Minnesota politics: God called Michele Bachmann to run for Congress

Her pastor says "amen" in church gathering

by Leigh Pomeroy

Andy Birkey at Minnesota Monitor sat in on a Michele Bachmann speech before the Living Word Christian Center, a large suburban chuch in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. At the speech, congressional candidate Michele Bachmann, running against Patty Wetterling in Minnesota's 6th Congressional District said:

God then called me to run for the United States Congress, and I thought “What in the world will that be for?” and my husband said “You need to do this,” and I wasn’t so sure, and we took three days and we fasted and we prayed and we said, “Lord. Is this what you want? Is this your will?” and after long about the afternoon of day two, he made that calling sure.

Pastor Mac Hammond of the church endorsed Bachmann's calling:

State Senator Michele Bachmann is with us and I’m going to ask her to come in in just a moment, and of course many of you know Michele, know of her pursuit of the United States Senate seat vacated by Mark Kennedy or Congressional seat vacated by Mark Kennedy’s run for a United States Senate seat. Keeping all this straight gets to be challenging. But ya know we can’t publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate but I can tell you personally that I’m going to vote for Michele Bachmann, because I’ve come to know her, what she stands for, and I want her to share her testimony with you tonight.

As Birkey points out, in order to keep their 501(c)3 nonprofit status, churches are strictly forbidden to engage in partisan politics. Does Pastor Hammond's indirect endorsement violate that tax-exempt line?

I'm sure we'll be seeing much more of this in the press before election day.