Religious Groups and Tax Experts Battle Over Campaign Rules for Clergy Members

Two religious factions are battling over the separation of church and state and the federal tax code.

On one side, the Alliance Defense Fund, a nationwide conservative legal-advocacy group, says it has recruited nearly 40 pastors to endorse a political candidate during their sermons on Sunday, September 28.

While that could result in an investigation and penalties from the Internal Revenue Service, the alliance is seeking to push the issue into the courts to challenge federal rules. The group has promised to provide legal support for the churches that face legal action.

“The government has no business being in the pulpits of American churches telling pastors what they can and cannot say,” said Erik Stanley, a lawyer for the alliance.

On the other side are a small cadre of Ohio pastors and former IRS officials who support the current limits on electioneering by nonprofit groups. They are asking the IRS to stop the alliance from soliciting churches and investigate whether its appeals are legal.

Pastors shouldn’t be getting tax-free dollars to promote a partisan agenda, said the Rev. Eric Williams, of the North Congregational United Church of Christ, in Columbus, Ohio. Rev. Williams and his supporters also are recruiting others to preach on the importance of the separation between church and state on Sunday, September 21.

Ban on Partisanship

The inherent tensions between religious groups and political advocacy date to the nation’s beginnings, but it was not until the 1950s that Congress restricted political speech by tax-exempt organizations, including churches.

Under IRS rules, churches and other nonprofit organizations are allowed to promote voter registration and distribute information on political issues. But they are required to do it in a nonpartisan fashion that doesn’t favor one candidate or point of view.

Religious groups have increasingly been chafing at those restraints, and the federal government has been paying closer attention. As a result, in 1992, the IRS began to send out election-year information on what kinds of political activities churches are allowed to engage in.

During the 2004 and 2006 election cycles the IRS has made a special effort to monitor and enforce the regulations on nonprofit campaign activity. Nearly three-quarters of the complaints in 2004 involved improper political activity, the agency reported. In 2006, the number of complaints rose by more than 42 percent, but the agency found that far fewer cases warranted an investigation, and no church lost its tax-exempt status after either election.

The Alliance Defense Fund, which doesn’t endorse candidates itself, isn’t asking churches to simply flout the law, but to challenge the constitutionality of the restrictions, said Mr. Stanley.

The alliance also isn’t seeking to allow churches to engage in a broader variety of electioneering, such as holding political rallies. “We’re not trying to turn the church into a political action committee,” Mr. Stanley said.

Suzanne Ross McDowell, a Washington lawyer, said that the courts already have ruled that the political restrictions on charitable groups are acceptable.

“This certainly smacks of civil disobedience,” she said of the alliance’s plans. “Whatever you call it, they’re certainly intentionally breaking the law.”

But the IRS is also in a difficult spot in deciding how to enforce the law and what penalty would be proportional to the infraction, she explained. While monetary penalties can be assessed for improper political expenditures by nonprofit groups, the agency would have to decide how to correct what could be a single sentence within a sermon, said Ms. McDowell.

“I suppose a minister would have to eat his words,” she joked.