Endorsing political candidates from the pulpit: Thus sayeth the Lord …
My friend Brian Lee, pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Washington D.C., has written an excellent critique of “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” at Real Clear Religion. Brian is a thoughtful political commentator and has spent years working for the federal government. Here he writes on the campaign to get pastors not only to speak to political issues this Sunday, but to endorse political candidates:
That’s what Jim Garlow and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) are urging preachers to deliver. ADF is promoting October 7th as “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” and is asking ministers to dedicate their sermons to explicit politicking. According to an online pledge, sermons should evaluate the presidential candidates according to “biblical truths and church doctrine,” and make a specific endorsement.
Lee reminds readers that the campaign has a specific goal: the defiance of IRS regulations.
ADF’s goal is to openly defy the 1954 “Johnson Amendment” to the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from making political endorsements. The provision has never been actively enforced, and by forcing the IRS to such action ADF hopes to trigger a court challenge and eventually have the provision overturned on constitutional grounds.
He also reminds us that it is highly questionable to call pastors to political activism when the very purpose of that activism is to defend a tax-exempt status. Jesus, after all, had something to say about the attitude of Christians toward mammon, taxes, and the rights of Caesar.
To be sure, the regulation in question is somewhat problematic and ought to be taken off the books. In fact, this is not a controversial opinion. Lee points out that drawing sharp lines between morality and religion on the one hand, and political speech on the other, as some seek to do, is an enormously problematic endeavor.
In our hyper-politicized age, the line between religious and political speech is an exceedingly difficult one to draw. Teaching on the morality of war and peace, on social issues including marriage, life, and finance are inherently political. It’s not clear who in the IRS is qualified to evaluate religious speech for its political content, or what the political support would be for committing a few thousand IRS agents to enforcing this ban….
The primary message the New Testament commends to preachers — “Christ, and him crucified!” — is scarcely a political one. But this doesn’t mean preachers should be constrained from speaking politically. One care barely open one’s mouth on a moral question of the day without giving political offense, and no one would suggest God’s word has nothing to say on these matters.
Well said. The church cannot allow the world (or politics) to determine what it can and cannot say. On the other hand, as Lee points out, the vast majority of pastors refuse to endorse candidates from the pulpit (although African American pastors are somewhat more willing), not because they don’t have concrete opinions, but because they take their charge to preach only the word of Christ so seriously that they wouldn’t dare pollute that word with what Calvin would have called their own fictions and opinions. Lee writes,
Clearly, many pastors are constrained by the sanctity of their office, and in particular, the pulpit. They recognize the very real tradeoff that in our polarized age political speech may offend and drive off many members of the flock they are called to shepherd…. But the further the minister of the word ventures from the claim of “thus sayeth the Lord,” there is a spiritual and political price to be paid. We risk squandering moral authority and offending the politically disaffected.
Note that Lee is not simply making the pragmatic point that we don’t want to offend people (though he is saying we should not needlessly offend people; the offense should come from the word of Christ, not from our own opinions). He is pointing out that the more political pastors get in their preaching the more they destroy their own credibility. The very authority of the word is at stake here.
“Pulpit Freedom Sunday” is a terrible idea.
Posted on October 5, 2012, in 2012 election, Preaching, Religious Liberty, Two Kingdoms and tagged Alliance Defending Freedom, Brian Lee, Christ Reformed Church, endorsing candidates in church, IRS, Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Bookmark the permalink. 10 Comments.
Well said. And I couldn’t agree more. A quick anecdote. When I was doing my doctoral work at the U. of Pgh. back in the late 80s, I had to take a few classes over at the very liberal Pgh Theological Seminary. In one seminar I argued precisely this point against the political activism of the moral majority, especially the activist pastors who were all but endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. I thought on THAT point, at least, I would get some agreement.
Guess what. A black woman in the class went bonkers telling me that I was “silencing” the black church blah, blah blah, which had a history of that sort of thing, blah,blah blah. I was truly shocked because I really was making an argument for LAY activism but not for CLERICAL activism and I was focusing my criticism on Falwell and co.
And in fact, since then, I’ve come to see that however much more conservative pastors aligned with Republican politics get involved with the down-and-dirty of Republican party politics, it isn’t even close to what happens in the Black church wrt Democratic party politics. Not even close. Ever heard of “walking around money’?
which is not to say that “we” should do it, because “they” do. We shouldn’t. But we should point out the hypocrisy of those who complain when conservative pastors do the same thing that the Black church has been doing without criticism for decades.
Keith, your anecdote actually goes a fair distance in making the point that Protestant liberals and religious rightists have much more in common than either would be willing to admit. And both are viscerally opposed to confessional Protestantism, which suggests that perhaps the PLs and RRs could be subsumed under the banner of evangelical. All of which might also give pause to cultural Calvinists who recoil to various degrees against the concept of the spirituality of the church and retain some notion that the gospel has a direct and obvious bearing on the cares of this world.
How does ADF not see the irony of telling preachers what to say on “Pulpit Freedom Sunday”?
I agree. Terrible idea.
Jason,
I guess the ADF takes itself too seriously to sense any irony here. Pretty sad.
Well, no one is saying what the church can and can’t say. The law simply says that if you do say certain things you lose a tax exemption.
IMO Caesar is wiser than the churches on this issue. http://presbyterianblues.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/blessed-are-the-tax-collectors-11222011/
One valid reason for the law is to simply help the tax man to distinguish what kind of group he is looking at. Is this a church or is it a political organization? And if they want to give a tax break to the former but not to the latter I’m not complaining.
Lack of enforcement has certainly undermined the law. I’d like to see splashy enforcement against a leftist church and the same against a right wing church.
The real underlying concern here is an application of what happened to Bob Jones University in 1983, when the school’s policy forbidding interracial dating was viewed as so contrary to public policy as to cost them their tax exempt status.
Beyond underlying concerns for freedom of expression, my suspicion is that a prime concern of these groups is a future where a church might lose tax exempt status based on its stance on gay marriage.
I agree with you, Donald.
I think the underlying fear is that the tax code might someday move from barring endorsement of specific candidates to barring preaching on specific issues such as homosexuality. The Bob Jones University case, as much as I detest their historically bigoted position, created a terrible precedent.
The old principle is true that great cases make bad law.
While I don’t agree with the current tax code as a matter of principle, it’s worked out relatively well in actual practice because it doesn’t bar issue advocacy by 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations, only explicit advocacy of a political candidate.
God is very clear in His word about a number of issues, some of which have direct political implications, though most do not. While we may have some pretty good and pretty well-founded opinions about which political candidate is best suited to implement those biblical positions, we have no inerrant wisdom from the Lord about whether a candidate who claims to support biblical views actually plans to fulfill his promises. Things become even messier when we have an inexperienced candidate who believes the right things. Even if he isn’t lying, is he the best-qualified candidate to actually accomplish what he says he’ll do?
The bottom line is that we ought not to be preaching opinions from the pulpit, only doctrines clearly founded on the inerrant Word of God, and in almost all cases that precludes endorsements.
Obviously there are exceptions. The Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party, prior to World War II, declared that it would excommunicate members of the Dutch Nazi Party. Some Reformed churches were willing to excommunicate slaveowners prior to the Civil War on the grounds that they were “manstealers” (I TIm 1:10). Sometimes the choice may be so stark that the church can and should take a partisan stand.
However, only in truly extreme cases does it make sense to endorse a political candidate from the pulpit. I do not believe this year is sufficiently extreme to warrant it, and if the case isn’t clearcut enough this year, I can’t think of any election in my life where the choice was more clearcut. Granted, this election might make a case for an anti-endorsement against Obama, but Romney is, at best, the lesser of two evils. I know enough people who cannot vote in good conscience for Romney that I would be very uncomfortable seeing a Reformed church tell parishioners that it is God’s will to vote for Romney rather than, for example Virgil Goode or some other third-party candidate.
That’s not a Constitution Party endorsement, BTW, just saying that conservative pastors need to consider the conscience of people who not only oppose Obama but also believe Romney doesn’t meet biblical standards and cannot be supported. The least that can be said is that his record on key conservative Christian issues was problematic before he left the Massachusetts governor’s office and decided to run for president in the 2008 race.
For a church to move beyond teaching on issues and try to advocate specific candidates is fraught with serious peril.
BTW, no slam against Pastor Lee. I visited his church in DC and was happy to do so. Good worship, good folk, and even an exceptional building.
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