On freedom of speech... in the church.

Pastors should be able to talk politics without outside retribution. (Inside retribution is kind of up to you.)

“If Jesus debated Senator Kerry and President Bush” was the title of George Regas’s sermon on Oct. 31, 2004. I don’t care for the premise.

Both Kerry and Bush claim that Jesus is Lord. The idea that Jesus would debate them implies that Jesus is on the same level as they are, and that either Kerry or Bush could refute, critique, or oppose his comments. You have not accepted his Lordship if you tell him no. I think American Christians tend to forget what the title “Lord” means. Well, that got the mini-rant out of the way up front.

Regas is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, CA, and in his sermon he critiqued the then-presidential candidates two days before the election. As is his right as the shepherd of a church. Pastors should critique the wider culture we live in. I wish they would do it with as much fervor as they critique their Christian subculture… or that they’d even do it in the first place. In my experience, they either preach about the nature of God, or they exegete a passage and don’t bother to relevantly apply what they’ve learned to anything that’s currently happening. Regas’s sermon is a proper critique of the attitudes behind the candidates. True, he’s coming at it from the position of the Religious Left, but so what? The Religious Right has said worse… and said it with much less compassion.

I bring this up because the IRS is threatening the church’s tax-exempt status because of that sermon. Supposedly Regas endorsed Kerry in that sermon. I read it; I don’t see that he has. Most of Regas’s critiques have to do with the Iraq war and the fact that neither candidate discussed poverty in their elections. Regas is pro-choice, but if you consider that an endorsement for Kerry by default, then you’re a single-issue voter, and out of touch with reality by default. (Besides, though I don’t agree with all of Regas’s positions on abortion, I do agree in this: This nation’s poverty rate and its abortion rate are connected. If we do something to decrease one, it decreases the other. And it is much easier, and more Christian, to help the poor than to change people’s minds about abortion. Save the born children, not just the unborn.)

Churches preach on politics all the time, and pastors regularly endorse candidates in everything but the literal words, “Vote for [CANDIDATE] this Tuesday.” I say since freedom of speech and freedom of religion are in the same amendment, pastors should be able to say the literal words. If Regas thinks Jesus would vote for Kerry, he should be able to freely say so.

The argument is that pastors shouldn’t be able to do so because they unduly influence their congregations. This idea obviously comes from someone who doesn’t attend church. My pastor has been preaching on evangelism for the past month, and how many people showed up for the evangelism outreach last Saturday? Five. Including him. The rest, including everyone else (but one) involved in the church’s leadership, didn’t show; and some are actually grumbling that he’s been preaching about evangelism too much. If that’s their attitude about something that Jesus obviously makes a priority, does anyone seriously thinkthat a pastor’s interpretation of Jesus’s politics is going to sway anyone?

Well, the IRS does. And I hope this thing goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and the IRS’s gag rule on churches is declared unconstitutional.

Read the sermon yourself here. Listen to it here.