At the Family Research Council's offices in Washington, D.C., the words “Faith, Family, Freedom” are printed above the door. Clearly FRC sees itself as an organization that is called to defend such values. But at an FRC event yesterday, they set aside quibbles over abortion or LGBT rights to discuss tax policy. Dick Patten, head of the consulting group Family Business Institute, weaved a strange and tenuous web among business, church, and social structure that made one thing painfully clear: The government is trying to take things away from “us” (Read: evangelical Christian family business owners)—property, spirituality, and a way of life.

The event was supposed to be about the estate tax—often referred to as the "death tax" by conservatives who seek to make it sound ominous. The estate tax is essentially one that applies to property that passes to someone else when the owner dies. The right claims both that the tax is a needless attempt to prey on one’s lifelong earnings, and that it is particularly severe on small business, but given that the estate tax only kicks in for inheritances over $3.5 million, the right's argument that this is a populist cause becomes more tenuous. Patten's goal seemed to be to tap into a powerful arm of the conservative movement—the religious right. At the event, the whole audience seemed to be sitting at something that more closely resembled a prayer meeting than a tax policy lecture.

Repealing the estate tax became a spiritual duty for Patten and his disciples, proscribed from the beginning of biblical times. Patten cited Proverbs 13:22, "A good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children, but a sinner's wealth is stored up for the righteous," and Ezekiel 46:18, "The prince shall not take any of the inheritance of the people, thrusting them out of their property. He shall give his sons their inheritance out of his own property, so that none of my people shall be scattered from his property."

These passages seemed to explain to Patten that inheritance comes up frequently as a sacred right in scripture. In this light, the so-called death tax—and all government intervention for that matter—becomes a matter of losing one’s spiritual heritage.

According to Patten, the original Hebrew word for inheritance refers to both spiritual and physical inheritance. Thus, when the government takes away from one’s physical inheritance, it takes away from a sort of spiritual inheritance as well.

The bizarre spiritual tone was built on the assumption that everyone in the audience was in on it. We were all in this together, Patten seemed to be saying. Even I, a Catholic liberal, felt that I was being asked to join a special, privileged and increasingly oppressed group of Christian business owners.

Because “we are talking amongst ourselves,” Patten said, he would let us in a rarely published fact: “Sixty percent of family businesses are owned by evangelical Christians,” so when talking about the death tax and who it affects, “We are talking about us.” If this statistic is true, Patten was right about it being rarely published, since, as far as I can tell, no data about the religion of small business owners is available. And it is “our” small businesses that support communities, Patten said. Thus, “we” become “the anchors of the small town, our churches, and our ministries.” So long as the estate tax lives, Patten and his followers must believe their Christianity and its businesses are in spiritual danger as well. It’s an us-versus-them mentality that suggests who "we" are, what "we" have, and what "we" love about "our" country is on the line. It’s all riding on one tax.

And in case there was any confusion about who, exactly, was consistently trying to take everything from “us,” Patten described the attackers as a kind of Marxist government force with laser focus on redistributing wealth. Patten noted that "we" should be asking "tough" questions, like “Are we merely taxpaying serfs that when [we die] our property reverts back to the government as though they owned it in the first place?”

Patten brought the fight to life, “We’re not just fighting for our stuff … this is the battle of what our world is going to look like,” this is not only a significant battle but is also a moment to teach “the evilness of socialism,” because the estate tax is “socialism in a box.”

Though he included some typical conservative economic rhetoric, Patten's reliance on blending religious identity with ownership and cultural integrity was so blinding that any other argument was left in the dust. The Family Research Council and the Family Business Institute seemed only too happy to foster such a perspective. The alarmist sense that all is lost if the audience did not accept this one task was disturbing because of its manipulative power. Such a potent mix of religious fervor, patriotic passion, and economic theory has the potential to obscure the facts, and that, in the modern world, is scary.

Rebecca Foerg-Spittel is an editorial intern for Campus Progress. She is a junior at the College of Holy Cross.

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