Does politics belong in the pulpit? - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Here’s one wall President Trump wants to dismantle: Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State.”

“Freedom of religion is a sacred right,” Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast last month, “but it is also a right under threat all around us. That is why I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

The 1954 “Johnson Amendment” bars 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including churches, from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office. Some see this as a key brick in the Jeffersonian barrier between church and state.

Our third president’s oft-cited “wall of separation” quote comes from an 1802 letter. The debate over politics and pulpit is even older — and still alive.

Today, San Diegans play central roles in this drama. While the Roman Catholic diocese’s bishop, Robert McElroy, is a vocal critic of Trump’s immigration and economic policies, he declines to endorse or oppose politicians.

“Our mission is not to elect certain candidates,” said McElroy, who supports the Johnson Amendment. “Our mission is to speak to people about the moral dimensions of certain issues that are coming up.”

Pastor James Garlow at La Mesa’s Skyline Church, though, argues the Johnson Amendment tramples on clergy’s freedom of speech.

“We object to any governmental intrusion into the pulpit,” Garlow said. “It’s that simple. I don’t care if they are on the right or on the left, I don’t care if they want to say something about the candidates or not.

“We’d like to have the pulpit police taken out of our churches.”

Setting boundaries between church and state can be difficult, said Mary Doak, associate professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego.

“The attempt to privatize religion,” she said, “to make religion only about your private life, does a disservice to religious people.”

Yet if ministers, imams, rabbis and priests enlist in campaigns, she said, they risk alienating worshipers and warping church teachings for ideological purposes.

“Which candidate is best able to further the goals of the church is not a matter that is in the church’s expertise,” Doak said. “It is good for the church to be reminded of that.”

The Wilderness

Jefferson was not the first to American to advocate a barrier between the sacred and the secular. In a 1644 pamphlet, nonconformist minister Roger Williams wrote of “the wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world.”

In Williams’ Wilderness, state-sanctioned churches were common. He was born in London, where the Church of England was the official faith. In 1631, he migrated to Boston, where his clashes with the colony’s official Congregational church led him to depart for Rhode Island.

Despite American patriots’ protests of “taxation without representation,” colonists were often taxed to support churches they did not attend. In Massachusetts, all residents paid taxes to the Congregational Church. In Virginia, the Church of England was the beneficiary.

An opponent of these measures, James Madison wrote the “establishment clause” of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. ...”

Preachers, though, remained engaged in politics. From abolition to the civil rights movement, many landmark American crusades were led by activist clergy.

Ministers also used their pulpits to endorse or attack candidates, Garlow noted, even on Election Day. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a popular Brooklyn-based Congregationalist, sermonized on behalf of Lincoln’s election and re-election.

Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a controversial radio show, endorsed FDR in 1932 and one of his rivals in 1936.

Historians say that then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson was not thinking about the clergy when he pushed a tax code amendment in 1954. Instead, The New York Times reported, his intent was to silence “two nonprofit groups that were loudly calling him a closet Communist.”

Passed by a Republican Congress on a voice vote, then signed by a Republican President, the amendment defanged Johnson’s critics. Months later, the freshman senator won re-election.

The amendment had served its immediate purpose. Its enduring effect, though, is still debated.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday

Recently introduced in Congress, the Free Speech Fairness Act would lift prohibitions on political speech from the pulpit.

At a Washington, D.C., news conference on Feb. 1, three of the act’s congressional supporters spoke — as did numerous clergy, including Garlow.

Although every sponsor of the bill is Republican, Garlow said this is not about boosting GOP candidates.

“I simply want the pastors to have that freedom and liberty that the First Amendment guarantees,” he said.

In 2008, 33 pastors decided to test the Johnson Amendment. They delivered overtly political sermons, then mailed recordings of these talks to the Internal Revenue Service.

“Pulpit Freedom Sunday” has become an annual event in dozens of churches — including Skyline.

So far, the IRS has responded with silence or form letters thanking the ministers for their submissions.

Garlow’s sermons regularly address human trafficking, abortion, same-sex marriage, the national debt and other hot button issues.

“Some would say the church should not be in politics,” he said. “This is not political — this is Biblical.”’

He also dismissed concerns that churches could become political fundraising arms, showering tax-free money on favored candidates.

“This church — any church — has no extra funds to give anybody,” Garlow said. “But if they want to, so what?”

“A dangerous corruption”

In 1992 an upstate New York congregation, the Church at Pierce Creek, bought a full-page ad in USA Today and The Washington Times.

Headlined “CHRISTIAN BEWARE,” the ad cited Biblical passages that were seen to contradict the positions of the Democratic candidate for president.

“How then,” the ad concluded, “can we vote for Bill Clinton?”

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit, complained to the IRS. In 1995, Pierce Creek lost its tax exempt status.

“Clergy are permitted to speak about issues almost without limit and nobody is trying to stop that,” said Barry Lynn, Americans United’s executive director. “But when churches look and act like political action committees and endorse or oppose candidates, that’s different.”

A lawyer who has a theology degree, Lynn said polls show Americans — laity and clergy — don’t want political stumping in church.

“People go to church, go to a temple or synagogue, to get advice, to get moral messages, to be told how to live,” Lynn said. “They don’t go there to be told how to vote.”

That is true for liberals as well as conservatives, he said. In 1988, pastors backing the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination planned a “Super Sunday.” Collections that day, the pastors announced, would benefit the Jackson campaign.

Americans United responded by warning the churches — and then complaining to the IRS. This was bad politics, Lynn said, and bad religion.

“It is a dangerous corruption of the political process and the integrity of churches to have them mix in this very partisan way,” he said.

Descent into hell

Addressing a conference last month, Bishop Robert McElroy urged his audience to “disrupt” the Trump administration’s deportations of undocumented residents, its refugee ban, its moves against Obamacare and several other issues.

Yet McElroy, head of the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, did not call for Trump’s removal from office — nor will he if Trump seeks re-election in 2020.

“Our tradition, especially in the United States, is to not seem in any way to be endorsing candidates,” McElroy said. “The church understands itself as having no specific political mission, but it has a moral mission.”

While McElroy backs the Johnson Amendment, not every priest has followed his lead. In the month before the 2016 election, bulletins at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Old Town warned that Catholics who voted for Clinton would “descend into hell.”

The diocese issued a statement, saying the bulletin did not reflect Catholic teaching or diocesan attitudes.

That incident was widely reported, from the Union-Tribune to Huffington Post. Unnoticed was a similar episode with a dissimilar message: a priest in an unnamed San Diego parish sermonized on behalf of Clinton.

“She wasn’t mentioned by name,” McElroy said, “but people who were listening felt it was very clear. I had to call there and say, ‘Knock it off.’”

While McElroy said churches shouldn’t have a partisan identity, he insisted that issues are fair game.

The bishop admitted his “disruptor” speech was met with protests from Catholics and non-Catholics who want the church to stay out of politics. Many of the objections, he said, came from parishioners who support the church’s work against abortion.

“People don’t really object to the church speaking to a moral question,” McElroy said, “if it is the one they like.”