Conservatives Also Irked by IRS Probe of Churches

First AME also taps the expertise of member Kerman Maddox, a public relations and political consultant. He tells candidates they can worship at First AME but cannot speak from the pulpit about their candidacy. Instead, he tells them "they can shake hands, pass out literature and campaign to their heart's delight" if they stay off church property. The church doesn't endorse ballot initiatives, he said, and it bans campaign literature at the church.

At All Saints, Rector J. Edwin Bacon on Sunday told the congregants that the guest sermon by Regas, a former rector, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted the warning from the IRS. In the sermon, Regas did not instruct parishioners whom to support in the presidential election but said that Jesus would have told the president that his Iraq policies had failed.

The IRS' letter cited a Times article describing Regas' sermon as having triggered the agency's concerns. The church denies it violated tax rules and has retained a Washington law firm to help argue its position.

Using such news reports and tips from the public and interested groups, the IRS identified more than 100 nonprofits that had allegedly intervened politically in the 2004 presidential election. The agency reviewed the cases and selected more than 60 for fuller examination. About of third of those organizations were churches, officials said.

The IRS is barred by law from identifying those nonprofits, and the agency would not comment on the specifics of the All Saints case or others.

Steven Miller, the IRS commissioner of tax-exempt and governmental entities, said there is nothing political about how cases are chosen. Churches need to be more cautious about what they say during election seasons, and make it clear when they're not speaking for the church, Miller said. "If there's no election, there's no potential for intervention.

"The courts have said, yes, you have freedom of speech, but not the right to tax-exempt status," he added.

The best-known target of the IRS initiative is the NAACP. The IRS has cited a July 2004 speech in which the organization's chairman, Julian Bond, criticized the Bush administration's policies on civil rights as the cause for the audit. The NAACP is fighting the audit.

In 1976, Congress passed a law that required audits of churches to be done only if there was a "reasonable basis" to believe a violation had occurred, and made such audits subject to a special approval process from senior IRS officials.

Marcus Owens, the former head of tax-exempt organizations at the IRS and now a private attorney representing All Saints, said that the more recent IRS policy changes lowered the threshold for church audits, allowing front-line IRS agents to pursue probes with only cursory approval from above.

"This is exactly the sort of 1st Amendment briar patch the Congress wanted to keep the IRS out of," said Owens. The IRS disputed Owens' contention, saying audits still face a rigorous approval process by high-level agency officials.

On Monday, Regas did a half a dozen interviews with reporters from local and national newspapers, radio and television. And he was inundated with phone calls and e-mail messages, "all positive," he said.

When he was asked if he had any regrets about his 2004 sermon, he said: "No regrets. I only wish I had preached it with greater intensity."