There are laws in our country that forbid churches from influencing, suggesting or demanding that their parishioners vote for/against any candidates, propositions or measures. If they are caught doing so, they are supposed to lose their tax exempt status. Yet, increasingly, with every election, more and more churches are doing just that without repercussions. I believe it’s unfair, illegal, immoral and must be stopped!
So, I have this idea & I’m hoping that many of you will read this, consider it, talk it over with friends and then join me in brainstorming on how we can put an end to this form of vote tampering, legally and with the full force of the government, it’s laws and the United States Constitution supporting us!
Hundreds if not thousands of of these churches span the country. You can usually, but not always, tell them by the size of the church and the enormous amount of money the church and it ministry are worth. What I mean by this is that if a church is flush with cash, has an amazing amount of land, property and state of the heart buildings, they aren’t getting all that money from donations tossed into the bowls passed up and down each row during Sunday services.
The fact is that there are corporations and huge money donors with their own agendas involved even in the churches. And the pawns attending the churches are either completely ignorant or purposely ignoring the fact that no church can become a mega-church without a huge influx of BIG BUCKS, repeatedly and on going far beyond what regular parishioners’ weekly/monthly/yearly donations can possibly add up to. The millions that are given to the churches by the very wealthy always have strings attached. If the money is coming directly from corporations, it’s often easier to trace to the core purpose of pushing for a certain vote. But we don’t need to prove who or why the votes are being influenced, just that they are!
So what do we do? We need proof! We can’t just go to the DOJ with accusations and nothing to back them up. A few years ago I heard of a very small group of citizens that started attending a rather large church nearly a year before the next election. People began to recognize them when they arrived, waved at them when seeing them around the city, and they blended right in to the congregation in no time. Of course they would attend the services, but occasionally they’d also attend a church picnic, or concert, or potluck as well. They also participated in one of the churches events where a few senior citizen’s homes were picked and volunteers went to clean, paint, garden, etc. helping a nice older person with things they were unable to do on their own any longer. So, as far as anyone paying attention these people would appear to have become part of the congregation.
As election time drew nearer, the topics of the sermons would be more and more political. The two months before the election, the Minister/Reverend/Pastor was blatantly telling people who they should vote for and how it was the Christian thing to do. He would continue on with blatant lies and slanderous statements about the opponents, but with just enough ‘disdain’ that many of the parishioners never asked ‘exactly’ what the other opponents had done that was so wrong or un-Christian. And for some, it was only enough that their beloved minister didn’t like the opponent. The had a completely blind allegiance.
What they didn’t know was that there were huge financial benefits for their Minister to want them to vote for certain candidates and against great propositions which were obviously the best propositions for the ‘greater good’! It’s like when the Koch Bros. pad the pockets of Gov. Walker and all the GOP state Senators and Assemblymen. The Koch Bros. get to eliminate education so that the Bros can have more tax cuts, less opposition, makes it easier to rig an entire state against the needs of the working people, students, seniors & the disabled, and for increased profits & even deeper tax cuts for the ultra rich, corporations, Wall Street businesses, and Big Oil!
But first they had to get the votes. In order to get the votes, they offer millions in donations to the churches. They offer insanely discounted building and expansion projects. There are dozens of different ways to funnel money into the church, as long as the Minister/Reverend/Pastor can successfully convince his ‘flock’ to vote in mass in the particular way the corporation wants. That’s where we need to focus!
The couple I spoke of earlier and their friends who also participated, now being considered a part of the church membership, were not watched as suspiciously as the election grew nearer. As many as 6 months before the election, names of candidates were casually dropped in the sermons, as tho they were an example of who was good and who was evil, starting to lay the path for the members (voters) to blindly follow.
A couple of months before the election, it was ‘suggested’ that the members contribute money and their time & energy volunteering to walk precincts, or man a table outside of the grocery store, etc. ‘Suggesting’ that it would be the ‘christian’ thing to do, for numerous reasons that were in reality, non-existent.
A month before the election, the congregation was occasionally during the sermon for a sign of hands as to who were definitely voting for the ‘only decent candidate’, and who was planning on voting against the propositions that would have only caused Big oil to pay their fair share in windfall profit taxes. The hands flew up in the air, including the hands of the people who had only been attending to see for themselves how the congregation was being politically manipulated. They even had a small pretend spat over one of the women not raising her hand, and acted as tho they were still trying to convince her.
There was ‘something’ different tho! While the friends had become accepted by the congregation, they had also found ways to film the sermons from 3 different locations. One couple sat in the balcony, and the ‘wife’ sat her purse in such a way that the video camera was able to catch the entire front of the chapel, including the sermon of the week, all the announcements, and record the tax exempt laws being broken, again and again! The other cameras and a few voice recorders were also capturing every word, every action, every manipulation, every single attempt to tamper with the votes for the upcoming election.
Just before the election, one of the couples had become so incensed by the actions that the woman just refused to return, stating that they had already enough evidence and she just ‘couldn’t’ stomach any more of the hypocrisy. She was probably right about the amount of evidence, but having seen it that far already the rest of the friends met and decided to continue thru election day.
Twice a week, at least, their home phones would ring, with church members all calling from their cell phones from another church member’s house, asking the people to tell them how they intended to vote. For the woman who ‘hadn’t decided’ and didn’t immediately raise her hand when the minister asked for a showing of hands on who was voting the ‘Christian way’ - the phone calls came more often and the people calling had done their best to insure she would be voting the way the church wanted. (Can you imagine? Not certain I would have tolerated ‘that’ part)
So, election passes, the church got propositions their way and most of the candidates elected that they wanted, and while the Minister/Reverend/Pastor was beaming in his glory, drooling over the blue prints for the new extension to the chapel, the new sound system, the revolving stage for the band, and the flush & tax exempt bank accounts, the friends had gathered together, organized all their evidence, months of videos of politically themed sermons, audio recordings, handbills, answering machine messages, and more. They filed the paperwork, complaints against the church, included the evidence and took their case to the Department of Justice and the IRS. The church is still fighting to get it’s tax-exempt status back. They never did get the extension, revolving stage, sound system and all funds were frozen. The church is still fighting. The friends have all moved on to other cities to start again, with their only agenda being to stop churches from manipulating the voters for pure greed, into voting in any specific way.
Well, that’s what they did. But they can’t take on every church by themselves. Every year more & more churches are joining in on the persuasion train, throwing all morals out the window. We can do more to stop this. More of us can do the sort of thing, or come up with better ideas. Like I said, I’m writing this to start people thinking, talking to each other about it, coming up with new ideas, making plans on how we can stop one arm of the Corporate/Wall Street vote tampering machine. If we make examples of enough of them, the other churches will realize how much they can lose if they try the same thing.
Think, talk, brainstorm, plan, do something alone or as a team….let’s stop this madness.
