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I think the loss of IRS non-tax status is less of a deal than doomsayers state. In fact, I would have to say that dangling the no taxes as hush insentive is itself anti-Church and State seperation. I thought the whole idea was for the Church not to control what the State does and the State not to control what the Church does.

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I intend to ask them.

My theory, if you’ve been reading, is that they tested a spectrum of responses. See my original post on this topic.

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So it may be fundraising. Or political brochures in the back. Or perhaps an enterprising activist creates a political organization as a nominal church (think mail-order ordination). There’s mischief there and it all comes from not asking “what activity should not be allowed by a church.”

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That is a very real issue. Courts are allowed to pursue three things in church-state cases — fraud, profit and clear threat to life and health.

I think this would fall under the first two.

Also, note that religious groups can already pursue this strategy if they are cynical enough. All they have to do is adopt one of the wink-wink approaches to endorsement that have been used in the past on the left and right.

The Slacktivist article also mentiones channeling this money to campaigns. Through donations from the church? I am 99 percent sure that would be fraud.

Like them or not, the evidence is that what the ADF is going for is the ability to preach sermons on hot-button moral issues (which is legal, of course). However, the ADF wants to test the law that says a cleric cannot then LINK that moral and doctrinal judgement TO A PERSON’S NAME. That’s where the legal hurdle exists. Open, clear, uncynical endorsement — as opposed to the winking methods I have detailed.

Like it or not, that’s what this seems to be about.

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…Think about it. The Obama and McCain campaigns have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, plus hundreds of millions more for the Democratic and Republican national committees, the state committees, the House and Senate re-election committees, the PACs and all the other candidates at every level of government. That’s a multibillion-dollar pot of money.

All of those groups and candidates have to raise money without being able to promise their donors a tax-deduction in exchange for their contribution. Now imagine those donors had a tax-deductible alternative. Imagine they could instead give this money to the churches in ADF’s network and take a tax deduction, knowing that the churches would simply be rechanneling the money to the same campaigns and committees. In exchange for this laundering service, the churches could skim a tiny percentage of the contributions. Cha-ching! It’d be like a license to print money.

That’s what the Alliance Defense Fund is shooting for.

Now, as a matter of theory, I don’t think that it’s always so easy to “separate politics and religion,” but in this particular concrete case, it’s pretty clear that the effects of allowing the ADF to succeed would be damaging to both our religious and our political institutions.

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I think the title conveys my opinion.

I believe the churches are sending a copy of their services to the IRS.

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Still, I think it’s helpful to know that the ADF’s underlying assumption is that the state has no right to tax churches.

But in Swaggart Ministries v. Board of Equalization, 493 U.S. 378 (1990), the court ruled differently. Swaggert’s ministry argued that it was not required to pay sales tax. The court disagreed:

“The collection and payment of the tax imposes no constitutionally significant burden on appellant’s religious practices or beliefs under the Free Exercise Clause, which accordingly does not require the State to grant appellant a tax exemption.”

The court seemed in this case to rule to view a tax exemption as a privilege, not a right.

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I know. Yet it appears that they may have been very subtle, with some sermons that violated the law and some that did not. The group may, in fact, be testing the spectrum as one way of tearing it apart.

The standard church-state doctrine in American is that the power to tax is the power to destroy or control and that you cannot do that under the First Amendment. Thus, the same laws apply to religious and secular non-profits. The ADF is saying it is wrong to shackle all of these groups, as a kind of speech content censorship.

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The Alliance Defense Fund intended that the sermons violate the law, according to their lead counsel in a story from the Tennessean.

“These churches actually hope that the IRS will come after them, and that it will set up a chance for litigation in federal court,” said Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, the Arizona-based group organizing the pulpit protests.

The other interesting thing about the ADF is that they believe the IRS has no right to tax churches. That’s the crux of the story, between those who see the tax exemption as a right and those who see it as an act of legislative grace.

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