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The IRS is responding to complaints? How outrageous!
It'd be so easy to get outraged over the news that the IRS is persecuting All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, for an antiwar sermon. So, so easy.

The fact is, however, there's no real story here. Nobody is really being persecuted. Nobody is being harmed. No actual speech is being limited.

But many, many people are going to be able to cash in on this big time.

For those who missed it, here's the lede in Monday's Los Angeles Times:

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California's largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

The Pasadena Star-News picked the story up Tuesday, and the Los Angeles Timesfollowed up.

George Regas's sermon (PDF) was pretty standard liberal church stuff, preferring to make up things for Jesus to say rather than preaching about what Jesus and the rest of Scripture really do say. And Regas was critical of both Bush and Kerry: Bush for being a warmongering killer who hates the poor and frightens children, and Kerry for, um, I guess for not standing up to Bush enough.

It's clear that Regas is supporting Kerry over Bush. But he does so with the silly phrases one has to use since Lyndon B. Johnson changed the tax code in 1954: "I believe Jesus would say to Bush and Kerry: 'War is itself the most extreme form of terrorism. President Bush, you have not made dramatically clear what have been the human consequences of the war in Iraq.'" (Regas's Jesus repeatedly singles Bush out for criticism but has nothing to say to Kerry directly at any time in the sermon. Poor Kerry: Even Liberal Jesus doesn't pay much attention to him.)

So in other words, the sermon was partisan, but not politically problematic. (Note the word politically. It's not the IRS's concern whether the sermon was sound theologically, homiletically, or even statistically—one section is devoted to Glen Stassen's abortion figures that even he now rejects as flawed.)

Still, there were complaints, probably less from those who attended the service than from those who read a write-up in the Los Angeles Times the next day:

At All Saints Church in Pasadena, a liberal Episcopal congregation of 3,500 members, Rector Emeritus George Regas began by telling congregants: "I don't intend to tell you how to vote. We can just agree to disagree. You go your way, and I'll go God's way," he said, provoking laughter from the crowd.

Then Regas delivered a searing indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. He criticized the drive to develop more nuclear weapons, and described tax cuts, which he said benefited the rich, as inimical to the values of Jesus.

In a sermon titled "If Jesus Debated Sen. Kerry and President Bush," Regas imagined Jesus would call war "the most extreme form of terrorism," and would equally mourn the U.S. soldiers and Iraqis who have died since the U.S. invasion.

Two commenters at the excellent orthodox Anglican blog titusonenine suggested that complaints be filed with the IRS over the sermon. One imagines that many others had a similar idea.

But remember that tattletaling to Uncle Sam was a bit of a popular meme back in November. You had Americans United for Separation of Church and State trumpeting its complaints to the IRS over Ronnie Floyd's First Baptist Church of Springdale, Arkansas, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs, and others. The Mainstream Coalition was making headlines for sending spies into conservative suburban Kansas City churches, and groups like Rat Out a Church sprung up either to parody the efforts or to counter them with IRS complaints from the Right.

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49