Progressive Christians Uniting

All Saints Stands Tall for All of Us

When Bob Long, the senior warden of the All Saints Church vestry (i.e., the chair of the church council), announced on Thursday that he and his colleagues were speaking for the whole congregation in unanimously choosing to resist an IRS summons for all documents and expenses related to a single sermon, I am quite sure that progressive people of faith, both in heaven above and on earth below, breathed out a collective Hallelujah. It is well past time that the question of what a preacher can preach without jeopardizing the tax exemption of his or her house of worship got a proper airing, and the only place for such airing to take place is in a court of law–not within the murky recesses of the IRS, which appears quite clueless in the matter of the difference between electioneering and faithful truthtelling.

Today All Saints Church, and many other progressive Christian congregations across the U.S., openly define themselves in profoundly countercultural ways. Which is to say, their leaders and members search the scriptures and search their consciences and then cannot avoid the conclusion that today’s United States, with its $550 billion in yearly “defense” expenditures (not even counting the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan deployments), with its 1200 overseas military bases, and with its two million incarcerated (mostly people of color), more nearly resembles Egypt than Israel–more nearly approximates Imperial Rome than the struggling and oppressed early Christian community, with its inclusive and compassionate practices.  

All Saints clergy leaders, and many others like them, search the scriptures and discover that Jesus was brutally tortured and executed as an enemy of the Roman state, and so they wonder what business a “Christian” nation has torturing and executing its enemies as so-called enemy combatants or as terrorists without so much as trial or charge.

All Saints leaders, and many others like them, find they cannot in conscience refrain from speaking out against a winner-take-all society that lionizes and rewards the already rich while leaving those whom Jesus called “the least of these” to fend for themselves in a totally atomized and privatized “ownership society.”

The point All Saints has been making throughout this affair is that what former rector Rev. George Regas preached on October 31, 2004–the sermon that triggered the IRS investigation, a sermon to the effect that Jesus would undoubtedly be dismayed by what the Bush Administration stands for–is what gets preached every Sunday from its pulpit. And further, that such sermons are preached not because the preachers–most notably the current rector, Rev. Ed Bacon–enjoy taking shots at government officials but because faithful Christians have no choice but to be at sharp odds with inhumane, violent, and unjust regimes of all kinds but especially those supported by their own tax dollars. 

The IRS–and this is where its cluelessness comes in–does not appear to understand that preachers in the All Saints pulpit and in similar pulpits across the nation do not care in the least whether the King Ahab of the moment is a Republican or a Democrat. Like the prophet Elijah, they are going to shout “I have found you, because you have sold yourself to do what is evil!” whenever officeholders of either party practice or endorse the unjust expropriation of a vulnerable person’s holdings and livelihood.  

The IRS does not appear to understand that believing Christians are presented with a peacemaking mandate and that seeking reconciliation and renouncing the unlimited violence inherent in an unending war on terror is not just one option among many. For this reason there is no hyperbole at all in Bob Long’s and Ed Bacon’s assertion that the issue for All Saints at this point is indeed the free exercise of religion that is supposed to be guaranteed under the First Amendment.

All Saints may lose its court case. A judge who is just as clueless as the IRS bureaucrats may decide that invoking the spirit of Jesus to evaluate the actual values and practices of someone holding a public office crosses the squiggly line of permissible activity by a tax-exempt religious organization. (I say squiggly because the Family Research Council and many other such tax-exempt religious bodies routinely instruct their constituents on how to vote and yet somehow continue to escape IRS scrutiny.)

Should this happen, many All Saints members (myself included) will continue to make our annual pledges–and will probably increase the amount pledged–regardless of whether we can list the amount given to the church among our charitable contributions.

One wonderful and immediate benefit of the All Saints controversy is the way in which the congregation’s many interfaith partners immediately rallied ’round the beleaguered parish. Calling themselves the “solidarity members” of All Saints, on Thursday many Muslim and Jewish and other faith leaders from throughout Greater Los Angeles visibly spelled out the classic solidarity message that an injury to one is an injury to all, signalling that they completely grasp the stakes involved when a free pulpit in America is challenged by state power.

We will see what the courts ultimately decide, but in the meantime there is much to celebrate in a 21st century North American church finding that, much like Luther in the 16th century, it can “do no other” than resist the coercion of the conscience.

                                                                               - Peter Laarman

Posted under: Director's Cut, Happening in the World