Sadly, ProPublica, the independent journalism organization that does a ton of investigative work, has no designated religion beat professional. But occasionally they do cover religion, including this recent piece on the Washington, D.C., based Family Research Council (FRC).

Sadly, the piece doesn’t come near the level of other ProPublica investigative works, for the reasons I’ll describe below.

The issue at hand is the FRC’s designation of itself as a church, a move that nonprofits sometimes make to evade IRS reporting requirements on how contributions are spent. For those of us who’ve spent any time in Washington, the idea of the FRC being a church is somewhat amusing, as everyone knows it operates more like an issues-driven think tank.

The question of what does or does not constitute a church has bubbled for years, including when the IRS resisted calling Scientology a church. It finally did so in 1993.

During the Obama administration from 2008-2011, Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, investigated six televangelists who weren’t making their financial records public. It was after this time that religious activist groups began reconstituting themselves as churches.

When the chief executive of Mozilla resigned in 2014 following release of donor records showing he had contributed toward banning same-sex marriage, more groups decided that becoming a “church” was the only way to insure their donor records remained secret. Other groups made the jump in anticipation of government interference in the hiring and firing of employees, when decisions are based on disagreements about doctrinal and lifestyle covenants.

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.

With whom or what denomination is Perkins ordained?

That important detail never appears in the article, which tells me that the reporter knows little to nothing about covering religion. (Wikipedia says Perkins is Southern Baptist).

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. 

The above link in ProPublica’s report links to a January 2020 Washington Post story about religious groups calling themselves churches, from which ProPublica apparently got much of its information.

Two years have passed since the FRC decided to go the church route back in March 2020, so why is ProPublica doing a story now?

That question is never answered in this piece. ProPublica explores FRC’s application (to become a church) to the IRS point by point, explaining how ridiculous it is for this very politically involved group to be styling itself as a church.

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. …

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.”

It’s definitely worth reading. I just wish the reporter had added further up that this is a stratagem employed by the Religious Left as well as the Right. Further down in the piece it cited The Satanic Temple (TST), whose national headquarters are in Salem, Mass., as a liberal religious group that’s decided it too can play this game. TST got recognized as a church by the IRS back in 2019.

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.”

Why isn’t the reporter just as indignant about the Religious Left pulling the same stunt as the Religious Right is doing?

Then the reporter adds that the FRC is one of several conservative organizations classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

That’s a connection with some important history, for those who follow religion-beat work. Read this USA Today guest editorial on how the SPLC’s designation is what brought a gunman into the FRC headquarters exactly 10 years ago back in 2012. Miraculously, no one was killed. There was even a Chick-fil-A wars connection to that attack (see this GetReligion post on that subject).

This past Aug. 15, Fox News did a retrospective asking why the SPLC continues to list the FRC as a hate group, even when there is evidence demonstrating that the organization’s rhetoric is what led to the shooting.

Even the New Yorker piled on the SPLC back in 2019. Didn’t the ProPublica investigator bother to do a Google search about the history linking these organizations? That kind of sloppiness puts the whole article in question.

At least it did for me, but not for several members of Congress who read it.

The reporter followed up a few weeks later with a report on 40 lawmakers who are asking the IRS to investigate advocacy groups registering as churches. Several other media jumped on the story and there was the usual indignant posting on Twitter about the matter.

Again, the ProPublica reporter doesn’t apply the same magnifying glass to TST and similar groups on the left. What should be a dispassionate treatment of all the conservative and liberal groups out there going to crazy lengths to call themselves churches instead comes across as a hit piece on the FRC.

Former GetReligionista Mark Kellner got through to Perkins and did a recent article on the matter for the Washington Times. I didn’t see Perkins interviewed elsewhere in other news-media reports and I’m guessing the FRC is going to shrug the whole thing off. Did other reporters call Perkins?

Back to ProPublica, why this piece and why now? I understand it took awhile for to get Freedom of Information data about the FRC, hence some delay, but it feels more like a slow news day at ProPublica when we’re recycling old news.

If ProPublica really wants to get its investigative feet wet on the religion beat, circle back to TST, about which I reported on last fall for Newsweek — and for which I have since been sued. (Here is what Jezebel, the Houston Press and QueerSatanic, a group of four Seattle-area Satanists that I also reported on, have to say.) Or do pioneering work on other meaty topics, such as religious persecution and clergy sex abuse, to name a few.

Earth to ProPublica leaders: Don’t mess around with petty old stuff like the FRC’s tax exemptions. Don’t repeat talking points of the SPLC. There’s better stuff out there to investigate in terms of God, money, sex and power. Look harder. And be careful out there.