Friday, January 26, 2007

A Church's Perspective On Enforcement Of The Political Campaign Proscription


A Church's Perspective On Enforcement Of The Political Campaign Proscription

A presentation to the Exempt Organizations Committee of the American Bar Association meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 18, 2008

by the Reverend J. Edwin Bacon, Jr., Rector, All Saints Church, Pasadena, California

Thank you for inviting me to tell a bit of the story of All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena, California and what our perspective on the IRS investigation of us has been and continues to be.

It is important for you to hear from me what it means to "practice religion" at All Saints both in theological theory and in everyday expression of that theology. I also want to share with you something of the passion that we have experienced around the IRS case, including the determination to stay our course in protecting our religious practices which we see as clearly in alignment with the IRS proscription against campaign intervention. In the last part of my presentation I want to share something of the profound sense of offense and anger we feel to this day and that is felt by at least 500 new members who joined our church in an innovative category of membership called, "Solidarity Members."

First, both a theological and practical description of what it means for us to practice our religion.

A window into the practice of religion at All Saints Church is the current cover story of our church newsletter, called Saints Alive. The article prepares the parish for the upcoming Martin Luther King, Jr., day. Entitled, "What Would Martin Do?" in the center of the front page there appears a photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. John Burt. Dr. Burt was the immediate predecessor of Dr. George Regas who preached the sermon in the IRS question. Dr. Regas is my immediate predecessor. I think of Dr. Burt as my grand-predecessor. He served All Saints during the years, 1957-1967. Dr. Burt is remembered for his fierce advocacy of racial equality during those years. (He also pioneered in interfaith work and a variety of social action issues.) Not content merely to speak about racial injustice, he both preached and organized for human rights for all, regardless of race. This resulted in his being one of the few if not the only white minister in Pasadena who sat on the stage with Dr. King when in 1963 John Burt was a co-sponsor of the "Rally for Freedom," Los Angeles's largest civil rights rally until that date. Dr. King spoke to 35,000 supporters of freedom fighters that day. It is important to note that the night before the rally, Bishop Burt convened a "Town Meeting for Democracy"
with Dr. King at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. On that night a bomb threat was called in to his home where my wife and I now live.
The recipient of the bomb threat was his 8-year-old daughter, Emily.
"I'm going to kill your daddy, little girl," the violent voice said on the other end of the line. Fortunately, there was no bomb.

That incident and that rector were not exceptions to our life as a church with a passion for what I call, "political spirituality." When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered Japanese-Americans into internment camps, John Burt's immediate predecessor, Frank Scott, preached from All Saints' pulpit in criticism of FDR's policy. Here was a president who is revered for the statement in his first inaugural address that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Yet he enacted a racially discriminatory policy against one class of people a policy that was based in fear. Dr. Scott preached against the policy from our perspective that bigotry in any form dehumanizes both the victims and the perpetrators. Then Dr. Scott went to the train station and stood in protest as those trains transported Japanese Americans away.

My immediate predecessor, Dr. George Regas, is known primarily for preaching a sermon entitled, "Mr. President, The Jury Is In." It was a criticism of the Vietnam War and was occasioned by a statement President Nixon made in defense of continuing the war. Nixon at that point was in stubborn denial of both the failure and the immorality of that debacle and said that the jury was still out. Dr. Regas also helped lead the fight in the Episcopal Church for the ordination of women and was one of the first Episcopal priests in the country to bless same-sex partnerships, a practice we continue to this day.

These practices challenging bigotry and violence are expressed at All Saints in our preaching about and organizing letter writing campaigns against the current immoral and unjust war in Iraq, the practices of torture that accompany it, the resultant depletion of funds for basic care of the vulnerable and marginalized among us, and the erosion of civil liberties and the First Amendment attendant in this war's wake.

These issues are not some liberal or progressive political agenda.
Rather they come from a deeply held religious conviction shared by many compassionate people of differing religious traditions. All Saints Church's practice of religion has deep roots in the belief in what Gandhi called, "the democracy of souls." We believe that all policies mitigating against the sacredness of every human being must be criticized from the pulpit, protested in public, and organized against.

I find it both reductive and dismissive to call our social and political activism a result of All Saints being a Liberal or Progressive Church. There are important theological foundations at stake in what we say and do. This is our religion. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put my point this way when he was marching with Dr.
King in Selma, Alabama, "When I was marching I felt that my feet were praying." Faith without works and action is dead. Many religious people are so concerned about getting to heaven that they are no earthly good. Jesus' primary concern was what he called "The Kingdom of God," which has less to do with getting to heaven and all to do with bringing heaven to earth especially for the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized. These were the people whom the Roman Empire considered dispensable and Jesus said a resounding "No" to that dehumanization.
Jesus' primary concern today is the same: bringing heaven to earth for all of us especially for the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized the people whom the current American Empire considers dispensable.

Obviously I have now begun to explain (or preach about) the theology that fuels the passionately held All Saints' position in our contention with the IRS. Another way to describe our practice of religion is to speak about how the expression of Christian theology represented by All Saints, Pasadena, is differentiated from a globally growing expression of Christianity which actually high-jacks Jesus to the detriment of the human race.

Unfortunately, the common understanding of Jesus and of the Christian religion in America today is that of a hard right-wing, conservative Evangelical orientation which seeks to gain an ever-growing number of members world-wide to profess Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. Without this relationship with Jesus, this theology argues, one stands eternally condemned before God who is exclusively the God of Christ, or the Christian God. This theology in recent years has taken on a militant military posture which can be referred to as a Crusade-oriented Christianity with the most popular spokespersons being the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. One of its most unfortunate expressions came from Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin who publicly stated that his Christian God is stronger than the God of Islam. ("I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.") This theology is violently intolerant of other religions and those who are not religious. The logical conclusion of this theology is that Christianity must dominate the world, using billions of taxpayer dollars to ensure that the U.S.
wields the strongest military force on the planet regardless of the effect on social services for the poor and marginalized, and regardless of the loss of innocent lives of those who live in countries who are our enemies.

All Saints and many other churches offer a very different perspective on Jesus and the Christian message. Rather than having our tap root in evangelicalism (although we express the news we share as "good news,"
the literal translation of the root word, "evangel") All Saints'
grounding is in what is commonly referred to as prophetic Christianity a religion,, which, like Crusade Christianity, is also deeply prayerful, but which seeks to balance prayer and faithful action. The focus of this Christianity is not the salvation of individual souls but seeking the salvation of the entire human community through radically inclusive love, justice and peace for all ? particularly for the marginalized and vulnerable both in our neighborhoods and in the world.
This we believe is the faith that Jesus observed, forming his own religious practices and shaping his own view of God from the tradition of the 8th century Hebrew prophets. Jesus focused much of his ministry on the message and behaviors of those prophets who went before him.
Jesus saw himself as a prophet (Luke 4: 24). Albert Nolan has written, "He does not seem to have ever contradicted anyone who referred to him as a prophet. In its basic inspiration, therefore, Jesus' spirituality was like that of the Hebrew prophets. (Nolan, Albert, Jesus Today; A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, p. 63)

Prophetic religion is given not to claiming that Christians are advantaged before God over other religionists. Rather, prophetic religion is given to authentic interfaith collaboration in the service of increasing the quotient of compassion, justice, and non-violence in one's interpersonal relations and in one's nation and the world.

Jesus' words about when one ministers to the "least of these" in the world, that person is ministering directly to Jesus drives us passionately to advocate for the alleviation of poverty, inadequate health care, inferior education for certain groups, and the elimination of all practices of bigotry both in religion and in the world. The biblical admonitions to welcome the stranger drive us fervently to demand comprehensive and compassionate immigration reform. And Jesus' calls to forgive, to love for and pray for one's enemies and adversaries lead us to be quite vocal in criticizing any international foreign policy that would seek to destroy or even dominate our enemies. Political and diplomatic solutions and even police-oriented uses of our military are always to be sought over warfare. Warfare can never be blessed because in the nuclear age in which we now live, war always carries with it the increased spiraling of retaliation and more violence leading to the literal destruction of masses of people. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the greatest, most daring and eloquent articulators of prophetic Christianity appropriately identified the axis of evil not as three countries as did President Bush, but as three enemies of the human family. Dr. King's axis of evil was bigotry, poverty, and militarism. These are the three enemies we at All Saints organize against constantly. So All Saints Church has at the core of our practice of religion what is known as seeking to balance contemplation and action or fighting against these dehumanizing forces balanced with vibrant community worship and prayer as the spiritual energy for our social action in the world.

Both the interfaith spirituality as well as the peace and justice dimensions of prophetic religion were expressed powerfully in the collaborative work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when in the 1960s they found common spiritual ground both to work for racial equality and to protest the war in Vietnam.

Gratefully, there are a myriad of other examples of prophetic Christianity and prophetic religious beliefs and practices throughout the ages. I will only cite one other case which makes the point that the religious practices I am describing transcend not only the current moral issues of our own country faces, but also pertain to the crucial distinction which All Saints and the IRS regulations make and which the IRS case position against All Saints simply misses.

Last Saturday's New York Times reported the retirement of The Rev. Christian Führer, pastor of the Nikolai Church, Leipzig, Germany. "Pastor Führer fought political injustice as one of the leading figures of the Monday Demonstrations in 1989 that gathered tens of thousands in the streets of Leipzig and helped bring down the former East German government" and led to removal of the Berlin Wall. "After German reunification," the Times reported, "... he refocused his energies on the region's emerging economic injustices, helping the unemployed find not only jobs but also a voice for their problems. Since the end of Communism, he has taken a stand against everything from the Iraq war to the closing of a brewery, from right-wing extremists to the curtailing of unemployment benefits." (Nicholas Kulish, "A Clergyman of the Streets Leaves His Historic Pulpit," The New York Times, January 12, 2008)

Germane to All Saints' position in the IRS investigation of us is a statement Pastor Führer gave the Times, "The church must always be political," he said, "but there is a difference between political and party-political."

This is the distinction I want to emphasize. Our church believes that Christians are called to be political but never party-political. The practice of our religion demands our attention in word and in action to political policies without ever being politically partisan. My father was both a Baptist preacher and our county school superintendent, which was an elected position. But he never ever used his pulpit to even mention his candidacies. Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of South Africa, who is a personal friend of mine and of my church forbade his clergy from affiliating with the AND. Martin Luther King, Jr. never endorsed a candidate.

A Christianity which is actually formed by the message and ministry of the prophetic minister, Jesus, must always be political. Again, Nolan,

Prophets are people who speak out when others remain silent. They criticize their own society, their own country, or their own religious institutions. True prophets are men and women who stand up and speak out about the practices of their own people and their own leaders while others remain silent.

This leads inevitably to tension and even some measure of conflict between the prophet and the establishment. In the Hebrew Scriptures we see how the prophets clashed with kings and sometimes priests too.

Jesus was painfully aware of this tension or conflict in the traditions of the prophets. "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets" (Lk 6:22, 23 par). Jesus saw those who killed the prophets in the past as the ancestors or predecessors of the scribes and Pharisees (Mt 23:29-35)

Jesus spoke out boldly and radically against the assumptions and practices of the social and religious establishment of his time... The conflict that he created became so intense that in the end they killed him to keep him quiet.

Any attempt to practice the same spirituality as Jesus would entail learning to speak out boldly as he did and facing the consequences.
(Nolan, Albert, Jesus Today; A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, p. 63)

So, in the spirit of the prophetic spirituality of Jesus I protested the war in Iraq both by preaching against President Bush's foreign policy and, along with others, by being arrested on Ash Wednesday,
2003 prior to our invading Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was an act my church's governing board and I considered a war of choice and an act of aggression which was unjust, immoral, and illegal. My governing board, called the Vestry, passed a resolution to this effect and published it in a full-page advertisement on two successive days in our local paper, The Pasadena Star-News. When Bill Clinton was president, in a sermon entitled, "The Worst Thing President Clinton Ever Did," I preached against his so-called welfare reform policy which shredded the social safety net for poor people in America. In recent months I have endorsed holding hearings into the possibility of impeaching Vice-President Cheney.

I believe that our country will simply have to engage in a process of moral reckoning to turn around from the immorality of these post 9-11 years as well as to say historically that the kind of imperial presidency most muscularly advanced by the Vice-President's office, free of the basic checks and balances we all learned about in the fifth grade and which are essential to democracy, is inimical to basic values of justice for all.

All of this political activity is for us at All Saints fundamentally an act of expressing our spirituality which is rooted in a supreme unifying principle of the sacredness of every human being, equally precious before God. Starkly put, an Iraqi human being is just as worthy as an American human being, and we have a moral responsibility to protest any leader whose policies are intentionally destructive of any segment of humanity. This is for us the core of our spirituality.
It also very often is intrinsically political.

However, our spirituality or stated in another way, our foundational religious practices, never allow us to be partisan or, in Pastor Führer's words, "party-political." Out of fidelity to our mission we must critique or endorse policies and positions without ever aligning ourselves with one party or candidate or another. That is why for years at All Saints and in my own priestly career of 36 years, we have had in place institutional practices which are in total alignment with the IRS regulations prohibiting campaign intervention. We have a number of elected officials in our parish whom we ask to speak throughout the year. However we never allow them to speak once they announce that they are up for re-election because of the appearance that our giving them our very high-profile platform would give them unfair advantage in their election. It is important to say that these are men and women who are both registered Republicans and Democrats.

We have around 20 tables on our lawn every Sunday inviting people into different forms of engagement. We do not allow those members who staff those tables to wear their favorite candidates' campaign buttons.

We believe with Dr. King, that the church is not the master of the state. We should not be free to try to impose some party affiliation on our government. That has been the substance of my disagreements with Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina in his overtures to me to support his legislative ideas to get rid of the campaign intervention regulations altogether. Dr. King also said that just as the church is not the master of the state, neither is it the servant of the state, particularly when it comes to critiquing the government according to our foundational values.
We must maintain a fierce independence from the state and whatever party is in the ascendancy so that we can be what we are really called to be, and that, according to Dr. King, is the conscience of the state. When Dr. King articulated that distinction he went on to say,

The church must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

If the church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause [people] everywhere to say that it has atrophied its will. But if the church will free itself from the shackles of a deadening status quo, and, recovering its great historic mission, will speak and act fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice and peace, it will enkindle the imagination of [hu]mankind and fire the souls of [people], imbuing them with a glowing and ardent love for truth, justice, and peace. [People] far and near will know the church as a great fellowship of love that provides light and bread for lonely travelers at midnight." (King, Jr., Martin Luther, "A Knock at Midnight", A Knock at Midnight; Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Halloran, p. 73)

I now close with a word about the passion and anger about our case.
When the IRS suggested in a conference call with our attorney, Marcus Owens, that all of this would go away if we would admit that we had done wrong and would never do it again, the sense of offense was palpable throughout the church, the city, and the country. It was such an easy decision to fight this intrusion into our First Amendment freedoms to speak and to practice our religion non-partisanly without intimidation. Everyone immediately knew that these values were at stake and were vulnerable in a new way. We received support from both the right and the left of the theological and political spectrum.

Eleven major newspapers endorsed our position in editorials without any effort on our part to meet with those editorial boards or otherwise influence them. A Muslim walked in off the street the day after our announcement, gave us a generous check and said that if we needed him to he would produce 500 Muslims to protest the IRS's position. The statement that the sermon in question was partisan by implication raised even more passion defending against the government intruding into religious practices saying in effect, "You didn't actually say this but we knew what you meant." A rabbi friend contacted our own rabbi-in-residence and close Muslim friends to say that they wanted to do more than support us, they wanted to become identified with us as actual official members of us recalling Pastor Martin Neimoeller's statement after he was released from a Nazi concentration camp, with which he opened every sermon,

First they came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, but by that time, no one was left to speak up.

As a result our membership grew by 500 new "Solidarity Members."

We are still trying to get our heads and theology around the fact that we now have official members who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'is, and atheists. One person wrote on her solidarity membership card, "I don't believe in God but if I did I would go to your church."

We teach at All Saints that when God made us God said that we were good that each of us has an intrinsic goodness and godliness which is not removed by the reality of evil and sin in our behavior. There is so much in that article of faith, but one small item is that all of our feelings are important messengers. And the message carried by the feeling of anger is that there has been a violation and there is a need for setting limits, establishing boundaries, and verbalizing resentments. I think we have done the latter. However my parish and I still believe that a rather recent regulation ruling from the IRS shows that our practice of religion is still vulnerable particularly in situation 16 which paints a scenario of a non-profit taking a position on a value which has been central in a political campaign. It is easy to extrapolate a situation for All Saints or any other pulpit next November to continue not being silent about the issues of the day from immigration reform to the brokenness off our country to the fact that we are "a torture nation, a nation in an unjust war; a nation with three million men in prison, disproportionately African-American; a world broken by the gulf between the rich north and the desperately impoverished south; and a world on the edge of environmental disaster." (James P. Carroll, "Church: According to Constantine?" A Presentation to All Saints Church, Pasadena, Ca., Monday Evening June 11, 2007)

We will not and cannot be silent about these issues which prevent us from our religious responsibility to help God turn the human race into the human family.

Many of us thought there were certain issues that past years of American history had settled and put to bed. We have jadedly learned through our case that fear itself a manifestation of evil Jesus preached against over and over in his words, "Do not be afraid," fear can still cause reasonable people and even reasonable governmental services to do democracy-destructive things. So we at All Saints think that the task of addressing the government regarding basic First Amendment principles may well again cause us to speak truth to power and tell the government to get on their side of the line.

Thank you for your respectful attention. I would love to entertain your questions.