Icon (Close Menu)

Clergy loan forgiveness?

Are clergy “public servants”? That seems to be the real question behind whether or not clergy qualify for student loan forgiveness under recent legislation.

Part of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, the law specified that as long as students took public service jobs at nonprofits and made on-time loan payments for 10 years, their remaining debt would be wiped out. Matthew calculated that for him this would work out to his paying $450 a month for a decade.

Over the four years since the law passed, seminaries across the country have conducted financial aid seminars explaining and publicizing this loan forgiveness program.

But last week, the Department of Education released guidelines outlining exactly who qualifies for loan forgiveness. It turns out that employees whose work is related to “religious instruction, worship services, or any form of proselytizing” don’t fit the bill.

What’s not to love about student loan forgiveness? It might be useful to have the government stay away from funding religious work, however indirectly. (Whether this would be consistent is another story. Clergy get special tax consideration, after all.) But surely to deny that religious workers are public servants is to deny from the start the public nature of “religion.” In any case there are several parallels with the ongoing showdown between the Obama administration and the USCCB, and no solution is likely to satisfy everyone.

Read the rest.

1 COMMENT

  1. I am not a public servant. I am an Episcopal priest. I am a Jesus servant. Clergy of any stripe are servants of the God who calls us into ministry.

    In an earlier life, when I was a public school teacher and a deputy sheriff, I was a public servant.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

DAILY NEWSLETTER

Get Covenant every weekday:

MOST READ

Most Recent

A Catena on the Cross

In her 2017 The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy, Robin Jenson notes that among the memorials of the...

AI — Not Made in the Image & Likeness of God

A unique feature of Anglican life in the United Kingdom is that 26 Church of England diocesan bishops...

God Is Not on the Ballot

On the morning of November 6, the day after the presidential election, there will be exploded heads littering...

The Dream of Isaiah: A Sacramental Vision of Divine Continuity

In my first essay, focusing on supersessionism, I did nothing new. If anything, I was trying to use...