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| There should be a healthy separation between church and state, where the state does not intrude into the internal workings of the church. | |
| All kinds of people, from potheads to pastors, are rebelling against usurpation by the federal government. | |
| And a group of pastors, encouraged by Alliance for Defending Freedom, ...has engaged in something called Pulpit Freedom Sunday. | |
| That started out with just 33 people in 2008. | |
| It jumped to 80 the next year, 100 the next year, 500 in 2011, and this last year it exploded to 1,500 pastors. | |
| And there's been a little bit of pushback. | |
| Another organization, the Foundation for Freedom from Religion, has filed suit now with the IRS trying to get them to do something about it because the IRS is not trying to enforce this regulation that goes back to 1954. | |
| I'm gonna let Eric Stanley kind of fill us in on the details. | |
| Eric, welcome. | |
| Well, it's great to be with you today. | |
| Tell us a little bit about what you're trying to accomplish with this campaign. | |
| Well, Pulpit Freedom Sunday is really all about ensuring a pastor's right to speak freely from the pulpit and to not be intimidated or censored by the government in any way when he does so. | |
| A lot of people may not realize it, but since 1954, with the passage of the Johnson Amendment, which was added to the Internal Revenue Code in 1954, the IRS has been censoring what a pastor can and cannot say from the pulpit when it comes to the issue of candidates in elections. | |
| And we believe that's unconstitutional, that a pastor has a right to speak freely from the pulpit, that it's the job of the pastor to determine what's said from the pulpit, not the IRS. | |
| And so we launched Pulpit Freedom Sunday really as a means of challenging the Johnson Amendment head-on and to have it hopefully declared unconstitutional. | |
| We don't usually like to use the phrase separation of church and state. | |
| It's been overused and abused over the years. | |
| But I think in this instance it might be appropriate to use that. | |
| There should be a healthy separation between church and state where the state does not intrude into the internal workings of the church. | |
| And since 1954, the Johnson Amendment has set up this scheme where the IRS has essentially become a pulpit police. | |
| They have been determining the content of pastor sermons as to whether it violates the rule or not. | |
| And that violates the Establishment Clause. | |
| That is not what, you know, Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote that phrase, separation of church and state in 1802, had this type of situation in mind where the state was intruding into the internal workings of the church. | |
| And so, that really forms the basis of what we're trying to do here, is to protect the constitutional rights of pastors. | |
| You know, we need to go back and remember that one of the primary sources shaping the vision of freedom and independence in the American Revolution were the clergy at the time. | |
| They even called them the Black Regiment, didn't they? | |
| Well, they did, yeah. | |
| In fact, historians have said that we owe our independence in great degree to the moral force of the pulpit. | |
| And pastors have always led the way, even beyond independence, in the great social and moral movements in America. | |
| Ending child labor, promoting women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, on and on and on it goes. | |
| Pastors have always been at the forefront of that. | |
| But yet this law, since 1954, has really placed a chill on pastors in their speech from the pulpit. | |
| The IRS has done a lot over the years to fuzzy up the line as to what is permitted and what is not. | |
| And what has ended up happening is when pastors don't know where that line is, they back away from the line. | |
| And that gap in there is called self-censorship. | |
| And that's a chill on speech. | |
| And it's unconstitutional. | |
| Even before the Johnson Amendment went in, people were able to get tax deductions for their donations. | |
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | |
| In fact, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, their argument just really ignores history. | |
| Churches have always been tax exempt from the very beginning of our country. | |
| And in every iteration of the tax code from the very beginning up until now, churches have been exempt from taxation. | |
| And the reason for that is because of what the Supreme Court said many years ago. | |
| It said the power to tax involves the power to destroy. | |
| And there's no surer way to destroy the free exercise of religion than to begin taxing. | |
| And so our country made the determination that churches needed to be tax-exempt to protect that constitutional structure and to protect the free exercise of religion. | |
| And for 166 years, from the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights until 1954, there was absolutely no restriction on what pastors could and could not say from the pulpit. | |
| What would it do to a church if the IRS were to come against them for their tax deduction stuff? | |
| Is there retroactive issues involved for donations? | |
| Well, that's the interesting part, because really, the IRS, when it comes right down to it, is more bark than bite when it comes to churches. | |
| There was a case involving a church that had its tax-exempt letter revoked several years ago, but it never had its tax-exempt status revoked. | |
| Churches have really built up the IRS to be something that it's not, and have given it a lot of power over churches. | |
| And our message from the very beginning when we started Pulpit Freedom Sunday has been, no pastor should ever fear the IRS when he stands in his pulpit to proclaim biblical truth. | |
| And we shouldn't give the IRS that amount of power over what can and cannot be said from the pulpit. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| Well, thank you very much, Eric. | |
| Thank you for talking to us, and thank you for the work that you're doing. | |
| Well, thank you so much. | |
| It's been good to be with you. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| Well that's it for tonight's news. | |
| Join us tomorrow night at 7 p.m. | |
| Central, 8 p.m. | |
| Eastern. |
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