Pastors to ignore separation of church and state

Here

NASHVILLE — On Sunday, a group of 100 preachers nationwide will step into the pulpit and say the only words they're forbidden by law from speaking in a church.

They plan to use the pulpit as a platform for political endorsements, flouting a federal law that threatens churches with the loss of their nonprofit status if they stray too far into partisan politics.

While other church and nonprofit leaders cringe at the deliberate mix of the secular and the religious, participants in the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday protest hope this act of deliberate lawbreaking will lead to a change in the law.

"For governor, I'm going to encourage people to vote for Bill Haslam," said David Shelley, pastor of Smith Springs Baptist Church here, one of seven Tennessee religious leaders who plan to take part in the pulpit protest. He also will throw his support behind a Republican congressional candidate and a Republican statehouse candidate and urge his congregation to skip the spot on the ballot where a Democratic state senator is running unopposed.

"My support for these candidates has nothing to do with their party or their skin color or any other nonbiblically related issue," he said.

Shelley knows he runs the risk of provoking the Internal Revenue Service into revoking his 60-member church's tax-exempt status. In fact, he's hoping the IRS will try. But this is the second year he's baited the IRS from the pulpit, and still the agency has not risen to the bait.

"We're not trying to get politics in the pulpit. We're trying to get (government) out of the pulpit," said Erik Stanley, spokesman for the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based nonprofit that maintains linking a church's nonprofit status to its nonpartisanship is an unconstitutional restriction on the free speech of the clergy.

"This is about a pastor's right of free speech," Stanley said.

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But many mainstream churches recoil from the idea of erasing the line between church and state.

"It puts congregations in an awkward position. It's not a wise thing for churches to endorse candidates. We think candidates should endorse us," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Land said the church endorses many of the defense fund's initiatives, but "we think the mixing of the sacred nature of the church with the exceedingly worldly nature of politics is. .. unseemly."

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I gotta say, a surefire way to keep government out of the pulpit is to bring government into the pulpit. These guys got it figured out. Tax these fuckers already.