IMPOLITE TOPICS

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When religious authority conflicts with political authority, which authority takes precedence?

Any consideration of the relationship between religion and politics in the United States must take into account that most churches, religious organizations, and ministers are tax exempt.

Congress has enacted special tax laws applicable to churches, religious organizations, and ministers in recognition of their unique status in American society and of their rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

Churches and religious organizations are generally exempt from income tax and receive other favorable treatment under the tax law; however, certain income of a church or religious organization may be subject to tax, such as income from an unrelated business. (“Churches and Religious Organizations:  Benefits And Responsibilities Under The Federal Tax Law” )

Now we come to another fine line. What is the difference between legal and illegal actions by religious organizations with tax-exempt status? This an important question, especially in an election year.

 
Political Campaign Activity

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all IRC section 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches and religious organizations, are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made by or on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violation of this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise tax.

Certain activities or expenditures may not be prohibited depending on the facts and circumstances. For example, certain voter education activities (including the presentation of public forums and the publication of voter education guides) conducted in a non-partisan manner do not constitute prohibited political campaign activity. In addition, other activities intended to encourage people to participate in the electoral process, such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, would not constitute prohibited political campaign activity if conducted in a non-partisan manner. On the other hand, voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that: (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates, will constitute prohibited participation or intervention.

Individual Activity by Religious Leaders

The political campaign activity prohibition is not intended to restrict free expression on political matters by leaders of churches or religious organizations speaking for themselves, as individuals. Nor are leaders prohibited from speaking about important issues of public policy. However, for their organizations to remain tax exempt under IRC section 501(c)(3), religious leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official church functions. To avoid potential attribution of their comments outside of church functions and publications, religious leaders who speak or write in their individual capacity are encouraged to clearly indicate that their comments are personal and not intended to represent the views of the organization.  IRS “Tax Guide For Churches And Religious Organizations”

My intention at this point is to post this IRS material on the blog for future reference as we go farther into the political campaign.

For now, I will include two references to cases when Roman Catholic priests denied communion to church members.

Word spread like wildfire in Catholic circles: Douglas Kmiec, a staunch Republican, firm foe of abortion and veteran of the Reagan Justice Department, had been denied communion.

His sin? Kmiec, a Catholic who can cite papal pronouncements with the facility of a theological scholar, shocked old friends and adversaries alike earlier this year by endorsing Barack Obama for president. For at least one priest, Kmiec’s support for a pro-choice politician made him a willing participant in a grave moral evil.

Kmiec was denied communion in April at a Mass for a group of Catholic business people he later addressed at dinner. The episode has not received wide attention outside the Catholic world, yet it is the opening shot in an argument that could have a large impact on this year’s presidential campaign: Is it legitimate for bishops and priests to deny communion to those supporting candidates who favor abortion rights? (“Denied the Rite“)

In Kansas City, Kan., Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann has ordered Ms. Sebelius [Governor of Kansas] also an Obama supporter, not to receive Communion after she vetoed abortion legislation riddled with constitutional red flags. The bill in question made it easier for prosecutors to search private medical records, allowed family members to seek court orders to stop abortions and failed to include exceptions to save the life of the mother. Along with many public officials, Ms. Sebelius recognizes the profound moral gravity of abortion. She has supported prudent public policies that have reduced abortions in Kansas by investing in adoption services, prenatal health care and social safety nets for families. But in his diocesan newspaper, the archbishop blasted the governor over her “spiritually lethal” message and her obligation to recognize the “legitimate authority within the Church.” (“Don’t Play Politics With Communion”)

In recent posts, I have been raising questions about the relationships between religion, politics, and the Bible by offering a series of specific, current examples of the collisions between political and religious beliefs.

Behind the specifics of any particular incident, lawsuit, political campaign, or religious organization, the basic challenge is this: the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States requires that we must respect the rights of others whose religious beliefs and practices are different from our own.

It is also important to recognize that any belief about religion comes under the category of religious belief. Atheism is as much a religious belief as belief in God. (For a perceptive commentary on this point, see the comment by John Thomas.)

As our society continues to become more and more religiously, culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse, this means that clashes between religion and politics will grow more and more frequent. The question then becomes a matter of authority. Which authority is the ultimate authority on such matters? Does religious belief trump federal law?  Or does Federal law trump religious belief?

I remember the 1960 presidential election when John F. Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith was a major political issue, based on the question of authority:  Would John Kennedy abide by federal law or be obedient to the authority of the Pope?  

The basic question of authority has not changed, and applies to Roman Catholics who must decide if they are going to follow church teachings or federal, state, and local laws at the risk of being denied sacred rites.

The same question applies to evangelical Christians who treat the Bible as their highest authority. When there is a conflict, do they obey the Bible or the law? 

What happens when churches provide sanctuary to illegal immigrants against federal law, based on a claim that they are following a higher authority? 

Under Martin Luther King, Jr, the civil rights movement was fundamentally a proclamation that a biblical vision of justice carried higher authority than Jim Crow laws requiring segregation by race.

And since the question of Barack Obama’s faith continue to be the stuff of internet urban legends, with endless claims that he is really a Muslim and would take the oath of office on the Koran, what happens when a non-Christian is elected to political office? 

And if we are going to teach the Bible in public schools, are we willing to provide money to teach the Koran in public schools? Will we spend tax dollars to educate Muslims in private Muslim schools?

We might even add to the list, is it really possible for someone in the United States to run for President who claims to be an agnostic or atheist?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to such questions. I know only that religious and political beliefs can never be treated as if they inhabit separate realms. Like it or not, every religious question is also political and every political question is also religious. And in each case, the real question comes down to authority.

When religious authority conflicts with political authority, which authority takes precedence? This is the most impolite and the most difficult of the Impolite Topics.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

written by Kalinda \\ tags: authority, Authority And The Bible, communion, Impolite Topics, IRS, John F. Kennedy, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, muslim, obedience, obedience to authority, political authority, politics, Roman Catholic, tax code, teach Bible in public schools

What authority in your life is primary? Is it God? The Bible? The government? Some person? An organization? A business? Whom or what do you fear the most? Or to ask the question in a different way, what authority will you obey above all others?

Some Christian churches claim that the central theme of the Bible is salvation from human sin. But if you read the Bible carefully, you will see that salvation from sin is nowhere nearly as important a theme as the question of power. At its core, the Bible is a book about the use and abuse of power and conflicting demands for obedience to authority.

The Bible, taken as a whole, is a study in the relationship between God, government power, and personal obedience. It claims that God is the ultimate authority, but has mixed messages about whether or not human rulers are agents of God’s authority on Earth.

Most of the Bible stories are about these questions of power and the abuse of power and about authority and conflicting claims to authority.  I didn’t learn those Bible stories in Sunday School. Instead, I learned sweet stories about being nice and giving to the poor. Mostly, I learned that I was supposed to be obedient to established authority.

In fact, the stories about Jesus are fundamentally the stories of a man who was acting against the authority of the government with its government-controlled religion. Again and again, Jesus confronted the abuse of power by the religious/political power system. Yet my religious education was almost exclusively about teaching me to obey established authority without question.

For most of us, this is the essence of both religious and public school education. Our lives are one long experience of being told that we must obey some external authority. When we are small, ultimate authority is vested in our parents and teachers and the other big people in our lives. For children, God is just another big person to obey. The idea of God easily becomes a Santa Claus type figure in the sky who is watching to see if we are naughty or nice. 

The older we get, the more complicated the questions about obedience to authority become. We have traffic rules, IRS rules, homeowner association rules to obey. Every where there are rules to follow. Don’t walk on the grass. Don’t litter. Don’t park here. And sometimes the obedience to rules makes the difference between life and death.

I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War and the tremendous personal anguish involved in questions of obedience to authority. In the era of the wartime draft, the government claimed obedience as its right. If it drafted one of its citizens, that young man had no choice. He had to obey or face the consequences.

Military training is fundamentally an exercise in teaching people to obey authority, even at the cost of their lives. This is why there are ranks with visible insignia, and people are taught to salute signs of authority.

While my husband was an officer in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, we lived for three years on an Air Force base in Arkansas. We had a sticker on the front bumper of the car signifying that this was an officer’s car.

I used to drive on and off the base to go to work each day, and always felt a bit awkward each time the guard saluted as I drove back onto the base. Even then I thought it was odd. What was he saluting? I didn’t deserve the salute, because I was not an officer in the Air Force. He was told to salute a sticker. If intelligent people can be trained to salute a sticker on the bumper of a car, think of how powerful the forces of persuasion are to persuade people to kill as an act of obedience to authority.

This blog is named “Impolite Topics.” Most churches have their own list of impolite topics. For many churches, the most impolite of all the impolite topics is the question of power in relationship to the government. These churches tend to be mainstream, established, and practicing traditional religion. In contrast, churches made up of people who feel oppressed or excluded from social power are not so polite on the topics of religion and politics.  The topics of power and confrontation of government abuse of power are no longer impolite topics, but become central to the teaching of the church.
 
In my book, Going Broke With Jesus, I wrote about what Jesus said about money as part of his condemnation of the abuse of power by the government and temple system. One of these stories concerns the temple tax. Matthew 22:15-22 and Luke 20:19-26 tell two versions of a story in which members of the political and religious establishment attempt to trap Jesus with a question about paying the temple tax with a coin with Caesar’s image on it.  Jesus answered with the words: ”Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.

If anyone has any idea that money is simply a matter of personal morality, this episode brings to the surface the relationship between religion and government. This is a story about taxation. But it is about more than taxation. It involves questions of authority on Earth. Do believers obey God or the government? Interpretation of this particular episode goes far beyond money. The Bible verse: “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” is responsible for shameful moments in church history, when Christian churches kept silent while governments perpetrated atrocities.
Going Broke With Jesus, Chapter 9, By Kalinda Rose Stevenson

Religion, politics, and the Bible are completely interwoven with questions about authority and obedience. And so this is the fundamental question: What authority will you obey above all others?

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

written by Kalinda \\ tags: authority, Authority And The Bible, Bible, God's authority, Impolite Topics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, obedience, obedience to authority, religion and politics, Vietnam War

Claims about authority are always personal, because they either increase or take away take personal power. And so rather than begin with an abstract study of authority, power, and persuasion, I will tell you a personal story.

My story began in the fall of 1973, with three days of orientation at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which is a large evangelical seminary north of Boston, Massachusetts. I was an incoming student, who knew almost nothing about the Bible and very little about evangelicals.

I had recently experienced what I perceived was a call from God to attend seminary and study for the ministry. I chose to attend Gordon-Conwell rather than one of the other theological seminaries located in the Boston area on the recommendation of the minister of the church I was attending, who told me that he didn’t trust any of the other seminaries to teach the Bible accurately.

With hindsight, I can see many warnings signs of what was to come, and am sure that I would have been much happier if I had chosen to attend one of the other Boston area schools. But I simply didn’t know enough to anticipate what lay before me.

And so on a beautiful September day in New England, when the leaves were already beginning to turn, I joined more than two hundred other incoming students for orientation. I noticed immediately that I was one of only five incoming women enrolled in the Master of Divinity program. I found out that there were three women in the class ahead of me.

So, in a student body with more than seven hundred students, there were eight women enrolled in the degree program leading to ordination, as well as a few women enrolled in the Christian education program. I also happened to be the only student in the entire school who was also a mother. I soon began to feel that I had stumbled uninvited into a stag party.

Since the seminary required us to be present at orientation all day, it provided us with lunch each day. On my first day, I sat down at a table in the dining room across from a young man. He looked me up and down, as if he was inspecting a side of beef, and obviously noticed my wedding ring. He then asked this question: “Is your husband a student at this school?”

I thought the question was odd, considering that all of us in the room were incoming students, and so I said: “I am a student at this school.” And then his eyes narrowed into little slits and he asked: “What is your degree program?”

I said: “M.Div.”

And then his tone, which was cold enough to start with, turned even colder and he said: “Haven’t you heard of 1 Timothy 2:12?  What is your hermeneutical position which allows you to be disobedient to the Word of God?”

The truth was, I hadn’t heard of 1 Timothy 2:12 and I had no idea what the word “hermeneutical” meant. And so I said: “I believe that I have been called by God to be here.”

At that point, the young man started to pound his fist on the table to create a drumbeat to emphasize each word he proclaimed loudly with dramatic pauses between them: “God!    Does!    Not!    Call!   Women!”

I remember thinking at that moment: “This is going to be harder than I thought.” I had never met a women minister, but I thought that was simply a cultural thing. At that point, I hadn’t met a woman doctor, lawyer, or truck driver either. This was the era of Women’s Liberation, with expanded possibilities for women, and I naively assumed that I was simply entering into new territory for women. I didn’t know that I was challenging the authority of the “Word of God.” 

I truly was ignorant about so much of the Bible. I didn’t know that many evangelicals thought (and still think) that women have no authority to be leaders within the church. I didn’t know that 1 Timothy 2:12 is the single verse most often cited to prove that God forbids women to be ordained into the ministry.

I did grasp in a single instant that I was in a battle for which I was not prepared. I had no answer for the question I was asked again and again: “How can you justify your disobedience to God by being here?”

A wiser woman would have said, “I am not going to put up with this,” and transferred immediately to a more welcoming seminary. But I was not wise enough to do that. I really thought I was supposed to be there. And so I endured. And “endured” is the proper word, in a place where most of the male students and many of the faculty (all male) thought that women had no right to be there. They felt that it was their obligation to continually “confront the women with their disobedience.” And the administration that accepted us as students and cashed our tuition checks did absolutely nothing to quell the endless harassment.

What made it tolerable for me was that I didn’t live at the seminary, but commuted back and forth. The women who lived at the seminary and ate their meals in the dining hall were exposed to relentless assault, day and night, by the male posse accusing them of disobedience to the authority of scripture.

Not surprisingly, of the five of us women who started in September, the woman who told us on the first day of orientation that she had dreamed of being a minister since she was a child  and couldn’t believe that she was finally in seminary, dropped out before the end of the first term, with her dreams of ministry shattered.

The second woman transferred to a friendlier seminary at the end of the first term.

The third woman dropped out in the middle of the second term, feeling devastated by the relentless attacks.

The fourth woman had made very clear that she had no intention of seeking ordination to the ministry. She simply thought that the Master of Divinity degree was a better career choice than the degree the seminary offered for Christian education, and so the male posse left her alone.

By the end of the first year, I was the only woman of five who started together in September who still intended to seek ordination.

In my rude awakening among the evangelicals, I learned how the concept of “authority” lies at the root of an evangelical world view. The idea of “authority” shaped almost every topic of study, from biblical studies, to systematic theology, to church history, to pastoral counseling.

And yet despite this relentless assault by the most vocal critics of women in ministry, I was also exposed to teachers who began to teach me how to answer such questions. I began to learn Hebrew and Greek and see beyond the limitations of English translations to grasp a larger vision than exclusion based on gender. I even learned what the word “hermeneutical” means. And I began to understand why those who use Timothy 2:12 as a weapon against women seeking ordination are misusing the verse, to claim that it means something it does not.

At this point, I will not answer the questions that my angry inquisitor demanded that I answer: “Haven’t you heard of 1 Timothy 2:12?  What is your hermeneutical position which allows you to be disobedient to the word of God?”

I promise that I will return to this story, to demonstrate a new perspective on these words, based on what the original Greek actually says. For now, I will leave this story at the point I was when I started my theological education, with no answer to the questions except to know that something was very wrong with the type of  relentlessly cruel authority that created such pain and suffering for women whose only crime was a desire to serve.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
     

written by Kalinda \\ tags: 1 Timothy 2:12, authority, hermeneutics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, ordination of women, theological seminary

What are the big theological questions? Is there a God? Who are you? Why are you here? What is the meaning of life? What happens when you die?

There is another big theological question that doesn’t get as much attention as these more obvious questions, but it is foundational to every religious ideology and every religious group: Who has the authority to speak in the name of God?

The question of authority is crucial to every religious discussion on any topic you can imagine.

This is the first article of what I intend to be an in-depth exploration of religious authority, especially related to the Christian Bible.

Before we can go any further, we need to look carefully at the word, “authority.”

I know that citing dictionary definitions of words tends to be the dullest possible way to start anything, but until we get clear about what the word “authority” means, we can’t get too far in recognizing claims to authority IN the Bible and claims to speak with the authority OF the Bible.

According to Merriam-Webster, “authority” is derived from the Latin “auctoritat,” which means “opinion, decision, power.” (It is also related to the English word, “author.”)

“Authority” has a range of meanings in English, but the one that I want to focus on is: “the power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior.”

Merriam-Webster also identifies these synonyms: “influence,” and “power,” In the vocabulary of this blog, I will often use the word “persuasion” as a synonym for “influence.”

The most critical point I want to make concerns the interrelationship between the three words: “authority,” “power,” and “influence.”  These words are synonyms, with meanings that overlap and intertwine. In other words, every claim to authority is simultaneously a claim to power. And every claim to power carries with it the power to influence thoughts, opinions, and behaviors.

This focus on the interrelationships between authority, power, and persuasion goes back to two specific intentions for “Impolite Topics. Religion, Power, And The Bible…For Seekers.”

• Impolite Topics: is about techniques of persuasion as weapons of power. It demonstrates how you are persuaded to believe what you believe. And it also reveals how the powerful benefit from your beliefs.
•  Most of all, “Impolite Topics” is a blog about how the Bible is used in our contemporary world as a tool of persuasion. Words are the most powerful weapons on earth. Words from the Bible are often used to persuade people to be silent and surrender their power.

At the outset of this exploration, I want to acknowledge my mentor and teacher, Dave Lakhani of Bold Approach, who knows more about persuasion than anyone I know. He encouraged me to address the question: “Where does the authority for the Bible come from?”  Thanks for the suggestion, Dave.  Let’s see where this question takes us.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

 

written by Kalinda \\ tags: authority, Dave Lakhani, influence, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, persuasion, power