A new coalition of a dozen conservative religious organizations is trying to defund taxpayer dollars from religious leaders who are little more than leftist political activists. Americans shouldn’t have to fund harmful Democrat politicking from those who ought to be focused on spiritual work.
The Deposit of Faith Coalition held a press conference on July 20 to discuss just how many Christian leaders (especially Catholic bishops) have turned into leftist hacks. The coalition proposes three ways of defunding this politicking:
- Stop congressional appropriations committees from granting them contracts
- Force the churches to publish their tax filings (990s) by amending the IRS code
- Cancel the tax-exempt status outright for blatant partisan politicking
At the press conference, Church Militant’s Michael Voris insisted that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is a political not a spiritual organization, despite its church veneer, and that many of its pronouncements are political opinions — not binding pronouncements of faith. “That’s like saying a bunch of Catholics started a baseball team and somehow the baseball team is Catholic. Has nothing to do with it,” he said. “It’s a political lobbying arm here in the States, and that’s all it engages in. It does not express anything about the faith. It has no binding authority when it comes to the faith.”
Epoch Times contributor and climate realist Trevor Loudon called out the U.S. bishops for supporting the climate hoax, explaining how it is antithetical to the Biblical command (Gen. 1:28) to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” Instead of teaching Christians that it is their duty to rule, populate, and take care of the earth, leftist religious leaders support the leftist contention that humans are a sort of parasite that needs to stop procreating and inhabit as small an area of the earth as possible.
”If you follow the Bible correctly, you’ll see that there is unlimited potential in this world because we are creative beings that can solve any problem if we have the liberty to do so,” Loudon said, emphasizing that resources are not a finite amount or a zero-sum game. “And that is the key point, the liberty to do so. That’s why America is great because America was founded on biblical principles… Russia had way more natural resources than America, but it had a Communist system where there were no property rights.” He added, “The Christian view brings prosperity — brings freedom and brings prosperity. And the Catholic bishops are now standing directly in opposition to that view.”
Indeed, according to Loudon, by lobbying to pour money into “green” electric vehicles and other climate initiatives, bishops are actually lobbying to drain money from the military and other necessary government areas. While America’s enemies rely on dependable fossil fuels, America’s bishops want the U.S. to waste money on highly unreliable “green” options. That’s a national security risk, Loudon emphasized.
Prof. William Wagner, president of Great Lakes Justice Center, highlighted how leftist church leaders also facilitate the attack on free speech. Freedom of religion and free speech were enshrined in the Constitution, but now Democrats are attacking those First Amendment rights and enforcing their own dogma.
“And so the free exercise of religious content and the freedom of speech is a constitutional rule of law in this nation that serves as a limitation and a limit on the exercise of government power,” Wagner said. He added, “Many problems exist with hate speech laws, but perhaps the most troubling are the provisions that unconstitutionally make citizens criminally punishable for their ideas and for their viewpoints.”
In Sweden, Christians have been jailed for preaching about Biblical teachings on sexuality, and Christians have been persecuted for the same reason in the U.S., Wagner noted, not to mention the new hate speech law in Michigan that could lead to strangling free speech and vocal Christianity. But the Michigan bishops have been silent about this very real threat.
Alliance for a Safe Texas founder and president Sheena Rodriguez called out Catholic “charitable” organizations and NGOs that facilitate the crisis of human trafficking and sexual exploitation among migrants heading toward the U.S.
“What if I told you that there are non-governmental organizations or NGOs that facilitate and profit from a process using … taxpayer money, which places fellow human beings, including children, in vulnerable situations, where there is a high probability that they will be taken advantage of by vicious cartel and transnational organizations?” Rodriguez asked. That’s just what’s happening.
After all, NGOs, Catholic charities, and dioceses get millions and millions of dollars in taxpayer funding to “help” the migrants. As Rodriguez explained it, the way the funding works, these groups are actually incentivized to bring in and process more illegal migrants! Rodriguez said, “The Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbied for a total of nearly 30 billion in appropriations of American taxpayer dollars just for fiscal year 2024 related, of course, to addressing the rising cost of immigration in the U.S.”
Catholic groups shut schools and churches and reportedly turned the homeless out of shelters during COVID-19 but continued to assist illegal migrants. Even as large numbers of unaccompanied minors are trafficked to sponsors they don’t know, Catholic groups argued to end DNA testing to verify family units. One Catholic-affiliated group was reportedly handing out “rape kits” with condoms and abortion pills, in defiance of Catholic teaching, as if that helps the sexual exploitation crisis, according to Rodriguez. Don’t believe the sob stories about asylum seekers, either — DHS reportedly found less than 2% of asylum claims credible in 2021.
Finally, filmmaker Zoe Warren discussed how bishops and religious leaders support Democrat efforts to undermine Second Amendment rights.
As a Catholic, I can testify to some of this political partisanship, so wholly unrelated to the faith, in my own experience. My sister once researched Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and found it was engaging in activities contrary to Catholic doctrine but compatible with leftist ideology. When she notified our bishop (who has since retired), the bishop refused even to consider the research.
I also know of a priest who received a series of complaints because he always prayed both for immigrants and for those law enforcement officers who try to guard the border. He was being criticized as a Catholic priest for praying for Border Patrol!
Finally, at my largely conservative Catholic college, I was the only person in my Political Science class (including the professor) who was interested in even looking at the sobering realities of illegal immigration, both for migrants and for Americans. The bishops declared that immigration was a right, I was told — was I saying the bishops were wrong?
Emphatically yes. But that’s the core of this issue. Many Catholics misunderstand the Catholic teaching of infallibility and magisterium; they don’t understand that a bishop or the pope must meet certain external requirements from canon law before what he says can be considered a matter of faith.
In other words, just because the bishops said it doesn’t make it true. That goes for other Christian leaders as well. And the terrible danger of having so many bishops and pastors who are not spiritual leaders but Democrat political activists is that they trick millions of well-intentioned Christians into believing that pernicious leftist policies are integral teachings of the Christian faith. That’s precisely why these political hack bishops and pastors must be defunded.
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