These FFRC letters are chilling. Indeed, if the IRS actually enforced FFRF’s suggested standards, it would be downright frightening. It would mean that not only that pastors could be forbidden from candidate endorsements but also that they could not even inform their congregants about the real-world tenets of their faith. The traditional bright line between explicit electioneering and the sorts of things FFRF’s letter wants stopped exists for good reason: Freedom of conscience, and of faith practices, is the founding freedom of this nation. If government dares to forbid preachers from mere religious instruction — while the preachers still leave it up to their flocks to apply that instruction according to their understanding and their consciences — then there is nothing to stop government from infringing on other pulpit pronouncements with ever-more-intrusive regulatory strictures.

The standard suggested by FFRF would be far more than a gentle slippery slope toward trammeled religious freedom; it would be an avalanche that buries and then asphyxiates liberty.

Worse, by prohibiting clergy from making pleas for protecting religious liberty at the ballot box, FFRF would make churches the only institutions in America denied free-speech rights on their own behalf.