The Johnson Amendment, which became law in the U.S. in 1954
and was named for Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. Senator, “is a provision in the
tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from openly supporting
political candidates. In the words of the tax code, ‘all section 501(c)(3)
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.”[1]
I submit that it is in a cleric’s interest to expand this prohibition to
include advocating for (or opposing) particular public policies. This general
principle would of course be subject to exceptions in which a proposed or
enacted policy is strongly anathema to the religious
principles of the given religious organization or religion.
Generally speaking, it is in the medium- and long-term interest
of both clerics and their religious organizations to resist the temptation to
preach along partisan lines. That such preaching is a temptation should signal
the presence of a bad odor, and yet it is almost always overlooked or dismissed
out of hand. Besides turning off members who are good fits religiously speaking
but do not agree with the particular political ideology being preached, the
stain of partisan ideology can make the cleric seem self-obsessed. In other
words, that such preachments are convenient to the speakers themselves can
easily be translated into self-idolatry in religious terms.
One cleric, not of one of the Abrahamic religions, in my
hometown once told me that according to his religion, certain social structures
are sacred. In particular, only those sociological/economic/political systems
that are egalitarian and thus just in this way can be sacred. The use of this
overtly religious term takes human
artifacts to have divine status. By implication, the social, economic, or
political ideology in play is also divine. I submit that such a position counts
as self-idolatry—the worship of the human as itself being sacred, or divine.
Put another way, if the societal systems we design are sacred, then the makers
themselves must also be sacred—essentially little gods admiring their
handiwork. I submit that when the cleric preaches on socio-economic and
political policies or systems thereof as sacred, he is engaging in
self-idolatry. Religion for him has become too comfortable, too easy. Absent is
the wholly other, or absolutely different, quality of the divine, which is
transcendent as well as immanent. Declaring a human artifact to be sacred
eclipses the transcendent.
Unfortunately, the temptation to make the preachment as
fitting as possible to the preacher’s own ideology can easily exploit good
exceptions, where the public policy is anathema to a major religious teaching. Roman
Catholicism’s doctrine of humanae vitae (i.e.,
on the sanctity of human life) arguably justifies preaching in opposition to
abortion and capital punishment. To be sure, the doctrine’s salience relative
to the Incarnation and the Resurrection can be subject to critique, such that
the political opposition may actually be ideological in nature. In other words,
the doctrine of the sanctity of human life—which does not imply that human
beings are sacred!—could be used as a subterfuge allowing for the true,
subterranean motive: political influence in line with a particular moral/political
ideology.
Even if the allowance of good exceptions has a tendency of
being exploited, it is indeed possible that public policies run contrary to
significant religious beliefs, and such opposition is legitimate in the pulpit.
The task for the conscientious cleric
writing a sermon is to be on guard—like the disciples presumably on the night
Jesus is handed over to the Roman guard—for the slithering motions of
self-idolatry under the subterfuge of pious religion.
[1]
Randall Balmer, “The
Peril of Being Partisan at the Pulpit,” Stars and Stripes, February 7,
2017.
