On Monday the IRS released a court filing reinterpreting the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits any tax-exempt non-profit organizations from participating in political campaigns.
Churches and agencies have always been free to advocate for particular policies, but were previously banned from raising money for or endorsing specific candidates.
For years, many white evangelical churches and Christian broadcasting companies have been challenging that ban, filing lawsuits and participating in annual “Pulpit Freedom” Sundays when pastors recorded themselves endorsing political candidates from the pulpit during worship and sent those recordings to the IRS.
The government almost never prosecuted offenders.
Now the IRS has made the implicit carve-out explicit, granting pastors permission to endorse political candidates from the pulpit.
I still won’t be. Because it wasn’t fear of jeopardizing my church’s tax exempt status that kept me quiet. It was fear of God.
When I heard the news, I was studying a passage from the prophet of Amos in preparation for a leadership meeting. Amos is what the scholars call a peripheral prophet, meaning he was an outsider, sent to preach to the Kingdom of Israel, even though he wasn’t an Israelite.
God famously sent him in with a vision of a plumb line, a weight suspended from a string to tell if a line is straight, because the people were so morally malformed that they could no longer tell the difference between crooked and straight.
It went about as well as you’d expect.
Nobody wants to hear that God is angry about injustice and exploitation of the powerless, which is the general message of the Hebrew prophets. But they especially don’t want to hear it from a stranger who isn’t from around here.
Which begs the question, why weren’t the local prophets sharing the unsettling news that God was demanding reform? Because, over time, the Israelite prophets had stopped speaking for God and started working for the King.
They used God’s name to push the government’s agenda.
The book of Amos includes the threats made by the head prophet Amaziah, who demands that Amos quit preaching “against” Israel and go back to where he came from because “this is the King’s sanctuary and the temple of the Kingdom.”
Honestly, I don’t have strong opinions about whether the IRS should sanction faith communities for endorsing particular candidates. People have been doing it for decades. The change in the tax code probably won’t make a significant difference in practice.
Faith communities can and must be political, our beliefs and values should shape the way we live.
But it’s terrible when faith leaders become partisan, teaching their folks to be devoted, not to God, but to a particular political party. It’s only a short step from there to teaching people that a certain political party is God.
