Does the Constitution Prohibit the Johnson Amendment?
The short answer is...no. In today's installment of Barry Lynn v. Erik Stanley in the LATimes, the topic is "What does the Constitution Say?" Rev. Lynn responds to the charge that the prohibition against pulpit endorsements encourages government to micro-manage sermon content, in violation of the First Amendment:
We have a dazzling amount of freedom to express the most controversial viewpoints imaginable from American pulpits. We just can't have sermons converted into political advertisements for candidates.Also, there is very little "parsing" of sermons done by the Internal Revenue Service (with the exception of one case involving an Episcopal church in Pasadena, where I think the IRS initially made an erroneous conclusion about an endorsement after reading a sermon). Most of what the IRS investigates are the kind of egregious examples of electioneering that we sometimes report to them. Is it "free exercise" of religion to spend church collection plate money on an ad telling people not to vote for Bill Clinton? (Most people would say of course not. In this case, two federal courts also said of course not.) How about a pastor telling people to vote for Al Gore when he was running against Bill Bradley in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary in New York? (That minister got a visit by the IRS and admitted he had done the wrong thing.)