The eCrozier

In case you haven’t heard, this Sunday, October 7, is Pulpit Freedom Sunday, declared so by The Alliance Defending Freedom, which I discovered through an exhaustive investigation on the Internet (actually, I just googled it). The Alliance Defending Freedom claims that there’s no constitutional basis for a separation of church and state. That’s a fiction, they say, posed by those who have an “aggressively secular agenda.” These nefarious fiction-mongers “have persuaded many pastors and church leaders that their God-given right to freely worship, freely speak their faith, and freely assemble with other believers is at the mercy of bureaucrats” (presumably from the IRS). The purpose of Pulpit Freedom Sunday, as its leaders describe it, is to liberate preachers so that they will without fear openly endorse specific candidates or political parties.

This is creating a nonexistent crisis. I completely agree that it’s debatable whether or not the Constitution asserts a separation of church and state. The 1st Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So, reasonable and thoughtful people can debate whether there’s a so-called “wall of separation” in this amendment. Of course, the term “wall of separation” isn’t even in the Constitution. It comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to members of the Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association in 1802.

But that’s not what The Alliance Defending Freedom is really concerned about. They’re creating a straw man. Today, any preacher is completely free to preach whatever he believes his faith calls him to preach. Our government, we must know, doesn’t stop preachers from preaching. Pulpit Freedom Sunday is stirring up people, out of their ignorance, to think that the awful government, led by aggressive secularists, will swoop in and arrest these martyr-preachers. Like with a lot of deliberate misdirection, we should follow the money.

The real issue is tax-exempt status. Yes, if a preacher endorses a particular candidate, then his church is in danger of losing tax-exempt status. If churches and other similar non-profit organizations want the benefit of not paying taxes, then they must refrain from political partisanship. But that doesn’t muzzle them as The Alliance Defending Freedom claims. All they have to do is give up their tax-exempt status. If these self-proclaimed “defenders of freedom” really felt as strongly as they do, then they’d gladly give up their tax-exempt benefit in order to make their partisan pronouncements. If they did that then I’d have respect for their conscience and conviction. But they won’t do that, because this isn’t really about religious freedom at all. It’s all about the money.

Preachers should preach on important political issues if, in their discernment, Jesus’ Gospel relates to those issues. And any preacher worth her/his salt can do that freely without telling people who to vote for. So, I say to preachers: Preach the Gospel and then trust Jesus’ disciples to vote their Gospel-inspired conscience. The Alliance Defending Freedom must think Jesus’ disciples are so infantile that they can’t discern for themselves. They’re the ones undermining the real religious freedom of disciples.

+Scott