The Church’s Free Speech Rights ~ Church and State are Meant to Be Separate.

Your Divine Worship is Between you and God, Goddess, the Great Spirit and is not about "the State.

"Regardless of whether a church has 501(c)(3) status, the church always has the right to speak out on the issues of the day, according to Glen Lavy, a constitutional attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund.

Because the question comes up so often, the ADF on its website (www.alliancedefensefund.org) has provided “Guidelines for Political Activities by Churches and Pastors”

http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/userdocs/GuidelinesforChurchesandPastors.pdf

“In regard to churches getting involved in social issues, the IRS rule against intervention in a political campaign doesn’t apply,” Lavy said.

What does apply, then?

“IRS rules have the force of law,” Lavy said. “The government’s administrative agencies, like the IRS, have the ability to enact regulations which have validity, unless they are changed by the legislature. Congress has the right to change any regulation.”

The ADF’s “Guidelines” specify that churches are not allowed to endorse a particular candidate, contribute either funds or in-kind services to a candidate’s campaign, or distribute literature for a particular candidate.

“Issue advocacy, however, may not be limited by government and can be freely engaged in by churches,” the ADF pamphlet says. “As long as one does not use explicit words expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, one is free to praise or criticize officials and candidates — this is called issue advocacy.”

Although churches are often threatened with loss of their tax-exempt status — sometimes by anti-church activists, sometimes by the IRS itself — there is no law that restricts churches from defining moral positions and asking people to vote accordingly, according to the ADF.

Chilling the Church?

Churches were added to section 501(c)(3) of the tax code in 1954. Critics, such as Peter Kershaw, author of The Church and Caesar: A Look at Incorporation and 501(c)(3), charge then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson with using 501(c)(3) status as a way to “eliminate the significant influence the church has always had on public policy” (http://hushmoney.org/articles.htm — radio interviews with Kershaw are available on this site).

“Since they’ve done this, the church has lost much of its ability to influence the culture,” Kershaw said.
This is a controversial claim. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s — whose best-known leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., was an ordained minister with a church — enjoyed strong support from many churches.

Today, evangelical Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican, thus influencing American culture and policy. Nor should we ignore the example of many Roman Catholic bishops in 2004 withholding Communion from politicians who have voted to support abortion and homosexual “marriage.” If the bishops were at all deterred by any potential threat from the IRS, they didn’t show it.

But Kershaw’s claim is not without merit. The churches’ political activity in the 19th century — most notably, the movement to abolish slavery — might not have been possible under today’s tax laws, Marcus Owens said.

“Preaching against slavery would not have been illegal per se,” he said, “but getting involved in the Lincoln-Douglas debates might have been a problem.”

Churches in the 19th century didn’t have to worry about tax exemption, Owens said, “because everybody was exempt — there was no income tax.” But in 1934, Congress enacted laws against “lobbying and propaganda” that applied to churches. The intent of this legislation, he said, was to stop organizations from paying off officials or candidates in return for future political favors.


Source of Post
http://chalcedon.edu/research/articles/do-churches-need-501c3-status/