oh sorry there’s another key fact to this, religious institutions are tax exempt under 501(c)(3) in the same way as all other charitable organizations.

so going after “religious organizations” already means you are going to have to define which 501c3s are “allowed” or not—and unfortunately there’s a lot of crossover of semi-but-not-really religious groups. so any attempt at un-tax-exempting churches is going to look like persecution to some because the line is going be drawn somewhere. think of yoga or mindfulness studios, plenty of which are 501c3. are they religious? well, yeah, often. all of them? certainly not. so how do you choose? in any raw “tax the church” scenario you end up litigating what consitutes “religious” or not—which looks like ( and arguably might be) proto-persecution.

so, investigate the profit. publish the documents showing a church breaking its 501c3 requirements. give them 180 days to knock it off or something, then tax them like the rest of us. you’ll probably also catch some non-religious 501c3s doing shady stuff as well—and all the better.

hope this makes sense.

edit: i guess the other assumption i made is that we don’t want to just… tax all non profits. i hope we both can agree that would be shitty lol.

edit 2: ok you don’t make that assumption, so there we go.