For Christians throughout the centuries, tax has usually been a given—that is, something that Christians have encountered as a reality of the social and political worlds they inhabit. Christians have rarely had the opportunity to design tax policy from the ground up in ways that reflect their conceptions of justice and understandings of the proper role of the state. Rather, they have found themselves living in a world already shaped by taxation. To the extent Christian theologians have reshaped the institution of taxation, they have done so from the inside out in a fundamentally conservative fashion. They typically did not seek to eradicate the institution or dramatically increase its influence. Instead, they subtly reframed the arguments justifying taxation and carefully tinkered with its effects—particularly its effects on the poor and needy in society.
Christian theologians could play this role in the public square because, for most of the past two thousand years, economics and politics were not distinct disciplines from ethics. And, since western thought was not easily separated from Christian theology during those twenty centuries, and because ethics itself was rarely distinguishable from theology, it is not surprising that taxation as we know it has been formed and re-formed by Christian theology over time. The theological substratum is neither appreciated nor recognized now, in twenty-first-century neoliberal societies, but that is all the more reason to excavate the current narratives around tax and examine the goals and functions of tax anew through a theological lens.
This volume undertakes such an examination. The book’s approach falls in the wider context of the field of law and religion, which emerged as a scholarly endeavor in its own right in the 1970s and has grown rapidly in scope, methodologies, and number of researchers since then. John Witte, Jr.—one of the leading figures in the interdisciplinary study of law and religion—has noted the increasing interest among many scholars in “the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the interaction of legal and religious ideas and institutions, norms and practices.”
Although the laws of contemporary secular states are not as overtly religious as those of the legal systems that preceded them, Witte argues that substantive legal doctrines continue to reflect “strong moral and religious dimensions,” and, perhaps even more importantly, “the characteristic forms of contemporary legal systems in the West” reflect those influences.