Beginning with his first run for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump has promised to undermine the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits the endorsement of political candidates on behalf of tax-exempt organizations.
That’s a bad, even dangerous, idea.
In 1948, Lyndon Johnson had won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate (then tantamount to election in Texas) by fewer than a hundred votes, and those votes very likely were stolen. (When he arrived in the Senate, he was known as “Landslide Lyndon.”)
When Johnson faced reelection in 1954, various conservatives in Texas, who deemed Johnson too liberal, were using nonprofit organizations to finance efforts to defeat him. Johnson wanted to hold these critics at bay, so he introduced the Johnson Amendment to the Internal Revenue Service Code, prohibiting tax-exempt organizations from making endorsements for or against political candidates.
Congress approved the Johnson Amendment, and Dwight Eisenhower signed the IRS code, including the Johnson Amendment, into law.
Johnson was clearly acting out of self-interest, but that does not diminish the importance of the principle that tax-exempt organizations should not be engaging in partisan politics. Why should taxpayers be forced to subsidize political activities?
For decades, the Johnson Amendment was uncontroversial. Tax-exempt organizations recognized that forswearing political endorsements was a small price to pay in exchange for exemption from taxes — which of course is a form of public subsidy.
Those attitudes began to change with the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. After the leaders of white evangelicalism organized to defend the racial policies at Bob Jones University and other so-called segregation academies, they added other issues to their political agenda, including opposition to abortion and homosexuality (in part to camouflage the fact that the catalyst for their movement was the defense of segregation).
Especially following their electoral success in the 1980 presidential election and their alignment with the far-right precincts of the Republican Party, leaders of the Religious Right began to chafe at the restrictions imposed by the Johnson Amendment.
They demanded to know why preachers shouldn’t be allowed to make political endorsements from the pulpit. They even advanced the disingenuous argument that such restrictions represented an infringement on their right of free speech.
That’s nonsense, of course. Any preacher or religious organization can make any endorsement they wish to make; all the Johnson Amendment requires is that they forego the public subsidy of tax exemption.
Then, in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with white evangelical leaders by promising to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, a pledge that helped consolidate the support of Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham and others at a crucial moment in the Republican primaries.
Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2017 shortly after his inauguration, Trump declared, “I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”
Indeed, Trump tried to neuter the Johnson Amendment with various executive orders. More recently, the Internal Revenue Service, which has always been lax about enforcing the Johnson Amendment, issued a directive that allows preachers to endorse political candidates.
The Johnson Amendment is a critical component in the wall of separation between church and state mandated by the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion… .” It shields the state from religious contestation, but it also guards the integrity of the faith.
Let’s play out the scenario of eliminating the Johnson Amendment. It’s not difficult to imagine a wealthy person with, say, a couple million dollars of disposable income approaching a megachurch pastor with the following proposition: I’ll donate $2 million to your church, and all I ask in return is that you mention complimentary things about my preferred candidate — J.D. Vance or Josh Shapiro or Ted Cruz — at least once every Sunday.
How is that not a money-laundering scheme? The donor receives a $2 million tax deduction, and the pastor has sold his soul to the highest bidder, all at the expense of taxpayers.
And if the pastor accedes to this request, what is the likelihood that he will lend his prophetic voice to the arena of public discourse, especially at a time when we need to hear prophetic voices?
The separation of church and state, America’s best idea, has shielded the government from religious contestation and it has also protected the integrity of the faith from too close an association with the state. Despite the less than savory origins of the Johnson Amendment, it has served as an important reinforcement in the wall of separation.
Randall Balmer’s most recent book is “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.”