The first day of a Trump presidency would include a seemingly mundane priority: asking Congress to change the language contained on an obscure page of the IRS tax code.
Focusing on a law passed in 1954 called the Johnson Amendment, Trump has joined a long line of Republicans who have fired shots at language that prohibits nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations from endorsing candidates for political office or from participating in political campaigns. It is the reason why, for instance, the president of a university or the head of a prominent philanthropic foundation cannot endorse candidates for office. But Donald Trump and other Republicans taking issue with the law are not looking for the endorsement of Brown University President Christina Paxson. Instead, they take issue with the law because they believe it violates the freedom of speech to which churches and other religious institutions are entitled.
At a recent event convened by the Family Research Council, a nonprofit, conservative Christian think tank, Trump told attendees – and the evangelical world at large – that he would repeal the Johnson Amendment as president. “The first thing we have to do is give our churches their voice back. All religious leaders should be able to freely express their thoughts and feelings on religious matters,” Trump said. This was not the Republican presidential nominee’s first time articulating his aversion toward the tax provision; in an attempt to shore up support with evangelicals in his base, Trump has frequently called for the retraction of the Johnson Amendment.
By characterizing the issue as one of free speech, Trump’s position is especially resonant among evangelicals whose votes Trump desperately needs and who have long despised the law, fitting the issue within a broader spectrum of criticism among Christian conservatives that frames the left as trying to stifle religious freedom and expression.
Among those who oppose the Johnson Amendment, considerable weight is often placed on a particular story about the legislation’s history, one that casts the rule as the product of cynical political machination. The Johnson Amendment is eponymously named for then-Senator Lyndon Johnson who proposed the amendment to the United States tax code on the floor of the US Senate in 1954. In introducing the amendment, Johnson did not say much about his motivations for the change in the tax code. The bill, he said, would deny “tax-exempt status to not only those people who influence legislation but also to those who intervene in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.” Johnson shared nothing more about his reasoning, only saying that he had discussed the matter with some of his colleagues already. The proposed change was later passed. In turn, the dearth of historical record on the matter has left historians and politicians to fill in the holes on why Johnson proposed this particular change.
Donald Trump, in his September speech at the Values Voter Summit, offered his own explanation for Johnson’s motivations: “[In] 1954 or so, Lyndon Johnson was having problems with churches. And there was a church in Houston that was giving him a hard time, maybe for very good reason. And he put in an amendment that basically stopped our great pastors and ministers and others from talking, under the penalty of losing their tax-exempt status.” Determining the accuracy of Trump’s account is difficult, but some interpretations suggest that Trump was correct on Johnson’s intention to use the language for political gain, although wrong on the political context.
According to sociologist James Davidson, who researched the history of the Johnson Amendment in a 1998 article, “There is no reason to believe the amendment had anything to do with churches and their political activity.” According to Davidson, George Reedy, a political aide of Johnson’s, wrote in a letter that “Johnson would never have sought restrictions on religious organizations.” Instead, Johnson’s language was likely a reflection of his experience navigating an electoral landscape rife with partisan attacks from anticommunist, nonprofit organizations that were critical of the Democratic Party. It is possible that Johnson had looked into the activity of one nonprofit organization called Fact Forum and presumably took issue with the group’s partisan support for his opponents in Texas and Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had led the anticommunist scourge on a national stage. In other words, Johnson stood to benefit from preventing nonprofit organizations such as Fact Forum from engaging in partisan politics, which threatened to saturate the political landscape with hyper-partisan jeremiads.
Despite the fact that the language affects all nonprofit organizations, Trump’s remarks show that the political gravitas of the law has become wrapped up in a story that conservatives have spun among their ranks: The government, like the left, is complicit in silencing religious voices. In order to abide by the law, many nonprofits engaged in political activism or organizing maintain both a 501(c)(3) and a separate political action fund, which can be categorized as a 527 or a 501(c)(4). This leaves little room for places of worship, such as churches or synagogues, which use donations for all sorts of purposes, rather than purely for advocacy work like a 527 or 501(c)(4) does. Leaders of such organizations must tread carefully around political activity, lest they risk their institution’s tax-exempt status. This careful dance affects all places of worship, but it has taken up particular resonance on the national stage among the religious right: a subset of conservatives formed by institutions and leaders sharing a culturally conservative worldview, often focused on social issues.
For the past several decades, white evangelical Protestants have constituted a critical mass in the Republican Party. Comprising a large part of the religious right, these voters are a testament to the success of an organizing effort that began with conservatives painting liberals as godless communist sympathizers in the 1950s and 60s and came to a head during the 70s and the Reagan Revolution of the 80s. Trump’s work to court this demographic by attacking the Johnson Amendment highlights the bloc’s continuing importance.
According to historian Daniel Williams, in his book titled “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right,” the “political ethos” of the religious right found its footing in the development of Christian “fundamentalism” in the early 1900s. Fundamentalists fomented a reactionary movement in the form of biblical literalism that they intended to act as a check on what they perceived as the danger of an increasingly secular society. Their key to this mission, Williams writes, was protecting the family and their religious values.
Fundamentalist conservative Protestants eventually began calling themselves evangelicals, going on to form the National Evangelical Association (NAE) in 1942. Since its inception, the movement has been deeply and inextricably tied with politics. The fear of an increasingly secular, godless society soon found itself reflected in the NAE’s anticommunist campaign during World War II and the ensuing decade. Early on, evangelicals made a home for themselves within the Republican Party; Billy Graham, a face of the early evangelical movement, established a public rapport with President Eisenhower and helped Richard Nixon win evangelical white voters in both the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections.
Ronald Reagan followed suit in 1980, a year after Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a prominent evangelical political advocacy organization. The political coalition was established as a response to several high-profile political controversies, including the IRS’s 1978 announcement of its intention to enforce a requirement that any tax-exempt private school satisfy racial quotas for enrolled students. Reagan successfully reached out to evangelicals amid such a political climate by “speaking out against abortion, the sexual revolution, communism, and moral decay, and in proclaiming a new moral vision for the nation as a ‘shining city upon a hill,’” language that resonated with leaders like Falwell and their followers. The religious right responded in kind, becoming a long-lasting and crucial component of the conservative coalition that would continue into the present day. Having begun as an organic movement to protest the status quo, evangelicals suddenly found themselves pulling the strings of national politics. Consequently, since the Reagan era, conservatives have included the priorities of evangelical voters on the top of their lists, visiting churches and right-leaning political groups associated with the community and speaking out against issues like gay marriage and abortion on the campaign trail.
In turn, given the religious right’s historic support for the Republican Party, it is unlikely that Trump’s campaign is at risk of actually losing this key base. Therefore, Trump’s choice to amplify such a niche issue as the Johnson Amendment seems like a peculiar way to spend the last few months of his presidential campaign. Concurrently, while a GOP “autopsy report” focused on the party’s failure to be inclusive and suggested ways to increase its membership diversity following Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, the party has seemingly failed to act on these recommendations. The acceptance of a presidential candidate that has styled himself as the “law and order” candidate – an expression that harkens back to the politics of segregation, discrimination, and student-led protests of the 1960s – indicates that the Republican Party’s base remains attracted to rhetoric that resonates with blocs of voters such as white conservative evangelicals. Such rhetoric has been historically unpopular among those voters whose support the “autopsy” reported that the Republican Party needs. As Trump’s support for repealing the Johnson Amendment demonstrates, the only support the party seems to be seeking is among groups it has already won.
On the other side of the religious spectrum, the rise of “nones,” or Americans not identifying with any particular religious movement or tradition, does not pose much of a threat to Trump either. The nones may have reached the general population but have yet to reach a critical mass within the American electorate. This may mean that a large number of those who identify as religiously unaffiliated are staying home on Election Day. Such an apathy gap stands to the religious right’s benefit, suggesting that religious voices still have a disproportionate presence in the electorate.
With little change in the religious right’s status quo and little threat from a new coalition of nonreligious voters, Trump’s focus on the Johnson Amendment may be explained by the nature of this particular election. Trump has not necessarily demonstrated veritable religious chops to American voters. In February, Trump fished his pockets for money when Communion plates were passed among a congregation he was visiting, believing that the plates were for offerings. Last August, Trump infamously referred to the Eucharist as the moment in a service in which he receives his “little cracker” and his “little wine.” Both blunders demonstrated a lack of basic knowledge about the sacraments that many millions of Americans practice every week.
In this sense, Trump’s talk of the Johnson Amendment helps to heighten his profile among Republican voters who see their religious beliefs as inextricably linked to their politics but who may not see the same sincerity reflected in their presidential nominee. Although he polls well among evangelical voters – 63 percent said that they would vote for Trump on Election Day in an August Pew poll, compared to only 17 percent of evangelicals who said that they would vote for Clinton – he is no Ted Cruz, whose announcement speech was centered around the importance of faith and delivered at Liberty University, the Christian university founded by Jerry Falwell and currently run by his son. In other words, Trump may feel he still has something to prove to religious voters who cringe at his blunders but look favorably upon the Islamophobic, anti-immigration rhetoric that the candidate has been espousing.
But the debate around the Johnson amendment extends beyond Trump and the 2016 campaign. On the first day of the 114th Congress, Republican Congressman Walter Jones from North Carolina submitted a bill to repeal the Johnson Amendment. According to a Pew poll, nearly one third of Americans believed in 2014 that places of worship should be able to “come out in favor of one candidate over another.” Despite the right’s familiarity with this issue, the revival of the Johnson Amendment debate points to a deeper shift in American politics: the changing role of free speech on the right. The religious right, which has often used religious beliefs as a basis to justify the censorship of speech perceived as violating “family values,” is now rallying around freedom of expression.
More broadly, the use of “free speech” as a rhetorical tool to decry the left’s perceived political correctness has emerged as a successful Republican strategy on many fronts. The right has cast the left’s attempts at inclusivity and sensitivity to historical forms and systems of oppression as hostility to open discourse. Nowhere has this been more obvious than within the religious right, where the politics of reproductive rights and marriage equality were transformed into a fight over free speech. Consider Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who became an overnight sensation when she refused to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court ruled that they had the constitutional right to marry on the basis that doing so violated her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. She was jailed for her refusal and emerged from prison to a rally attended by Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz as a martyr of the religious right.
For Kim Davis and her sympathizers, this was a matter of both belief and expression. Not only was the government seemingly telling Davis that she must change her beliefs, but so too was she being told that she could not protest these changes. She must swallow the proverbial pill, it seemed. And it was not just Davis who had to swallow it, but also, by extension, those who agreed with her: a part of the country that has felt marginalized and under attack since the early 1900s. The religious right’s free speech rallying cry represents an inversion of the role that free speech has taken up within these circles. At one point, the intersection of free speech and the religious right was wrapped up in calls to ban certain books from public libraries and certain television shows and movies from the airwaves. While these calls persist, the modern conservative movement is more likely protesting the importance of defending speech in order to protect faithful Americans.
Trump has tapped into a powerful current among conservatives and the religious right by invoking the Johnson Amendment and focusing on the silencing of religious leaders and voices. This is about more than an obscure tax law on the books. Rather, it is a reflection of the manner in which the politics of religion, race, and speech remain both subtle and looming for American voters who remain convinced that the ground is shifting beneath their feet.