Earlier this week, Melissa Rogers pointed to this week's On Religion column in USAToday, written by Dan Gilgoff, the senior editor at US News and World Report. He believes the IRS needs to enforce the church politicking regulations with more teeth.

American taxpayers should be concerned about the IRS enforcement vacuum: Tax exemptions for non-profit groups were never intended to offer tax relief to partisan political advocacy.

By failing to enforce the 1954 rule, however, that's exactly what the IRS is doing. The agency has concluded investigations into complaints filed against 40 churches in the 2004 election cycle. Though so-called "political intervention" (IRS-speak for actions that violate its prohibitions on backing or opposing candidates) was substantiated in all but three cases, not a single house of worship saw its tax-exempt status revoked. Instead, the IRS wrote advisories, warning citations that carry no punishment, or assessed excise taxes, the equivalent of light fines, on those churches.

The IRS justifies this slap-on-the-wrist approach by claiming that it wants to bring churches into compliance with IRS rules rather than punish them.

Those are honest questions, not rhetorical ones. If you read the BJC blog, you know that I take those violations seriously and consider them to be not just a crossing of important church-state provisions but questionable religious practice as well. I'm especially wary of broad attempts by tax-exempt religious organizations to effect large numbers of voters through their churches. But I'm also concerned about the implications of an arm of government having churches in its crosshairs and more than willing to offer extreme punishment. The more openly we sanction and empower the government to intimidate and investigate church activity, the more our climate of religious freedom will suffer.

Regulating churches is something the government should do very carefully. Those of us who believe in church-state separation from a perspective of faith should continue to educate congregations and ministers on both the legal and religious reasons to avoid electioneering from the pulpit. And efforts to exert public pressure on groups that would exploit churches for political purposes will continue to play an important role. But I tend to think the slap-on-the-wrist, educational approach of the IRS is appropriate in most cases.  I'm interested in your reaction. Do you believe the IRS needs to start ruling with a heavier hand, especially if, as Gilgoff suggests, violations are increasing? What activities, if any, should prompt the revocation of tax-exempt status?