The article states that Trinity's senior pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and it's pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, have endorsed Sen. Obama or attacked his opponent Sen. Hillary Clinton from the pulpit. If true, this would violate Federal tax laws governing non-profit activities. The article notes that a Baptist group is being investigated for endorsing Mike Huckabee's unsuccesssful bid for the Republican nomination. I remember recently an Episcopal church in California being investigated for too strong support of Sen. John Kerrey, President Bush's opponent in 2004.
The examples that the WSJ gives?
- On Christmas morning, Mr. Wright compared Sen. Obama's impoverished childhood to Jesus Christ's. "Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people, Hillary can never know that."
- During that Christmas morning sermon, Mr. Wright declared that Sen. Clinton "ain't had to work twice as hard just to get accepted by the rich white folk who run everything or to get a passing grade when you know you are smarter than that 'C' student sitting in the White House."
- On Jan. 13, Mr. Wright told the Trinity congregation that some people say, "'Hillary is married to Bill and Bill [has] been good to us.'" Mr. Wright continued, "No, he ain't!"
- During a sermon observed by a WSJ reporter on March 2, Mr. Moss III preached, "There was a non-Babylonian, a young man who heard the word of God and said, 'I have the audacity to hope!' Now the whole nation says, 'Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!'"
There's nothing wrong with preaching about social issues, in fact, I think its hard to preach the Christian faith without doing that. The line the law draws is that you don't endorse candidates or parties.
In my parish, we celebrate Independence Day on the Sunday before July 4. In 2006, I had the opportunity to preach that day and I talked about the idea that God is supporting one party or the other:
"Unfortunately, in our political life, the values of our faith seem to be held hostage by the right and ignored by the left. God is not a Republican; neither is Jesus a Democrat. Some people seem certain of their knowledge of God’s intention and believe that the Bible proclaims a particular strategy of governance, if not a mandate to vote for a party. Among Christians, some draw on parts of the Bible to claim that our duty is to preserve the values of society, while others draw on the Love Commandment—that we should love our neighbors as ourselves—to urge that our primary duty is to help our neighbor. One side calls its opponents 'Enemies of the faithful', while the other smugly dismisses its opponents as uneducated social illiterates. Both have truth, but not all of the truth.
"It is tempting at times to say that our political agenda is God’s agenda and that our perception of truth is God’s truth. Neither side—neither party—has the authority to speak for God. We must recognize that all of us are struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible and that none of us have a monopoly on the truth. Instead of talking like Christians as we attack each other and claim the other side is un-Godly, we would do better to act as Christians, confessing that God’s truth is greater than ours and great enough to include the truth of others. Conservatives and liberals alike can say that."
No one is saying that a church can't endorse a candidate, just that it shouldn't. The easy reason is that a church can lose its tax-exempt status. To me, the better reasons are that tying God's message to a candidate weakens the message and also that it insults the worshippers by implying that they need to be told who to vote for, because they can't decide on their own.
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