Monday, September 29, 2008
Church and State in the United States
How does the seperation of Church and State work in the States? We've already had some discussion on whether that is consitutional or not and if people would like to discuss that in more detail, go to. My question is more in terms of the peachers that endorsed a political candidate this past Sunday. From what we could understand, that is illegal because churches pay taxes to the Federal government (oh wait, what do American's call their central government if state politics are considered federal?) It sounded like they would now have to pay those taxes. Does that really make it a law. Apparently not one that they were too concerned in breaking...? Does anyone know more about those churches and who they were all endorsing (I have a good idea, but don't want to assume :) ) What is the general feeling about what occured?
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13 comments:
A little clarification is in order I think... Each individual state has their own unique laws and for the most part the federal government has to stay out of state affairs except where they are in conflict with the U.S. Constitution which each state had to sign into law before they joined the union of states.
I am not sure what churches in particular you are speaking of.
In general the rules for preaching from the pulpit goes as as follows...
The Internal Revenue Service code prohibits churches and other tax-exempt organizations from endorsing or opposing candidates.
However, pastors can preach on biblical and moral values.
Pastors can encourage people to vote, register them to vote in the church and actually talk about the views of the candidates by distributing objective voter guides.
Pastors can also be very direct with regards to endorsing state marriage amendments or other initiatives that advance pro-family, pro-life views...that view can also be posted on a church sign. They can preach biblical truths and educate their congregations about the critical moral issues at stake in this election without violating any IRS rules.
As far as I'm aware, no church has lost its tax-exempt status for involvement in the political arena...but a certain political party is going out of its way to try to get some to lose their status...
Thanks!
Here's an article about what happened on Sunday: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iOglIxiBY7ZLeg1lwDIiP5kwkcuAD93GK2BG0
nothing came up from that link...
here is a link I found about it...is this what you are talking about??
http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/news/story.aspx?cid=4692
http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/news/
story.aspx?cid=4692
Really? I got it to come up again. It's the AP article on the issue- gives a bit more of both sides and their actions thus far than the Alliance Fund statement does.
But yes, that was what I was talking about.
it looks like it got cut off...try putting it in two lines...
Ok, I'll try something different. I can get it to work with a cut and paste but prehaps you recieve it differently.
Oh- Josh is going to make it a link
Link
hmmm...interesting. Thanks for the link :-D. Yeah, I would say that stating "there is no way in the world a Christian can vote for Barack Hussein Obama." would go against the IRS rules and they very well might lose their tax exempt status. It will be interesting to see how that pans out.
as long as he said it from the pulpit anyway...
yeah, it was from the pulpit. That's why there was such a controversy.
This has nothing to do with all your comments but your post & post title. :) I was just going to say that as for the constitutionality of it, it depends on how people are interpreting it. It's in the Constitution, but it was intended to protect people's faith/religion. It's supposed to keep the government/state OUT of religion/the church, not religion out of the state or any public place. Especially not one SPECIFIC religion over all others. But anyway... :)
:)
CB, HM and I have been talking about that in emails- but feel free to talk about that here too. :)
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