Taxing Churches Involves the Government as Church Speech Police

Since 1954, the government has prohibited churches from speaking about a certain area of life in order to maintain their tax exemption.  Pastors are allowed to talk about anything they want to from the pulpit of their church except how Scripture applies to our electoral politics.  Called the Johnson Amendment, because of its sponsor Lyndon Johnson, this prohibition has enabled IRS agents to monitor and censor sermons preached from the pulpit for almost 55 years.  Allowing the government to condition tax exemption on a church refraining from preaching on a certain issue allows the IRS to act as speech police and monitor churches for compliance.

The Johnson Amendment allows government to determine when a pastor’s speech becomes too “political.”  That is an absurdly ridiculous standard.  A pastor’s speech from the pulpit that addresses candidates in light of Scripture is religious speech.  That speech doesn’t become political any more than a pastor’s speech becomes commercial when he addresses from Scripture the current financial debacle on Wall Street.  Allowing government agents to make that determination is as absurd as asking a first-grader to design and build NASA’s next space shuttle.

The Johnson Amendment also allows the government to parse the content of a pastor’s sermon to determine whether it violates the law.  That is called a content-based restriction on speech, which the Free Speech Clause prohibits unless the government has a compelling reason to censor speech based on its content.  And you would have to ignore reality to agree that any compelling reason existed for Johnson’s amendment.

Allowing the government to police speech is a bad idea that contains dangerous consequences for liberty—a principle that our nation’s founders understood most clearly.  The best way to preserve liberty, and specifically religious liberty, is to get the government speech police out of the business of reviewing a pastor’s sermon.  That is no place for the government in a free society.  Tax exemption for churches protects freedom of speech and gets the government out of the role of policing a church’s speech.