Dr. Kennedy Testimony Before Congress - House of Worship Political Speech Protections Act

Statement of D. James Kennedy, President, Coral Ridge Ministries, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and
Senior Minister, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Oversight
of the House Committee on Ways and Means

Hearing on Review of Internal Revenue Code Section 501 (c)(3)
Requirements for Religious Organizations

May 14, 2002

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. On behalf of the thousands of people who have signed petitions asking Congress to pass the Houses of Worship Political Speech Protections Act—some of which you see stacked on the table before me—I am pleased to have this opportunity to address the subcommittee.

In the summer of 1954, Lyndon B. Johnson had a problem: What to do about powerful anti-Communist organizations threatening his Senate reelection. The answer proved amazingly simple. Just like Congress this past spring, Johnson figured out that the best way to deal with these “special interests” was to silence them.

So, on July 2, 1954, as the Senate considered a major tax code revision, Johnson offered a floor amendment to ban all nonprofit 501(C)(3) groups from engaging in political activity. Without hearings or public debate, his amendment passed the Senate on a voice vote. Johnson’s revision to the federal tax code was targeted at the nonprofit groups contesting his seat, but churches were caught up in the ban. In just minutes and without debate, churches, for reasons that had nothing to do with the separation of church and state, were stripped of their liberty to participate in America’s political life.

That will change if “The Houses of Worship Political Speech Protection Act,” introduced by Rep. Walter Jones, and cosponsored by 114 other Members, becomes law. Jones’ bill will reverse Johnson’s ban and return the protection of the First Amendment to America’s churches, synagogues, and mosques. Today, the hearing that never took place 48 years ago is convening as the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee considers this bill.

This legislation is a vitally important step in reversing a long-standing injustice whereby free speech seems to be protected everywhere except in the pulpits of our churches and other houses of worship. It will restore to churches a freedom and role that dates to America’s infancy. Nineteenth century historian John Wingate Thornton said that “in a very great degree, To the pulpit, the PURITAN Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence.”

The British would agree. Disgusted at the black-robed clergy’s prominent role in stirring the colonies to fight, the Redcoats called them the “Black Regiment.” And Prime Minister Horace Walpole declared in Parliament that “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” Walpole was most likely referring to John Witherspoon, who was a Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon, who was accused of turning his college into a “seminary of sedition,” was the most important “political parson” of the Revolutionary period, according to the Library of Congress.

During the Revolutionary era, it was graduates of Yale and Harvard, serving in churches across New England, who laid out the theology of resistance that made war with Britain inevitable. One of the most provocative and influential sermons preached was Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 “Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.” His message, quickly printed and read on both sides of the Atlantic, justified political and military resistance to tyrants and has been called “The Morning Gun of the American Revolution.”

When British General Thomas Gage attempted to silence the incendiary messages being preached by New England’s Black Regiment, one clergyman, William Gordon, declared in defiance that “There are special times and seasons when [the minister] may treat of politics.” To do otherwise was not possible for New England’s ministers, who had been faithfully applying God’s Word to every area of life since the first generation arrived in Massachusetts.

In the mid-nineteenth century, evangelical Christians were primary agents in shaping American political culture, according to Richard Carwardine, author of Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. “Political sermons, triumphalist and doom laden, redolent with biblical imagery and theological terminology, were a feature of the age,” he writes.

For example, one minister distilled the question before voters in the 1856 election as a contest pitting “truth and falsehood, liberty and tyranny, light and darkness, holiness and sin … the two great armies of the battlefield of the universe, each contending for victory.”

Language like that today might earn a visit from the Internal Revenue Service. It did in 1992 after the Church at Pierce Creek in Vestal, New York, placed a newspaper ad warning Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton for president. Such a vote, the ad warned in rhetoric echoing 1856, would be to commit a sin. The IRS took notice and three years later revoked the church’s tax exemption.

Aggressive toward Pierce Creek, the IRS has, at other times, looked the other way. In 1994, for example, New York governor Mario Cuomo campaigned for reelection on a Sunday morning at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem. “Cuomo was rewarded with a long, loud round of applause and an unequivocal endorsement from the pastor,” according to a Newsday report. The American Center for Law and Justice, which represented the Church at Pierce Creek, uncovered evidence at trial that the IRS knew of more than 500 instances where candidates appeared before churches, as happened with Gov. Cuomo and Bethel A.M.E., but took no action to revoke these church’s tax-exempt status.

The unequal enforcement of the existing law is just one of several reasons why scrapping the political activity ban altogether is a good idea. The political activity restriction is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, is vague and burdensome, and marginalizes churches at a time when America most needs a moral compass.

The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech….” Yet that is exactly what the Congress has done by silencing churches.

Nor is the political activity ban easy to obey. Not just endorsements, but voter education activities, such as voter guides that compare office-seekers on issues, may violate the ban if they are perceived as partisan. Even addressing moral concerns, such as abortion, from the pulpit during an election campaign may violate the IRS rule if abortion, for example, is under debate in the campaign.

With so much uncertainty and so much at risk, silence is, regrettably, the only option for the minister who wants to ensure that the IRS does not open a file on his church. But when Caesar’s demand for silence confronts the message of God’s Word, ministers are forced into hard choices. That’s what happened in Nazi Germany a generation ago. Many pastors submitted, and were silent. Others were not, and paid the price.

If, as has been asserted, we owe our liberties to the “moral force” of the pulpit, the censorship of that voice—for reasons that have everything to do with partisan politics and nothing to do with the separation of church and state—is a monumental mistake that should be quickly corrected. In a culture like ours, which sometimes seems on moral life support, the voice of the Church and her message of reconciliation, virtue, and hope must not be silenced.