Do you hear the resonant voice of the ring announcer shouting stands inside the canvas square?

The 2008 presidential heavyweight title match entered its final rounds after the party conventions. You will be inundated unto drowning with waves of advertising intended not to inform you, but to convince you. The ads will cater to your basest fears and your primary self-interest.

Some of you will want to promote a particular person or party from the pulpit.

You should resist the urge.

Most people think the main reason to refrain from endorsing politicians from the pulpit is to protect the church’s precious tax-exempt status. The threat of losing a government benefit should never silence a prophetic voice. There are better reasons to be more circumspect.

First, you probably alienate half of your congregation who see things from a different perspective. Men and women of good conscience can see things differently.

Second, political parties and politicians are sure to disappoint you eventually.

Third, if you align yourself with the “losing” side, how do you lead your people to respect and pray for the authority in place, as in Romans 13?

Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Ethics Religious Liberty Commission, says when we “become entangled in partisan politics, we lower moral authority.”

“Political parties are profane institutions,” he said in a telephone interview. “They are founded for the purpose of organizing people to get more votes than their opponents. They will exploit, manipulate and take advantage of anyone they can to achieve their objectives. It is the role of Christians, churches and church leaders not to allow themselves to be manipulated, abused and taken advantage of.”

“We should be looking for candidates who endorse us,” he said.

Of course Land, who was named by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals, is very active in one such profane institution, even advocating in 1998 for marriage between it and Southern Baptists.  

An Aug. 30 story in The Associated Press quotes Land as saying he had urged Republican presidential candidate John McCain to consider political unknown Sarah Palin for vice-presidential candidate. Palin, Land said, is “straight out of veep central casting.”

“Veep” as the nickname for vice president, by the way, is a term coined by Alben Barkley’s 10-year-old grandson when Barkley was Harry Truman’s vice president 1949-1953.

While pastors and churches should avoid endorsing particular candidates or parties, they are free to address moral and social issues and conduct voter registration drives if they are bi-partisan. They are free to hold candidate forums, as long as both candidates have equal opportunity. They are free to distribute voter guides as long as they have more than two or three issues and are accurate and give all candidates a chance to participate.

While a pastor is free as a private citizen to endorse a candidate or party, the distinction between a pastor as pastor and a pastor as private citizen is “a distinction without a difference,” Land said.

For all the threat behind the 1954 tax law put in place by an angry Lyndon Johnson to silence criticism from non-profit organizations, the IRS has only pulled the tax exempt status of a church once — for a year — after the church ran a full page ad nationally urging people to vote against Bill Clinton, and asking in the ad for donations to help pay for it.

There is currently a case involving an Episcopal church in California in which a visiting priest preached against the Iraq war. The IRS is investigating, although if that case ever saw the light of day every church in America ought to march on Washington, D.C., in protest. The day the government tries to prohibit Christians from clamoring against the machinery of war is the day the calendar flips back to 1939.

The idea that the government or its tax arm, the IRS, can silence the pulpit from preaching about moral or social issues, whether homosexuality, abortion, war, race, poverty or any other issue is “just nonsense,” Land said.

What you cannot do — unless you want to risk your tax-exempt status — is to tell your congregation what person or what party to vote for.

Fourth, after several decades of neo-con this, Moral Majority that, disingenuous White House receptions and reneged promises in between, American voters — which includes you — are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics.

A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted from July 31-Aug. 10, reveals that it is conservatives who most are releasing their embrace of religious involvement in politics.

Four years ago, just 30 percent of conservatives believed that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics. Today, 50 percent of conservatives express this view, according to the survey.

The survey finds a small but significant increase since 2004 in the percentage of respondents saying that they are uncomfortable when they hear politicians talk about how religious they are.

Similarly, the survey finds increasing numbers who believe that religiously defined ideological groups have too much control over the parties themselves.

Maybe we are realizing at long last that politicians sing religious songs only to entice us to join their choir. I suspect most of them, like the little Chinese girl at the Olympics opening ceremony, are only lip synching.