Are the feds monitoring your preaching?

Randy Steele, preacher at the Southwest Christian Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois, was recently visited by FBI agents inquiring about a sermon he had preached several months earlier. The sermon was about abortion, and at one point, according to Mr. Steele, he asserted "that we are in a different type of war that is being fought under the presupposition of freedom." After talking with Mr. Steele, the agents found nothing further to investigate. Their appearance, however, left the preacher wondering how the FBI became involved in the first place. No one in the congregation, he said, expressed any reservations about the sermon at the time:

"The thing that bothers me the most about this whole thing is that right now the pulpits in America are pretty open to attack," Steele said. "If somebody wants to call in and make an accusation against a minister for preaching the gospel and call it hate crime they can do it."

In Sweden last year, a preacher was jailed for speaking out against homosexuality. But it couldn't happen here--right?