Where in the constitution does it say Church speak out on politics lose tax exemption?

Can you image the abuse of donor money if churches were alowed to speak out regarding political matters. Instead of having PACs which are highly regulated to disclose donor information, people could just donate all their campaign contributions to churches and get a nice fat tax write off. If you think our system is corrupt now, can you image how much worse it would be with people creating churches for the sole purpose of funnelling campaign dollars? Good lord (no pun intended).

Some Dem president in the 50s or 60s (for some reason, I want to say Johnson) wrote it into IRS policy. It's not in the constitution, nor was it ever voted on by congress.

There recently was an attempt to right this bad policy...the freedom of religion act I believe it was called. Sadly, it didn't pass (I don't even know if it made it out of committee). I believe Walter Jones was the one that wrote the bill. But I think it's absolute crap that any church speaking for Dems is fine, but any church criticizing Dems or backing Reps is threatened as you say. If any institution should be allowed to speak out on any issue, it should be the church...Dem or Rep.

The separation of church and state is a legal and political principle derived from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ."

IRC Section 7611 (IRC § 7611)

(06-01-2004) "carrying on an unrelated trade or business or otherwise engaged in activities subject to any IRC tax"

Basically - when a church or any non-profit gets into other business aside from the charitable mission they put themselves at risk You can read the full thing @ http://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/ch52s07.html#d0e66177...

Where in the Constitution, did they get their tax exempt status?

The same place it specifically says the phrase, "separation of church and state". In other words, nowhere.