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As Churches Get Political, IRS Stays Quiet - Reuters
As Churches Get Political, IRS Stays Quiet - Reuters
As Churches Get Political, IRS Stays Quiet - Reuters
Pastor Jim Garlow will stand before congregants at his 2,000-seat Skyline Wesleyan Church in La
Mesa, California, on Sunday, October 7, just weeks before the U.S. presidential and congressional
elections, and urge his flock to vote for or against particular candidates.
He knows such pulpit pleading could endanger his church's tax-exempt status by violating IRS rules
for a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. A charity can take a position on policy issues but cannot act
"on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office." To cross that line puts the $7
million mega-church's tax break at risk.
Even so, Garlow not only intends to break the rules, he also plans to spend the next four months
recruiting other pastors to do the same as part of Pulpit Freedom Sunday. On that day each year
since 2008, ministers intentionally try to provoke the IRS. Some even send DVD recordings of their
sermons to the agency.
Last year, 539 pastors participated. This year organizers expect far more. Participants want to force
the matter to court as a freedom of speech and religion issue.
"I believe we're on the early stages of the next great awakening," Garlow told his congregation last
year. "We're going to see it just sweep across this nation."
The situation is fraught with peril for the IRS, which needs to be seen as apolitical. When it cracks
down on political activities proscribed by the 501(c)(3) regulations, it is inevitably branded as
partisan.
When the target is a church, mosque or synagogue, enforcement puts two fundamental American
values at odds: freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. Although the agency has
enforced the tax-exemption rules against churches in the past, it has so far ignored the provocations
of Freedom Sunday.
The IRS has also been silent about the increasingly aggressive political activity of the U.S. Catholic
bishops, who have called for their own Fortnight for Freedom this week. Masses, rallies, and parish
bulletins are being mobilized against the Obama administration's healthcare regulations on
contraceptives.
The result of agency inaction, according to tax experts and former IRS staffers, will be a lot more
electioneering by leaders of the faithful, in local races as well as national, and to the benefit of
Democrats as well as Republicans.
"It will get worse unless the IRS takes action, and they seem reluctant," said Nicholas Cafardi, dean
emeritus and professor of law at Duquesne University and the longtime lawyer for the Catholic
diocese of Pittsburgh.
Cafardi called the current state of affairs "toxic" in its mingling of the two worlds. Many religious
leaders do not support the trend toward more political involvement by organized religion and worry
it will undercut their moral authority.
BILLIONS IN TITHES
The money involved is enormous. Combined, federal tax breaks on donations to churches and
exemptions from state and local property taxes likely add up to something on the order of $25 billion
in lost revenue each year.
Last year churches received $96 billion in tax-free contributions, according to estimates compiled by
the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Unlike other types of charities, churches do not have to file financial statements with the
government. There are only rough estimates of church endowment or investment income, which is
also tax-free and believed to be larger than annual contributions.
Using tax data from the U.S. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation and data on giving to churches
from the Indiana Center, a Reuters analysis found that tax breaks on church giving shaved $12
billion or so from total U.S. tax collections in 2011 and approximately $145 billion over the last
decade.
The property tax break is probably even bigger. In their 2011 book "Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit,"
law professors Nina Crimm and Laurence Winer calculated that houses of worship received $12.7
billion in property tax exemptions on $685 billion of property in 2006, a figure large enough to have
played a role in city and state budget deficits of recent years.
In big cities the numbers can be dramatic. New York City's 9,500 churches, synagogues, and
mosques, for example, will avoid $626.9 million in property taxes this year thanks to their tax-free
status, according to the city's Independent Budget Office.
Like most of California, La Mesa, where Garlow's Skyline Church is located, has suffered a steep
drop in property tax collections, forcing municipal staff cuts and a sales tax increase.
Skyline's campus, which is assessed at $7.3 million and cost a reported $27 million to build, is
almost entirely tax-exempt, according to the county assessor's office.
AN ERA OF ENFORCEMENT
The IRS has not always been quiet. In 1992 it went after the Church at Pierce Creek in Binghamton,
New York, which had bought full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic presidential
nominee Bill Clinton.
The church lost its IRS tax-exempt status but continued operating, changing its name to Landmark
Whatever the reason, IRS inaction has effectively thwarted the evangelicals' efforts to force the
matter in court.
BISHOPS TAKE AIM
At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting last week in Atlanta, bishops vowed to
keep up their criticism of Obama administration policies on employer-provided birth control and
other controversies.
"The first principle is that American citizens don't lose their freedom of religion or their freedom of
expression when they become bishops," said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.
As to what is and is not acceptable to say about candidates for office, "the guidelines are broader
than some may interpret them," George told Reuters at the conference. In follow-up email
correspondence, he declined to say whether he thought the IRS rules constrained free speech or
whether he would be willing to forgo the church's tax exemption so clerics could speak out without
restriction.
The meeting offered no public discussion of an April sermon by Illinois Bishop Daniel Jenky that has
been vigorously debated in the local and the religious press and which many think violated the
prohibition against opposing a candidate for office. The sermon has drawn a request for an IRS
investigation by a watchdog group.
After asserting that Obama, "with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda" seemed
to be on an anti-Catholic path similar to Hitler and Stalin, Jenky exhorted all Catholics to "vote their
Catholic consciences" this fall.
Do the people in congregations follow such instructions? Only 18 percent of those polled by the Pew
Research Center in January said the endorsement of a candidate by their minister, priest or rabbi
would sway their vote. Seventy percent said it would make no difference.
A second Pew study this spring found that most parishioners would prefer their religious leaders
steer clear of electioneering, with Catholics among the most adamant.
(Additional reporting by Stephanie Simon in Atlanta; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Prudence
Crowther and Douglas Royalty)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-churches-irs-idUSBRE85K1EP20120621