OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — A recent Sunday found Tina Kolm paying particularly close attention to a church sermon more conservative than what she typically hears when she's at her usual Unitarian Universalist service.
Kolm departed from her usual church to visit another church where the sermon included a few minutes about the importance of amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Kolm is one of about 100 volunteers for the Mainstream Coalition, a group monitoring pastors' and churches' political activities. The coalition, based in the Kansas City suburb of Johnson County, says it wants to see that clergy adhere to federal tax guidelines restricting political activity by nonprofit groups.
The coalition's decision last month to send volunteers into churches ignited an intense debate and put suburbs in the Kansas City metropolitan area at the center of a national battle over religion and politics.
Kolm, a 47-year-old mother of two from Prairie Village, said keeping church and state separate was important to her. She said she didn't want one religious denomination defining marriage — or setting other social policy — for everyone.
"What it's all about to me is denying some people's rights," she told the Associated Press.
Some clergy think the Mainstream Coalition's tactics are designed to keep them out of politics.
"Somebody is trying to act like Big Brother when there's no need for Big Brother," said the Rev. James Conard, assistant pastor at the First Baptist Church of Shawnee. "It's obviously an intent to intimidate."
Nationally, churches already face scrutiny.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a complaint this month with the Internal Revenue Service against the Rev. Jerry Falwell over a column endorsing President Bush on his ministries' Web site. Falwell said the group was waging a "scare-the-churches campaign."
Falwell told NBC News for a story broadcast yesterday, “I do believe that pastors, religious leaders, men of God, women of God may in fact voice their personal opinions, as I often do, but only as private citizens."
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United, told NBC News, "Falwell is playing a shell game that wouldn’t work in a backwoods carnival. It’s all about electing George Bush and using the church to do it."
According to the NBC News story, Falwell said to look at the Democrats, pointing to a July 18 visit by vice presidential candidate John Edwards to an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Orlando, Fla., and to an April visit by presidential candidate John Kerry to a black church in Boston.
The AP reported that Sen. Edwards pledged July 18 from the pulpit of St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church that his party would work hard to head off the kind of ballot irregularities that Democrats assert gave the White House to Bush.
"We will get voters registered. We will get voters mobilized. We will get voters to the polls," Edwards said.
And in another dust-up over church-state separation, the AP reported that the Bush-Cheney campaign had recently asked religious volunteers to send church membership directories to the campaign. NBC reported that ministers also had been asked to send the directories.
The Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land told NBC, "When I heard about it, I was appalled. And I continue to be appalled. It's a direct intrusion and an inappropriate intrusion into the internal life of churches.”
As for monitoring what is said in churches, Lynn, of Americans United, told the AP that local chapters of his organization had in the past sent volunteers to church services on the Sunday before an election, but he said the Mainstream Coalition's efforts were more sustained.
"To my knowledge, there's no other state organization doing what the Mainstream Coalition is doing," said Lynn, himself a United Church of Christ minister.
And some conservatives are upset.
"These people will stop at nothing to silence churches," said Andrea Lafferty, executive values of the Washington-based Traditional Values Coalition, which says it represents 43,000 churches.
The catalyst in Kansas is the debate over gay marriage. The national debate on the issue has kept tensions high, said Charles Haynes, senior scholar with the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va.
As for Mainstream's tactics, Haynes said, "If we want to escalate a cultural war, this is a good way to do it."
But Mainstream's executive director, Caroline McKnight, said her organization was only trying to make sure that churches follow federal law.
According to IRS guidelines, churches cannot endorse individual candidates, and their pastors cannot use the pulpit or church newsletters to do so. The group has not yet filed any complaints, McKnight said.
But churches can compile voters' guides — though such guides are supposed to be unbiased. Pastors can preach on issues and, as individuals, endorse candidates.
McKnight said her group reacted to pastors going public — "brazen," she argued — about political activity.
In May, the Kansas House rejected a proposed amendment to the state constitution to ban gay marriage. Dozens of pastors joined a statewide effort to register 100,000 new voters and elect sympathetic candidates.
McKnight said the IRS did not have the resources to monitor churches' activities, as an agency official confirmed during a seminar last week on political activity by nonprofit groups.
Lynn said complaints to the IRS were uncommon, though his group had filed 50 during the past decade. He said 19 of those complaints involved improper endorsements of Democratic candidates.
McKnight said Mainstream Coalition volunteers visit houses of worship of all types.
But conservative groups don't take such assurances at face value.
"Who deputized this group and its members to be thought police in Kansas — or elsewhere?" said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, of Virginia Beach, Va.