Pastors Urged to Defy IRS to Defeat Evil, Hitlerian Obama

Conservative evangelical leaders hope that 1,500 pastors will take part in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” on October 7 and tell their congregants that they must vote against President Obama and other “unbiblical” candidates. Today, publisher Steven Strang, anti-gay activist Rev. Jim Garlow, and too-radical-for-John-McCain pastor John Hagee participated in a conference call designed to either shame or inspire more pastors to take part.

One context for the Pulpit Freedom Sunday project, which has been growing over the past decade, is the fervent belief among religious right leaders that America would not be such a cesspool of abortion, homosexuality, and secularism if only more pastors had the courage to speak freely from the pulpit. Too many pastors are being intimidated, they believe, by restrictions against political endorsements by tax-exempt nonprofits (501c3 groups in IRS lingo) which includes churches. Garlow said the day in 1954 when the “Johnson amendment” language was put into the tax code was the day that “changed America” and set the stage for bad Supreme Court decisions and everything else that has gone wrong since the 1960s.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday participants agree to preach political sermons, send them to the IRS, and dare the agency to sue them. The Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund) has offered legal help to churches that might get into trouble, even though organizers say no church has ever lost its tax-exempt status over political preaching. Another context for the call is the increasingly frantic fear among religious right leaders that Barack Obama might actually be re-elected, which they believe would spell the end of freedom and America itself. Garlow told pastors that America has only 30-some days to turn around or the nation and the liberties and privileges Americans have enjoyed “are going to evaporate very rapidly.”
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