Christian Thoughts on Taxation
9 principles and 4 things you can do
It’s tax-time here in the United Kingdom.
Like most things in this Mammon-worshipping country, it’s complicated.
Back in Canada, our tax year ran from January 1st to December 31st. That made sense.
Here in the U.K., it inexplicably runs April 6th to April 5th.
This means, unlike in most sane countries where the government presents the “2026 budget,” the UK presents their 2026/7 budget. It’s a sign of genuine mental derangement.
But it has me thinking about taxation.
Today I want to share 9 brief Christian perspectives/ideas/principles about taxation, along with 4 things you can practically do to navigate the worst of it.
This is just a conversation. Don’t get (too) worked up if you’re an atheist. ;)
1. Taxes are the result of fallenness
In the beginning, there was no taxation.
In the beginning, there was no scarcity.
No scarcity, no economics, no need for taxation of any kind.
Taxation was not part of God’s perfect plan.
Taxation is a direct result of humanity’s rebellion against the word, will, and way of God.
Throughout the Bible, tax collectors were viewed among the worst of the worst alongside sinners and prostitutes; corrupt symbols of a corrupt system that shouldn’t even exist and will not exist in the Kingdom of God.
2. Taxes are permitted by God
Because He refuses to violate human free will, God allows plenty of horrible human behavior.
Like kingship, which God warns will lead to horrible outcomes (including heavy taxation! See 1 Samuel 8:10–18)
But Romans 13:6 says it pretty clearly: “Pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God.”
3. You are not accountable for how wretched governments spend your tax dollars
It isn’t biblically mandated, but mad respect to those who risk life and livelihood to donate the portion of their tax bill that would’ve been used to fund war/abortion/euthanasia/etc to charities that save lives instead.
In Matthew 22:15–22, Mark 12:13–17, and Luke 20:20–26, Jesus is asked whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to Rome. Jesus says, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”
The Caesar from Jesus’s teenage years to his crucifixion was a paranoid and depraved despot named Tiberius Julius Caesar. He withdrew to Capri and oversaw a reign of terror and political purges, even of his closest allies.
Ancient writers accuse him of unbelievable cruelty and sadism, including the raping and strangulation of virgins, inventing new forms of torture which I cannot bring myself to write, desecration of corpses, and engaging in extreme sexual behavior including the abuse of boys and girls (even infants) and breaking the legs of those who complained. He killed or forced the suicide of his own adopted son, daughter-in-law, two of his grandsons, his closest advisor and his children, and hundreds of senators, equestrians, and elites, including one who carried a coin with his image into a latrine.
And what does Jesus do with the coin bearing the image of such a profoundly evil man?
Jesus tells a crowd to give him money.
Taxation isn’t the hill Jesus thinks we should die on.
Rest assured, at the end of days, Tiberius Julius Caesar will stand before God and pay for his actions. God is justice and justice will be served.
4. We should treat poverty like war
Under the old law in Deuteronomy 14:28–29, the people of God paid a special 10% tax every three years that was specifically earmarked for people in need, working out to ~3.33% per year to help the very poorest of the poor.
Most countries today spend 2–4% of GDP on their militaries.
How much more should we be investing in loving the poor under Jesus’s law of love?
5. No one in poverty should be taxed
It is wrong to extract taxation from anyone who cannot afford to feed and shelter their families. This is evil and wrong.
Over 1 in 5 people in Britain lives in poverty (14.2 million people including 4+ million children), yet the government still smashes millions will taxation.
In 2019/20, you didn’t have to pay tax on your first £12,500 in income.
But that figure has been frozen near there since then. Government after government insists they “aren’t raising income taxes”, but in reality, inflation is ensuring more and more poor people are forced to pay.
The current tax-free threshold of just £12,570 is frozen until at least 2030/31.
That’s the equivalent of taxing someone who made just £6,500 in 2019/2020. You can’t live on that. Not even close. It’s utterly demonic.
Interesting, under the old law, the tithe on livestock kicked in at animal #10, meaning the first nine were tax-free, and only one cow was due out of the first nineteen. Not to mention that all non-agricultural produce remained completely untaxed. This ensured tax relief for the poorest families, in addition to the other types of support they received.
6. No one wealthier should receive taxation payouts from people who are poorer
“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees… to turn aside the needy from justice.” — Isaiah 10:1–2
In my country, the government taxes millions of struggling young working people and hands out free money every month to over three million millionaires.
This is a gross injustice.
This is not a just form of redistribution that Christians support.
Proverbs 22:16 says, “Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth or gives to the rich will only come to poverty.”
Support needs to be based on true need. 2 Corinthians 8:13–14 makes this pretty clear: “For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be equality.”
The focus should always be on meeting the needs of the least, not the richest.
7. We should stop taxing good behavior
“Woe to those who decree unjust laws, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to deny justice to the needy and to rob my poor people of their rights.” — Isaiah 10:1–2
Human beings run on incentives and disincentives.
We need to stop punishing work with income tax and payroll tax.
We need to stop punishing commerce with sales taxes and VAT.
We need to stop punishing development with property tax.
To give you an idea of taxation under Moses, it looked something like this:
10% Levitical Tithe (10% of all agricultural production was given to the religious workers for their service. See Numbers 18:21–24; Leviticus 27:30–33)
10% Sanctuary Tithe (10% for annual celebratory feasts to be eaten by the contributing family and their religious leaders. See Deuteronomy 14:22–27)
10% Charity Tithe every 3rd year (laid up in urban storehouses for religious workers, refugees, orphans, and widows. See Deuteronomy 14:28–29)
One-time Temple Tax (A half-shekel — roughly 2 days of wages — payable once in a lifetime by every male over the age of 20. See Exodus 30:11–16)
In other words, the annual tax burden was 20% for two years, then 30% in the third year, but 10% of all three years was for parties, and the whole tax system was more of an act of worship, sharing, and mutual support that worked out to an annualized rate of ~23.33%, and even that was only on the produce of the land.
(Later, when the fallen institution of human kingship took over, new taxes emerged. 2 Kings 23:35 reports one taxation was in proportion to an assessment of people’s wealth.)
Notice how there was a small tithe on what the land naturally produced, but not on wealth produced by working with your hands.
This is why I loathe income taxes: Income tax on earned wealth punishes people for adding their labor to God’s free natural resources to create new useable value for others.
Quite interestingly, under the Mosaic law, all monetary income earned from non-agricultural work (fishermen like Peter, artisans like Paul, traders like Lydia, and craftsmen like Jesus) was exempt from income taxation.
8. We should start taxing bad behavior
“And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.”
— Matthew 24:12
Tens of trillions in economic crime goes unpunished every year. Here’s how:
Capitalism thrives on privatizing gains to the self, while externalizing costs to others. The Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou famously observed that when the production of an item generates negative externalities, the private market will overproduce the item, even beyond what is socially optimal.
In other words, capitalism makes it easy, acceptable, and wildly lucrative to turn a profit despite horrible costs for others. Examples include industrial overfishing, deforestation, cigarette production, and the oil industry filling the ocean and our bodies with microplastics.
An honest, fair, God-honoring, humanity-respecting market would ensure a product’s price includes all of its cost to humanity.
Tax poison
While corporate shareholders poison Britons with the highest level of Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) in Europe, U.K. taxpayers will be forced to spend over £225 billion (U$300+ billion) this year on healthcare.
It is good and moral and godly to bear each other’s burdens when it comes to things like car accidents, birth defects, genetic diseases, and other health problems outside human control.
But is it really fair that healthy people who make healthy choices should have to pay the consequences of other people’s willfully bad decisions?
Frankly, a Big Mac meal should cost $50.
Oreos should cost a tenner.
Alcohol should be for special occasions, not bingeing every weekend.
Nicotine products must include a health insurance surcharge that fully covers 100% of the cost of nicotine-related healthcare costs.
Any and all seed oils, artificial flavors and colors, synthetic sweeteners, endocrine disruptors, trans fats, PFAS, and DNA-damaging substances in or on foods must pay their own way.
This will obviously raise the price of these items to true cost, which will give shoppers with a choice: Is it worth it? Many will stop buying in favor of healthier options. This will give corporate shareholders with a choice: Will we create a healthier version of this product? Those who don’t will likely go under. Those who do will win, the nation will be healthier, and healthcare tax expenditure will fall.
Tax pollution
Nations spend tens of billions per year on healthcare costs due to corporations polluting our air, water, and land.
Any company that emits nitrous oxide, tropospheric ozone, CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs, PFCs, sulfur hexafluoride, nitrogen trifluoride, VOCs, particulate matter, heavy metals, POPs, pathogens, radioactive contamination, etc, must price in the full amelioration of their product.
Tax litter
Do bananas really need to come in a plastic bag? Absolutely — if you’re trying to stretch shelf-life in order to maximize profits for shareholders.
Want to get rid of plastics in the ocean and microplastics in your baby’s bloodstream? Tax plastic out of existence.
Tax land monopolization
This is the big one. Land monopolization without recompense to everyone else is theft. Land hoarders should have to pay a fee to the community for their exclusive enjoyment of what rightfully belongs to all.
A Land Value Tax is empirically the fairest tax. It reduces land speculation (land-hoarders benefiting from a rise in land values thanks to community efforts), encourages efficient land stewardship (decreasing blight and empty plots), and it’s non-distortionary (not discouraging productive activities like working, saving, building, or trading.)
People across the political spectrum have supported LVTs, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, and Winston Churchill. Milton Friedman quipped that it is the “least bad tax.”
Having an annual land monopolization charge immediately stops people from hoarding land, which drops land prices so nearly all can afford to be sheltered, and the tax money can help the truly needy.
Tax exploitation
The Bible differentiates between earned money (from working with your own hands) and profit (from extracting a profit off the work of others.)
We should tax interest out of existence to wean society off debt.
We should tax rent profits out of existence to wean landlords off property hoarding.
We should tax dividends and some capital gains to move the economy away from $10+ trillion multi-national shareholder monopolies like BlackRock in preference to non-exploitative business models like co-operatives, for-benefits, trusts, not-for-profits, charities, partnerships, and sole proprietorships.
Tax crime
This one is something no one talks about, but it’s a no-brainer.
Let’s say one of the countless Muslim rape gangs in the U.K. abuses 100 little boys and girls in Manchester.
The cost to those children is huge — a lifetime of trauma, therapy, etc.
The cost to society is vast — police investigations, years of court battles, decades of jail time for the gang members.
What do the rapists get?
They get sexual gratification, followed by years of free food, free shelter, free electricity, free heat, free water, free clothing, a free weekly money allowance to spend on snacks and phone calls, free legal advice, free education and training, free healthcare, free prescription meds, and free dental care (something even taxpayers on the outside can’t get!)
What do taxpayers get?
They get to foot the bill.
It costs taxpayers £56,000 (U$76,000) per year to house one inmate.
High-security can cost over £130,000 (U$177,000) per year per inmate.
THIS IS NOT JUSTICE.
True justice requires all criminals to repay:
Their full cost to society
Society’s lost opportunity cost
Full restitution to their victims
Full cost to society
Criminals in prison should be working 60+ hours per week for $0 to cover their own costs.
Society’s lost opportunity cost
If no one committed crime, we wouldn’t need cops, bailiffs, judges, court stenographers, jail builders, wardens, guards, janitors, etc. All these people could have been working productive jobs to actually build up society, rather than maintaining a cost-free life for criminals.
Criminals owe society the compounding wealth they lost.
Full restitution to their victims
Criminals have a direct obligation to compensate their victims, too.
In the Bible, the amount of restitution varied per crime.
120% in Leviticus 6:4–5
200% in Exodus 22:7
400% in Luke 19:8–9
500% in Exodus 22:1
Instead of taxpayers being forced to pay tens of billions each year to support criminals, crime should be a $0 budget line on federal tax budgets because crime, like poison, pollution, litter, and land monopolization, should pay for itself.
Anything less is injustice.
9. Justice decreases the need for taxation
Politicians ignore this reality because they are unjust.
I don’t know why the public doesn’t clue in to this one.
Some example:
If you allow dishonest money and bankers to inflate the money supply by printing debt-based interest-money out of thin air, inflation guarantees $1 billion in tax dollars buys less next year, meaning incoming service cuts or tax rises. But abolishing this injust does the opposite — a strengthening currency buys more each year, so you can provide just as much service on less taxation.
If you ban profit on lending (interest on money-lending, rent profit on shelter-lending, etc), the poor and middle class keep significantly more of the wealth they create (economists estimate 30–50% of the price of everyday items is actually embedded profit on lending.)
If you obey the Bible, ban land hoarding (Isaiah 5:8), and restore land rights to all (countless passages), you decrease the cost of living drastically and eliminate homelessness.
If you jubilee all debts every seven years — national debt, student debt, mortgage debt, all of it — then your nation’s need for taxation falls through the floor.
Economic justice erases most of the need for taxation.
The Bible is extremely clear: Obedience to God opens His storehouses of blessing.
Tying it all together
Okay, let’s imagine if…
We invested 3% of GDP in helping people become permanently un-poor.
We stopped taxing everyone below the poverty line.
We stopped using tax money to enrich the rich.
We stopped taxing work, commerce, and development.
We started taxing poison, pollution, litter, land monopolization, economic exploitation, and crime at their full cost.
We got rid of dishonest money and strengthened our currency.
We banned profit on lending, stopped land hoarding, restored land resource rights to all, and forgave old debts.
Would taxes go up or decrease?
Would poverty increase or decrease?
Would justice continue to suffer or would it “roll down like waters”? (Amos 5:24)
The answers are obvious.
The Christian view on taxation obliterates the current Mammon-worshipping model.
What you can do practically
Obviously this article is not tax advice, it’s a theological perspective.
Here are some things you may might to consider regarding tax:
1. Explore how to legally avoid as much taxation as possible
No verse in the Bible encourages illegal tax evasion. Dishonesty and fraud are sins.
Christian pay what is legally owed or due. Romans 13:6–7 says, “For this reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants… Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue…”
On the other hand, in Matthew 17:24–27, Jesus even pays a tax that he argues he doesn’t even owe.
On the other other hand, nowhere in the Bible does it command Christians to maximize their tax burden.
In Matthew 10:16–23, Jesus warns that persecution is coming and the thing to do is flee. That’s exactly what happens in Acts 8:1–4. The murder of Stephen causes the Jerusalem church to scatter far and wide.
You don’t have to let your government abuse you. You can minimize your tax burden as much as legally possible.
And if you have the ability to move elsewhere and feel called to do so, then go. Some choose to go where they’re treated least-abusively. Others choose to go where they’re treated slightly-less abusively. Radicals sometimes end up in places that are significantly more abusive because that’s where God is calling them to advance His kingdom.
2. Pay whatever tax Caesar demands without complaint or worry
Jesus hints at the idea that taxation is corrupt in Matthew 17:24–27 and Mark 12:13–17 when he suggests kings tax others but not their own.
But that doesn’t mean we should complain or worry about what we’re inevitably forced to pay.
“Do everything without complaining.” (Philippians 2:14) Taxation doesn’t get a complaint pass.
“Do not worry about your life.” (Matthew 6:25) Taxation doesn’t get a worry pass.
It’s difficult, but extremely simple.
3. Express gratitude to God for what Caesar gives back in return
Many governments in history have enslaved their entire populations.
Some still do — I’ve been to North Korea, which resembles a slave plantation far more than anything we’d recognize as a nation state.
But even the big bad government, the utterly fallen state, can be an instrument of God’s justice and protection for the poor. Romans 13:4 says the state is “God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
1 Thessalonians 5:18 says, “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Taxation doesn’t get an ingratitude pass.
4. Get involved in politics or support reformers who care about fair taxation
You don’t actually have to run for office to get involved in politics. (But it really would have to have fewer sociopaths actually holding the reins.)
Plenty of charities, institutes, foundations, and individuals do great work lobbying for fairer taxation.
You can stop throwing away your vote on the main establishment parties and support moral candidates instead.
In the meantime, you can support activists and reformers who are educating, raising awareness, and stirring up public consciousness about the alternatives to the horrid Mammonomics system under which we’re currently enslaved. Belief and worldview drive policy.
You can add your voice to the global conversation right now, by acts as simple as sharing this article or these ideas with others.
Your thoughts?
What should we stop taxing and why?
What should we start taxing and why?
Comment or hit reply.
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