The voice from the pulpit:

...The Church at Pierce Creek (New York), an Evangelical Christian church, had lost its exempt status after purchasing full-page ads in newspapers urging Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign...

...The boundary between law and religion is thus a fragile and impermanent one, shifting according to the circumstances of particular controversies...

...Now that the government must defend its own behavior, we can expect that it will maintain that the restraints in the tax code do not violate the First Amendment rights of religious communities...

...In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), the Supreme Court invalidated a Massachusetts statute prohibiting expenditures by banks and other for-prof-it corporations for the purpose of influencing the vote on referendum proposals on any question "other than one materially affecting any of the property, business, or assets of the corporation...

...Does the tax code's total, absolute ban on political campaigning by religious organizations sweep too broadly...

...On April 17-this year's tax day-a church gave the IRS a lawsuit testing the constitutionality of these provisions...

...Justice Lewis Powell wrote: In the realm of protected speech, the legislature is constitutionally disqualified from dictating the subjects about which persons may speak and the speakers who may address a public issue...

...Religion is not only a set of doctrines and exercises...

...At one end of the spectrum, for example, Mennonites do not typically seek to shape the political agenda of a world they know from long experience to be corrupt...

...People in our society have a variety of views, both political and theological, about the wisdom or folly of such overt participation in politics by a religious community...

...Since 1934, as a condition of their tax-exempt status, religious communities have been forbidden to expend substantial amounts of their resources (how much is "substantial" is illdefined) in efforts to communicate moral convictions on matters of public concern to elected officials (lobbying activities...

...Since 1954, an absolute ban has been imposed on their efforts to persuade voters of the correctness of their moral convictions on these matters (electioneering activities...

...On this view churches are free to speak about anything they like...

...Throughout the 1980s the National Conference of Catholic Bishops had to defend against a lawsuit seeking IRS revocation of the church's exempt status because the plaintiffs, known as the Abortion Rights Mobilization, alleged that Catholic pastors had told the laity whom to vote for in the presidential campaign of 1980...

...Maybe not always for the better, but at least with the amount of vigor and boldness that they deemed appropriate to their religious self-understandings as they relate to moral issues...

...Neither is the institutional church...

...As anyone familiar with the history of slavery and abolitionism knows, the line between religious concerns and political concerns is often a fine one...

...At the other end of the spectrum, several religious communities have in fact influenced politics and the law, including Roman Catholics...

...The government may be proving too much...

...As George W. Gerner reminded us recently ("Catholics and the 'Religious Right,'" Commonweal, May 5), Catholics are not exempt as individuals from the political movements and pressures that swirl around us...

...The government may not purchase a person's constitutional rights by giving him or her a welfare benefit, conditioning the receipt of food stamps, say, on the willingness of the beneficiary to refrain from political activity...

...they just can't do that and enjoy tax-exempt status...

...it is people legislating, adjudicating, administering, negotiating-it is a living process of allocating rights and duties and thereby resolving conflicts and creating channels of cooperation...

...The ads said that some of Clinton's positions were contrary to the biblical views embraced by the church...

...E-specially where, as here, the legislature's suppression of speech suggests an attempt to give one side of a debatable public question an advantage in expressing its views to the people, the First Amendment is plainly offended.plainly offended...

...The same could be said of many of the most dynamic social movements in our country, including women's suffrage and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which were legitimately inspired and shaped by religious motivation...

...Even if the plaintiffs had prevailed on the merits and the church had indeed lost its tax-exempt status, there is not the slightest possibility that the bishops would have budged from their position on abortion...

...If a legislature may direct business corporations to 'stick tobusiness,' it also may limit other corporations-religious, charitable, or civic-to their respective 'business' when addressing the public...

...Neither the "spending power" nor the "taxing power" is beyond the limit of the First Amendment's command that "Congress shall make no law...

...THE VOICE FROM THE PULPIT SHOULD IT BE TAXED...

...The government didn't have to answer that question in the Abortion Rights Mobilization case, where the IRS and the NCCB were on the same side urging dismissal of the plaintiffs' case...

...But a lot of us would have had to amend our income tax returns for claiming deductions for gifts to the church...

...As the federal courts face the question posed in the Pierce Creek case, one can hope that they will be guided by the broad protection afforded to political liberties in our democracy, by the venerable tradition of religious involvement in American politics, and by at least one precedent that seems clearly relevant...

...If that is what the law is and that is what religion is, it seems plain that in a democracy that cherishes its commitment to pluralism, religion would be one of the guiding influences of the political discourse within which the law takes shape...

...it is people manifesting a collective concern for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life-it is a shared intuition of and commitment to transcendent values...

...Without much regard for the legitimacy of the religious voice in American politics, however, the federal tax code imposes significant restraints on two activities that many religious communities might occasionally wish to engage in: influencing what the law should be and influencing who should make laws...

...The suit was eventually-after nearly a decade of expensive litigation-dismissed on the sensible view that those plaintiffs lacked standing to bring their complaint to resolution by a federal court...

...According to the plaintiff church, the IRS violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the spirit of the First Amendment when it revoked the church's exempt status for engaging in this "ministry...

...Such power in government to channel the expression of views is unacceptable under the First Amendment...

...In an influential set of lectures in 1974, Professor Harold Berman of Emory Law School wrote: "Law is not only a body of rules...

...Similarly, the government may not diminish a church's constitutional rights just because the government has decided not to tax gifts contributed to churches for their religious purposes...

...inhibiting the freedom of speech...