Next Sunday, around 100 pastors will deliver sermons that direct challenge American law. Forbidden by their tax-exempt status to endorse political candidates from the pulpit, these preachers will defy the Internal Revenue Service by applying Biblical lessons to the current election campaigns. And not in secret; the legal representatives of the pastors have informed the IRS of what they intend to do.
In isolation, the actions of the reverends are not especially newsworthy. Their relevance lies instead in thee Religious Right’s growing attempts to reclaim political influence that they claim they have possessed throughout American history. And at the coal-face of politics, the events of next Sunday will foreshadow what are likely to be dramatic debates in the next Congress of 2011/12.
As the Tea Party enjoys considerable success by concentrating its message on fiscal responsibility and a constitutionally -imited government, these conservative principles go hand-in-hand with the beliefs of conservative Christians. If the Tea Party is as successful in the November election as is predicted, there will be a titanic struggle not only in Congress but within the Republican Party over the relevance of Christian social values to America’s political future.
The Religious Right, now roused, will not walk from conservative political victories. This will be its mandate to change American society as well as American government.
The pastors are participating in the third annual Pulpit Initiative of the Allied Defense Fund, a foundation created specifically to oppose the restrictions on free speech placed upon churches by legislative action. The ADF argues that threat of an audit by the IRS, or exclusionary state zoning laws, has neutered churches’ rights under the First Amendment’s Establishment, Free Exercise, and Free Speech clauses.
The Fund maintains that the purpose of Pulpit Initiative Sunday is not to publicise the right of the church to endorse political candidates directly; it argues instead that the protest from the pulpit is over who has the authority to regulate the speech of religious leaders. The ADF point sout that churches were free to speak on political concerns until the Johnson Amendment to tax law in 1954, and they insist that they are merely looking to restore the traditional mandate of the church to scrutinise, and inform their members of, the moral and spiritual values of politicians.
There is a "joker in the pack" that will ensure this complicated subject becomes a part of mainstream political debate in the next year. At the Restoring Honor Rally at the end of August, radio and TV commentator Glenn Beck used the national stage to announce he was helping to form a Black Robe Regiment of religious figures, of all faiths, dedicated to reviving the relevance of "faith, charity, and hope" to contemporary society. At his Friday night event, "Divine Destiny", 240 religious leaders, Mormon, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant --- Beck claims to have received the cooperation of some Muslims but there is no evidence to support his contention --- gathered behind the Fox News host who, according to one attendee, “got up at the end and simply said that we as a nation need to turn back to God, that our problems will never be solved by any one man. He mentioned that it involves each of us ‘asking God what God wants us to do and then doing it'” .
One of the speakers on that Friday night was David Barton, founder of Wallbuilders, an organization that is “dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built –-- a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined”. In a 28 April appearance on Beck’s TV show, Barton provided the inspiration to form a "Black Robe Brigade".
Beck's slightly-renamed Black Robe Regiment refers to the colonial clergy, dressed all in black, who fortified the spirit of freedom among the revolutionaries with their rousing sermons linking God’s destiny for America with independence. Wallbuilders comes from the lesson of the different tribes of Israel joining together to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, told in the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament), an allegory of Barton’s call “for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation's foundations".
Since his August rally, Beck has been quiet about an organizational structure for his new venture, even on his recently-started website The Blaze. A Black Robe Regiment website appearedin May, but it appears to be a project of some Tea Party members from Tennessee.
However, last Friday Beck on Friday, in his enigmatic fashion, asked his audience to follow his example: “For the next 40 days and 40 nights, I pledge...I COVENANT to practice faith, hope and charity.” For Christians, that is a poignant reference --- going back to Jesus in the wilderness --- denoting a period of reflection before actions.
Those 40 days end the week before the mid-term elections. And Beck went further: he requested his followers to sign a pledge of commitment to the principles of nonviolent protest outlined by Martin Luther King. In the first 2 days of his appeal, 81,000 people signed the pledge, which includes the recognition: “Non-violent resistance is not a method for cowards. It does resist....(The) method is passive or nonaggressive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, but his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is mistaken.”
A Black Robe Regiment of religious leaders, a cadre of non-violent resisters, a 40-day period of reflection. These are the signs that Beck is planning some campaign to use America’s religious principles to influence the upcoming elections. Allied with the Pulpit Initiative and other attempts to use the popularity of the Tea Party’s frustrations with Washington to advance conservative social values, it appears the Religious Right is gathering its forces to launch an assault on what it perceives as the secular trend in American culture.
Those who dismiss the significance of next Sunday’s Pulpit Initiative ignore the importance of federal tax exemption to the Religious Right at their peril. Godfrey Hodgson, in the World Turned Right Side Up, argues convincingly that the catalyst for the key role of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants in Ronald Reagan’s successful Presidential campaign of 1980 was not the decision on abortion in the court case Roe v Wade. Instead, the uneasy truce in which right-wing Christians stayed out of politics, separating themselves from the corrupt influence of unbelievers, was broken when the IRS began to question the tax-exempt status of parochial schools --- because they did not have a sufficient number of minority pupils --- in the late 1970s.
Nothing stirs the passion in American politics quite like the relationship of religious views to public policy. And nothing in an equally-divided Congress, will polarise American politics as much. To restore the enthusiasm of his Democratic base before 2012, President Obama will try to handicap the conservative resurgence by restricting the tax exemptions of foundations and churches which promote right-wing politics.
Get ready for a dramatic two years in Church, state, and US politics.