Campaigning for Candidates from the Pulpit is a Bad Idea

 

The “Johnson Amendment” prohibits most church pastors from making declarations “in support of or in opposition to candidates for public office.” Is this limitation on freedom of speech constitutional?

One thing is clear – the electioneering ban is not rooted in Jeffersonian views of separation of church and state or the First Amendment which are silent on issues involving the interplay between tax-exempt organizations, including churches and charities, and the Internal Revenue Code. Under section 501(c)(3) of that code, churches and other charitable organizations are exempt from income tax and entitled to receive tax-deductible contributions from donors.

Instead, it is based on an agreement that non-profits make with the IRS. In order to obtain 501(c)(3) status, applying organizations must represent that they will not participate in any political campaign on behalf of, or against, any candidate for political office. A contributor to a church that does not sign up for 501(c)(3) status can still deduct those contributions from his or her income but if that contributor is audited, he or she has the burden of establishing that the church meets the qualifications of a section 501(c)(3) organization.

On October 2, 2011, as part of “Freedom Sunday” which is promoted by the Alliance Defense Fund, 539 ministers throughout the United States defied the IRS rule and identified where candidates stood on the issues and “where followers of Jesus Christ should stand.” ADF claims that before 1954 when the Johnson Amendment was passed, preachers could promote candidates from the pulpit and that the effect since then has been to “silence and chill the pastors.”

So far, it does not appear that the IRS has taken action to revoke the 501(c)(3) status of these churches. In fact, such cases are exceedingly rare. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to address this issue head-on although a lower court, the District Court for the District of Columbia in Branch Ministries v. Rossotti (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/branch_ministries.pdf) did find that the IRS could revoke the tax-exempt status of a religious organization that bought and published a newspaper ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post that specifically and clearly argued against a political candidate. The ad said, “Bill Clinton is promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.” The ad concluded, “How then can we vote for Bill Clinton?” At the bottom, the church was named along with an invitation for readers to make a “tax-deductible donation” to pay for the advertisement.

A church that loses its tax exempt status will operate like any other corporation for purposes of tax liability. They would be able to speak out freely but some contributors may be less inclined to donate if they cannot take the tax deduction.

If 501(c)(3) organizations were suddenly able to engage in partisan politicking, and donors were able to give on a tax-deductible basis, donors could ostensibly deduct currently non-deductible political donations simply by funneling these monies through churches. Churches would not only pass the collection plate for their religious mission, but churches would also be able to use these tax-deductible donations on behalf of particular candidates.

Large churches could bankroll entire political campaigns and receive favorable treatment from those who support them. Politicians could visit with church pastors and lobby them for their campaign support. The lines of mutual respect between church and state could be erased as churches become nothing more than overt political mouthpieces during campaign season.

Because of the tax advantages, it is not inconceivable that churches would become a primary venue for gathering votes as political goals were interwoven with spiritual teachings. A politician who ignored this new reality would be at a distinct disadvantage.

In response, many congregations might, as a matter of policy, refuse to allow the politicking from their pulpits but may perceive that they lose the favor of politicians who receive their support elsewhere.  In churches that permitted politicking, congregants of different political persuasions than their clergy might feel alienated and leave.

As it now stands, churches and charities are welcome to speak truth to power on the issues that matter – from opposing human trafficking, to lobbying for workplace accommodation for religious employees, to pursuing morality and justice. Religious organizations just cannot support or oppose particular candidates or political parties. This is a good thing.

ANALYSIS: Bishops Claim Religious Liberty Under Assault

This week, at its annual conference in Baltimore, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops asserted that “religious liberty” is under assault.

The conference pulled together issues from the federal level and various states. For instance, in Illinois, after 40 years of cooperation, government officials stopped working with Catholic Charities on adoptions and foster-care placements because the agency refused to recognize a new civil union law. Bishops are suing the state, claiming that denying funds because of the religious beliefs of the church is impermissible. In New York, the Catholic church has complained that the religious exemption to gay-marriage laws is too weak.

On health care, the Catholic Church has argued that there should be a broader exemption to the federal mandate that private insurers pay for contraception. The church is also fighting the Health and Human Services Department’s recent denial of renewal of financial aid for their anti-human trafficking work. The ACLU had filed suit opposing government funds to anti-human trafficking groups that “impose religiously based restrictions on reproductive health services,” claiming that many of the women who are victims of rape and forced prostitution are in need of reproductive health services.

This is coming on the heels of recent attempts by the church to pressure Catholic politicians to vote in line with church teachings.
Each year, Catholic charities across the nation receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, which have increased over the years, and the battle for “religious liberty” is about who gets to control the way that the tax dollars are spent.

In the past, Catholic public policy discussion covered a broad range of issues ranging from immigration and workers’ rights to nuclear proliferation. Today, the focus has narrowed to the issues of abortion and gay rights.

The conference has formed a new “religious liberty” committee, the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty and is hiring another attorney and lobbyist to address “religious liberty and marriage issues” on Capitol Hill. The Committee is also planning to lobby against a Congressional repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and the military’s repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Sadly, as part of this change in focus, the term “religious liberty” is being redefined away from protecting the rights to speak, believe, and practice religion. Instead, “religious liberty” is apparently the right to receive government money without restrictions.

And we cannot ignore the fact that other Americans have sincere religious disagreement with the positions being promoted by the bishops. Are the rights of conscience of those who take a different stance on the disputed issues to be dismissed as illegitimate?

To be sure, these are not easy questions to answer. Certainly institutions should not be compelled to act against their religious mission. Yet, the state does not have an implicit obligation to fund them. The Church can assert its right speak in the the public square, but it should not assume power it does not have in order to force the rest of society to follow its lead.

In 1773, a Baptist minister in New England observed that where “church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued.”

That separation should not be torn down in the name of religious liberty. I hope that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops will keep this in mind as it begins its new chapter of advocacy in Congress, and recognize that they are not the arbiters of morality in the nation, but rather are one of many organizations representing the broad spectrum of belief and non-belief in the United States.

(Click here to read Archbishop William T. Lori’s speech at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.)

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Druidry to be classed as religion in Britain (BBC)

EXCERPT:

UNITED KINGDOM — Druidry is to become the first pagan practice to be given official recognition as a religion [in Britain]. The Charity Commission has accepted that druids’ worship of natural spirits could be seen as religious activity. The Druid Network’s charitable status entitles it to tax breaks, but the organisation says it does not earn enough to benefit from this.

The commission says the network’s work in promoting druidry as a religion is in the public interest. The move comes thousands of years after the first druids worshipped in Britain. Druidry was one the first known spiritual practices in Britain, and druids existed in Celtic societies elsewhere in Europe as well.

Phil Ryder, chairman of the trustees of the Druid Network told the BBC: “It’s nice to have that official recognition. It’s not why we applied originally. We applied because we were legally obliged to do so.”

He said the organisation represented around 350 people who had paid £10 each for membership but referred to a BBC Inside Out investigation from 2003 which suggested that up to 10,000 people described themselves as druids.

He added: “You have to apply [for charitable status] if you’re an organisation that is taking money off people because the Inland Revenue want to know what you’re doing with it.”

BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott says that with concern for the environment growing and the influence of mainstream faiths waning, druidry is flourishing more now than at any time since the arrival of Christianity.

Read the full article

Washington House of Representatives Attempts to Facilitate Union Take-Over of Religious Child Care Centers

By Michael D. Peabody, Esq.

So what’s the biggest threat to religious liberty? According to J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the answer is found in the strings attached to government funding of religious activity.  Earlier this month, during a speech for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, Walker said, “What the government funds, it always regulates. Government-sponsored religion is always bad for religion. How can we raise a prophetic fist with one hand and take government money with the other?”

The truth of Walker’s statement was underscored just last week when the Washington State House of Representatives passed HB 1329, now working its way through the state Senate, that cleared the way for unionization of private and most non-profit child care centers if they take government subsidies for as little as one child, and even declares the centers’ employees “government employees” for the purposes of unionization.

In fact, HB 1329 openly declares that “child care center directors” and “workers” are “public employees” for the purposes of collective bargaining, if at least one child attending the center received government subsidies.  It further declared that “solely for the purposes of collective bargaining, the Governor is the ‘public employer.’”

There is an exemption for large non-profits with more than 200 regional affiliates or that send more than $3,000,000 in “membership dues” to a national organization.  The term “regional affiliates” is not defined although it is believed to primarily be aimed at large organizations such as the YWCA.  Large churches might be able to escape through this loophole if they can claim that the local congregations count toward the total of “regional affiliates” and that money sent to the national organization counts toward membership dues, but that will not be an easy argument for most churches that happen to run child care centers to win.

The House analysis claims that the bill would allow private child care centers to continue to have the right to “chose, direct, and terminate” child care workers. However this is boilerplate language for most contracts between employers and employees and it is easy to foresee scenarios in which religious child care organizations would be required to work their way through the union grievance process and defend their religiously-based decisions to a non-religious entity.  How can a religious child care center fulfill its faith-based mission when it has to answer to a secular labor union?

At a time when child care is expensive and parents are having to work longer hours to make ends meet, religious child care centers that have accepted subsidized children are in a particularly precarious position.  Local child care centers are generally small, mission-focused organizations with little money to defend themselves at the legislature. Sponsors of HB 1329, including the labor unions, are banking on this government dependence to generate pressure to dive into the non-profit sector and take over religious employers.  In this case, the labor unions are on the verge of taking over an entire industry.

There are Federal laws which might pre-empt this legislation, or as an alternative, a basis for non-profit exclusion, as well as U.S. Constitutional considerations, but it could be years before these issues could be sorted out by the courts.  In the meantime, if HB 1329 passes in its current form, and barring any court orders stopping it from going into effect, religious child care centers might either have to accept unionization or close their doors.

While there are many good reasons why government funding is necessary, and it is not at all certain that HB 1329 will become law, I would not be surprised to see similar legislation cropping up in more states as labor unions take advantage of government strings to try to control the elusive non-profit sector.

More on government funding to come in a future newsletter.

For more information about HB 1329:

• Read the House Bill Analysis at:http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2009-10/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/House/1329%20HBA%20CL%2009.pdf

• You can track HB 1329 and read legislative summaries and materials athttp://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/Summary.aspx?bill=1329&year=2009
• Also, be sure to read NRLA President Greg Hamilton’s testimony, in opposition to HB 1329, that he presented before the Washington Senate’s Labor, Commerce, and Consumer Protection Committee on February 18, 2010 athttp://www.npuc.org/site/1/docs/HB_1329_Senate_Testimony_2-18-10.pdf

Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government (NY Times)

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups — and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

First, he recalled his own community service in Chicago, noting that it had been church supported.

Then he reminded listeners that it was President Bill Clinton who signed landmark legislation widening the role religion-based groups could play in government-financed programs, and Al Gore who in 1999 first proposed a full-scale religion-based initiative.

. . .

“First,” he said, “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion.”

That little phrase between the dashes — “or against the people you hire” — ignited a political explosion. “Fraud,” declared Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. “What Obama wants,” Mr. Donohue said, is “to secularize the religious workplace.” In its newsletter, the conservative Family Research Council called Mr. Obama’s position “a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds.” No less heated reactions came from the other end of the political spectrum, where the Obama proposal was denounced not for that short phrase but for what liberals saw as an abandonment of their principles and part of a suspicious move toward the center.

. . .

(Read the rest at NY Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/us/05beliefs.html?em&ex=1215403200&en=a09309a4e26fb70c&ei=5087%0A

NEWS / ANALYSIS: Obama to expand Bush’s faith based charities and support their right to hire/fire based on faith (AP)

Jennifer Loven of the Chicago AP bureau reports today that Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand the amount of federal social service funding that will be going to religious organizations that provide services to their local communities.

CHICAGO (AP) – Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans that would expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and – in a move sure to cause controversy – support their ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday at Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio. The arm of Central Presbyterian Church operates a food bank, provides clothes, has a youth ministry and provides other services in its impoverished community.

“The challenges we face today, from putting people back to work to improving our schools, from saving our planet to combating HIV/AIDS to ending genocide, are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. “We need all hands on deck.”

Read the full article at http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080701/D91L1BDO1.html

Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.,  described the faith-based initiative program in the July / August 2001 issue of Liberty Magazine, and had this to say:

True charity is ennobling of everyone involved, both those giving and those who receive. A government grant is ennobling of no one. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this more than 150 years ago when he called for the abolition of public relief, citing the fact that private charity established a “moral tie” between giver and receiver. But that tie is destroyed when the money comes from an impersonal government grant. The donors (taxpayers) resent their involuntary contribution, while the recipients feel no real gratitude for what they receive.

Private charities may find even fewer people contributing voluntarily. If people come to believe that government will provide the funding, they may decide that there is less need for their own contributions. This will result in a loss not only of money, but of the human quality of charity. As Robert Thompson, of the University of Pennsylvania, noted a century ago, using government money for charitable purposes is a “rough contrivance to lift from the social conscience a burden that should not be either lifted or lightened in any way.”

The result will be a substitution of coercive government tax financing in the place of compassion-based voluntary giving. That would mean an end to charity as we know it.

Read Michael Tanner’s full article at http://libertymagazine.org/article/articleview/266/1/28/

Take Money, Lose Faith – Seven Catholic Schools turned into public schools in Washington DC (Maryland Daily Record)

Charles C. Haynes points out the trap that religious schools can fall into if they decide to take government money.  For those of you who study the tight bonds between money and religious freedom, this story is a must-read. – Editor

EXCERPT:

On June 16, seven Roman Catholic schools in Washington, D.C., were transformed into seven public charter schools by a unanimous vote of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. It’s a conversion of sorts — only in reverse.

Other religious communities around the nation are already on the charter bandwagon, opening Arabic charters without Islam and Hebrew charters without Judaism. Not to be left behind, a Protestant minister in Harlem is pressing to start what he claims will be a religion-free charter in his church building.

Strange as it may sound, this is a hot new trend in education: creating faith-based schools without the faith.

Establishing a charter requires shedding overt religious identity because “religious charter school” is a First Amendment oxymoron. Although free from some regulations that apply to traditional public schools, charters are still public schools. That means they must be nonsectarian — neither promoting nor denigrating religion.

Read the full article at http://www.mddailyrecord.com/article.cfm?id=145829&type=Daily

Dobson says Obama has “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution and is distorting Bible; still won’t vote for McCain

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO – In a soon-to-be-aired episode of his non-profit, tax-exempt radio program “Focus on the Family,” Dr. James Dobson accuses Barack Obama of pandering to the “lowest common demoninator of morality” with his “fruitcake interpretation” of the U.S. Constitution and distortion of the Bible.

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Focus on the Family has invited both Obama and McCain to visit their campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  Obama apparently has not responded, and Dobson declined a meeting with McCain in Denver because Dobson wanted to bring McCain down to the FOTF campus so he could have a better idea of what their ministry is all about.

It is hard to guess whom Dobson is going to vote for, since he has said he could not in good conscience vote for McCain and associates Obama’s legal theory with a sugary Christmas confection.

This is not to say that Focus on the Family does not have some excellent resources for helping families and promoting good values in general, but sometimes it crosses a fine line.

For more information about this story, read an Associated Press article by Eric Gorski at http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gnLulDbwWGYGLiXlDW5hPiNMGMRQD91G3VJ80

Listen to Focus on the Family programs at http://www.focusonthefamily.com

 

Pastors Challenge the IRS: Using the Pulpit to Promote Candidates

During this hotly contested election year, some church pastors are deliberately promoting candidates, knowing that the Internal Revenue Service could remove their tax-exempt status as the result.

In Minnesota, Pastor Gus Booth, of the Warroad Community Church, not only promoted a candidate, but wrote to the Internal Revenue Service, told them what he was doing, and dared them to investigate.  He told his parishioners that a Christian could not in good conscience support somebody like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Pastor Booth would be well within his rights to participate in political activities at church, but only if he was willing to surrender his church’s tax exempt status.  In other words, he could say whatever he wanted, but only if his congregants were willing to donate without expecting their donations to be tax-deductible.

It is indeed ironic that separation of church and state, so far as the church is concerned, ultimately is enforced by the Internal Revenue Service.

Read more about Pastor Booth and his challenge to the IRS at ABC News:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5198068&page=1

See also Baptist Joint Committee:

http://www.bjconline.org/cgi-bin/2008/06/more_coverage_of_pulpit_initia.html#trackback