The Alliance Defense Fund, a group whose work I usually appreciate, organized an effort by several dozen pastors to defy the Internal Revenue Service regulations prohibiting political candidate endorsement from the pulpit. This was presented by the ADF as an initiative to secure freedom of speech for the pulpit, but I think it a foolhardy move on the part of the pastors.
Earlier this week, ADF senior lawyer Erik Stanley said this:
Pastors have a right to speak about Biblical truths from the pulpit without fear of punishment. No one should be able to use the government to intimidate pastors into giving up their constitutional rights. If you have a concern about pastors speaking about electoral candidates from the pulpit, ask yourself this: should the church decide that question, or should the IRS?”
ADF is not trying to get politics into the pulpit. Churches can decide for themselves that they either do or don’t want their pastors to speak about electoral candidates. The point of the Pulpit Initiative is very simple: the IRS should not be the one making the decision by threatening to revoke a church’s tax-exempt status. We need to get the government out of the pulpit.
Churches were completely free to preach about candidates from the day that the Constitution was ratified in 1788 until 1954. That’s when the unconstitutional rule known as the “Johnson Amendment” was enacted. Churches are exempt from taxation under the principle that there is no surer way to destroy religion than to begin taxing it. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, the power to tax involves the power to destroy. The real effect of the Johnson Amendment is that pastors are muzzled for fear of investigation by the IRS.
Stanley is right about the constitutional history, and the story surrounding the Johnson Amendment (named for author Lyndon Johnson, who wrote it while in the Senate as a way of muzzling non-profits giving him fits back in Texas) is more than a little sordid, and it should be repealed if for no other reason than for being a blight on the freedom of speech. He’s also right about the tax exemption for churches, which isn’t a gift from the government for good social works, but a protection for religious freedom.
All that said, pastors should not have gotten involved in this. It’s true that you can’t bring a court case on an abstract question, but have to have real people with real interests involved, but that’s ADF’s problem. Pastors who are getting into partisan politics in the pulpit are abusing their office and their calling. Preach about moral issues in light of Scripture and theology all you want, but when you get partisan you wind up portraying God as a mere politician. You also, incidentally, buy into the fallacy of the religious left (which contends that they have some kind of mandate to stamp God’s imprimatur on to prudential political, social, and economic measures), since choosing between political candidates is by its very nature a matter of prudential judgment. That’s something that all Christians are called to do as they live as citizens of a democratic polity, but it has no place in the proclamation of God’s eternal Word. By helping the ADF pursue their legal crusade, these pastors are doing an enormous disservice to their congregations, and the ADF is doing one to the churches that it is supposed to be dedicated to serve.
September 28, 2008 at 4:55 pm
This is one of those classic “slippery slope” situations. You cannot get into it without getting yourself into trouble. As is so rightly pointed out in the article, to muddy the preaching of God’s word with politics is a great disservice to the Church, and this will get the Church in trouble with the IRS very quickly.
There is nothing, however, to prevent preaching about the need for honesty and integrity in leadership, for vision, for Christian character, perseverance, and charity in our national leaders. What a candidate says about all of these things needs to be interpreted in the light of all that we know about the candidate, rather than simply taken at face value. Thus we can preach about the way people must evaluate the entire package, not just what the candidate says on a particular issue.
September 28, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Well put, Dr. I agree completely (though I wouldn’t get into evaluating whether particular candidates lived up to those ideals. I’d let parishioners make their own judgments).
September 28, 2008 at 9:42 pm
David,
I totally agree with you on this. Besides that it is a distraction from preaching Christ and may turn sinners away from hearing the gospel.
September 28, 2008 at 9:49 pm
This is just plain stupid. All Churches have the right to give donors tax receipts without becoming 501 C3s. The can organize as Corporation Soles or Limited Liability Corporations or one of several other available alternatives. But once they become 501 C3s they have to abide by certain rules and regulations. Every election year you see this violated by churches pastored by political figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and you never hear of them losing their 501 C3 status. So I suppose that the churches involved in the current controversy feel somewhat justified in a tit for tat sort of way. In my view they ought to surrender their 501 C3s and then they can substitute partisan politics for the Gospel.
September 29, 2008 at 9:45 am
I must respectfully disagree with Viola and Rev. Fischler on this one. I think it is the Christians preachers place to teach their parishioners how/why they should/should not exercise their vote in the “public” sphere. I think our reluctance to do so comes from a misunderstanding of the two kingdoms. I think a quick look at the sermons of the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and others of the Reformed past (and present) shows that we do have responsibility to speak to the “public square” in our preaching and teaching.
My Pastor did speak to this yesterday but properly said, “I would endorse a candidate if I thought there was one worth endorsing”.