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{"id":17240,"date":"2011-06-04T12:51:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-04T17:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/jesuscreed\/?p=17240"},"modified":"2011-06-04T16:45:17","modified_gmt":"2011-06-04T21:45:17","slug":"were-not-going-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2011\/06\/04\/were-not-going-away\/","title":{"rendered":"“We’re not going away.”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

From Bob Unruh<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

What is the policy at your church? in your denomination?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hundreds of Christian pastors across the United States have knowingly spoken out from their pulpits about political candidates and have gotten virtually no response from the Internal Revenue Service, whose job it is to enforce the 1954 Johnson Amendment banning such speech from pulpits.<\/p>\n

Have they intimidated the IRS? Or is there just a delay between the comments and the response?<\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t matter, according to officials with the\u00a0Alliance Defense Fund,<\/a> which is running the\u00a0 Pulpit Project<\/a> to restore the Constitution\u2019s speech rights to pastors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether the IRS responds, doesn\u2019t respond, or chooses to wait to respond, we\u2019re not going away. Protecting the freedom of the pulpit is too important to stop this effort after a few short years,\u201d wrote Erik Stanley, a senior counsel with the ADF, in a\u00a0 blog report on the campaign.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Johnson Amendment has been around for 56 years now. It may take a few more years to see it rescinded, but we\u2019re committed to staying the course until we do,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

WND reported last fall when at least 100, and perhaps as many as several hundred, Christian pastors preached about biblical issues and the political candidates. They then packaged up their sermons and sent them to the IRS.<\/p>\n

The campaign also took place in 2008 and 2009, although with fewer participants.<\/p>\n

The program challenges IRS rules adopted in 1954 at the behest of then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, D-Texas, that prohibit any speech from a church pulpit favoring or opposing a political candidate.<\/p>\n

The rules were adopted after Johnson found himself bearing the brunt of critical comments from Christian pastors concerned about his behavior in Washington. Before then, according to the ADF, pastors spoke freely from their pulpits even about specific candidates, issues and elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cPastors have the right to proclaim biblical truth from their pulpits without having to worry about the government looking over their shoulder and threatening their churches with revocation of tax exempt status if they say something the IRS doesn\u2019t like,\u201d his report said.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"