Back Door Pulpit Politics Pushes Right

If ever there was a need for the American system of government to enforce its laws and regulations, the current, organized defiance of rules against using church pulpits for political purposes is it!

Everybody needs to get the message – clearly – that the church cannot ever use the pulpit to endorse or defile a political candidate. Endorsing or vilifying a candidate is forbidden, so much so that the churches found guilty can lose their tax-exempt standing.

But pastors are taking presidential stances, saying they will challenge the tax take away before the courts. Currently there are 33 pastors in 22 states getting some legal help from the Alliance Defense Fund in Arizona. Leaders of the ‘Christian Right’ founded the ADF with the clear goal of pursuing a conservative agenda. The ADF is a 501C public charity and declares it’s “a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding and litigation.”

The key to the organization’s goals is the capitalization of truth. The ADF isn’t pursuing so-called freedom of the pulpit to advance balanced freedom of speech, it is engaged solely to promoted a defined “Truth,” and further defines this as “a servant organization that provides the resources that will keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel through the legal defense and advocacy of religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and traditional human values…”

Back in 1954, the Internal Revenue Service set the rule that churches could have nothing to do with endorsing or opposing any candidate. Now the Alliance Defense Fund is ready to challenge this tax rule. The plan was revealed September 29 by Los Angeles Times writers Bob Pool and My-Thuan Tran.

At first blush, of course, the normal reaction is to assume that the IRS will quickly react to investigate and file complaints, and that will be followed by Justice Department prosecution, seeking to make short work of these preaching rebels, especially since they are choosing to violate the rules prior to an important national election.

But there are mitigating factors, and clearly one of them is that the Bush Administration has shown itself sympathetic to conservative Christian interests. Perhaps, of course, the wheels of justice simply couldn’t move fast enough no matter what, but it is reasonable to assume that if the pulpit challenger were considered a priority at least the public would see the IRS and Justice pursuing the issue. So far, that’s not the case and of course the election is only weeks away as the preachers seek to sway their congregations.

By the time the cases come to court, if in fact they do end up in court, the damage to the concept of church and state separation will have been accomplished.

Dogma vs. democracy – the two cannot steer one institution. They can coexist in separate entities. But only one can prevail in a single organization.

Power is tantalizing and it can be addictive. To allow churches to wade into politics without fear of losing their institution’s tax exempt status is to tempt both fate and faith. Already, as many churchgoers understand, priests and pastors often step over the line and talk about local elections, and sometimes go much further to speak of state and Congressional elections. But the third rail is presidential politics. This has long been where churchmen have been most hesitant, largely because it is where they might receive the most formal complaints.

To consider the potential that the ADF and its 33 test case pastors are trying to achieve, it is only necessary to remember that those church leaders, across 22 states, will have an opportunity to address thousands of churchgoers and all will at least intimate that they have the will of God on their side. Churches do not have opinions that can be swayed by argument; by their sheer fabric churches keep strict rules. They are not structures that can reshape themselves.

Preachers can and often do say they are speaking their own mind, not preaching God’s word, but the congregants gathered before them cannot be expected to clearly differentiate the given point since it is being made from the same pulpit, from the same messenger and with the same claim to religious correctness that the minister carries.

Take the preaching of the Rev. Wiley S. Drake, who presides over the First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, California.

"According to my Bible and in my opinion, there is no way in the world a Christian can vote for Barack Hussein Obama," Drake said. "Mr. Obama is not standing up for anything that is tradition in America." Rev. Drake argued that his congregants should vote for Alan Keyes of the American Party. Others of the cloth who have been recently quoted have opted for Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin.

While acknowledging that there are many independent thinkers who attend church, it is also possible to realize that there are percentages of people who are faithfully in church regularly and who generally follow what the church teaches, since they have chosen their particular church because they get spiritual reinforcement. Preachers know this. They know it all too well.

Some ministers believe the churches have the same right to free speech as any individual citizen, and they conveniently forget or overlook the power position they assume and hold when they take the pulpit in a church.

Erik Stanley, Alliance Defense Fund senior legal counsel, says, “If the 1st Amendment doesn’t protect controversial speech, it protects no speech at all.” Stanley will help churches get their free speech rights, he says, but what he is trying to effect is to give the power and weight of the word of a supposed representative of the Lord – the priest or pastor – to a secular construct: making the church a government.

By putting a church blessing or curse on any government activity, the religious authority commits a horrible sin: it seeks to rob parishioners of their own independence of mind, their own independent reasoning regarding how they would be governed, and it does this through the implication of guilt if one does not follow the guidance of the church and its spokesman. Church thought, which is faith, supplants cogent thought. And when various religious groups differ – and they do specifically because churches are founded to escape other church’s laws – there is inevitably religious war.

American forefathers saw this problem clearly and made a secular government the cornerstone of the Constitution’s Amendments. Expressly the Congress is barred from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”

An American government is ruled by laws. Religion is ruled by divine word.

The United States must keep church doctrine separate from the state. If that separation is dropped, the nation turns into a hotbed of religious groups trying to get their ideas made into law. Of course the result will be factions of faith-based voters trying to win the country for their specific deity.

If clergymen claim free speech as American citizens, they have to give up any power of speaking for their deity absolutely. No one can hold both tongues. Justice officials need to make a big deal out of this challenge, and assure that church and government stay unconnected – forever and absolutely.