During the Feb. 2, 2017, National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump promised to “destroy” the so-called Johnson Amendment. This promise highlights past governmental violation of religion’s fundamental rights — a violation that needs to be corrected. On the other hand, religion should be careful about its presidential petitions. President Trump’s promise may not be a blessing to religion nor the nation.
Under the pretense of separating church from state, the Johnson Amendment prohibits religion from being involved in partisan politics, including endorsing and campaigning for political candidates. A violation of that prohibition threatens the tax-exempt status of religion and other 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. The Johnson Amendment presupposed the tax-exempt status of religion is a privilege granted by government and not a fundamental right naturally held by religion.
Some argue the government never had authority to tax religion in the first order — a tax that is a violation of the oft misapplied principle of the separation of church and state — a principle usually wrongfully used to penalize religion from exercising its natural rights, and less often invoked to contain governmental infringement of those rights. In other words, it cannot be a privilege to grant something that already exists as a fundamental right.
What is worse is to presume to grant something that already exists as a fundamental right and then threaten to remove it as a punishment for not behaving in the way the government demands. In effect, this is exactly what the Johnson Amendment presumes to do, and seemingly is what President Trump is promising to correct on behalf of religion. He should be applauded for correcting the wrong embodied in the Johnson Amendment.
On the other hand, President Trump may not be doing religion a favor, and for that matter the nation. Probably the worse thing that could happen to religion is its further politicization. Politicizing religion, particularly with political partisanship, inevitably divides it from within and from without to its own detriment and the nation’s well-being.
The Founders learned from the long history of the world that all other attempts to create and maintain a democracy failed miserably. They understood that establishing a democracy in whatever form to undergird government was a high-risk proposition. In their view, previous attempts at democracy failed in part because religion was controlled by government to prevent disruption. The Founders’ revolutionary idea advanced just the opposite approach. They believed that a religiously free people would strengthen democracy, not unsettle it.
The Founders, among other safeguards, memorialized the natural rights and freedoms belonging to religion through the First Amendment, with the hope and expectation that religion would grow and prosper to advantage the nation. They hoped that as religion spread, it would promulgate morality and other virtues, including peace and harmony, to help discipline the passions of the populace — passions that when unbridled proved to be damaging to democracy throughout history.
In this day of political and cultural disruption that increasingly deepens the divide of our nation, religion is not needed to add to partisan dissension and discord. What this nation needs is exactly what the Founders hoped for — free religion to temper the passions of the people and thereby sustain the well-being of a fragile democracy.
If President Trump is successful in his quest to “destroy” the Johnson Amendment and thereby return freedoms, religion should take care that it does not abuse those freedoms by politicizing its pulpits with partisanship. It should take care that it does not further divide this nation. Religion should take care to advance the morality and virtue expected by the Founders, who dreamed they would secure democracy in harmony and peace, against enemies both foreign and domestic. For the sake of the nation, let us pray their dream will be fulfilled.
Stuart C. Reid is a former U.S. Army chaplain and Utah state senator.