Dissertation

The Pulpit Freedom Sunday (PFS) Initiative represents one of the most pointed challenges to IRS restrictions on church political activity in modern American history. At its core, PFS was not merely a defiant act of pastoral resistance but a carefully orchestrated legal strategy designed to provoke a constitutional confrontation over the Johnson Amendment, the federal statute that prohibits 501(c)(3) organizations from engaging in campaign intervention. Spearheaded by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), PFS sought to push the boundaries of permissible political speech from the pulpit, testing the limits of American liberal democracy’s uneasy balance between religious liberty and state neutrality. Yet its significance extends beyond the realm of tax law. The movement raises deeper questions about the trajectory of evangelical political engagement, the evolving role of clergy as political actors, and the shifting place of religion in public life. It also highlights the epistemological crisis that has shaped much of contemporary political and moral discourse—the contested role of moral knowledge in public life, as articulated by Dallas Willard.

This dissertation examines these questions through a mixed-methods analysis of sermons delivered from 1990 to 2024, with a particular focus on Calvary Chapel Chino Hills (CCCH), a PFS participant, and Grace Community Church (GCC), which did not take part in the initiative. By employing R Studio, as well as computer-aided text analysis (CATA) using MAXQDA and DICTION 7.2, supplemented by manual coding and interrupted time series (ITS) analysis, this dissertation assesses whether participation in PFS corresponded with measurable shifts in sermon content, particularly in political messaging. Additionally, through qualitative interviews with ADF lawyers and PFS pastors, it interrogates the broader motivations behind the movement and the legal strategies that underpinned it.

At stake in this inquiry is not merely an understanding of whether pastors became more politically engaged but how and why certain evangelical leaders moved from implicit to explicit political intervention. Contrary to the prevailing assumption that pulpit politicking is simply a matter of partisanship, the evidence suggests that for many of these pastors, political engagement was framed as a religious obligation rather than a secular preference. This dissertation argues that PFS participants saw their involvement not as a departure from their pastoral calling but as a fulfillment of it—a direct response to what they perceived as an erosion of religious authority in public life and, more critically, the disappearance of moral knowledge from public discourse. In this sense, the PFS movement was not simply about defending religious liberty but about reasserting a foundation for moral reasoning in a cultural and political landscape that many evangelicals see as increasingly untethered from transcendent moral truths.

To understand the stakes of PFS, one must first situate it within the broader history of clergy involvement in American politics. The idea that pastors would engage in political discourse is not new. From the colonial era through the Civil Rights Movement, clergy have frequently played an outsized role in shaping the nation’s political trajectory. Yet what distinguishes PFS is its origins within theologically conservative evangelicalism—a movement that, for much of the twentieth century, remained wary of overt partisan entanglements from the pulpit. Historically, progressive religious leaders—particularly in mainline Protestantism and Black churches—have been far more willing to mix theology with political activism. By contrast, the evangelical tradition has tended to emphasize individual conversion over collective political mobilization.

However, by the late twentieth century, the landscape of American evangelicalism had changed dramatically. The rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s, the increasing polarization of American politics, and the growing sense among conservative Protestants that the state had become hostile to religious expression laid the foundation for a more aggressive form of political engagement. PFS emerged as a response to this shift, providing a legal and theological framework for pastors who wished to challenge the constraints imposed by the Johnson Amendment. By inviting clergy to openly engage in campaign intervention and submit their sermons to the IRS in an effort to trigger enforcement action, ADF sought to provoke a legal showdown that would, in their view, expose the unconstitutionality of government-imposed speech restrictions on churches.

But the IRS did not take the bait. Despite thousands of pastors participating in PFS over multiple election cycles, the federal government largely refrained from pursuing legal action, leaving the Johnson Amendment intact but effectively unenforced. This outcome raises crucial questions about the limits of legal activism, the strategic calculations of government agencies, and the broader implications of an increasingly blurred boundary between religious and political life in the United States.

To assess the practical effects of PFS, this dissertation undertakes a comprehensive analysis of sermon content at CCCH and GCC over a thirty-four-year period. The methodological approach is rooted in a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. Using MAXQDA’s dictionary-based content analysis, the dissertation systematically tracks shifts in political rhetoric, examining the frequency and framing of campaign intervention, election-related discourse, and moral-political narratives. This is supplemented by ITS regression models, which allow for an empirical assessment of whether PFS participation coincided with statistically significant changes in political messaging.

The findings reveal that while CCCH had long engaged in political discourse to some degree, its involvement in PFS marked an inflection point in the church’s rhetorical trajectory. Prior to 2008, discussions of elections and political figures were sporadic, often framed in broad terms about national morality rather than direct engagement with candidates or party platforms. However, after PFS, CCCH’s sermons exhibited a sharper, more deliberate integration of political messaging. The concept of the “biblical vote” became a recurring theme, with certain policy positions—opposition to abortion, support for Israel, and rejection of LGBTQIA+ rights—framed as non-negotiable mandates for Christian voters. Statistical analysis confirms that campaign intervention mentions increased significantly post-PFS, with election-related discourse following a cyclical pattern that spiked during election years.

Yet these findings must be understood within a deeper theoretical framework. This dissertation draws upon James W. Ceaser’s foundational concepts—religion, history, and nature—to contextualize how evangelical pastors justify their political engagement. Evangelicals engaged in PFS did not merely see themselves as acting within a legal gray area; they believed they were fulfilling a foundational duty that transcends statutory law. Their invocation of biblical principles in defense of pulpit politicking fits within Ceaser’s modes of religion, particularly the belief in permanent laws revealed through divine authority and history as providentially directed by God. By contrast, evangelicals are deeply skeptical of nature as a source of moral knowledge, rejecting the idea that reason alone can provide an adequate foundation for justice and governance.

This skepticism of reason brings the dissertation to a critical comparison between Jesus of Nazareth and John Locke—two figures whose teachings, though radically different, continue to shape American political thought. Evangelicals engaged in PFS frequently ground their arguments in biblical revelation rather than natural rights, despite often invoking Lockean rhetoric concerning individual liberty and limited government. While Locke’s conception of natural law suggests that human beings, through reason, can discern moral truth, the PFS pastors maintain that moral knowledge must be rooted in divine revelation. Their vision of governance is not simply one of procedural liberalism but of a moral realism in which biblical principles provide the true foundation for law and justice. The tension between Lockean liberalism and biblical theocracy thus remains unresolved, even as evangelicals seek to navigate their place within the American constitutional order.

Ultimately, this dissertation challenges conventional understandings of evangelical political engagement. It demonstrates that pulpit politicking is not merely about partisanship but is deeply embedded in religious and moral discourse. For PFS participants, politics is not just a civic duty but a sacred obligation, inextricably linked to their understanding of biblical authority and the moral order. The disappearance of moral knowledge from public institutions, in their view, necessitates a return to prophetic leadership from the pulpit. By examining how PFS reshaped evangelical political engagement, this dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of the legal, cultural, and theological forces shaping church-state relations in twenty-first-century America. It also raises fundamental questions about the future of liberal democracy: whether it can sustain itself in a world increasingly divided over the sources and legitimacy of moral authority.​