This sounds like something out of a religious leader’s worst nightmare: “The IRS signs a secret pact with atheists, promising it will investigate 99 churches.”
Unfortunately, this is not an imaginary headline from a bad dream. It’s the truth.
Pastors and ministers, if you decide to address volatile social issues from your pulpit, beware. Your church could be targeted next.
We recently learned that former IRS senior official Lois Lerner (she of the lost emails fame) had an open disdain for conservatives, referring to them as “crazies” and “a**holes,” and once writing, “We don’t need to worry about [illegal] alien terrorists. It’s our own crazies that will take us down.”
This helps to explain why, under Lerner’s leadership, “hundreds of conservative groups were subjected to intrusive questioning and years-long delays when they applied for nonprofit tax benefits – steps that were not taken against liberal organizations.”
This is what prompted Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice to title his recent column, “The IRS Thinks You’re a Terrorist.” And he was hardly exaggerating.
But that was not the really bad news, the news that seemed so farfetched that the title to Quin Hilyer’s article in National Review Online was “The IRS’s God Complex.”
According to the story, which somehow continues to escape the mainstream, liberal media, last Friday, the IRS “secured a final court order formalizing what amounts to a secret agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches.”
Previously, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) had taken the IRS to court, claiming that the IRS was turning a blind eye to churches that acted as “unaccountable Political Action Committees using tax-exempt dollars to influence the outcome of elections.”
They claimed to be speaking in particular of churches that took up the challenge of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a network of conservative Christian attorneys, to preach an openly political message on what the ADF calls “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” normally the first Sunday in October.
As the ADF had earlier explained, “Pulpit Freedom Sunday is a strategic litigation plan. Through tactical lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Alliance Defending Freedom seeks to restore the right of each pastor to speak scriptural Truth from the pulpit about moral, social, and governmental issues – as well as other topics concerning his congregation – without fear of losing his church’s tax-exempt status.”
It was this in particular that FFRF challenged in court, arguing that when roughly 100 church leaders addressed politically related issues from the pulpit over the last few years, the IRS turned a blind eye. (For background to the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which “explicitly prohibits non-profit organizations from engaging in campaign activity,” and which the ADF was challenging, go here.)
Now, it appears, the IRS will be turning a hawk eye toward these very churches. As announced with celebration on its website, “The Freedom From Religion Foundation has won a major victory: compelling the Internal Revenue Service to resume doing its job by policing tax-exempt churches that engage in illegal electioneering.”
Note carefully that word “policing,” then ask yourself the question: Would the IRS have made this known if the FFRF didn’t?
Potentially, this means that if a pastor speaks out against same-sex “marriage” or expresses his agreement with the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby against Obamacare, the IRS could accuse that pastor of engaging in “illegal electioneering.”
And while Dan Barker, co-leader of FFRF, could speak dismissively of “the hysterical disinformation machine that is Fox News Network, and the scaremongering claims of religious zealots such as Tony Perkins and ADF,” the fact is that the IRS’s deal with FFRF does indeed have major consequences for religious liberty.
As Hilyer noted, “In a 2012 letter to the IRS, for example, FFRF complained that Bishop Robert Morlino of the Madison, Wisconsin, diocese, had dared send out an election-season letter stressing the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage. The letter said that ‘no Catholic, in good conscience,’ may vote for candidates who are ‘pro-choice,’ who support same-sex marriage, or ‘who would promote laws that would infringe upon our religious liberties and freedom of conscience.'”
Bishop Morlino did this without endorsing a candidate or a political party. He merely reminded his parishioners of what the Catholic Church clearly taught.
But that was too much for FFRF, as if religious faith and moral choices never intersect, as if a faithful pastor can never address social issues, as if the church can have no intersection with daily life.
Can you imagine what American history would look like if Christian leaders in the 19th century did not lead the way in the fight against slavery – roughly 100 years before the passing of the chilling Johnson Amendment – and if groups like FFRF were around then to try to muzzle the church?
Can you imagine what our history would look like had there been a Johnson Amendment in force back then and had church leaders said, “We know that slavery is a hot political topic these days and we really do care about the suffering of the slaves, but we dare not risk losing our tax exemption”?
It is with good reason that Hilyer asked, “Is the Internal Revenue Service a threat to religious liberty?”
The answer is absolutely yes and absolutely no: Yes because this legal settlement with FFRF is clearly hostile to our freedoms; no because the IRS might try to take away our tax exemptions – although the ADF and others will surely fight them in court – but no one can take our away our liberties, and if we want to speak, we can.
I’m not talking about turning the church into a political machine, which I firmly oppose. I’m talking about the church being God’s prophetic voice to the world, a voice of conscience to the society.
From that perspective, we need only fear God, not the FFRF or the IRS or others, since no one can truly muzzle us.
We can only muzzle ourselves.
