Separation Of The What, Now?
From the WSJ:
Pastors May Defy IRS Gag Rule
Legal Group Urges Ministers to Preach About Candidates
By SUZANNE SATALINE
May 9, 2008
A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics.Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz., nonprofit, is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity.
The action marks the latest attempt by a conservative organization to help clergy harness their congregations to sway elections. The protest is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 28, a little more than a month before the general election, in a year when religious concerns and preachers have been a regular part of the political debate.
It also comes as the IRS has increased its investigations of churches accused of engaging in politics. Sen. Barack Obama’s denomination, the United Church of Christ, has said it was under investigation after it allowed the Democratic presidential candidate to address 10,000 church members last year. Last summer, the tax agency said it was reviewing complaints against 44 churches for activities in the 2006 election cycle. Churches found to be in violation can be fined or lose their tax exemptions.
The section of the tax code barring nonprofits from intervening in political campaigns has long frustrated clergy. Many ministers consider the provision an inappropriate government intrusion, blocking the duty of clergy to advise congregants.
Alliance fund staff hopes 40 or 50 houses of worship will take part in the action, including clerics from liberal-leaning congregations. About 80 ministers have expressed interest, including one Catholic priest, says Erik Stanley, the Alliance’s senior legal counsel.
“The government should not be telling the church what it should or should not be saying,” says the Rev. Steve Riggle, senior pastor of Grace Community Church in Houston, who hopes to take part in the Alliance effort. Mr. Riggle says he told his congregation from the pulpit, before the Texas primary in March, that he was supporting former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for president. “As a pastor, a private citizen, I can speak for myself. The IRS cannot quench my voice,” he says. …
The separation of church and state is not a “gag rule.” If the churches feel that strongly, they can forgo their tax exempt status and do whatever they wish. Powerful institutions seem to thrive on this victimization ideology about rules that protect society at large (this is one example, privacy is another; actually, the Constitution has a whole list of them; you could look it up). But if they’re not the ones writing the rules, it’s practically downright evil.
May 10, 2008 at 12:40 pm
This has been a long time coming, and unfortunately the way it will play out will not go our way, because it’s going to come to a head over “gummint” stepping in to curtail (rightly, but that isn’t the point) specific churches. The specific point about non-political speech being specifically linked to tax-exempt status has either little bearing on people’s opinion, or something that they adamantly refute for more arcane reasons (not least being “Churches are churches, and are tax exempt quid pro quo.”).
So…fuck.
May 10, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Well, sounds like it’s all over, then! Me, I tend to think the law is sort of generally the point, as do these people who desperately want to change it. This is not a broad-based popular movement, except to the extent that churches are already overly politicized. The ADF, which is pushing this operation, is like the New York Yankees of Intolerance. This is a nasty rat-king of hard-core conservative Christian leaders whose M.O. is to strive for ever more conflation of religious and political power. They are the reason this stuff was written into the Constitution and written into law.
Again, it’s a case of respecting the Constitution or not. (You want to cede that to these people? I’d think it would be something worth thinking about at least. I know you get an earful at the holidays, but that’s no reason to presume everyone else should roll over. Is all your hope tied up in the Obama campaign this year?) For another take, here’s Tristero on the same piece:
This is the kind of off-year project that we’ll see plenty of if Barack is elected. I know your salt-of-the-earth types are inscrutable to me and my delicious maritime Italian coffee-swilling friends (all gay Prius-drivers, by the way), but I think “separation of Church and state” has a pretty nice, American ring to it and I’m thinking maybe, when not whiipped up to it by specious, inaccurate historical arguments, they kind of respect it. In general, outside the hardest centers of bigotry-as-political-clout, people are perfectly capable of thinking clearly enough to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. The statistics are always alarming, but I’m guessing there are a lot of people who would admit they wouldn’t want other religions to have the kind of sway over them that these most aggressive leaders want (and have) over the rest of us. We should be preaching tolerance and keeping the government out of the churches wherever we can; but that means keeping churches out of government, too, which is the problem these folks have. Yet another case where the Constitution is just an inconvenience to them; they have so much and still have to grasp for more. Isn’t there something in the bible about that?
May 12, 2008 at 10:47 am
You know, for all your astuteness, you have incredible ability to conflate what I say. So I’ll try again:
1. OF COURSE we should maintain separation of church and state, and we need to bring this fight to them, and by no means am I willing to cede anything here. But fighting is different from winning. By every rhetorical metric I can imagine (not the same as voting/demographic metrics, mind you), we’re going to lose a lot of battles here. I’m still optimistic that we win the war.
2. The way the rhetoric of this works out, is that any (absolutely righteous) pushback against either (1) churches abusing their tax exempt status or (2) churches attempting to cede that status altogether in order to do some real politicking; will be branded as the works of “radical” secularists/atheists (which are conflated in their view) attempting to destroy God or any mention of God in the public sphere. It will get lumped in with the fight over Nativity displays, the Ten Commandments, the pledge, etc. Millions of marginally informed voters, some of whom may even be merely centrist churchgoers, won’t see what you and I see here. Although they are more than capable of understanding and approving of secularism as we understand it, that’s not how it will play, in my view (I hope I’m wrong).
3. To this end, our primary outrage/action should be focused on targeting the overwhelming majority of the church-going public who would under normal circumstances oppose this sort of thing. We should be reminding them that not only are these people the lunatic fringe, and they don’t care for/about the Constitution at all, most of the time they don’t even use their power to instill “family values” anywhere, but rather to support far-right economic reforms/regimes (paging Pat Robertson). I hope it works, but the folks most upset by this (like you and me) are largely outsiders. We need insider allies.
I guess really I don’t disagree with you at all, except in a matter of how I think the message (and tone) must be delivered, and to whom.