A few weeks ago Kara and I finally watched Happy Feet. I didn’t really feel like blogging about it. It was alright for an animated film, but was nowhere as memorable as a film like Finding Nemo. Even as a person who supported the “message” in Happy Feet (cultural tolerance, global warming awareness, environmentalism) I felt beat over the head with these themes. There was little to no subtlety in the approach and the result was a story that suffered. That being said, Robin Williams was still great.

Then there’s March of the Penguins. Pretty much the exact same film, only it’s a live action documentary. Well to be fair, it seems like Happy Feet took March of the Penguins and added pop music and Saturday-morning morality.

Morgan Freeman narrates the yearly journey the penguins make from the shores of Antarctica to 70 miles “inland” (or is it inice?) where they mate, lay eggs, and care for the eggs in the midst of the harshest cold weather on earth. It was mind-blowing. I was amazed the entire time that any of this could be possible, let alone just normal penguin life. The fathers go without food for around 4 months in order to make the journey inland and then care for the eggs. It seemed as though these penguins lived lives of perpetual sacrifice and hardship in order to continue their species. I am amazed at God’s creativity in his creation.

Kara and I caught Wes Anderson’s new film The Darjeeling Limited the other night at Princeton’s little art-house theater, the Princeton Garden. It is the story of three estranged brothers who meet in India at the request of the oldest brother. They board the Darjeeling train looking for a spiritual journey. Like all of Anderson’s films, Darjeeling is funny… but not that kind of funny. It’s funny in the way that looking back on life can be funny, a mixture of tears and laughter. The three brothers are very broken people, untrusting, dishonest, depressed, bandaged… people. They can’t go a minute into their spiritual journey without being interrupted by each other. As adults they continue to live out brotherly tensions. In the midst of their journey in the heart of India they face some particularly hard times, but do so as brothers and friends. In the end we realize it is particularly good news that brothers from this family stuck together.

I finally got around to watching The Queen, which hit it big this past year at the Oscars. The Queen follows the reaction (or lack thereof) of Queen Elizabeth in the wake of Princess Diana’s death in Paris. I was still in High School when Diana was killed in that car accident. I didn’t really know much about her at the time and have only recently come to realize the roll she played in global activism for things dear to my own heart. All that aside, that’s not why I wanted to watch The Queen. Rather, it was all the hype surrounding Hellen Mirren’s portrayal of Elizabeth. I was actually surprised at the way in which her performance excelled. Unlike Forrest Whitaker’s performance in Last King of Scotland, which was so powerful that you never stopped thinking “wow, this is really incredible acting,” Mirren’s performance is so subtle that you get drawn into the story and only afterwards realize what a performance it was. In the end I think that’s probably the best kind of acting, the kind that makes you forget someone is actually acting (even if it doesn’t come off as overwhelmingly powerful).

Now that I’m working in a church again I’ve started to think about this whole “tax exempt status” our churches have. Tax exemption doesn’t really sit right with me. Here’s why tax exemption makes me raise an eyebrow. I had a conversation with a pastor friend of mine several years ago about why he supported a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. In the end, the constitutional ban on same sex marriage had to do with tax exemption. That was his last straw. “You see,” he said, “if they legalize gay marriage, they can force the church to start marrying gay people. And if we say no… they’ll take away our tax exempt status!”

There’s a big difference between the Christian rite of marriage performed by the church and that legal thing you get at the county courthouse, so I don’t care too much about what’s in the constitution concerning marriage, because the constitution does not determine the sacred rites of the church. I wouldn’t oppose a constitutional amendment against being resurrected from the dead either, because I think God (and not the constitution) gets to determine what will and will not be for his church.

Okay, so back to tax-exemption. Does it make anyone else feel slightly icky that the church is put in this position of “owing” something to the state? I sometimes feel like the tax-exemption thing is like the “favor” that a mafia don has done for a church, and our response naturally is to not make a fuss when the don does something that doesn’t sit right with us, out of our gratitude for his favor. And this is exactly how it works, when a church starts getting “to political” there are always threats of taking away the all sacred tax-exempt status. Well so what?! Martin Luther King Jr. had some pretty political things to say once upon a time. The gospel is always reaching out into culture and stirring up trouble. What if we were to scared to follow the gospel into the world because we thought it might mean we have to start paying taxes?

Now, to argue the other side for just a second… I certainly don’t want a portion of my tithe money going to build fighter jets and bombs. But is this “innocence” worth the private and non-political box that the nation sticks the church in? There’s got to be a better way.

What do you think? Are you for or against the tax-exempt status for churches?