Saturday, August 31, 2024

Christianity directly attacks Johnson Amendment in federal court

The National Religious Broadcasters association has joined a complaint alongside two East Texas churches calling for the Johnson Amendment to be declared unconstitutional. The complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler on Aug. 28.

Congress approved then-Senator Lyndon Johnson’s amendment to the U.S. tax code in 1954 that prohibited 501(c)(3) organizations such as charities and churches “from engaging in any political campaign activity.” In 1987, Congress added a clarification that the amendment also applies to statements opposing candidates.

According to a National Religious Broadcasters statement, the complaint details how organizations have “engage[d] in electoral activities that are open, obvious and well-known, yet the IRS allows some, but not all, such organizations to do so without penalty.”

The Internal Revenue Service, it continued, routinely “acts in an arbitrary and capricious manner” toward nonprofit organizations “that disfavors conservative organizations and conservative, religious organizations.” Such an unequal enforcement, it determines, constitutes “a denial of both religious freedom and equal protection.”
This is a very big deal, huge actually. The current USSC will probably declare the JA (Johnson Amendment) unconstitutional on grounds of undue burden on free speech, undue burden on religious freedom and/or anything else they can think of. The court might even find a way to apply the history and traditions test. If the JA is overturned, theocratic Christian nationalist (CN) church leaders will be free to fill their sermons with all the lies, slanders, fake American history, and poisonous bigotry, e.g., seething hate of the LGBQT community, that dominates dark free speech from CN elites. 

Plaintiffs [Christianity] contend that the Johnson Amendment, as written and as applied by the IRS, violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause, Free Exercise Clause, the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (Void for Vagueness), the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (Equal Protection), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

To be clear, if the JA is overturned, priests, pastors and other church elites will be free to openly threaten their flocks with things like excommunication, ostracism, expulsion from the church and condemnation to eternal damnation in Satan's lake of fire if they vote for the wrong candidate according to God's sacred and infallible will. 

The really interesting aspect of this lawsuit is the nature of the JA itself. The JA was passed into law as an explicit condition on a church maintaining its tax-exempt status, not an outright prohibition on speech or religious freedom. As it is now, CN churches and religious leaders still have significant freedom to speak on political and moral issues - they just can't explicitly endorse or oppose candidates while maintaining tax-exempt status. One source comments:
Repealing the Johnson Amendment would either require an act of Congress or the Supreme Court ruling that the law is unconstitutional. Neither of these possibilities have occurred. While there is frequently language introduced by Republican lawmakers to repeal it, such legislation has historically been unsuccessful. Most recently, in the Republican tax reform bill in 2017, repeal language was dropped due to the Senate’s reconciliation rules.
Radical Republican theocratic politicians failed to repeal the JA, most recently in 2017, so the next line of attack on the JA is the USSC. Churches already can implicitly endorse and oppose candidates but even that is not enough for the aggressive, kleptocratic CN wealth and power movement. Theocratic Christianity wants to rip off the JA fig leaf and go full Monty in politics. Churches can already say, for example, that politicians who support abortion rights are agents of Satan or otherwise terrible people in God's eyes. Churches already know exactly how to implicitly endorse or oppose a candidate without running afoul of the JA. 

The courts have consistently held that tax exemption is a privilege, not a right, and organizations can choose to forgo tax-exempt status if they wish to engage in prohibited political activities. That is the main barrier that the USSC has to somehow knock down if the authoritarian CN theocratic agenda is to take its power to the highest level so far. This lawsuit is the clearest example of the ravenous greed that constitutes a major motive and goal of the elites who control America's authoritarian radical right Christian nationalist wealth and power movement.[1]

Given the radical, theocratic intend of this USSC, this lawsuit is terrifying. If the JA does get invalidated, that will happen most likely in June-July of 2026 or 2027. In normal times with a normal USSC, the chances of repeal of the JA would seem to be low. But with this radical theocratic court, certain things that are implausible but important to the CN movement become possible, maybe even likely. 

No one thought the Roe v. Wade would be overturned, but it was. 


Footnote:
1. An anti-CN source comments about the CN wealth and power movement:
Is Christian nationalism Christian?

No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation.
Why should Christians oppose Christian nationalism?

Pro-democracy, pro-love Christians must speak out together to show the country that Christian nationalism does not represent Jesus or our faith. When we do this, we prove that the biggest critics of the Christian-nationalist ideology are in fact Christians, and thus disprove the source of its biggest power: the false perception that the religious-right speaks for all American Christians.
I am not the only person who sees CN as bigoted (anti-love) and authoritarian (anti-democracy).

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