January 26, 2006 | Read Time: 4 minutes
A group of Christian and Jewish religious leaders have asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate two large evangelical churches in Ohio, charging that they are breaking federal law by engaging in political activities.
The ministers, rabbis, and other leaders from 31 Ohio churches and synagogues say the Fairfield Christian Church, in Lancaster, and the World Harvest Church, in Columbus, are improperly campaigning on behalf of J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican candidate for governor of Ohio.
The religious leaders, who represent nine different denominations, said that the two churches have featured Mr. Blackwell at several of their events, held a voter-registration campaign designed to sign up voters who will support him, and distributed voter-education materials designed to sway people in Mr. Blackwell’s favor.
Under federal law, religious congregations and charities are prohibited from participating in partisan political campaigns in support of, or in opposition to, candidates for public office.
The evangelical churches have denied any wrongdoing. The Rev. Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church, said in a statement that the leaders should have brought their questions to him before contacting the IRS.
“Had they come to us directly, as people of faith are instructed to do in the Scriptures, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and embarrassment,” he said.
The leader of Fairfield Christian Church, the Rev. Russell Johnson, was not available for comment.
Exemption Review
In their letter to the IRS, the religious leaders asked the federal agency to seek a court order if the churches do not immediately halt any activities on Mr. Blackwell’s behalf. The religious leaders also requested that the tax agency look into whether the churches’ tax exemptions should be revoked and whether any church officials should be fined.
The Ohio complaint comes at a time when IRS officials are investigating 130 organizations, about half of them churches, for possible violations of election and campaign rules.
The latest complaint may represent the first time that religious leaders have publicly sought an IRS investigation of another church, legal experts said.
“This is an interfaith coalition of churches that feels churches should not be in politics,” said Frances Hill, a law professor at the University of Miami who specializes in nonprofit issues. “I don’t know of another case where churches have just said, Enough of this.” Active political campaigning by some religious organizations, she said, has “gotten so bad, so pervasive, so shameless, that churches are just saying, We’re going to do something about this ourselves.”
One religious leader who signed the letter to the IRS, the Rev. Eric Williams, senior pastor of North Congregational United Church of Christ, in Columbus, Ohio, said he felt he had little choice but to complain. “Whenever the line between church and state is violated, I’m worried that down the road my religious liberties are going to be limited,” he said.
Mr. Williams said he and others who signed the letter have been compiling instances of what they believe amounts to political campaigning by the evangelical churches since last fall. He said they were moved to take action by the news that the IRS is investigating an Episcopal church in California to see whether an antiwar sermon in 2004 violated the ban on political activity. That investigation has prompted charges from some members of Congress that the IRS is politically biased, which the agency denies (The Chronicle, November 24, 2005).
Marc Owens, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who helped the religious leaders draft the petition, said the IRS appears to be enforcing the law against charitable political activity unevenly.
Mr. Owens — who also represents the California congregation, All Saints Church, in Pasadena — said a single sermon at All Saints resulted in an IRS audit. But, he said, the revenue service appears to have taken no action against the two Ohio churches. “It’s odd that you see these disparities,” Mr. Owens said.
Mr. Owens, who formerly headed the IRS division that oversees nonprofit groups, said one issue may be that the IRS does not investigate allegations of improper politicking by charities unless someone brings a case to its attention. The agency has no systematic way to identify churches or charities that might be violating the political-campaigning ban, he said. “The bottom line is they’re at the mercy of who complains,” he said. “If no one complains, it slips by.”
As is its practice, the IRS declined to discuss specific cases or complaints.
