Politics and the pulpit
2005 is going to be a year of interesting fights in the Congress, as the Democrats try to figure out what sort of party, exactly, they want to be. One of these interesting fights could come over HR 235, the “Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act.” The act frees religious organizations from the threat of losing their tax-exempt status if their leaders endorse a particular political candidate in a sermon. Read more at the site set up by the bill’s sponsor, Walter Jones of North Carolina
This bill has come up numerous times before, but has been shot down, mainly over fears that the bill could be abused, turning churches into organs of political parties. Those fears appear to have been addressed by the bill’s provision that the endorsements can’t be disseminated beyond the congregants present–that is, they can’t put the Pastor’s quote onto a pamphlet and then pass it around the neighborhood.
This bill seems like a good idea to me–it is not the job of the IRS to be policing the words of pastors, priests & rabbis. However, I don’t think it will change much that actually happens. Pastors who want to endorse candidates already do–some tacitly, some blatantly–and the IRS usually doesn’t notice. What the bill will do is take away the threats meted out by various organizations–mostly on the left–against churches that they don’t particularly like. Rat Out A Church has more on that piece of it.
Quite a few arguments have been put forward against this bill, as you might expect. They’re pretty much all bad. OMB Watch provides a couple:
The 501(C)(3)s receive a tax-exemption because their work is educational, religious or charitable. It is an acknowledgment that the organization performs an activity that relieves some burden that would otherwise fall to federal, state, or local government. Taxpayers should not be required to fund the political activities of tax-exempt organizations.
This is ridiculous on its face, as religious groups do all sorts of things that don’t relieve the “burden” on the government, and their tax exempt status certainly doesn’t hinge on the government approving of the things they do (praise God). Churches could hold book burnings, spew racism or swear profusely at passers-by and not lose their tax-exempt status–but if a pastor endorses a particular candidate–watch out!
Additionally, tax-exemption is afforded to churches as a safeguard to preserve separation of church and state by preventing governments from using taxation to favor one religion over another. Allowing churches to advocate for one political party or another would blur the line between the separation of church and state. The money in the collection plate should not pay for bumper stickers or attack ads on behalf of a politician or political party.
The latter business is, of course, a straw man of ludicrous proportions. The argument that letting churches endorse a particular candidate some how blurs the line between church and state is similarly ridiculous, if not as obvious. How, pray tell, does a ban on candidate endorsement blur said line, while the fact that churches are–as OMBW noted just two paragraphs before–”allowed to engage in advocacy activities such as lobbying, public education campaigns, comment on public policy, and litigation”?
A somewhat better argument is presented by Faithforward, if you can slog through the shrill post title and the paranoid mutterings about “gravy trains” and whatnot. Eventually, he hits on a decent–but ultimately unpersuasive–argument:
Not to mention how divisive this would be within the church. How many congregations do you know that could accomodate easily a pastoral endorsement of one candidate or another? Most pastors I know would get thrown out on their arse by the second or third time.
That’s well and good–I wouldn’t want to attend a church that spent a remotely significant amount of its time endorsing particular political candidates, no matter which party. But that should be something for pastors and congregations to decide, not the IRS. Pastors deserve the same freedoms as the rest of us. The law was originally devised to prevent political groups from masquerading as religious groups and thus escaping taxation–not to keep Pastors from dropping particular names in the middle of their sermons.
To be honest, I expect this bill to have more of an impact in more liberal congregations than more conservative ones. Conservative pastors tend to be focused on the things of Heaven, with less concern about the political happenings on Earth–while many liberal pastors don’t believe in things of Heaven to begin with, and so are quite concerned with politics in the here and now. Still, it’s the right thing to do.
If you want to support this bill, there are a couple things you can do. You can sign the online petition, you can obviously call your congressman, and in particular you can contact any of the 167 cosponsors of the bill’s previous incarnation, and ask them to sign on to the new one. Some of the cosponsors may have moved on, and so their replacements may need to have the bill pointed out to them–Rep. Dave Reichert (WA-8), for example, took the seat of previous cosponsor Jennifer Dunn when she retired last year.
Regardless of whether you think this bill would hurt or help your political party, or whether you think pastors have any business endorsing candidates, we should all agree that the IRS shouldn’t be in the business of censoring sermons. I wish this would be a point of bipartisan agreement, but somehow I doubt that will happen.
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