The last thing I want when I go to Mass on Sunday is for the priest to tell me which candidate I should vote for. That’s not because I think he’s going to tell me to vote for someone I don’t like. It’s just because it would be inappropriate.
I don’t mind hearing some political issues discussed on rare occasions — after all, as Pope John Paul II once said, politics and religion intersect where they deal with how people treat people. The Syrian refugee crisis has come up in a few homilies at my church lately, and now and then there’s a timely reminder to be skeptical of politicians who lack respect for human life in the womb.
But outright endorsement of candidates? Please, no. Even letting candidates speak from the pulpit is too much for me. I go to church for the sacraments. And if I were Protestant and had to choose the kind of church I attended, I would avoid any church whose pastors did things like that, even if I agreed with them and the politicians they wanted me to support.
The vast majority of Americans share my view on this, the New York Times notes in today’s print edition — 80 percent of them, in fact. Pastors are even more strongly against it at 87 percent.
And yet, like myself, I suspect far more than 20 percent of Americans would be okay with President Trump’s promise to get rid of the Johnson Amendment and its punishment (potential loss of tax-exempt status) for churches that do endorse candidates. Regardless of how I feel about pastors telling me to vote for someone, I don’t see why pastors’ candidate endorsements should be illegal or punishable in any way.
This is supposed to be a free country — not one where someone reports the contents of your sermon to the Stasi and you face recriminations later. We should err on the side of freedom. If an Imam wants to tell his flock to vote against Trump because he’s imposing a “Muslim ban,” why shouldn’t that be allowed? There’s no good reason it shouldn’t be, because “I don’t like something” is not a sufficient reason to make it illegal. If someone else out there wants a church that routinely endorses candidates, let him have his way. It’s a free country.
The legitimate rationale behind the ban on church politicking is that you don’t want to see tax-deductible church donations laundered into what would effectively become SuperPACs. That would essentially become a public subsidy for politicians in a way that the current SuperPAC and 501(c)4 structures are not. (Donations to (c)4 organizations, contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, are not tax-deductible.)
But surely, there’s a less intrusive way of preserving this interest than what we have right now. You could always keep a prohibition on political cash expenditures by churches and synagogues without telling pastors what they’re allowed to say in the pulpit. And that’s probably what the law should continue to do when Trump is done with it.
