A thought experiment where the IRS fact-checks every Sunday sermon

This post is a thought experiment, and a piece of satire. Nothing in the first half describes a real agency, a real rule or a real ruling, and no sentence in it should be mistaken for a news report. The imaginary office I am about to describe does not exist. I am inventing it for one purpose: to follow a bad idea one step further than its fans ever do, and see where it ends up. The real law, and the real limits on what the Internal Revenue Service may do to churches, come after the jokes, and they are labelled too.

Now. Please rise for the reading of the imaginary memorandum.

Memorandum 1: the Office of Pulpit Accuracy and Balance

Picture it: a federal bureau, which I will call the Office of Pulpit Accuracy and Balance, housed in a beige building with a lobby fountain that has not worked since the Carter administration. Its mission statement, in the imaginary world, reads: "To ensure that every sermon delivered in the United States is accurate, balanced, and filed in triplicate." Its motto, carved in stone above the door, is "Trust, but verify the sermon."

The Office employs, in this fantasy, ten thousand reviewers. Their qualifications are the usual ones: a degree in public administration, a lanyard, and a firm belief that Scripture could be improved by a style guide. Every Sunday, each reviewer sits in a pew with a clipboard and a rubric. The rubric has seven columns.

Column one: Factual accuracy. Did the preacher claim anything that cannot be confirmed by two independent sources? Column two: Balance. Did the preacher present the opposing view? Column three: Tone. Was the sermon "welcoming," on a scale defined in Appendix F? Column four: Length. Column five: Citations. Column six: Forecasts. The preacher may not predict anything, including the Second Coming, without a confidence interval. Column seven: Humor, where a joke must be cleared by the Office in advance if it touches on a protected category, a pending bill, or a Baptist.

You see where this is going, and I am going to follow it all the way.

Memorandum 2: the rulings

Naturally, the first thing a federal office does is publish decisions. The first, in this imaginary world, is Ruling 1: The Sermon on the Mount.

In the imaginary ruling, the reviewer examines the most famous sermon ever preached, which is recorded in the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of Matthew's Gospel, and finds it deficient. The Preacher says "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." Finding: unsupported by any peer-reviewed land-ownership data. He says "Take therefore no thought for the morrow." Finding: contradicts the guidance of the nearest financial regulator, and creates an unbalanced impression of risk. He says "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Finding: the speaker then proceeds, in the same sermon, to pass judgment on hypocrites, which violates the Office's internal consistency standard. And he says "Love your enemies." Finding: no opposing viewpoint was offered, and the Office wishes to hear from the enemies.

The imaginary verdict is "Mostly False, with Missing Context." The preacher is invited to file a corrected version. The correction runs to four hundred pages and contains no verbs.

Ruling 2 concerns the Exodus. A pastor preaches that God brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand. The reviewer notes, in the imaginary file, that Pharaoh was not afforded an opportunity to respond, that the plagues were disproportionate to the offense, and that the sermon fails to disclose potential conflicts of interest on the part of the Deity. The Office issues a "Context Label," to be posted on the church door, which reads: "This sermon contains claims about a river that some experts dispute." A second Label is attached to the Red Sea, which has failed to obtain a permit for the crossing.

The preacher appeals. The appeal is heard by a panel of three imaginary administrative judges, none of whom has ever attended a worship service, who rule that the sermon may proceed provided the congregation signs a waiver acknowledging that miracles are "outside the scope of verified claims." The congregation signs, and the waiver itself requires a notary, who is on vacation.

Memorandum 3: the waiting list

I hope you are laughing, because the rest of this goes badly for everyone, in the imaginary world and in the real one.

In my invented Office, a small-town pastor in, let us say, a hypothetical congregation in Nebraska, receives a Notice of Preliminary Review. His sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan has been flagged. The reviewer wants to know which Samaritan, on which road, and whether the donor of the inn payment has filed a Form 1099. The pastor responds. The Office replies that his response was received but not "processed," and that processing takes twelve to sixteen weeks. By then the sermon series has moved on to Ephesians, which raises its own questions about the cosmic powers and authorities.

Every church bulletin now carries a legal disclaimer longer than the prayers. Every preacher is a part-time compliance officer. Sermons get shorter, safer and flatter, which is the whole point: a government that can grade a sermon does not need to forbid anything. It only needs the preacher to wonder.

That is the joke, and it is also the argument. Let me make it properly.

The real law: what the Johnson Amendment is

Time to switch from satire to fact. Everything below this heading is real, and I am saying so on purpose.

Churches in the United States are, as a general rule, tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, the same section that covers many charities and educational groups. A church does not have to apply for that status in the way many other nonprofits do, and churches are generally not required to file the annual information return that other exempt organizations file. In 1984 Congress passed a law, found in section 7611 of the Code, that restricts how and when the IRS may begin an inquiry into a church, requiring a high-ranking Treasury official to approve it on the basis of a reasonable belief that the church is not exempt or is engaged in a taxable activity. That protection exists because Congress understood that agents in pews were a bad idea.

Section 501(c)(3) also contains a condition. An exempt organization may not "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office." That language was added in 1954, by amendment from the Senate floor, offered by Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate's Democratic minority leader. The provision is known as the Johnson Amendment. The statute also says that no substantial part of the organization's activities may be carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation. Notice what this does and does not do. It concerns candidates for office, not issues. A pastor may preach on abortion, marriage, poverty, war and immigration, and may even say what Scripture teaches about justice and taxation. What the rule restricts, for exempt organizations, is the organization's endorsement of or opposition to a candidate. Whether that rule is wise is a fair fight, and I take it up in Should pastors endorse candidates? The Johnson Amendment fight, argued fairly. The point here is narrower: even the real law, as written, does not grade a sermon for truth.

Nor should it. The real IRS does not rule on whether a sermon is accurate. It does not weigh whether the preacher's reading of Isaiah is correct. The agency's real task, with respect to churches, is tax compliance, and Congress has even fenced that task with procedural limits. The distance between that real, bounded power and my imaginary Office is the distance between a rule about candidates and a rule about content. The satire is meant to dramatize what happens if the first slides into the second.

Five numbered reasons the imaginary office could never be real

Here is the argument, in order, because even a joke deserves a spine.

One, the First Amendment forbids it by its own text. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech." A federal office that ranks sermons for accuracy is a law respecting religion, abridging speech and burdening exercise at once. It would be the rare statute to violate three clauses in one sentence. You can read the full text on the Constitution page, and the religion clauses phrase by phrase in Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase. Another satire, A thought experiment where the First Amendment is regulated like the Second, runs the same experiment on the whole Bill of Rights.

Two, the government is not a competent judge of doctrine. In United States v. Ballard (1944), the Supreme Court held that a jury could ask whether a defendant sincerely held his religious beliefs, but could not decide whether those beliefs were true. Justice Douglas wrote that the First Amendment places religious beliefs beyond the reach of the courts' inquiry into truth. The Sermon on the Mount is a claim about how to live in the sight of God. No bureau has the standing to mark it "Mostly False."

Three, accuracy rules do not stay neutral. An agency empowered to demand "balance" must decide what the balanced position is, and its employees are appointed by whoever holds the White House. The rubric that protects your pulpit today is the rubric that silences it after the next election, whichever side you are on. A weapon you hand to a friendly administration is a weapon you hand to the next one.

Four, it would reverse the history of American religion. The colonial settlers who came here included many who fled establishments that licensed preachers and policed doctrine. In Virginia, in the years before the Revolution, Baptist preachers were jailed for preaching without a license. Madison wrote his Memorial and Remonstrance in 1785 against a state tax for teachers of the Christian religion, and in it argued that religion must be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The Office of Pulpit Accuracy and Balance is the Virginia licensing board in a lanyard.

Five, the chill is the penalty. My imaginary reviewers never need to fine anyone. The goal of every such regime is to make the preacher self-edit. A pastor who knows a clipboard is in the third row will preach differently. Remove the clipboard and he preaches freely, which is the entire gift of the First Amendment.

The strongest objection, answered

I owe the opposing case its due, and a point-by-point rebuttal is overdue in a post this jokey.

The objection goes: "You are attacking a straw man. Nobody proposes an Office of Pulpit Accuracy and Balance. The real Johnson Amendment is a modest, campaign-finance-style rule, and it exists because tax-exempt status is a subsidy, and the public should not subsidize partisan activity. Your satire proves nothing about the real law."

That is fair, and I grant most of it. Nobody proposes the Office. I labelled the whole thing a thought experiment for exactly that reason. And the subsidy argument is the best one the supporters have: exemption means other taxpayers carry a slightly higher load, so the exemption can come with conditions.

Here is the answer, in three parts. First, the question of whether the rule is wise is separate from the question of whether the government may inspect the content of a sermon to enforce it, and the real law, to its credit, has never needed that inspection to function, because it is limited to endorsement of candidates. Second, the logic of "tax exemption is a subsidy, so conditions are fine" has no natural stopping point. The Court said in Regan v. Taxation With Representation (1983) that the government need not subsidize lobbying, and in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983) that the IRS could deny exemption to a school with racially discriminatory policies, an episode I discuss in Bob Jones University, the IRS and the question it left every church. Each step looked reasonable. The question for a free people is where the next step lands, and who decides. Third, an exemption is, historically, not a favor but a recognition. Chief Justice Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that the power to tax involves the power to destroy. A government that holds the power to withdraw exemption holds a lever over every pulpit in the nation, and the founders did not build a Constitution to put levers on pulpits.

So I will concede one point to my opponents: the line the real law draws, candidates and not content, is a line that can be defended. The proper conservative position is to defend it vigorously where it protects the church from the state, and to reconsider it where it protects the state from the church. That is a debate for citizens and Congress, with the text open and the temperature low.

What a congregation can take from the joke

The satire has a practical coda. If you are a pastor or a vestry member, three plain things apply, not as legal advice for your situation but as a map of where to look.

• Read the actual text of section 501(c)(3) and the IRS's own publication for churches and religious organizations, which is public.
• Know that the law restricts a church's support of candidates, and does not restrict teaching on moral and political issues.
• When in doubt, ask a lawyer who handles religious organizations. I cannot answer your particular case here.

And for the rest of us, the lesson is a sturdier one. The pulpit is the oldest independent institution in American life that does not take its orders from the government. Every other voice in the public square, from the newsroom to the university to the corporation, can be regulated, licensed, subsidized or shamed. The pulpit answers to a higher authority, and that is exactly why free societies protect it. When we imagine a bureau grading Matthew and Exodus, we laugh, and the laugh is the right instinct. It is the sound of a free people recognizing an absurd power before it is built.

The case in brief

1. The imaginary Office of Pulpit Accuracy and Balance is satire, but it follows a real logic: a government that can grade a sermon can chill one without ever punishing anyone.
2. The real law is narrow. Section 501(c)(3), since the 1954 Johnson Amendment, restricts exempt organizations from intervening in campaigns for candidates, not from preaching on issues, and section 7611 fences the IRS's power to examine churches.
3. The Constitution forbids the imaginary Office three times over: Ballard (1944) says courts cannot test whether religious beliefs are true, and the First Amendment bars laws burdening religion and speech.
4. The best objection, that exemption is a subsidy and conditions are fair, explains the candidate rule but gives no principle for stopping at the edge of content.
5. The pulpit is free because it answers to a higher authority than the state, and a free people should protect that independence from every administration.

What you can do: read the text of the First Amendment and of section 501(c)(3), then ask your own congregation's leaders how your church documents its policies on speech and political activity.