Evangelicals denied receiving federal money while quietly accepting tax exemption

Evidence

For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes), the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act a decade later, however, changed that calculus. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 109

Categorization

• QUESTION: The parenthetical irony (‘except for, of course, not having to pay taxes’) suggests the exemption was consciously not-regarded as a subsidy — worth digging into how evangelical leaders framed the exemption to their own supporters.
• XREF: connects to: Tax exemption functions as a hidden public subsidy for churches — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 111

Related

• Tax exemption functions as a hidden public subsidy for churches (similarity 0.86)
• Tax exemption is a public subsidy funded by other taxpayers (similarity 0.83)