News & Posts

By Linda Nathan

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority?

Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval,

for he is God's servant for your good.

Romans 13:3–4

Many years ago, Christian author Os Guinness illustrated the decline of Western civilization in his book The Dust of Death with the example of a fire burning in a jungle at night. The fire, he said, represents the Christianized West and the spread of the Gospel in this dark and dangerous world. When it’s burning brightly, the wild beasts stay at a safe distance. But when the fire of the Gospel burns low, the encircling beasts press in.

Not only are many beasts pressing in today, but they often seem to be running the show.

Yet, despite the beasts’ nearness, many Christians refuse to get involved in anything that smacks of political involvement. How much could such a lack of resistance result from the Johnson Amendment? For 70 years, churches have been marinating in this bondage and acclimating to silence to protect their 501C3 tax status.

Speech Police.

In 1954, Congress passed the Johnson Amendment to the tax code bill to restrain Christian churches and organizations from advocating for political candidates. Dr. Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), who began his legal career as an IRS attorney, called the Johnson Amendment:

“a ‘62-year-old federal tax law that prevents religious leaders from truly exercising their constitutionally-protected free speech rights when they act in their official capacity as a pastor or head of a religious, tax-exempt organization.’ The purpose of the IRS was ‘to collect revenue for the general treasury,’ but this amendment has turned the organization into the ‘speech police’.”^[1]

Opponents of the Johnson Amendment argue that churches already can say what they’d like—but they must cede their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Americans United for Separation of Church and State insists that repealing the Amendment would “turn America’s houses of worship into miniature political action committees.” The National Council of Nonprofits argues that “501(c)(3) nonprofits enjoy more power and independence to solve community problems by steering clear of partisanship.”^[2]

The IRS’s Extensive Leftist Culture.

Perhaps emboldened by its success in controlling churches’ political speech for the past 70 years, the IRS, according to Sekulow, has developed into a strongly leftist culture that has been actively shutting down the free speech not only of churches but of a wide variety of conservative and often Christian political movements.^[3]

In June 2016, federal judges fed up with the IRS’s stonewalling forced it to release a near-complete list of the 426 conservative organizations it had targeted. This didn’t include another 40 who opted out of a class-action suit.^[4]

The targeting was so extensive and so severe that the American Enterprise Institute argued that if the IRS hadn’t blocked the Tea Party’s growth, but instead the Party had continued its proportionate impact on Republican voting, “it could well have made up the difference in key states” in the 2012 presidential election.^[5]

But even while under congressional investigation for its “targeting, intimidation, and harassment of conservative groups,” the targeting didn’t stop, although the IRS claimed it had. A recent major free speech victory by the ACLJ in a court just below the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed this fact.

During this time, the IRS also agreed to “monitor churches and other houses of worship for electioneering” as part of a settlement with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FRF), a radical atheist organization.^[6]

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court made a significant stand for First Amendment freedom of speech in Citizens United v. FEC. Justice Kennedy stated, “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”^[7]

Pulpit Freedom Sunday 2024?

Are any Christians resisting the Johnson Amendment?

Every year since 2008, the conservative advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has organized a “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” to encourage pastors to preach elections-related sermons. Their purpose? “They hope to provoke the IRS into revoking the tax-exempt status of a church that is actively violating the prohibition so that the revocation, and the Johnson Amendment itself, can be challenged in court.” The ADF’s website states, “2,032 pastors have violated the Johnson Amendment since 2008.” However, ADF counsel believes the IRS doesn’t want to challenge the Amendment.^[8]

I’ve done numerous online searches to find out whether there will be a Pulpit Freedom Sunday in 2024, and I’ve also tried to contact the Alliance Defending Freedom office twice. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to learn anything at the time of this writing.

The Republican Platform.

The 2016 Republican Platform supported the repeal of the Johnson Amendment, stating that “Republicans believe the federal government, specifically the IRS, is constitutionally prohibited from policing or censoring the speech of America’s churches, pastors, and religious leaders. We support repeal of the Johnson Amendment, which restricted First Amendment freedoms of all nonprofit organizations by prohibiting political speech.” Unfortunately, repeal of the Johnson Amendment was removed from the final GOP tax bill at the end of 2017.^[9]

The 2024 Republican Platform makes no mention of repealing the Amendment other than the general statements to “DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION, OUR BILL OF RIGHTS, AND OUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS, INCLUDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF RELIGION, AND THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.” And to “END THE WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”^[10]

Yet, despite biblical commands and First Amendment guarantees, a recent report by LifeWay Research revealed that “For the most part, Americans with evangelical beliefs agree that pastors and churches should abstain from using their resources—including the pulpit—to campaign for a particular candidate. Seventy-three percent say pastors should abstain, while about 65 percent say churches should abstain.” However, it states, “Yet fewer than half of Americans—and just 33 percent of evangelicals—want churches to be punished if they do endorse candidates.”^[11]

What Does the Bible Say About It?

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. 2 Timothy 4:1–5

* * *

“Persecution is easier to understand when it’s physical: torture, death, imprisonment.... American persecution is like an advanced stage of cancer; it eats away at you, yet you cannot feel it. This is the worst kind of persecution.”

—Underground House Church Leader in the Middle East.^[12]