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Disability, Accessibility, and Civil Rights

The Church the Law Cannot Refuse: Automated Ministry, Disability Access, and the Collapse of the Church-Definition Tests

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working draft. Not peer reviewed.

Written
July 2026
Version
v0.7
Pages
13
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Abstract

Federal tax law extends churches a set of privileges no other charitable entity enjoys: exemption without an application, freedom from the annual information return, and procedural insulation from audit. Yet Congress never defined the word church, and the Constitution forbids it from defining the word too closely. Into that vacuum the Internal Revenue Service inserted a fourteen-factor test and the courts added an associational test, and this article shows that neither can do the work now demanded of it. Using the author’s own research foundation as a worked, and expressly hypothetical, example, the article walks all fourteen factors and demonstrates that a sincere new faith organized around a genuine body of doctrine, a real deliberating congregation, and its own literature can approach church status while an automated fraud can do the same, because the two are, on the criteria the law is permitted to apply, indistinguishable.

Keywords

  • church definition
  • fourteen-factor test
  • associational test
  • American Guidance
  • Foundation of Human Understanding
  • United States v. Ballard
  • disability access
  • digital assembly
  • section 7611
  • automated ministry

Plain language slides

First slide of the plain language summary of The Church the Law Cannot Refuse: Automated Ministry, Disability Access, and the Collapse of the Church-Definition TestsOpen the 15-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "The Church the Law Cannot Refuse: Automated Ministry, Disability Access, and the Collapse of the Church-Definition Tests." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Draft, July 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/jmxb5b/

Other versions

This paper is also posted on SSRN.

SSRN version

References (26)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

  1. Footnote 1.See, for the method in a tax-adjacent setting, Bond v. United States, 572 U.S. 844, 866 (2014) (Roberts, C.J., for the Court).
  2. Footnote 2.I.R.C. § 7611(h)(1).
  3. Footnote 2.Confirmed via Descrybe against the U.S. Code.
  4. Footnote 3.Walz v. Tax Comm’n of City of New York, 397 U.S. 664 (1970).
  5. Footnote 4.St. Martin Evangelical Lutheran Church v. South Dakota, 451 U.S. 772, 780–782 (1981).
  6. Footnote 5.United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, 86–87 (1944) (the First Amendment forbids submitting the truth or verity of religious doctrines to a jury; men may believe what they cannot prove and may not be put to the proof of their beliefs).
  7. Footnote 6.Employment Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990) (the government may not evaluate the validity or centrality of religious beliefs)
  8. Footnote 6.Hernandez v. Commissioner, 490 U.S. 680 (1989).
  9. Footnote 7.Gen. Couns. Mem. 36,993 (Feb. 3, 1977), incorporated into Internal Revenue Manual § 7.26.2.2.4
  10. Footnote 7.Cong. Rsch. Serv., IF12520, Churches and the Tax Code, https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12520/IF12520.4.pdf.
  11. Footnote 8.American Guidance Found., Inc. v. United States, 490 F. Supp. 304, 306 (D.D.C. 1980).
  12. Footnote 10.The 508 Company, The 14-Point IRS Church Test, https://the508company.com/compliance/14-point-irs-church-test/.
  13. Footnote 12.The Church of Eternal Life & Liberty, Inc. v. Commissioner, 86 T.C. 916, 924 (1986) (a church is a coherent group of individuals and families that join together to accomplish the religious purposes of mutually held beliefs, whose principal means of accomplishing those purposes must be to assemble regularly).
  14. Footnote 13.Found. of Human Understanding v. United States, 614 F.3d 1383, 1390 (Fed. Cir. 2010)
  15. Footnote 13.Found. of Human Understanding v. Commissioner, 88 T.C. 1341, 1360 (1987).
  16. Footnote 14.Internal Revenue Serv., Exempt Organizations Continuing Professional Education Text (1994), Topic A (media ministries; broadcast audiences not counted as a congregation), https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopica94.pdf.
  17. Footnote 17.Richard R. Hammar, Pastor, Church & Law (describing the mail-order church pattern: an individual forms a church, declares himself minister, retains control of funds, and conducts few religious activities), https://www.churchlawandtax.com/pastor-church-law/definitions/tax-legislation-federal/churches/.
  18. Footnote 21.Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & Sch. v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012) (the ministerial exception barred a disability-discrimination claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act brought by a called teacher, on church-autonomy grounds).
  19. Footnote 22.Ellen P. Aprill & Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, 21st Century Churches and Federal Tax Law, 2024 U. Ill. L. Rev. 939.
  20. Footnote 25.Walz, 397 U.S. 664.
  21. Footnote 26.I.R.C. § 508(c)(1)(A).
  22. Footnote 27.I.R.C. § 6033(a)(3)(A)(i).
  23. Footnote 28.I.R.C. § 7611(a).
  24. Footnote 29.I.R.C. § 7611(c)(1)(A) (two-year completion requirement) and § 7611(f)(1) (five-year bar on successive inquiries into the same or similar issues).
  25. Footnote 30.Bruce R. Hopkins’ Nonprofit Counsel 36(8) (2019)
  26. Footnote 31.Corp. of the Presiding Bishop v. Amos, 483 U.S. 327 (1987)

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