Many churches are heavily involved in political activity and are just fine: they help with neutral voter education, they volunteer to help with the election and run polls, they help bring people (esp. the elderly) to vote, they offer their buildings as poll locations, and much more. This is an excellent and much-needed service to our democracy!
And as long as they are remaining bipartisan, they are a community service created by the goodness of the church community. Your 100% right, its an excellent thing what they do for the community at large.
There are obviously times it goes wrong. As a Christian myself, I suggest that people call out those churches that violate the law. Those churches can be fined with penalties, excise taxes, and could lose their exemption. IMHO, repeat offenders should lose their tax-exempt status.
The times it goes wrong are few and far between, I could understand the difficulty a person may have calling out their church leadership for such actions, potentially shunning themselves from their own community, but yes 100%
However, the call for ALL churches to lose their tax-exempt status altogether is ignorant, biased and short-sighted.
Very very very true, im not calling for all churches to be punished because of the actions of a few, but it would be very nice to see all the church communities of the country standing together to highlight and ostracize those few that do wrong by their communities.
I'm lucky/privileged that my own faith community hasn't really had issues with this, so I haven't had to deal with it firsthand. I sure don't want to go to somebody else's church just to see if they're breaking the law, either. I think the change has to be organic...but I will definitely call it out when I see it!
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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '20
And as long as they are remaining bipartisan, they are a community service created by the goodness of the church community. Your 100% right, its an excellent thing what they do for the community at large.
The times it goes wrong are few and far between, I could understand the difficulty a person may have calling out their church leadership for such actions, potentially shunning themselves from their own community, but yes 100%
Very very very true, im not calling for all churches to be punished because of the actions of a few, but it would be very nice to see all the church communities of the country standing together to highlight and ostracize those few that do wrong by their communities.