If you pay someone to pray for you, should that cost be tax deductible?

In our country, we have a separation of Church and State, and therefore may not constitutionally subsidize prayer.

@pdworkin

This IS in your country. This Church already has a tax deductible status for provision of services.

Why not? Whenever you hire someone to do something for you, you have an employment relationship. So long as the service is legal, it should not matter whether the service being hired results in a tangible benefit, or any benefit at all. So long as your employee delivers his or her prayers, you have a valid employment contract, and you are entitled to deduct their salary just as you would any other business expense.

You can not sue your employee if the prayers don’t work since there is no warranty, expressed or implied, that they will produce any positive outcome. As for getting your insurance company to pay for it, I don’t think that prayer would be considered a valid treatment.

The results of a $1.7 million, multi-center clinical trial was published in 2006 on the therapeutic effect of intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer itself had no direct effect on complication-free recovery from cardiac bypass surgery, but those who knew they were being prayed for tended to have poorer outcomes.

@Zuma As for getting your insurance company to pay for it, I don’t think that prayer would be considered a valid treatment.

Didn’t you look at the link?

Forgive me. I didn’t really treat this as a serious question. When seriously ill people are unable to obtain insurance, subsidies or tax benefits for actual ameliorative therapy, it is a bizarre and twisted joke that credulous zealots can get tax benefits from nursery tales.

Prayer service, built from the ground up to reap in the money for something that is free? All the while killing the consumer if they rely on it? Way to live the model of Jesus, guys!

If Jesus were real, he better apologize his ass of when he gets back here. He allowed the object he died on become the most lucrative, money grabbing icon in human history.

Someone kill religion. Fast. Keep the spirituality, that’s cool with me.

What a scheme, it makes me ill. Worse still is that insurance companies are going to love this. They get to pay a small amount for this “alternative treatment” in the event a person gets sick; I assume it’s cheaper, and will end up terminating the client in the swiftest way possible – allowing them to succumb to their illness.

@DarkScribe Yes, I did look at the link. And again just now to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

While there is a proposal before Congress to prohibit discrimination based on religious content, it is still just a proposal and by no means a done deal. Even though insurance companies may be prohibited from denying a treatment based on religious content, that should not prohibit them from denying treatment based on efficacy—at least that would be the position I would take if I were a health insurer.

On the other hand, what are they really talking about here? It sounds as though they are talking about prayer instead of medical care, no doubt when conventional medical care is no longer needed, wanted or appropriate. If what we are talking about is hospice care, it may be entirely appropriate for there to be “religious content” to help comfort the patient and ease his or her passing. I see no reason why such care should not be compensated, if that is what it is.

That would be so wrong! If someone wants to pay someone for nonsense there is nothing I can do about it, but I should not be forced to pay for it. Not only is there no evidence of medical benefit, but @Zuma‘s original post suggests that it may make things worse.

Man, this sounds so much like money changers in a Church. I wonder what it says about that in the Bible? ;)

If you give money to a church that is properly registered as a church and thus a charity, your gift is tax deductable. However, if you pay some random person to pray for you, it isn’t deductable, and the recipient has to pay income taxes on it.

The Church of Christian Science has jumped through all of the government hoops, so money going to that entity is tax deductable. If folks don’t like it, then they need to campaign to change the laws regarding churches.

Well since most Churches are tax-exempt anyhow I doubt this becomes much of an issue for them.

I think though that the US is moving towards supporting evidence-based practices only. They are in mental-health for example. And those are the only services that “count” so to speak. So then unless prayer were evidence based it would not be allowable. Personally though it wouldn’t bother me if they did get a health tax write-off.

NO.

No, but I’ll try that on my next tax submission. Thanks. It is tax avoidance, not tax evasion so what the hell..

What if you had someone in a hospice receiving end of life care? And what if it was run by a religious organization who employed special personnel to help comfort the dying person by praying with and for him and giving him the last rites? Don’t they deserve to be paid? Would you deny somebody that last bit of comfort toward the end because it is part of the hospice worker’s job to provide “religious content”?

We fund chaplains in the armed services, schools, and prisons. We don’t disparage paying people to provide “religious content” in those situations, so why, all of a sudden, are we so concerned that somebody somewhere is being spiritually comforted?

Everyone should have the right to a dignified death. And I would hope that my fellow citizen would not be so dickish as to question what kind of spiritual comfort I choose or don’t choose at the end, or to deny it to me on my deathbed. Are we really that niggardly and small?

You are confusing the issue. individuals cared for by religious organizations do not pay them specifically to be prayed for.

Deduct it, God will decide if the IRS minds.

why are churches tax exempt?

Because most churches qualify as a 501c3 non-profit organization, as long as they stay out of politics. Hence, they are tax- exempt if they do the paperwork.

Traditionally churches do a lot of charitable work such as visiting the sick, counseling members, and supporting places the feed the hungry, house the homeless, etc.

@Darwin Traditionally
I see what you did there. Clever.

@aphilotus – I am quite aware of the late L. Ron Hubbard’s thoughts on the matter, and I do not agree with him although what Scientology does is mostly legal.