The Conservative Group Behind the Effort to Use Churches to Funnel Unlimited Money to Political Campaigns
"The decree could open the floodgates for political operatives..."
Last week, the IRS said that religious institutions can endorse political candidates. At first glance, that may not seem like a political earthquake, but the directive essentially enables many charitable donations to be political contributions, allowing even more dark money into our political system. As Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, explained, “Megadonors will now have the ability to funnel cash to religious organizations and then leverage those vast networks to push political messages and get around campaign finance and coordination limits to support candidates — while getting a tax break to do it.”
To understand the significance of this change, first some background: Back in 1954, Congress banned all tax-exempt organizations, which includes churches and other religious organizations, from directly or indirectly participating in politics. The Johnson Amendment specifically barred those organizations from endorsing candidates.
The recent IRS decree changes that long-standing prohibition. Diane Yentel, the president of The National Council of Nonprofits, said in a statement that, “The decree could open the floodgates for political operatives to funnel money to their preferred candidates while receiving generous tax breaks at the expense of taxpayers who do not share those views.”
It’s important to know who’s driving the Johnson Amendment repeal effort, because from one perspective, there’s nothing intuitive about the idea that religious institutions endorsing political candidates will supercharge corruption — and advantage the most conservative factions within the Republican Party (who also happen to be aligned with corporate and billionaire megadonors).
It’s true that many churches, including prominent Black churches, have hosted Democratic candidates like Joe Biden, and have also run get-out-the-vote efforts like Souls to the Polls. The Moral Monday movement, founded by Bishop William Barber II, is still going strong, calling for a national budget that helps poor and working people. Many other religious institutions with political heft, like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, promote social views that don’t track neatly onto American partisan divides. The reality, however, is that those are not the religious groups that are pushing to repeal the Johnson Amendment.
Right-wing evangelical organizations have protested and sought to eliminate the Johnson Amendment for many years. As early as 2008, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — an ultra-conservative legal organization that has worked to stop gay marriage, legal abortion, and DEI initiatives — organized Pulpit Freedom Sunday, a campaign to encourage pastors to explicitly defy the federal regulation and preach “about the moral qualifications of candidates seeking political office.” ADF’s Senior Counsel Erik Stanley described the group’s opposition: “Pastors have a right to speak about Biblical truths from the pulpit without fear of punishment. No one should be able to use the government to intimidate pastors into giving up their constitutional rights.”
While courting evangelical voters ahead of the 2016 election, Donald Trump promised to “destroy” the Johnson Amendment, and early in his first term, he signed an executive order saying that the IRS wouldn’t enforce it.
Last September, represented by ADF, the National Religious Broadcasters (an international evangelical Christian association), Intercessors for America (a conservative Christian advocacy group), and two Texas churches filed a lawsuit claiming that the Johnson Amendment restricts their free speech rights and is discriminatory.
If the argument that a major campaign finance rule violates First Amendment rights sounds familiar, that’s because it is: When suing the Federal Election Commission in the seminal Citizens United case, James Bopp — a longtime conservative attorney who The New York Times once called “perhaps the most prolific anti-abortion litigator of his generation” — argued for the plaintiffs that limits on corporate political spending were First Amendment violations. We know how that has played out. During the 2024 campaign cycle, dark-money spending on federal elections reached almost $2 billion.
We’ve also already heard ADF use claims about freedom of expression and anti-Christian discrimination to chip away at federal guardrails. The legal group has made similar arguments in numerous cases, many of which are focused on eliminating protections for LGBTQ+ people, including in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission — when ADF represented the Colorado baker who refused service to a gay couple trying to order a wedding cake. ADF argued that cake baking is a form of artistic expression and therefore the baker couldn’t be required to comply with anti-discrimination rules that didn’t align with his Christian beliefs. The Supreme Court sided with ADF and the baker. According to ADF, the group also played a role in helping overturn Roe. They have worked on many other cases that haven’t made national news.
Conservative groups like ADF have pursued the strategy of slowly chipping away at everything from abortion to voting rights, so it’s reasonable to assume that ADF probably isn’t going to rest with the IRS decree. If the pattern holds, the group and its allies will push more legal claims until they’ve succeeded in eliminating the bright line between charitable and political donations. That would mean a truly cataclysmic change for the campaign finance system and political spending.
“I think it’ll have as big, or a bigger impact than Citizens United,” Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney, told The Guardian last year. “I don’t think people are fully prepared for a country in which churches can accept tax deductible donations in the billions of dollars and then turn around and use that money for partisan politics.”
Abolishing the Johnson Amendment would indeed further corrupt our government which clearly needs no additional help in its current state of corruption. Appalling...
We can not allow that to happen. Thats what had to happen!