How Rightwing Preachers Are Weaponizing Our Courts Into an Unholy Alliance

by | Sep 3, 2024 | Opinions & Commentary

Photo by Matt Meilner, Unsplash

How Rightwing Preachers Are Weaponizing Our Courts Into an Unholy Alliance

by | Sep 3, 2024 | Opinions & Commentary

Photo by Matt Meilner, Unsplash

Rightwing preachers and their lobbying group have filed suit to block the Johnson Amendment which says that if they push politics instead of religion on Sunday morning their church should lose its tax-exempt status.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

A group representing rightwing preachers is trying to bring about a merger of church and state with a new lawsuit. This is incredibly dangerous. The blowback against their effort has even generated a meme that has gone viral on social media:

Sadly, most Americans don’t understand that when a corporation (churches are corporations) doesn’t have money left over at the end of the year because they spent it all on their mission, they don’t pay a penny in income taxes, whether they’re non-profit or for-profit organizations.

Playing off this ignorance, rightwing preachers across America are howling that Democrats want to stop them from feeding the hungry or helping the poor, a completely 100% BS argument with no basis in reality. And they’re being helped out in this scam by their largest trade association and lobbying group.

The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) is a group heavily supported by preachers and televangelists, many of whom collectively rake in literally billions of dollars every year that they use for everything from promoting Trump to private jets to 35,000 square foot 40-room lakeside mansions.

And all of it is tax-free: you and I pick up the tab for everything from their police and fire to their use of the nation’s airspace and airwaves. As Leona Helmsley famously said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” And only a few of these folks are “the little people.”

To keep this gravy train rolling along, the NRB and two rightwing churches just launched a federal lawsuit to overturn the so-called Johnson Amendment, part of the IRS’s tax code that says that when nonprofits engage in political activity they lose their tax-exempt status.

We got the Johnson Amendment back in 1954 because rightwing whites-only churches had joined Fred Koch’s John Birch Society in the “massive resistance” movement against the racial integration of public schools mandated that year by the Supreme Court in Brown v Board. It passed that year by a unanimous voice vote in a Republican-controlled senate and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Since the Reagan era, however, the law has been largely ignored. As The Washington Post noted in a 2016 editorial:

“Indeed, more than 2,000 mainly evangelical Christian clergy have deliberately violated the law since 2008 as a form of protest against it; only one has been audited by the IRS, and none punished…” 

When preachers push politics instead of religion on Sunday morning, the so-called Johnson Amendment said, their church should lose its tax-exempt status. As the IRS notes: 

“Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”

The NRB is bringing their suit in a Texas federal court before a Trump-appointed rightwing judge who will almost certainly rule in their favor. From there, it’ll eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, which is clearly the NRB’s goal.

Given the six rightwing Catholics on the Court who’ve already enshrined their Church’s religious doctrine into law with the Dobbs decision, odds are the Johnson Amendment is facing the end of its days.

This is just one more example of how Bush and Trump packing the Court with rightwing religious fanatics—including one who was a member of a Catholic cult where, as The Washington Post notes, she was referred to as a “Handmaid” most of her early life—who are distorting American law and rewriting the Constitution.

Religion is one of the great unregulated realms of American life. There are no federal standards for a person to lead a congregation, become a televangelist, or open a new church. Anybody can do it.

It’s been that way from the beginning of America to this day because we’ve all accepted the Founders’ and Framers’ belief that religion and government should be as separated as possible. As author of the Declaration of Independence and then-President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association on New Years Day of 1802:

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Every member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 agreed, which is why there are two different places in that document that forbid our government from promoting or prohibiting any particular religion or religious doctrine, and outlaws a religious test for holding office.

They did this because of their experience of the previous two hundred years, during which Europeans on this continent brutally inflicted and enforced radical anti-woman religious dogma on our citizens, particularly in New England.

Now, however, Republican judges and politicians, heavily supported by rightwing preachers, want to take us back to that grim era and are working as hard as they can to pull it off.

This is just one more example of how out-of-control the rightwing faction of our court system is, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

It’s why it’s so vital that next year sees the Supreme Court expanded, term limits imposed, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito impeached, court-stripping legislation put into law, and a binding code of ethics on SCOTUS passed and enforced.

It also requires our federal legislators to get ready now, with legislation to re-impose the Johnson Amendment’s separation-of-church-and-state in a way that the Supreme Court cannot overturn. And the IRS must begin enforcing it.

Rightwing Republican fanatics constantly telegraph their next move, in part to help raise money from their base. Democrats and Republicans who care about our secular republic must stop playing after-the-fact defense and go on the offense now.

Pass it along.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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