Churches
Go Nuts for Trump After Realizing What They’ll Get If He’s Elected
Though many evangelical Christians
can certainly find a number of reasons to dislike or withhold their support
from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, there is at least one good reason why they should consider
supporting him.
In fact, many evangelical Christians
have thrown their support behind Trump for the simple fact that he has called
for the repeal of a decades-old law that prohibits churches from openly
endorsing or opposing political candidates, according to The Washington
Times.
That law would be the 1950’s-era Johnson Amendment, named after then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, which
threatened to have the IRS pull the tax-exempt status of any church that took
an overtly public stand on a political candidate or issue.
“If I get elected president, one of
the early things, one of the absolute first things I’m going to do is work on
totally knocking out the Johnson Amendment,” Trump promised a gathering of
Christian leaders in Orlando, Florida, recently.
As one can imagine, the law proposed
and passed by liberals has been utilized by liberal administrations over the
years as a tool to keep more conservative-leaning churches quiet on political
matters while looking the other way when liberal churches routinely do what the
law expressly prohibits.
In fact, a recent Pew poll of
churchgoers found nearly 15 percent admitted hearing explicitly political messages
from the pulpit, either for or against a political candidate. That number was
quite a bit higher among mostly liberal, predominately black churches.
Virginia Bishop E.W. Jackson pointed out the clear hypocrisy and double standard in how
the law is applied forcefully toward more conservative churches and hardly at
all with liberal black churches.
“Are we kidding ourselves? Is the
IRS going to go after a black church for having endorsed President Obama?”
Jackson asked rhetorically.
“There needs to be a new climate set
for First Amendment rights and the exercise of those rights and that Donald
Trump is setting, in our view, the right climate, so it’s very encouraging,”
Jackson added.
Trump’s opposition to the Johnson
Amendment could help strengthen the support he has already been receiving from
evangelical voters, a notion pointed out by Ken Blackwell, senior fellow at the
Family Research
Council.
“He doesn’t try to come off as an
evangelical himself, but as he did in Orlando, he speaks to the public policy
issues, whether you’re talking about pro-life issues, religious liberty issues,
the Supreme Court or the Johnson Amendment, that are very important to
evangelicals,” Blackwell explained.
To be sure, Trump could still
struggle to convince some evangelicals to support his candidacy and vote for
him, a problem that 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney also had that could
very well have cost him the election as many refused to cast a vote for him.
“He can’t leave as many on the
sidelines, as Romney did,” Blackwell noted. “I think right now he is probably
on par with Mitt Romney. That’s not good enough.”
Trump most certainly needs the
support of evangelicals to defeat the Democrat Party, liberal media and Clinton
machine in November, and his strong opposition to the Johnson Amendment that
has effectively silenced the political speech of too many conservative churches
should help in that goal.
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Amendment and the freedom of political speech from churches.
What do you think of Trump's promise
to do away with the Johnson Amendment that has been used to silence overtly
political speech from some churches? Scroll down to comment below!
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