IRS to Monitor Churches for Electioneering

The National Review Online comments:

According to a June 27 IRS letter to the Justice Department, 99 churches merit “high priority examination” for allegedly illegal electioneering activities. The letter was sent in reference to a now-dismissed lawsuit filed by the atheist group known as the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The suit originally was a rather broad one, demanding not only that the IRS enforce prohibitions against churches’ endorsing candidates specifically, but also that churches should be “required to file” what it described as “detailed annual information” that would force them (if they are like other nonprofits) to “expend substantial time and resources.”

With the end of the suit, those filings presumably will not be required (though a second suit, on just that subject, remains open). But IRS’s monitoring of alleged electioneering activities could still be quite onerous. . . .

Indeed, if the IRS actually enforced FFRF’s suggested standards, it would be downright frightening. It would mean that not only that pastors could  be forbidden from candidate endorsements but also that they could not even inform their congregants about the real-world tenets of their faith. The traditional bright line between explicit electioneering and the sorts of things FFRF’s letter wants stopped exists for good reason: Freedom of conscience, and of faith practices, is the founding freedom of this nation. If government dares to forbid preachers from mere religious instruction — while the preachers still leave it up to their flocks to apply that instruction according to their understanding and their consciences — then there is nothing to stop government from infringing on other pulpit pronouncements with ever-more-intrusive regulatory strictures. . . .