The Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal advocacy organization, is causing a bit of a stir with its call for clergy this Sunday to speak out about candidates for public office, in defiance of IRS regulations limiting political speech from the pulpit. (The regulations allow congregations, as tax-exempt organizations, to take positions on issues, but not on specific candidates.) The ADF is hoping that the event, which it has dubbed “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” will lead to a test case challenging the regulations. An excerpt from the ADF’s argument: For the rest of the article click on:
But the restrictions have many defenders as well, among them Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of Interfaith Alliance, which has launched a competing campaign to maintain the boundary between pulpits and politics. Gaddy said in a sermon last weekend:
“I cannot stress strongly enough my objections to turning houses of worship into pseudo-precinct nominating conventions. I am as concerned about what such a practice in houses of worship would do to the integrity and credibility of religion as about what it would do to weaken the Constitution.”