Blog from the Capital

One of the more insidious elements of the past weekend's Alliance Defense Fund efforts is proponents' conflation of the issue of candidate endorsement from the pulpit with the issue of speaking out prophetically on the concerns and events of the day. As ADF emphasizes freedom of speech generally, it glosses over its very real and precise goal - which is not denied - of engineering a test case to overturn the IRS' ban on advocacy for and against candidates by tax exempt organizations, allowing ministers to use the pulpit of the church to endorse candidates without threatening tax status.

And so, unaware writers, like the Austin (MN) Daily Herald's Wallace Acorn, who only just found out about the "pulpit initiative", are easily misled by ADF's platitudes. Unfortunately, that makes him skeptical of warnings by the Baptist Joint Committee and others.

What (the BJC) accuses ADF of saying, it did not say. The Committee’s executive director J. Brent Walker asserted: “An effort to recruit dozens of pastors to endorse political candidates from the pulpits on Sept. 28 is a misguided idea and a brazen attempt to blend the worship of God with electoral politics.” I searched for such a statement and found not anything like it but things distinctly different from it.

What I found from ADF is a declarative, not an imperative, statement: “Churches and pastors have a constitutional right to speak, truthfully from the pulpit—even on candidates and voting—without fearing loss of their tax exemption .”

But, ADF does say - quite clearly in some forums - that their intention is exactly as Brent describes. The original "pulpit initiative" documents solicit contact information from interested churches (that's the "effort to recruit"), they have a list of 33 churches *they selected* to support and advise (that's the "dozens of pastors"), and in their FAQ section, in response to this question (my emph) - What kind of commitment is required to participate? - They respond (again, my emphasis):

Each pastor will prepare and deliver a sermon on September 28, 2008 evaluating the current candidates for office in light of Scripture and church teaching and make specific recommendations based on that evaluation.

That last bit is the "endorse political candidates from the pulpit" part. Endorsement is the word that describes the "specific recommendation" that comes "based on evaluation" of "current candidates." So, they are recruiting churches for a campaign that "requires" pastors to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. They say as much themselves. Which part of Brent's description can be disputed? None of it.

What ADF would reject is his warning that such an effort is "misguided". But, instead of focusing on that argument, knowing that the majority of Americans do not believe ministers should endorse candidates from the pulpit, they blur the lines of their mission and sell it to the uninformed as merely a defense of "truth" and "honesty" from the pulpit. Who could be against that?

To be clear: the "pulpit initiative" is an effort to recruit a client for a lawsuit - at one point they practically offered to write the offending sermon themselves - to overturn the very specific IRS provision requiring tax exempt entities to refrain from political campaigning (advocating for or against a candidate). Any reading that suggests their goal is something less than that, or less precise than that, is not looking closely enough.