ADF Alliance Alert

The key sentences that ultimately distinguish the two positions in this debate are bolded below.

ADF attorney Erik Stanley has this commentary in the Columbus Dispatch. He writes:

The state cannot demand the surrender of constitutional rights for a church to remain tax exempt.

Nonprofit organizations are exempted because they are not profit-makers. If citizens are already taxed on their individual incomes, taxing their participation in a voluntary organization from which they derive no monetary gain amounts to double taxation.

Churches are all the more tax exempt. Church tax-exemption is not a gift or a subsidy, as some disingenuously contend. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, the power to tax involves the power to destroy, and churches always have been exempt from taxation under the principle that there is no surer way to destroy religion than to tax it.

Eric Williams,  senior pastor of North Congregational United Church of Christ in Columbus, offers this counterpoint in the same publication: Should clergy use pulpit to endorse candidates? No. It concludes:

I share a recently expressed view that tax-exempt charitable organizations are given a tax break because they do good works that transcend politics.

As the leader of a faith community, I respect that some of my colleagues might feel compelled to protest a law they think unjust or inconsistent with their religious beliefs, and I appreciate that the First Amendment protects that sort of expression. However, the Pulpit Initiative is not a mere protest; it is as if a group of lawyers have stepped into the pulpit to coordinate a mass violation of federal law. Even if ADF’s intentions are understandable, I cannot condone this inappropriate, unethical and illegal behavior.