The IRS, the IRD, and Red State Blue State Religion
Commentary by John H. Thomas,
General Minister and President, United Church of Christ
Delivered to Gettysburg College on March 7, 2006

Mention the IRS, and most of us glance nervously at the calendar to see how many days are left before April 15. Yes, it’s about that time to gather up the W2 forms, pull out the 1040's, and get to work. Or at least it’s time to start thinking about it! But in recent months the IRS has become one of the new flash points in the increasingly volatile relationship between American religion and American politics. On February 17 of this year, the IRS issued a new advisory on “Election Year Activities and the Prohibition on Political Campaign Intervention for Section 501(c)(3) Organizations.” “With the 2006 campaign season approaching,” the advisory begins, “the IRS is launching enhanced education and enforcement efforts, based on the findings and analysis of the 2004 election cycle.” The rather bland bureaucratic language masks an intense new battle in the struggle for the soul of America in which religion and politics are trying to use each other to achieve their ends.

Last year the IRS announced that it was investigating an Episcopal Church in Pasadena to determine whether it had engaged in illegal political activity, thereby jeopardizing its tax free status. The church’s well known and outspoken liberal rector had preached a sermon prior to the 2004 presidential election in which he had delivered a blistering critique of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. In my experience over recent years the IRS has not been overly aggressive with churches about compliance with the ban on support for particular candidates. Mainline churches generally tried to remain even handed, focusing on issues if they focused on anything related to elections at all. My hunch is that this had less to do with careful attention to ethics and more to do with the fact that their membership was, for the most part, middle of the road politically, and pastors were loathe to alienate anyone. Conservative churches, until the Falwell era, avoided politics. Roman Catholic churches and African American churches were much less coy in their political allegiances, but this seemed to be more or less “winked at” by the IRS. Things have changed.

When the investigation of the Pasadena Church became public, progressive voices howled in protest, assuming that Republican politics, perhaps even the White House, were behind the move putting pressure on the IRS to harass liberal churches. It reeked of Karl Rove to many. However, as the full range of complaints and investigations launched by the IRS has become clearer, these fears seem less well founded. And progressive churches themselves have started to fight back. In January of this year a group of clergy in Columbus, Ohio filed a complaint with the IRS against two Ohio mega-churches whose pastors are deeply involved in an effort to organize a group of so-called “Patriot Pastors,” a coalition closely associated with the Secretary of the State, Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, an extremely conservative Republican, is running for Governor of Ohio and is often mentioned as a potential Vice Presidential candidate in 2008. Blackwell played a key role in the passage of Ohio’s anti-gay marriage amendment in 2004, a central element in the strategy for the Bush re-election campaign in Ohio which became “ground zero” for the bitter election season. The educational and enforcement initiative by the IRS suggests that churches have become targets of political operatives seeking to enlist them in partisan politics.

Religion and politics, of course, have always had an intimate relationship in America from the time my Puritan forebears arrived in New England. The wall of separation has always been thin at best; religious social reformers have waded into the political fray over numerous causes from Abolition to Armenians, Prohibition to school prayer, and most recently in nearby Dover, Pennsylvania, Intelligent Design. Judges have tended to ward off the most egregious breaches of the wall, but it’s always been an easy creek to wade across. In the past, generally, it’s been the sphere of religion seeking to use the sphere of politics to further its causes. I believe that pattern has begun to shift in the last twenty years as politics - and politicians - have begun to find ways to use religion to serve their own partisan interests. Bible belt Republicans, and African American Democrats have long been comfortable employing the language of faith to further their political ends. Now everyone is trying it. Republicans have obviously been much more adept than Democrats. The famous reference to the “New Testament” book of Job by Howard Dean was only one instance of Democratic ineptitude on this. No one can end a political speech these days without the ubiquitous phrase, “God bless America!” And recently, well-connected Democratic operatives have begun quiet conversations with a few progressive religious leaders, including me, asking how their candidates might be able to use religious language and imagery more effectively to connect with church-going voters.

If speech making was all we were talking about, there would be little news here. But as the IRS investigations suggest, the stakes are being raised. No longer is it merely religious groups seeking to use the political arena to press their reform agendas. And it’s not just politicians seeking to coopt religion for their election campaigns, either. Now we are seeing well organized, politically connected initiatives intervening in the interior life of American religious bodies to serve their interests. Here the scene shifts from the IRS to the IRD.

The IRD - the Institute on Religion and Democracy - is a sophisticated “inside the beltway” organization well funded by conservative foundations and closely aligned with a neo-conservative political agenda. IRD includes on its board intellectual and media figures like Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Michael Medved. IRD’s stated purpose is “Reforming the Church to Renew Democracy.” It describes itself as “an ecumenical alliance of U.S. Christians working to reform their churches’ social witness in accord with biblical and historic Christian teachings, thereby contributing to the renewal of democratic society at home and abroad,” (emphasis added). The political agenda becomes even clearer when the Mission Statement goes on to say that the IRD believes “that Western representative democracy is, on balance, a good worthy of advancing.” The echoes of the Bush administration’s foreign policy are not hard to hear.

If the IRD were merely a think tank on the nexus of religion and politics from a neo-conservative perspective, there would be little to complain about even from those who disagree sharply. But the agenda is far less benign. IRD’s president describes some of their activities:

IRD monitors denominational agencies and leaders who often claim to speak for millions but really represent only an extreme view. We report our findings to churchgoers who want to reclaim their denominations from politicized ideologies. IRD helps church members battle for renewal within their denominations, arming them with facts.

The target is the Mainline churches whose leaders, they allege, “pursue radical political agendas, throwing themselves into multiple, often leftist crusades - radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, sexual liberation, and so forth.” And, as a recent book about their activities puts it, they “play hardball on holy ground.”

The IRD supports and encourages campaigns of disruption and attack in Mainline churches through its Alliance of Church Renewal. IRD has committees specifically focused on the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church (USA), committees which provide support for so-called renewal groups within each of these denominations - the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Good News, and Anglicans United. More recently the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the American Baptist Churches, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have increasingly come into their sights as well. The IRD pursues its political agenda in the churches through three strategies: campaigns of disinformation that seek to discredit church leadership, advocacy efforts at church assemblies seeking to influence church policy, and grass roots organizing which, in some cases, encourages schismatic movements encouraging members and congregations either to redirect mission funding or even to leave their denominations. Indeed, the Mainline churches are facing hardball tactics.

At the recent World Council of Church’s Assembly in Porto Alegre, the IRD was present monitoring plenaries and press. Daily reports were posted on the IRD website and disseminated through the Alliance of Church Renewal, reports which regularly sought to discredit the World Council of Churches in general, and U.S. church leaders in particular. The “weekly poll” in the IRD website homepage read, “In recent decades the World Council of Churches has emphasized liberation theologies and interfaith dialogue over evangelism. What should mainline churches do in response?” No evidence is offered to support this assertion, no mention of the renewed participation of Orthodox churches featured at this Assembly, churches which struggled under Marxist persecution and which would be unlikely to appreciate being associated with “liberation theologies.” These reports and allegations, and others like them, regularly become the basis of published attacks against mainline leaders provided by IRD to renewal groups who distribute them within their own denominations. The goal is to disrupt and distract, and it has been effective.

This past summer the IRD launched an advocacy effort aimed at undermining the mainline churches’ long standing support of justice for Palestinians in the Middle East conflict. As church assemblies addressed the Occupation, the security barrier or wall, and in some cases the use of economic leverage - either divestment or positive investment - to advocate for an end to the occupation, the IRD and its related organizations joined with some Jewish organizations to vigorously challenge these resolutions. In Portland, Oregon, for example, at the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the IRD joined the Simon Wiesenthal Center in a press conference denouncing a proposed resolution against the security barrier. The same Wiesenthal Center, in concert with the Biblical Witness Fellowship, had earlier orchestrated a massive email campaign directed at me and other United Church of Christ leaders as we took up the question of economic leverage during our General Synod in Atlanta, a campaign that also included full page ads in the Atlanta Constitution accusing the United Church of Christ of “anti-Semitism.” Since our Synod, the Wiesenthal Center, the David Project, and the Anti-Defamation League have been eager allies for IRD related organizations within the United Church of Christ in an on-going strategy of disinformation and disruption. The IRD agenda matches that of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby that largely controls the Washington agenda on Middle East policy. What was striking in this instance, however, was that the debates were not among United Church of Christ members or Disciple of Christ members; the debates were between the church and others outside the church.

Even more perversely, the IRD, through related organizations in its Association of Church Renewal, encourages grass roots dissenting movements within denominations using classic political organizing around “wedge issues,” issues such as gay marriage or ordination, or Middle East policy. These movements do far more than encourage vigorous theological and moral debate within denominations; in reality they seek to disrupt, ultimately to control, and failing that to dismantle mainline denominations. In the United Church of Christ the IRD’s desginated related organization is the Biblical Witness Fellowship which publishes The Witness, a newspaper filled with articles attacking UCC leaders. BWF encourages participation in and support for global mission outside the denomination’s network of missionaries, partnerships, and projects. And BWF also provides a “placement” service for so-called “orthodox” pastors and churches that refuse to use the denomination’s search and call process, thereby setting themselves outside the processes of oversight in the denomination. More recently, BWF has found common cause with two other groups: the Evangelical Association of Congregational Christian and Reformed Churches and with the “Welcoming and Faithful Movement.” The Evangelical Association regularly provides strategic advice to congregations upset with denominational resolutions, showing them steps whereby they may leave the denomination with their buildings and other financial assets. Leaders of a new “Welcoming and Faithful” movement claim that is its being organized to provide a place in the denomination for more “orthodox” members of the United Church of Christ who might otherwise leave the church. It is allegedly organized simply as an alternative to the Open and Affirming Church movement which expresses the denomination’s welcome of gay and lesbian Christians.

But the agenda is far more ambitious. Regular mailings are sent to local church leaders, often deliberately by-passing the pastors. One such mailing, sent by a judicatory leader associated with Welcoming and Faithful, encouraged churches to stop sending mission support to the denomination. The leader of Welcoming and Faithful is now traveling the country seeking out disaffected members with the claim stated in their literature that leaders of the United Church of Christ “declared independence from Jesus and the historic faith of the church” with our marriage equality vote on July 4, 2005. A national conference is being organized for this summer which apparently is to culminate in a pilgrimage to the Cleveland headquarters of the United Church of Christ in order to present a “manifesto” demanding a reversal of last summer’s support for marriage equality for all regardless of sexual orientation. These same stories are being repeated in every mainline denomination. In the latest and perhaps most shocking maneuver, it is being reported that members of some of these groups are joining congregations, ultimately getting themselves elected to positions of authority, and then dropping the veil of innocence to press for congregational disaffiliation.

What is important to note here is that IRD’s interests are not primarily fostering church renewal or encouraging lively theological and ethical debate in church councils and assemblies. The ultimate goal is to reshape the Protestant mainline into a powerful force advancing the neo-conservative political agenda with its goal of promoting its own version of “Western representative democracy” around the world. Just as politicians are now forging alliances with churches to promote their electoral agenda, and, in the process disregarding IRS laws and regulations, IRD is using church members, and even outside groups, to disrupt and ultimately control the mainline to promote its own political agenda,.

This attempt to co-opt, even to silence the church came into sharp focus for the United Church of Christ a year ago in the now famous refusal of the major television networks to air a commercial expressing a wide welcome to all. The commercial featured two night club bouncers outside a church, admitting some and blocking others. It spoke to an audience of deeply alienated members of our society whose experience of church - in many different denominations - has been wounding and excluding. People of color, women, gay and lesbian persons, persons with disabilities. The commercial announced, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” Controversial?

In sorting through this decision it’s important to remember that the networks’ decision about the commercial was being developed at the same time that anti-gay marriage amendments were being advanced in the 2004 election season and when President Bush was calling for a national constitutional amendment. These anti-gay marriage initiatives had proven to be powerful organizing tools to register conservative voters and to get out a strong Republican vote, a crucial factor in a state like Ohio. An internal CBS memo determined that our church commercial promoting inclusion was controversial because it advocated for gay marriage, apparently because it showed two gay couples along with many other people during the thirty second spot. As a result, an important theological message was silenced because it violated powerful political interests, political interests that have demonstrated themselves more than ready to make use of other churches more inclined to advance those interests.

Ironically, rather than silencing the message, the network’s refusal became a major news story and the commercial was aired constantly over several days on news programs for free, including news programs on the very same networks that had refused to air the paid commercial. This was an enormous windfall to the church, but that does not negate the ominous fact that in this instance, as in many others, political interests are seeking to shape the church’s message to conform to their own, or failing that, to render alternative visions invisible. It should be noted that the successor commercial to “Bouncer,” titled, “Ejector Seat,” with a similar message to be aired at Easter, has already elicited a likely rejection from the same networks.

Does this mean that in a political context now defined popularly by the “red state blue state” paradigm, we are destined to watch the ecclesial landscape devolve into red state blue state religion? Will the churches succumb to the political interests that would turn them into powerful weapons for red and blue causes and candidates? I’ve already indicated that there are efforts to equip Democratic politicians with progressive religious rhetoric to counter “red state” religiosity. Will “blue state” religion seek to invigorate itself in a battle with “red state” religion? I think the answer is yes and no. More progressive churches on the ecclesiastical spectrum are beginning to wake up to the tactics of disruption, disinformation, and disaffiliation that IRD and related groups are using to reshape the witness of the mainline into the image and likeness of neo-conservatism. And there are signs of an emerging resistance to those tactics..

The United Church of Christ tried humor last year, to good effect. During the Bush inauguration festivities in Washington last January, James Dobson of the American Family Association, a powerful conservative Christian organization closely aligned with conservative Republican politicians, attacked a small foundation that was developing an elementary school curriculum on tolerance using familiar cartoon characters. Dobson announced that Spongebob Squarepants is a gay character, and thus was part of a promotion of the so-called “gay agenda.” This would probably be news to the millions of children who watch Spongebob with eager enthusiasm. At one level it is all very silly. But James Dobson is also the person Karl Rove consulted with during the nomination process for a new Supreme Court Justice. And it is James Dobson to whom newly confirmed Justice Alito recently wrote a letter of lavish acclaim and gratitude for his help in the confirmation process, an ominous suggestion of a political alliance reaching beyond the Congress and the White House all the way to the Supreme Court.

To challenge this potent alliance of conservative politics and religion, we published a photograph of Spongebob sitting across from me at my desk with the caption, “General Minister and President John Thomas tells Spongebob Squarepants that he would be welcome in the United Church of Christ.” Underneath the humor - which was received with great appreciation by the way - was the reminder that there are, in fact, competing or alternative visions of what the Gospel says to our culture, “blue state red state” if you will, and that we must not allow only one of those visions to be seen simply because of the power of its political patrons. Progressive churches are discovering that neo-conservative politics are playing hardball on their holy ground, and that some form of hardball may be necessary to prevent the church from being completely coopted or silenced.

But in another way, the red state blue state paradigm falls apart for the church just as it does for politics, and in the end I believe that’s a good thing. Americans, either as political beings or as religious beings, are far too complex to be neatly slotted into such encompassing categories. And churches, even relatively progressive churches like the United Church of Christ, are both red and blue in their membership, their theological positions, and their moral views. Bush voters and Kerrey voters sit side by side in our church’s pews. Increasingly mainline church leaders and evangelical church leaders - leaders who differ radically in many ways, including their political loyalties - are allying themselves together around a common commitment to the care of the creation and on behalf of the needs of the poor. Last May, for example, I sat with a Southern Baptist leader and with the vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals in a meeting with the Administration demanding that the federal food stamp program funding in the new federal budget be restored. Red and blue politicians may vary considerably in their attentiveness to the poor, but at least in this instance red and blue church leaders hear the hunger pangs of poor children in a common cry.

In the end, this failure of the red state blue state model for the church may be the best news our red state blue state political landscape can receive. In a society marked by deep political and ideological alienation, where the fabric of the commonwealth is frayed to the point of tearing, communities that find ways to tolerate difference and live creatively with diversity may be their own form of redemption not simply for themselves, but for all of us. But in order to be this redemptive community, we will need to resist the political interests who would use us for sectarian, partisan, and ultimately deeply dividing interests. Here the challenge is the same for progressive and conservative churches and their leaders. It is terribly seductive to have political leaders and interests approaching you for your blessing. But do pastors and church leaders really want to have politicians lining up at their door come election time? Do they really want to be welcomed into a world where support and influence are traded like futures on the commodity market? The Old Testament is clear in its distinction between the prophets of Yahweh and those court prophets who offered their blessing to the king in return for a comfortable place in the court. Right now, in our politically polarized landscape, the IRS may be the one institution challenging churches to ask the right questions about how best to engage the public square. How strange that even when churches and church leaders are tempted to succumb to such powerful political interests, it just may be the IRS that helps us keep our integrity and allow us to be the church we are called to be.