Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan filed suit Wednesday against the World Church of the Creator and its leader, Matthew Hale, alleging that the East Peoria-based white supremacist group is an unregistered charity, not a church.
Ryan wants to freeze the group’s assets, the first of several possible legal maneuvers as authorities examine the World Church of the Creator after a deadly shooting spree by a former member. The Illinois Department of Revenue is now reviewing the group’s tax status, and the U.S. Department of Justice is considering its own investigation into whether the World Church had any connection to the rampage over the Independence Day weekend.
Hale, who denies any wrongdoing, called the lawsuit filed Wednesday “ludicrous.”
As a legal net appears to tighten around Hale and his organization, Ryan’s suit raises volatile questions about what kind of activities and beliefs constitute organized religion and who is legally protected under the umbrella of faith. In a nation founded on the principle of free exercise of religion, courts and government agencies have been loath to answer those questions too specifically or narrowly, for fear of stamping out legitimate faiths.
Ryan himself emphasized Hale’s right to free speech Wednesday and tried to steer clear of judging the World Church’s beliefs, though he did note that some of the teachings were “personally repugnant.”
The attorney general concentrated on the organization’s failure to register with the state as a charity. Under state law, most types of organizations that solicit donations are required to register with the attorney general’s office and provide a full accounting of their finances, while churches are not.
The civil suit in Cook County Circuit Court asserts that Hale’s group is subject to the charitable solicitation act, implicitly rejecting Hale’s contention that his organization is a church.
“We want to shine a light on the financial dealings of this organization,” Ryan said.
Ryan said his staff believes the group operates as a charity because it calls itself a “religious, not-for-profit organization,” collects $35 annual dues from members and solicits money for merchandise and books, including the “White Man’s Bible” and “Nature’s Eternal Religion,” over its Internet Web site. A spokeswoman for Ryan said the religious description does not by definition make the group a church.
Hale, meanwhile, insisted Wednesday that his organization is a church and called Ryan’s charges part of a long pattern of government persecution. He also said he welcomed the lawsuit as a chance to bring attention to the doctrine his organization calls “Creativity,” in which the white race is worshiped as a deity.
“He’s just doing us a favor. The lawsuit is just going to bring the message of `Creativity’ to more people,” Hale said in a phone interview. “They are simply continuing the publicity.”
Traditionally, government bodies and courts in the United States have given wide latitude to organizations that call themselves churches or religious groups.
“Courts would never permit any hard and fast rules of what a religion is,” said Derek Davis, director of the Baylor University Institute of Church-State Studies and editor of the Journal of Church and State. “Once you define it you have automatically eliminated some groups that may be bona fide religions.”
Still, it falls to the Internal Revenue Service and other taxing and zoning bodies to define what makes a church. The rule of thumb, according to Davis, is that if it looks like a church and acts like a church, it is a church.
One of the most famous disputes about the nature of organized religion flared into public view in the early 1990s when the Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology was targeted by the IRS, which had contended the organization operated as a for-profit business that enriched church leaders. For 25 years, the agency refused to acknowledge the church as a religion and grant it a blanket tax exemption. Ultimately, the dispute ended with the church paying the federal government $12.5 million in a settlement that provided Scientology tax-exempt status.
Illinois’ taxing agency, the Department of Revenue, already had declared that Hale’s group was not a church when it rejected Hale’s application for a sales tax exemption in 1995.
According to George Sorenson, deputy legal counsel for sales taxes, the application failed to provide information about what religious services were performed, where they were performed, and whether the group was affiliated with any regional or national body.
If the Cook County Circuit Court finds that the World Church of the Creator is a charity, Ryan said he will ask the court to freeze the group’s assets–stopping its fundraising and spending. Ryan also is asking the court to levy a $1,000 fine.
But even if the courts determine Hale’s group to be a church, that would not necessarily shield it from legal trouble.
Craig Mousin, director of DePaul University’s Center for Church/State Studies, said courts have long held that religious motivation does not supersede criminal law, as in a 1890 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against a convicted bigamist who used his religious beliefs as his defense.
In 1982, the court went a step further, revoking the federal tax exemption for Bob Jones University and another religious school because of their policies of racial discrimination. In that case, the court found that although the schools’ policies stemmed from religious beliefs, the government had an overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education.
Mousin said that the Supreme Court has been very reluctant to talk about the validity of different religious beliefs, however, and speculated that the Bob Jones case would have been more difficult for the IRS to pursue if it had been a church instead of a school.
Also on Wednesday, Gov. George Ryan called the shooting rampage and suicide of Benjamin Smith a “fire alarm” for the state of Illinois, as he attended the inaugural meeting in Chicago of the state Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes.
The commission had been created before the shootings, but it has accelerated a schedule of town meetings in response to the crimes. Ryan said he hoped the commission would have suggestions for new legislation by this fall.
Gov. Ryan also praised the attorney general’s lawsuit against the World Church of the Creator. “The problem is that those kinds of groups continue to pop up in one form or another, but they should not be tax-exempt,” he said.
Mayor Richard Daley also focused Wednesday on the aftermath of the shootings, as he and police Supt. Terry Hillard met with Jewish community leaders in the West Rogers Park neighborhood where Smith shot six people on their way to Sabbath services.
“A partnership built up between the Police Department and the citizens is extremely important . . . the partnership has to be there not just in time of crisis, but each day and each weekend,” Daley said.
