Pulpit Freedom Sunday Marks Pastors’ Stand Against IRS Intrusion

• By Alan Sears
• Posted Sep 29, 2010
• 2 Comments »

It has been pointed out that events like our third annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday (in which nearly 100 pastors nationwide participated on September 26) sound less like the work of the Alliance Defense Fund, and more like the work of an Alliance Offense Fund.

But then, we’d hardly be of much use as defenders of religious liberty if we didn’t recognize and respond to threats to our First Liberty – even if those threats are not yet fully realized.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday is a day for pastors who are called to do so to resist an intrusive government by standing before their people and applying the truth of Scripture to the realities of our current political environment.

Since the passage of the so-called “Johnson Amendment” in 1954, the IRS has asserted itself to limit (through the threat of removing church tax exemptions) the speech of pastors in evaluating the character and positions of political candidates.  That slap in the face of our religious liberty, as protected by the First Amendment, is now so commonly accepted that many Christians blanch at the thought of a pastor broaching any topic that touches – even remotely – on politics.

This tacit agreement on the part of Christians to stay out of the political sphere ignores both the priority of protecting our religious freedom and the noble, centuries-old tradition of American pastors bringing moral context to the most volatile, far-reaching political questions of their day.  (Christian pastors were outspoken catalysts in sparking the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, to cite just two examples.)

The question at stake is: who should decide what is preached from the pulpit?  Government bureaucrats and regulators, or the church and its leadership?  True, many churches may not want their pastor addressing political topics – but that’s for those members, not outsiders, to decide.

“ADF is not trying to insert politics into the pulpit; we want to get government out of the pulpit,” says ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley.  “Pastors and churches shouldn’t live in fear of being punished or penalized by the government – in this case, the Internal Revenue Service.  Churches should be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to talk about.

“The IRS,” he adds, “should not be used as a political tool to advance the agenda of radical groups bent on silencing the voice of the Church and inhibiting religious freedom.”

As our friend Chuck Colson put it in his September 23rd Breakpoint column: “Even though the IRS has never revoked the tax-exempt status of any church that has violated the amendment, it has had a chilling effect on the free speech of pastors across the nation.  It’s now time to ask the question: Who decides what the church can and cannot say?”

Pulpit Freedom Sunday is just one event associated with our ADF Pulpit Initiative and ADF Church Project, two major initiatives aimed at reinvigorating Christians to reclaim some of the religious freedoms we have lost in recent years.  Please be in prayer for these crucial efforts.