Elder Dixon Blames Seizure On Bush Administration

Members of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, battling to keep their church from being seized over $6 million in unpaid taxes, held out hope that the Bush administration would act as a cavalry.

President Bush is a Christian, they reasoned. New Attorney General John Ashcroft is as well. Surely they'd come to the aid of a house of God about to be raided by federal marshals.

That cavalry didn't come. It's likely it didn't even mount its horses.

And as the Rev. Greg J. Dixon, pastor emeritus, was placed on a gurney and wheeled off the Baptist Temple property Tuesday by federal marshals — and as a church was seized by the federal government for the first time in U.S. history — the new administration was the focus of considerable outrage.

"We had a promise from the Bush administration. We had every reason to believe there was a moratorium. ... They were going to dismiss the case. We had a deal, and they welshed on the deal," Dixon said.

"I blame this on George Bush and John Ashcroft, the Christians," said Dixon after forcing marshals to carry him from his church. "This is a Republican deal."

Dixon said that he believed that President Bush would have issued a pardon and let the church continue to operate. He accused the government of going back on a deal.

"We had a promise from the Bush administration," Dixon said after the seizure. "We had every reason to believe we had a moratorium. We've been betrayed and deceived by the Bush administration. We had a deal."

However, Dixon's son, current pastor Greg A. Dixon, said that the temple was never promised anything.

"We were expecting the Bush administration to do something," the younger Dixon said. "They're giving millions to faith-based organizations. I think it's a tragedy that they let this take place.

"We were never promised anything. We've not heard anything."

Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, said that there was no deal with the Baptist Temple.

"Mr. Dixon should want an attorney general who enforces the law, and Mr. Ashcroft has done so in this case," Tucker said.

Dixon Jr. recently made a trip to Washington, D.C., hoping to meet with the new president. That didn't happen, but the pastor felt he at least got word of the church's plight to the White House.

"There's no doubt that they did know what was happening," the younger Dixon said. "I think it's amazing that the Bush administration, that claims to be so Christian, has just trampled a church."

Political experts familiar with the situation didn't find it all that amazing.

"There was a more fundamental difficulty that the church got itself into," said Will McLauchlan, a political science professor at Purdue University. "They simply did not comply with the law. The Bush administration probably felt or decided that they really had to pursue the enforcement of the law."

Brian Vargus, a political analyst at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, said the Baptist Temple's case was a legal one and wasn't even in the political arena.

"It is highly unlikely that the Bush administration would intervene in what is essentially a federal tax issue, even though it's seen by the supporters of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple as a church-state issue," Vargus said. "If the Bush administration had intervened, I think many people would have said, 'Hey, wait a minute, everybody's supposed to pay taxes."'

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Tuesday that the Bush administration would have no comment on the matter.

Vargus concluded that any intervention from the president would have been politically dangerous.

Though church leaders had hoped that their chances would be better under the Bush administration than they had been under Clinton's, the marshal had said that politics wouldn't dictate how he handled seizing the Baptist Temple.

"I have no concerns about administrations," Anderson had said. "I am sworn to enforce court orders regardless of what administration is in."

And that left the elder Dixon, as he watched blue-jacketed marshals scouring his former sanctuary, feeling like the people he'd hoped might help him in the end never even bothered.

"I'm glad it didn't happen during the Clinton administration. It's not a Democrat deal, it's a Republican deal," the elder Dixon said after the seizure. "The Republican Congress passed this law back in the mid-'80s, that for the first time churches were required to pay taxes. It was signed into law by ... President Reagan. I stood before Sen. Dole's committee in 1984 and I told Sen. (Bob) Dole that if you pass this law, churches will be closed in America. And now, 19 years later, my prediction has come true.

"It was a Republican judge, and now a Republican president, and a Republican Supreme Court that refused to hear it, and a Republican attorney general has now carried this out."