While communication with a member of the clergy might be privileged, letters sent to God are not, as Ed Brayton reports in this case where the incriminating evidence was found in journal entries addressed to God:
The police seized copies of her journal, wherein she admitted to having hired someone to kill him, and used them as evidence to convict her. She appealed the conviction, arguing that because she addressed her journal entries to God, they should be protected under Michigan’s clergy-penitent privilege.
The appeals court rejected this argument:
In view of this function of the privilege, neither Michigan nor any other State (to our knowledge) treats the clergy-penitent privilege as a broad cloak protecting all religious communications. Because the objective of the privilege is to protect the human need to place total and absolute confidence in a spiritual counselor without risk that the law will extract those confidences from the counselor, the Michigan Court of Appeals had ample reason to hold that privilege does not apply to private writings. The privilege requires the communication to be directed to a member of the clergyjust as the other privileges require the communication to be directed to an attorney or doctorbecause it is the clergy who may be subpoenaed to testify against the individual. The same possibility does not exist with private writings to God, who may be petitioned but never subpoenaed.
