I’m not sure if this would belong under General Questions or what.
It seems traditional for political candidates to speak at African-American churches.
Doesn’t this violate the church’s tax-exempt status? Don’t these churches worry about losing that? I am a finance manager of a church, and we NEVER endorse a candidate or a position. We would never have a political figure speak during the church service, or even in the building at another time. People are encouraged to vote their conscience. Occasionally we support a cause, such as mosquito nets for Africa or something like that.
I’ve always wondered how these churches get away with it and why no one complains.
Well, at the least the church should be fair, in allowing all the candidates to speak. More of a Candidate Fair than just a speech by one candidate.
I was involved in a case where the church leaders were planning to allow only 1 candidate to speak at the church – even though the other candidate was an active member of the church!
They eventually backed down when a letter sent from our lawyer ‘accidentally’ included a draft copy of a complaint to the IRS, challenging their tax-exempt status. They never mentioned seeing that, but suddenly were willing to negotiate. Of course, they gave our candidate a lousy time, and tried various other nasty ways to discourage people from attending, but we expected that. (Very Christian of them!)
I think it’s very wrong. Both from the churches’ perspective and the candidates. The reasons are legion. The tax-exempt thing (which I oppose fundamentally, but this is a especially egregious case) and the separation of church and state are totally out the window. It panders to the lowest common denominator and any group that asks their constituents to vote in the favor of the organization as opposed to their personal needs is evil in my book. Consider also that the status quo essentially forces politicians to be religious it encourages them to be both duplicitous and hypocritical on the topic of religion when they should not be involved in it at all. In a way you can argue that it prejudices against minority (read: non-Christian) groups.
The entire situation is despicable on so many levels.
Make everyone live by reasonable rules, and then leave them alone.
It occasionally transpires that free people and institutions from time to time do things I might not like. If that bugs you, Omniscient, perhaps you ought to revisit your feelings on the subject of religious liberty in general.
Um, where did I say anything about religious freedom? I’m arguing against politics happening in a religious context. The founding fathers figured the separation of church and state was a good idea, I happen to agree with them. There are campaign rules in this government, I think there should be one restricting politicking on the pulpit.
Combined with the fact that as a tax-exempt entity, and therefore reaping the benefits of my tax dollars without recompense, I don’t want them supporting politicians.
Uh huh. But to prevent that, you have to restrict First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, and worship to some degree, don’t you?
Like I said, to some degree this has to be done - and we have done so by ensuring that churches aren’t used for partisan political purposes. But to go further we’d have to prevent candidates, clergy, and worshipers from doing things that in any just society they would be free to do.
I’ll throw out some examples - some people complained that certain funerals in recent years became too political. Would you restrict candidates or elected officials from attending these or delivering eulogies?
From time to time candidates appear in both parties who are ordained clergy - would you prevent them from running? Would you require that they stop preaching while they run?
This doesn’t just affect candidates - churches take explicit stands on a wide array of social and political issues and explain these positions to their followers. Do you feel this is inappropriate, and if so, why? And keep in mind that this sort of politics from the pulpit has affected every major political tide in this country, from abolition and civil rights to temperance, suffrage and the pro-life movement.
I’ve often wondered about this practice myself. Even though our church leadership may support certain causes, we are constantly reminded to vote our conscience, and never expected to vote alike, nor pressured to do so. Our denomination does take some political stands at times, but we are not expected to follow blindly, and we are not punished for thinking differently from the church doctrine…at least at the laity level. Ministers are held to a different standard, of course, and some conferences within the denomination have a reputation for being much more fundamentalist in their attitudes, but in general, it is pretty much not an issue if you believe or vote differently than the church hierarchy would like. That doesn’t appear to be the case in predominantly black churches, but I may be wrong. It just seems so odd to me to use the church building, nay, the very pulpit, as a speaker’s platform for political candidates.
Not as it applies to the church, only as it applies to the Candidates. Candidates are restricted on the types of TV ads and appearances they make and the amount of money that can be donated. They face all kinds of restrictions that a typical free American doesn’t, this is no different. The rules are intended to protect that election process and thereby protect the sanctity of the offices.
A politician being peddled by a church is no different than a politician being peddled by a lobby group.
I don’t care if the church stands up and commands that it’s followers vote for the scumbag du jour. I don’t care what causes they grandstand about. That’s their prerogative, though I would hope this abuse of their flock’s faith and trust would undermine them. I do however have a problem that candidates use this, and the fact that it’s use essentially requires elected officials to be of and practicing Christian faith.
Please prove to me that this is a job requirement.
I’ll make it easy on you - let’s stick with current elected senators and representatives. That should make the research easy to do, and allow us to judge based on a sufficiently large electorate.
Really?
My Congressman is a practicing Muslim, not a Christian. But he was still elected as a candidate, was sworn in (using Thomas Jefferson’s Koran for his photos), and is still serving as an elected official.
Unfortunately there is no database which lists our politicians faiths. It would make the process of investigating and proving it incredibly time consuming.
As it applies to the Presidential campaign, which is the context I should have limited my response to, it’s clear.
t-bonham@scc.net, what is the demographic of your district? Do muslims comprise a majority of the voting public?
Certainly the smaller the office and the less public the campaign the less this matters, the politician campaigning on the pulpit only really matters when there’s media there to report it to the masses.
The point is that a politicians religious affiliation should have no more bearing on their campaign for office than their hair color or their position on pet ownership.
Why not? People make value judgments based on someone’s religion or lack there of; it’s part of how we evaluate character, etc. I see no reason to exclude that from the mix.
Now, I may not weight it very heavily, but it certainly would factor into things if the person was a fundamentalist Christian running for school board or a Scientologist running for, well, anything.
The district is basically Minneapolis, MN and a few of the western suburbs. Including one that used to be commonly known as St. Jewish Park, for the concentration of jewish homeowners (possibly because realtors in other parts of the city wouldn’t sell to jews).
It is a very safe Democratic district, not having elected a republican in the past 45 years.
Isn’t this just a bit off-topic? The OP asked how churches can do this and still retain their tax-exempt status…not whether a candidate’s religion should matter. Is there no one on the board with any insight on this?
So can other tax-exempt groups have political speakers? Can my tax-exempt biking group have a candidate come talk to us about his proposal for bike lanes? There’s a lot of distance between inviting someone to talk and advocating for or against them.