...considering that LBJ gagged the Church in 1954 by the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status that basically prohibits the participation of state-churches in shaping the morals of our government. I'll throw out some meat for you to work with: “The federal government has proved a tremendous impediment to the ongoing work of Christians. In all the laws that they have passed against Christian schools, gagging the church, taxation, and all kinds of things that they have done, they have made it harder for the church to exercise its prerogatives and to preach the gospel.
"Take the last presidential election. There were numbers of things that I knew that I was never able to say from the pulpit because if you advance the cause of one candidate or impede the cause of the other you can lose your tax exemption. That would have been disastrous not only for the church, but for our school and our seminary, everything. So you are gagged. You cannot do that. The IRS, a branch of our government, has succeeded in gagging Christians."
-Reverend D. James Kennedy
"When a church accepts the 501c3 status, that church:
Waives its freedom of speech. Waives its freedom of religion. Waives its right to influence legislators and the legislation they craft. Waives its constitutionally guaranteed rights. Is no longer free to speak to the vital issues of the day. Becomes controlled by a spirit of fear that if it doesn’t toe the line with the IRS it will lose its tax-exempt status. Becomes a State-Church. The church in America today is, by and large, not speaking to the vital issues of the day. The church has been effectively silenced. There has been a chilling effect upon the church’s freedom of speech for fear of IRS retribution should the church get out of line. The inevitable result is a moral downward spiral in the culture as the church stands mute.
This did not happen by accident, but by design, and it is something of relatively recent design. Churches were added to IRS Code § 501c3 in 1954. All one need do is analyze who is responsible for sponsoring the congressional bill to include churches in § 501c3 and it should become apparent that his agenda was not to empower the church, but to silence the church (hint: the sponsor was a Senator from Texas who later became President)."
- Peter Kershaw