by guest blogger Joseph L. Conn

To employ a turn-of-phrase we use in the South, Jonathan Falwell “sure takes after his daddy, doesn’t he?” Jonathan may not look much like Jerry, but he sure acts like him.

In his “Falwell Confidential” last week, the Lynchburg televangelist urged pastors to plunge neck-deep into partisan politics. He quoted Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University School of Law, on ways to circumvent the federal ban on electioneering by churches and other tax-exempt entities.

Falwell and Staver touted the usual techniques: “preach on biblical and moral issues (such as traditional marriage or abortion); urge constituents to register and vote; discuss positions of the candidates; even personally endorse candidates.

“Further,” Falwell continued, “churches are permitted to distribute nonpartisan voter guides, register voters, provide transportation to the polls, hold candidate forums and introduce visiting candidates.”

As you might expect, this advice sheds more darkness than light.

Churches can, indeed, address public issues and hold non-partisan voter registration drives, but Staver and Falwell get into swampy territory when they advise clergy to preach on “biblical and moral issues” and then “discuss positions of the candidates” on those issues.

That’s code language to encourage preachers to stand in the pulpit on the Sunday before the election and say reproductive rights and gay rights are an abomination and Candidate Smith supports “killing babies and the homosexual lifestyle” while Candidate Jones opposes them.

And we all know how “nonpartisan” those Religious Right voter guides are. Republicans always come out looking like angels and Democrats the very imps of Satan.

I don’t think the Internal Revenue Service will go for any of this.

But Staver and Falwell urge pastors not to worry about the IRS!

Says the Falwell Confidential, “Since 1954, when the political endorsement/opposition prohibition was added, only one church has ever lost its IRS letter ruling, [Staver] says. But even that church (the Church at Pierce Creek in New York) did not lose its tax-exempt status….The IRS revoked the church’s letter ruling, but not its tax-exempt status.”

What a crock!

The Church at Pierce Creek had its tax exemption revoked in 1995 for paying for full page ads in newspapers in 1992 attacking then presidential candidate Bill Clinton. The church, represented by televangelist Pat Robertson’s legal beagle Jay Sekulow, went to federal court and lost at every turn! (Read the appellate court decision for yourself. It was written by Judge James L. Buckley, a conservative Republican and brother of right-wing pundit William F. Buckley! Hard to turn him into a “liberal activist judge,” isn’t it?)

Staver and Falwell’s suggestion that the IRS doesn’t enforce the law is also belied by a little incident from the Falwell empire’s own sordid history. In February of 1993, that old toothless IRS ruled that funds from Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.

Falwell was so bitter about this that he lied about it on national television. In two debates with AU staff members, Falwell flatly denied that any of his ministries had ever lost their tax exemptions for illegal politicking.

In August of 2004, he finally ‘fessed up (sort of). After AU’s Barry Lynn confronted Falwell on Fox News with a public statement about the IRS penalty issued by Falwell himself, the TV evangelist sputtered, “We went through four and half years of audits and our attorneys and the IRS attorneys agreed that they would settle if we would pay $50,000 in taxes rather than a million dollars continuing legal fees.”

Funny. I would think Falwell fils and Staver would have mentioned that in their Confidential. You know, in the interests of full disclosure.

I have my own “Confidential” alert to clergy: Get your advice on politics and tax law from sound sources, not the Falwell Gang. We have our own information on this prepared by experts or you can look from the ultimate source – the IRS.

Joseph L. Conn is communications director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.