It was Pulpit Freedom Sunday in early October, when preachers who’ve signed up to trespass into electoral politics go well beyond the limits their churches have agreed upon when accepting tax-exempt status. Organized by the conservative movement Alliance Defending Freedom, they praise or condemn candidates. They urge parishioners to avoid this politician or that one; Barack Obama was a regular target, even in a few black churches such as Hope Christian, because of his support for gay marriage and abortion rights. Occasionally, favored politicians are even invited to a service to be anointed by the minister’s endorsement.

Some pastors tread nervously onto this forbidden ground, because they don’t want to lose their churches’ tax exemptions. But others zealously hope for just that. They are trying to provoke the Internal Revenue Service into an adverse ruling so they can challenge the constitutionality of the law, which they believe violates the First Amendment. For many years, the IRS has refrained from taking the bait, and citizen complaints against churches’s electioneering have disappeared into the agency’s bureaucratic abyss.

Bishop Jackson’s parish is located in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., but his true constituency is nationwide thanks to Republican donors who adore the anomaly of a black conservative. He does not mince words, and he delivers dramatic hyperbole. He wears glasses and a black beard cropped short. His uniform is simple but elegant: a white collar and a gold chain draped diagonally across his chest, from his right shoulder to his left side.

His roots are tangled and intriguing. His grandfather’s father was white, he explains, and his grandfather’s mother was “a very dark-skinned black woman.” His grandfather was a Gullah from coastal South Carolina, and his father was the first in the family to go to college. Jackson’s maternal grandmother was part black, part Cherokee. And he, Jackson, went to excellent schools: Williams as an undergraduate, then Harvard Business School for his MBA. For a while, he worked for Corning glass in upstate New York, then turned to religion and founded a church. He sees religion as an agent of change and of moral preservation.

“If it had not been for a free pulpit,” he declared on Pulpit Freedom Sunday a month before the 2012 presidential election, “there would not have been an abolitionist movement ... It was a free pulpit in the civil rights movement that called for justice.”

And, as he might have added but did not, none of that would violate the law under the Faustian bargain that church and state have entered. In exchange for the generous public subsidy of avoiding all income and property taxes, and for its donors’s ability to deduct their contributions from their taxable income, the church limits its speech by staying out of electoral politics. That doesn’t mean it can’t take positions on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, civil rights, and poverty, unless the matter “has been raised as an issue distinguishing candidates for a given office,” according to the IRS explanation. When they apply for, and receive, tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3), religious and secular organizations alike may not “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”