Action.

In December 2020, Perkins — reportedly a close confidant of Trump’s during
his presidency — signed a letter containing the false claims that state
officials violated election laws and that “there is no doubt President
Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election.” The
letter called on state lawmakers to appoint a new slate of electors to
override the election President Joe Biden won. Perkins signed as
“President, Family Research Council.”

Experts say it’s not clear whether seeking to influence an election after
it’s already happened would run afoul of the nonprofit campaign
prohibitions.

But it’s rare for a nonprofit to face a challenge for political campaign
speech. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that, between
2010 and 2017, the IRS examined just 226 of more than 1.5 million tax-
exempt organizations for political activity. It sent a written warning to
56% of the organizations it examined and took additional action in just
10% of cases.

Scrutinizing the fuzzy line between FRC and FRC Action, or getting
involved in how far out of the gray area a charity may have strayed, is
not something that authorities are keeping a close eye on, said Frances
Hill, a law professor specializing in tax and election law at the
University of Miami. “It would take some sort of an earthquake to make the
IRS use its time looking into these matters,” she said.



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