The campaign, ‘Pulpit Freedom Sunday’, marked the protest of 33 participating pastors, mostly from conservative evangelical churches, against the 54-year-old Supreme Court ruling that spelled out the separation of church and state. This move comes in response to a church-state separation group’s complaints filed with the Internal Revenue Service, against six churches whose pastors either endorsed or made pointed comments about political candidates from their pulpits Sunday in defiance of federal tax law.

For more than half a century, members of the clergy in the US have been prevented by federal law from endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. However, some clergy opine that the 2008 presidential election is too important to remain publicly impartial, and they are openly breaking the ‘ban’.

The law against politics from the pulpit was introduced in 1954 by then Texas Senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Wiley Drake said that Johnson never intended to stop churches from supporting candidates.  

Drake said: “It is time for us to challenge the IRS and to challenge this law that has been interpreted that a pastor cannot personally endorse somebody. That is an interpretation and it is a wrong interpretation, in my opinion.”

Pledging to defend the pastors is the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) – a socially conservative legal consortium based in Arizona – which orchestrated the pulpit protest. The group hopes that a legal fight will lead to the restrictions being found unconstitutional.

ADF Senior Legal Counsel, Erik Stanley, said: “Pastors have a right to speak about Biblical truths from the pulpit without fear of punishment. No one should be able to use the government to intimidate pastors into giving up their constitutional rights.”

C. Welton Gaddy, a pastor of a Baptist church in Louisiana, has expressed disappointment in the clergy members who participated in the protest, saying: “They would seem to place more emphasis on getting a particular candidate elected to office than on preserving the historic ability of religion to reconcile people’s differences.”