Federal Religious Exemption Rule

The Federal Religious Exemption Rule gives churches sweeping legal immunity, allowing religious status to shield organizations from ordinary public oversight. In the crisis surrounding Valentine Michael Smith’s estate, that protection becomes a practical vulnerability: if Smith is converted to Fosterism and leaves his fortune to the church, the government may be unable to intervene as it otherwise could.## Scope and Legal Rationale Jubal Harshaw describes religion as a legal null area. A church may conduct the activities of any other human organization while escaping taxes, publication of records, searches, inspections, and regulatory control. The decisive threshold is unusually broad: an organization need only call itself a church. Attempts to distinguish genuine religions from cults have failed, Harshaw argues, because drawing that line would require establishing a state religion—a remedy worse than the problem.

The rule rests on equal treatment rather than a government judgment about religious truth. Under what remains of the United States Constitution and the Treaty of Federation, churches are equally immune; their political influence, especially their ability to command a large bloc of votes, makes that protection difficult to challenge. The result is not merely freedom of belief but an institutional shelter from scrutiny and control.## The Estate Loophole The rule matters when Harshaw and his household consider what the Fosterites might do to Smith. Harshaw has arranged that no one can take Smith’s fortune against his will, but that safeguard does not prevent Smith from giving it away. Ordinarily, the government could step in to prevent such a transfer; a gift to a church is different because religious organizations occupy the protected legal category.

Harshaw identifies the danger as a sequence: the Fosterites convert Smith, he makes a will in favor of his church, and then he undergoes the sect’s scheduled ascension. In that circumstance, the transfer could stand as legally valid despite the concerns that prompted Harshaw’s protections. The rule therefore turns Smith’s consent into the hinge of the dispute: his fortune cannot simply be seized, but a religious institution may receive it through a transaction the law is poorly equipped to supervise.## Consequences and Significance The exemption exposes an asymmetry in the safeguards around Smith. Harshaw can protect him against coercive confiscation, yet the law’s broad deference to churches leaves a route by which a politically powerful religious body might acquire the same wealth. The concern is not that Fosterism has already secured Smith’s estate, but that conversion, testamentary choice, and the church’s immunity could combine to make the outcome difficult to contest.

As Harshaw puts it, the result would be “as legal as church on Sunday.” The dry tautology condenses the rule’s central consequence: a system designed to avoid government control of religion can also make religious institutions unusually difficult to investigate or restrain, even when their immunity intersects with a vulnerable person’s property and the interests of powerful organizations.