Here’s a group of pastors that will be going to jail soon, and deservedly so:

“CHICAGO — Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.

The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.”

You can read the whole article over at the Washington Post.

Part of the agreement for a church to be tax-exempt is that they won’t make political endorsements. It’s the law of the land, and if their church is tax-exempt, they have made an agreement to abide by the law of the land. Your church is not entitled to be tax-exempt, it is a choice and an unnecessary one at that.

If you choose to incorporate, you are submitting to all the rules that that entails. That includes hindering the pastor’s ability to preach the whole counsel of God, and abiding by ANY OTHER RULES that your corporate master (in this case, the US Government), puts on you. If the government says you can’t endorse a candidate, otherwise you lose your tax exempt status, guess what? You’ve agreed to abide by that by choosing tax-exempt incorporation.

Here’s another quote from Art Fisher’s article: “IRS Publication 557 Sec. 508(c) provides that churches are not REQUIRED to apply for recognition of section 501(c)(3) status in order to be exempt from federal taxation or to receive tax-deductible contributions.”

Since these churches are incorporated as tax exempt “organizations”, the pastors have an obligation to abide by what their corporate masters tell them to. They could easily un-incorporate, which would show true obedience to God, and preach on whatever they want to. They’re supposed to be churches, NOT corporations.

Not only should these pastors be jailed for breaking the law (which they’ve agreed to abide by), they have ethically shown themselves to be liars (or ignorant of the laws they’ve submitted their flocks to out of greed), and their congregations should hold them to account for this. The lawyers involved know these laws inside and out, and know they will lose. But the Dobsonites obviously have deep pockets, so this political stunt in an election year will undoubtedly get a lot of attention in megachurches across the country.