What is a church?

A Bigot or Ignorant?

Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn stirred up a firestorm this week after her office denied tax-exempt status to a Unitarian Universalist church in Denison.

Strayhorn ruled that the Red River Unitarian Universalist Church Inc. did not qualify for the exemption because it "does not have one system of belief."

Ministers and religious-freedom advocates were flabbergasted.

"She's either abysmally ignorant of the law or a religious bigot," said Robert London, spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C. "She's acting like a grand inquisitor in deciding what should be a religion."

Ancira says a criterion used in determining whether a group qualifies as a church is "simply a belief in God or gods, or a higher power." That nettled some religious observers, too, since other groups, including Buddhists, do not include belief in a higher power in their principles.

"We didn't get to the point of applying the higher-power test in the Red River case," Ancira said this week. The Rev. Craig Roshaven, pastor of First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church in Fort Worth, which has tax-exempt status, said his congregation is no less religious because of its diverse beliefs.

"We are a creedless church, but every Sunday we recite that love is the doctrine of the church and service is our prayer," Roshaven said. "If that's not a religious statement, I don't know what is."

What has shocked many is Strayhorn's challenge of a congregation that is part of one of America's oldest religious traditions: the Universalists, formally established in 1793, and Unitarians, founded in 1825. The groups merged in 1961.

Four former U.S. presidents -- John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft -- were Unitarians.

There are about 200,000 Unitarian Universalists in about 1,000 churches in the United States, Canada and Mexico, including 45 congregations in Texas. Fort Worth will get a close look at the Boston-based denomination in June 2005 when the group holds its national convention here. The Unitarian Universalists also met in Fort Worth in 1994.

"The Unitarian Universalist faith has been around a long time, and if it is not a church, then we are all in jeopardy," said Brent Walker, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

The Rev. Lillie Henley, pastor of the Westside Unitarian Universalist Church in Fort Worth, called Strayhorn's decision a "travesty."