AOL News published an on-line debate on ADF’s Pulpit Initiative between myself and Barry Lynn from Americans United for Separation of Church and State. My article makes the point that ADF has been making since we launched the Pulpit Initiative in 2008, namely that the IRS has no business being the orthodoxy police and censoring what a pastor says in the pulpit.

Barry Lynn makes the same tired argument that he has made before; that churches voluntarily give up their right to speak out on candidates and elections when they take the gift of tax exemption from the government. The argument is so wrong that it borders on laughable.

Churches cannot be forced to give up their most basic freedoms simply because they obtain a tax exemption – something the government is constitutionally required to give anyway. Church tax exemption is the best way to preserve the proper role between church and state as I have previously argued.

It is ironic and telling that Americans United, an organization that claims to want to protect the “separation of church and state” should be arguing so strenuously for continued government entanglement and monitoring of churches. The current IRS regime of investigating and censoring pastors entangles the government in the internal affairs and workings of the church at its most basic level. Understanding this can only lead us to conclude that AU doesn’t want true separation of church and state as they claim. Rather, AU wants churches to be prevented by the power of the government from influencing government in any way. AU doesn’t want the state to be separate from the church. Instead, it wants the state to control the church.

Not only is AU’s view out of step and inconsistent with a basic understanding of the role of the church in American society, but it ignores hundreds of years of church history in America. Churches have been at the forefront of virtually every great and necessary social movement in our history including ending slavery, ending child labor, promoting women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement just to name a few. And it was churches and pastors who led the charge for independence during the colonial era. What would have happened if AU’s view of state control of churches was followed in the colonial era? It certainly would have been doubtful whether America would have achieved her independence had pastors kept silent. It was pastors who provided the communication to the people of the moral and Biblical basis for independence and many pastors led the way into battle to gain America’s independence.

AU’s view of the role of church in American society is a view of the state controlling churches and it is just flat wrong and harmful. Pastors must be free to preach from their pulpit without any fear of government censorship or control. Pastor, sign up today for the Pulpit Initiative and stand together with ADF to protect the constitutional rights of pastors and churches to preach freely from their pulpits.

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Many of us have been there - playing on the school playground when suddenly you find yourself in the cross-hairs of the school bully.  There you are minding your own business when the bully comes up to you and perhaps demands your lunch money or just wants to pick on you to satisfy their own cruelty.  Maybe you stood there with sweaty palms and a racing heart and gave in.  Or maybe you chose to fight back.  But the passage of time gives us a perspective that perhaps many of us lacked in those playground situations.  As we get older and more experienced in life we realized that the bully was really nothing more than a weakling who made up for his own weakness by being loud and obnoxious.  Perhaps that reality dawned on you if you refused to be pushed around by the bully and stood up to him.

Whatever the case, playground bullies still exist today, and one of the organizations that gets a kick out of trying to bully churches is Americans United for Separation of Church and State.  ADF was recently the subject of an AU blog post full of bellicose bullying.  AU basically yells at anyone who listens to them, that ADF’s Pulpit Initiative is a failure and that we should just give up.

Basically, AU’s blog post boils down to threats and intimidation by the “playground bully” of churches.  And bullying churches is something that AU is very good at.  Every election cycle, AU sends letters to churches trying to scare them into not addressing the issues of the day, and breathing threats that any church who crosses AU’s imaginary line in the sand will get reported to the IRS (put another way, “if you don’t do what I say, I’m going to tell…”).  AU also reports churches to the IRS that it believes have violated the IRS rules and regulations.  What AU doesn’t tell you, though, is that the IRS almost never acts on any complaints AU files.  And what they don’t tell you is that the only substance behind AU’s threats against churches is their own say-so, which doesn’t amount to anything and certainly is not in line with constitutional law.

AU says that the Pulpit Initiative is a failure yet they continue to yell and scream about it to anyone who will listen.  This is the classic behavior of a playground bully who knows deep down inside that his only method of control is to scare people and who actually understands a threat to their regime of fear and intimidation. Keep reading… »

The Florida Baptist Witness recently posted an article about ADF’s Pulpit Initiative.  ADF has been speaking to pastors and church leaders across the country about the Pulpit Initiative, and encouraging them to sign up for Pulpit Freedom Sunday on September 26, 2010. 

The Pulpit Initiative is an opportunity for pastors to speak scriptural truth from the pulpit without fearing government censorship or control.  Something is wrong in America when we allow the government to step into the pulpit and censor a pastor’s sermon.  Whether you believe that a pastor should endorse or oppose a candidate from the pulpit is not the issue.  The issue the Pulpit Initiative was created to decide is who gets to make that decision for churches.  We believe that it is solely up to a pastor and the church leadership to decide whether to address candidates and elections from the pulpit and the government should not mandate that churches remain silent on this issue.  The Pulpit Initiative is intended to remove the government once and for all from the decison-making process of what gets said from the pulpit of a church.  It is time to remove the government from the pulpits of America.

Have you taken time to look at the information on our website about the Pulpit Initiative?  Have you prayerfully considered becoming part of this important fight?  If not, why not do so today?  become part of the movement to regain the sanctity and autonomy of America’s pulpits.  Join ADF in the Pulpit Initiative.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a radical leftist organization bent on intimidating pastors and churches into silence is making noise about a recent radio appearance by Rep. Michele Bachmann.  Rep. Bachmann came right out and said what most pastors believe when she stated that Congress should repeal the Johnson Amendment.

Here is what she said, as reported by the Minnesota Independent, that has AU so worked up:

“The reason why clergy are afraid to be involved is because of an amendment that former President Lyndon Johnson passed when he was a senator from Texas… that stops 501(3)c [sic] organizations from saying anything political from the pulpit. Now, churches can be political from the pulpit. They can talk about issues all they want. What they can’t do is endorse a candidate from the pulpit. But the ACLU has been all over the backs of churches… Christian and Jews and people of faith are not second class citizens… but these radical leftist organizations have been intimidating Christians for so long and pastors don’t generally now that they do have the right to speak out from the pulpit. Congress should repeal that amendment from Lyndon Johnson… We need to repeal that and give Christians back their first amendment rights to free speech in the church.”

I say a hearty “Amen” to Rep. Bachmann’s comments!  The Johnson Amendment has been used for far too long as a tool of intimidation and coercion against churches and pastors.  That is why ADF launched the Pulpit Initiative - to allow pastors to speak freely from their pulpits without fear of intimidation and censorship from the government, or anyone else for that matter.

Click here to sign up for the Pulpit Initiative.  Stand with ADF and hundreds of other pastors across the nation to regain the right of pastors to speak freely.

The Catholic League reported on March 5th that the Kansas House of Representatives was considering a bill that would remove the sales tax exemption for churches.  It is unclear at this point whether the bill has any chance of success, but it raises an issue that has been assumed, but not debated much, in American history – should churches be taxed at all?

Jesus made it very clear that as citizens of whatever country we live in, we should pay our taxes.  But the question of whether churches should be taxed at all is a different question altogether.  And it is one that judicial case law has not discussed much.

It has been assumed from the foundation of our country that churches should remain tax exempt.  In 1890, Kentucky State Representative Whittaker summed up the sentiment nicely when he said, “Let an untaxed Gospel be preached, in an untaxed church house, from an untaxed pulpit; let the emblem of a crucified, but risen Christ be administered from an untaxed altar, and, as the spire points heavenward, . . . let it stand forever untaxed.”

In 1970, the United States Supreme Court noted the “undeviating acceptance given religious tax exemptions from our earliest days as a Nation.  Rarely if ever has this Court considered the constitutionality of a practice for which the historical support is so overwhelming.”  Walz v. Tax Comm’n of City of New York, 397 U.S. 664, 681 (1970) (Brennan, J. concurring).  The very next year, the Supreme Court noted that nontaxation of churches is undergirded by “more than 200 years of virtually universal practice imbedded in our colonial experience and continuing into the present.”  Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 624 (1971).

Churches, as nonprofit organizations, are exempt from taxes not because of the public benefits that churches provide, although that is also a reason for exemption.  Rather, it is their very existence as non-profit entities that justifies church tax exemption.  Taxation naturally applies to profit-makers, the generators of revenue upon which government depends.  In his book, Why Churches Should Not Pay Taxes, Dean Kelley makes a powerful argument.  He states, “Other entities, which are not in the wealth producing category to begin with [such as churches], do not need to explain why they are not taxed any more than do the birds of the air or the rivers that flow to the sea. . . .  [Taxation] would be pointless, since they are not in any meaningful sense producers of wealth.”

In fact, taxing such nonprofits discourages their existence and amounts to double taxation.  All citizens, whether or not involved in a church or other nonprofit, are taxed on their individual incomes.  As Kelley notes again, “To tax them again for participation in voluntary organizations from which they derive no monetary gain would be ‘double taxation’ indeed, and would effectively serve to discourage them from devoting time, money, and energy to organizations which contribute to the up building of the fabric of democracy.”

There are many more reasons why churches should not pay taxes, but just these few demonstrate that the Kansas legislature should never let this bill see the light of day.