WASHINGTON (ABP) — Barack Obama's denomination did nothing wrong in hearing a speech from the Democratic presidential candidate, the Internal Revenue Service has told officials of the United Church of Christ.
The denomination announced the move on its website May 21, releasing a May 13 IRS letter that cleared the church of violating the law for a speech the Illinois senator delivered at the UCC's biennial General Synod last June. It closed an investigation that church officials first made public in February.
The letter said the UCC's response to the investigation “established that the United Church of Christ had verbally communicated to those in attendance that Sen. Obama was there as a member of the church and not as a candidate for office, that the audience should not attempt to engage in any political activities, and that the church's legal counsel had advised Sen. Obama's campaign on the ground rules for the speech.”
Churches and other non-profit groups organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code are barred from endorsing or opposing candidates and political parties. If they do so, they risk losing their tax-exempt status. The prohibition extends to activities that would appear to endorse a candidate, including allowing the politician to speak in his or her capacity as a candidate at a worship service or church meeting.
The UCC is generally considered the nation's most liberal large Protestant body. Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, has been an active member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for more than two decades. Trinity is the UCC's biggest congregation.
In February, UCC officials received a letter from Marsha Ramirez, an official in the regional IRS office in Cleveland, where the denomination is headquartered. The initial letter informed the UCC that it was under investigation for potential violations.
In it, Ramirez said the agency's concerns “are based on articles posted on several websites” that described Obama's June 23 appearance at the meeting, held in Hartford, Conn. The senator — by then an announced Democratic candidate for president — spoke to about 10,000 church members, according to denomination and news accounts.
But UCC officials said they took pains to ensure that the speech was not perceived as a campaign event or an endorsement of the candidate.
Obama was invited “as one of 60 diverse speakers representing the arts, media, academia, science, technology, business and government. Each was asked to reflect on the intersection of their faith and their respective vocations or fields of expertise,” a UCC news release issued at the time said. It also said church officials invited Obama as a church member rather than in his capacity as a candidate. In addition, it noted, they first invited him to speak a year before he declared his intention to run for higher office.
The exoneration letter, also signed by Ramirez, appeared to vindicate those claims. “Based on your response to the inquiry, we have determined that the activity about which we had concern did not constitute an intervention or participation in a political campaign … and that the United Church of Christ continues to qualify as an organization described in section 501(c)(3),” she wrote.
In their May 21 announcement, UCC officials hailed the letter as a “complete vindication.”
“We are pleased that the IRS reviewed the complaint quickly and determined, as we expected, that the church took every necessary precaution and proactive step to ensure that Sen. Obama's appearance at General Synod was proper and legal,” said John Thomas, the denomination's chief executive. “This is very good news.”
James Hutchins, a UCC member from suburban Cleveland who is a frequent critic of the denomination's stances on secular politics via his blog (ucctruths.blogspot.com), said May 21 that he could live with the ruling. But he said he still contends that the denomination did break at least one IRS guideline for church-related campaigning, because it mentioned Obama's candidacy in some of the promotional materials that led up to the speech.
“Clearly, from the IRS response to the UCC, these guidelines are not firm and it opens up the spectrum of accepted political activity that churches may participate in and still be compliant with the IRS,” he wrote, in a May 21 post.
However, he said, the exoneration made more sense than the agency's recent clearing of Southern Baptist pastor and activist Wiley Drake. The IRS dropped its investigation of him — announced shortly before the UCC inquiry — even though he had endorsed then-GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in a press release written on church letterhead and through comments on a radio show that Drake said was conducted under the auspices of his First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif.
“The offenses identified by the UCC complaint to the IRS are arguably peripheral next to the complaint against Drake, but that doesn't mean that the UCC didn't walk into a gray area by identifying Obama as a presidential candidate in promoting his General Synod speech on the UCC web site,” Hutchins wrote.
“The only logical conclusion I can make is that the IRS is giving churches great latitude in their freedom of speech before threatening their tax-exempt status. That may be the more prudent approach. As long as they are consistent, I can live with it, although I think it should be clearly reflected in their guidelines.”
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Read more:
Wiley Drake cleared in IRS probe, but vows further endorsement (5/20)
IRS scrutiny of Obama's denomination may signal political-speech crackdown (3/17))
Obama speech to denomination spurs IRS investigation of UCC (2/28)