| WASHINGTON
- May 14 - At an Oversight Subcommittee hearing for the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee today, The Interfaith Alliance protested two pieces of legislation that would attempt to alter tax law to allow for partisan politicking inside houses of worship.
“Passage of these bills would turn pastors, imams, rabbis and other would-be prophets into potential political operatives to be lobbied by candidates for public office and used as endorsers of partisan campaigns,” testified the Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, executive director of The Interfaith Alliance. “To saddle religious leaders with the controversy and skepticism associated with politics would erode the reverence accorded to religious offices and leave congregations devoid of clergy functioning with an authority rooted in spirituality.”
H.R. 2931, the Bright-Line Act of 2001, and H.R. 2357, the Houses of Worship Political Speech Protection Act, seek to dismantle the absolute ban on partisan politicking to allow houses of worship to engage in the mechanisms of partisan politics while retaining their tax-exempt status and receiving tax-deductible contributions. Gaddy stated that churches are already free to endorse candidates for political offices and to give money to those candidates’ campaigns, but that they cannot do so as a 501 (c)(3) tax-exempt organization.
“Lifting the ban on politicking is also sure to create a rift between the leadership of a house of worship and the congregants,” added Gaddy. “A religious leader in a congregation must be able to serve all of the people in that congregation. Taking on the role of a political power broker would jeopardize beyond measure the acceptance and effectiveness of a minister within a congregation.”
Gaddy testified that these bills are not needed, nor wanted by America’s clergy. He cited a Gallup/Interfaith Alliance Foundation poll of religious leaders, which found that 77% of clergy believe that they should not endorse political candidates. Of those participating in the poll, 59% identified themselves as Evangelicals. “It is ironic that these polling results show that the very people whom these bills are supposedly intended to empower adamantly resist even the premise on which the bills are based,” remarked Gaddy.
“Even if by some stretch of the imagination one could conceive that the bills before this committee today presented no constitutional problems, I would oppose them. As a pastor who has worked in congregational ministry for more than 40 years as well as the executive director of a national interfaith organization that values the importance of religious congregations, I shudder to think of the devastation that would be visited upon the religious community and its leaders were these bills to become law.”
Gaddy’s testimony can be found at:
http://www.interfaithalliance.org/Initiatives/020514t.html
The Interfaith Alliance (TIA) is a non-partisan clergy-led grassroots organization dedicated to promoting the positive and healing role of religion in the life of the nation and challenging those who manipulate religion to promote a narrow, divisive agenda.
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