I followed up with a radio documentary, Who Would Jesus Tax?, discovering that the Christian Right lobby group FRC Action was gearing up its state outreach to oppose the progressive income tax and promote the flat or sales tax instead. Leading the effort was its lobbyist Tom McClusky, who once worked at the secular the National Taxpayers Union.

I never did a print version of this documentary  but had a chance to dig up my old interview with McClusky in reporting about liberal churches, Protestant and Catholic, taking on anti-tax sentiment in evangelical heartland states like Alabama and North Carolina.

In a story published in Religion Dispatches, I wrote,    

He used arguments saying regressive tax systems are better for families, and that the federal government should step back from a role in helping the poor.

"We think the options that are out there should be looked at, be it a flat tax or sales tax, just something that makes it simpler on families," he said. "Money is best in the hands of families, and they know how best to spend it on for their children."

"Helping out the poor, that's certainly something that the Bible tells you to do, but it doesn't tell you to turn to the tax collectors to help the poor. It's more to turn to yourselves to help the poor... We don't believe it's the role of the federal government to find an answer, a one-size fits all answer."

The Reagan Revolution thirty years ago made tax cuts for the wealthy mainstream, and "starving the state" has been part of the conservative strategy for cutting government programs ever since. Economic conservatives in the Heritage Foundation began reaching out to social conservatives in the 1990s to win support for tax cuts even for the wealthy, and the success of that outreach can be seen not only in McClusky's work at FRC Action but in Mike Huckabee's support for a national sales tax, and the antitax politics of Christian conservatives like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.

Trickle-down economics has trickled down to Christian conservatives, as a September 2009 study by John C. Green, et al, shows. 85% of conservative religious activists support tax cuts to encourage investment and 61% say that those cuts should only go to upper-income people. But they are not only powered by their embrace of right-wing economic theory; as conservative Christians build their own universe of (often all-white) Christian academies and charities, they divest from the idea of being part of a common national enterprise.

The local activists in Alabama find that some whites don't want to reduce burdensome taxes on the poor because they see the poor as black and overly benefitting from public spending. In meetings at churches and in communities, Alabama organizer Kimble Forrister told me many people have no answer when he asks them how they benefitted from state spending of tax revenue -- no mention of clean water, public schools, roads, police and fire services.  You can hear Mr. Forrister for yourself on this new radio documentary I made on progressive tax movements for Making Contact.

This is chastening to me because I wondered whether, in my years rightfully complaining about the proportion of my tax dollars going to war, that I forget to defend the notion of public services and our role as citizens in promoting the public good through government action.  The head of the NC Council of Churches, George Reed, didn't forget that piece.

We look to scripture for guidance and see Jesus feeding the hungry, his acts of compassion. In a democracy some of that has to be done working together through government and taxation because the task is so big and affects all of us. We're doing it for the common good, through taxation and the services taxes support.

Rev. Reed: I won't forget in the future.