Christian pastors should stop censoring themselves in fear of an “unconstitutional” 1954 provision in the IRS code that has threatened to eliminate their church tax-exempt status if they speak out against positions held by political candidates, urges a leading legal alliance.<\/p>\n
The Alliance Defense Fund today announced a new initiative that will challenge the IRS ban on political comment from churches and their pastors.<\/p>\n
“Churches have for too long feared the loss of tax exempt status arising from speech in the pulpit addressing candidates for office,” the ADF’s white paper on the campaign confirmed. “Rather than risk confrontation, pastors have self-censored their speech, ignoring blatant immorality in government and foregoing the opportunities to praise moral government leaders.<\/p>\n
“ADF believes that IRS restrictions on religious expression from the pulpit, whenever the IRS characterizes it as ‘political,’ is unconstitutional. After 50 years of threats and intimidation, churches should confront the IRS directly and reclaim the expressive rights guaranteed to them in the United States Constitution,” the group said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Its about time that some national organization stood up against the unconstitutional decrees of the IRS. If the IRS wants to go to court on this issue lets go at it. The IRS will lose. The fact that no one has ever lost tax-exempt status for what they preached from the pulpit is evidence that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,45],"tags":[24,138,122],"class_list":["post-933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-statism","category-the-church","tag-big-brother","tag-freedoms-and-liberties","tag-persecution"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawsE-f3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepropheticyears.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}