Churches campaigning for Trump? Take away their tax-exempt status.
Non Paywalled Link: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/x2zrw
Fine, as long as they have their tax exempt status removed.
They won’t, because the politicians they elect will defend their base of support.
This isn’t like when Obama/Pelosi went after ACORN in 2009. Or SCOTUS struck down the right of unions to fund raise for candidates under the Janis decision. Or FOX News spent months freaking out over the Ground Zero Mosque. Or Midwestern governors tried to cancel Sunday early voting in order to undermine “Souls to the Polls” black Evangelical turnout. These are people with real money and influence who aren’t to be fucked with.
Conservatives will tap that reserve whole heartedly. Liberals will just shrug and say they can’t be taxed because of The Norms.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s a brazen effort to transform religious congregations — which are technically supposed to keep electoral politics out of the pulpit — into a campaign powerhouse for the former president.
He spent much of the recent holiday weekend attempting to trash the legacy of a storied Christian reverend, Martin Luther King, Jr.)
The law is rarely enforced, and has been skirted by churches of all political orientations — whether by pastors who make their personal endorsements public or by congregations organizing turnout-boosting efforts like “souls to the polls.”
But Trump has made clear he won’t punish churches that violate the Johnson amendment in 2024, even vowing on a Christian nationalist broadcast last May that he’ll abolish the prohibition if reelected.
During his podcast, Wallnau insisted that the Courage Tour will also be working with right-wing women’s groups including Moms for America — which touts “truth, family, freedom and the Constitution” — and Concerned Women for America, a group dedicated to “Biblical values and Constitutional principles.” Wallnau insisted: “We’re creating a broad net.”
The movement poses a danger to democracy because it “sees no room for compromise,” Andrew Whitehead, author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States has told Rolling Stone.
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religious congregations — which are technically supposed to keep electoral politics out of the pulpit
Why would large, well-organized, ideologically unified groups of people stay out of electoral politics?
Aren’t these exactly the kinds of organizations you’d expect to be hip deep in political organizing and activism?
The movement poses a danger to democracy
I have to say that I think their views are often shit. But they are fundamentally popular shit. Hardly antidemocratic.
Liberals would do well to fight fire with fire. Attend big social groups. Organize with your neighbors. Raise money, run candidates, and enforce ideological orthodoxy as a condition of membership.
Hoping that some rules lawyers at the IRS are going to make Houston’s Second Baptist Church go away seems both foolish and unproductive.
