Summer ends with Donald Trump having spent the year’s hottest months pursuing evangelical voters by advocating repeal of the so-called Johnson amendment. His pursuit of evangelicals is understandable: Trump can’t win the White House without them—lots and lots of them. But the Johnson amendment?
Passed by Congress in 1954, the amendment to the tax code was named after its sponsor, then-senator Lyndon B. Johnson. The amended provision says that a tax-exempt organization may not “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” In other words, charities may not endorse or oppose candidates for office. An organization found in violation of the law risks losing its tax-exempt status.
Churches are tax-exempt organizations and are thus covered by the provision. But nothing in the (brief) legislative history of the Johnson amendment suggests that the senator and his allies were concerned about pastors and churches endorsing candidates. As sociologist James Davidson showed, Johnson “did not offer the amendment because of anything that churches had done.” It was what certain non-churchly charitable organizations might do that motivated him. “His amendment was directed at [nonprofit] right-wing groups such as Facts Forum and the Committee for Constitutional Government” that championed certain “causes and candidates at the national level and in Texas” and thus “stood between him and his [partisan political] goals.” Johnson, running for reelection, wanted to prevent those groups from supporting his opponents’ campaigns.
Trump’s own history with the amendment started no later than February, when he first announced his intention to repeal it. But he didn’t begin to make repeal a big issue until late spring, when his nomination seemed likely. Over the summer Trump has used major events to press for the amendment’s repeal.
In June, Trump met in New York with a thousand evangelical leaders, many of them pastors. “I think maybe that . . . my greatest contribution to Christianity,” he said with characteristic modesty, “and other religions is to allow you, when you talk religious liberty, to go and speak openly, and if you like somebody or want somebody to represent you, you should have the right to do it.” What’s constraining the exercise of those rights, said Trump, is the Johnson amendment, which has religious leaders “petrified.” The amendment is one reason that Christianity in America has grown “weaker, weaker, weaker.”
In July, at the Republican National Convention, Trump managed to make eliminating the amendment a plank in the platform: “Republicans believe the federal government, specifically the IRS, is constitutionally prohibited from policing or censoring speech based on religious convictions or beliefs, and therefore we urge the repeal of the Johnson Amendment.”
Trump used valuable time in his acceptance speech to advocate against the amendment. Thanking the “evangelical community” for being “so good to me and so supportive,” Trump told them “our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits.” The Johnson amendment “threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views,” Trump said, vowing “to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans.”
Come August, Trump was still pushing the issue. In Orlando, he spoke to 700 evangelical pastors and their spouses. Trump’s main message was about national decline and how the nation can be renewed—by repealing the Johnson amendment. “You’ve lost your voice,” he said. “We’re going to get it back.”
However implausible it may seem that the fate of Christianity depends on what is in the American tax code, Trump enters the fall having made repeal of an obscure tax provision a salient issue. No previous Republican party platform has called for repeal of the amendment.
During the primaries Trump attracted just enough evangelical voters to win the nomination—about a third of the total primary vote. Now polls show that his support among evangelicals has risen to 80 percent, par for the course for recent Republican presidential candidates. But that percentage has not always been enough to push GOP candidates over the top. Assuming he gets 80 percent of evangelical voters, Trump will need more evangelicals to turn out and vote than have done so in the past two presidential elections.
And if he is elected and undertakes to repeal the Johnson amendment, Trump would face a Congress that hasn’t shown much interest in reconsidering it. A few years ago, Sen. Charles Grassley led an effort to revise the amendment. It got bogged down in policy proposals and position papers by panels of legal experts and religious representatives. A Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations, a group formed by the respected Evangelical Council on Financial Accountability, determined that notwithstanding what may seem to some groups a “troubling, limiting, frustrating, and even potentially unconstitutional” prohibition on political and religious speech, the law “should not be repealed.”
That’s where things stood until Trump took up the issue. A President Trump could try to win the public and Congress over on the Johnson amendment. But if he is unable to turn Congress his way, he might be tempted to do what President Barack Obama has so often done to enact his policies—resort to an executive order or presidential memorandum. But surely the better course for Trump would be to negotiate and compromise to get what he could from Congress.
Terry Eastland is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
