If We Can Keep It

Our Democratic Republic, that is.

Whenever I do my Sunday post, I start thinking about the place of religion in America. Unfortunately, it is all too easy these days to find so-called faith leaders trying to run the country. As I mentioned, I bought Katherine Stewart’s book Money, Lies, and God and I am racing through it. It really is a page-turner. In fact, I was going to finish it before I wrote since I’m already at the last section; but I decided I would not want to feel any pressure and quite frankly, I’ve already lost an hour this morning to Daylight Savings Time (that’s a whole other subject for debate though).

Anyway, I wanted to follow up with Alfred, Lord Tennyson again from one of my daily readers: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

So many wars have been fought over religious views that it hardly seems worth discussing. But nowadays, the war is with words as much as with weapons, so I believe we need to keep speaking out. I called my local public radio station the other day when a talk show host had an open topic, and I brought up the fact that churches have become increasingly political and that we are heading towards a theocracy. I am now on a mission to determine whether these churches have violated the separation of church and state and thus should no longer be considered tax-exempt as religious entities.

But in researching the topic, I got deep in the weeds of the official IRS site. The plain language of the 501(C)(3) exemption is further developed in a “quick reference guide” of 40 pages entitled Tax Guide for Churches & Religious Organizations (Publication 1828 (Rev. 8-2015) Catalog Number 21096G Department of the Treasury Internal Revenue Service www.irs.gov).

Basically, my takeaway is that the church cannot take a political position although it can prepare and disseminate voter guides and materials that are non-partisan. And the pastors may speak about the need to be a good citizen and vote but without specifying a particular candidate. But honestly, the examples the guide gives provide some very grey areas in my opinion. And the pastors are free in their “personal” capacity to endorse candidates. In fact campaign literature may feature their pictures so long as there is language included saying that they are not representing their church. But of course we all know that most people are not reading the fine print!

So before I really get worked up again, I am going to stop for now and enjoy the sunshine pouring in my window. I really do think we have reached some DEFCON level with the current government. I just looked up what that means and it ranges from a low of 5 to the top at 1. I learned that the Cuban Missile Crisis invoked both 2 and 3 while September 11th started at 3 and then reduced to 4. Who knows what our current military brass might think.

And I will end with my refrigerator magnet from the United States Holocaust Museum with a quote from Pastor Martin Niemoller: “Then they came for ME—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

RESIST ALWAYS

TTFN