Churches Can Now Endorse Political Candidates - It's a Dark Money Nightmare
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Brad sits down with David Corn, Washington Bureau Chief at Mother Jones, to unpack the IRS’s quiet but monumental decision to gut the Johnson Amendment—effectively giving churches and religious organizations the green light to endorse political candidates for the first time in nearly 70 years.
They explore how this shift could turn churches into political machines fueled by dark money, spark “pay to play” dynamics among pastors, and deepen polarization within congregations. From mega-churches pushing campaign ads to local races influenced by pulpit power, the episode dives into the far-reaching consequences for democracy, transparency, and the already fragile wall between church and state.
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We all know what happens when someone runs for office.
They say, hey, I've been endorsed by this union.
I've been endorsed by this other candidate.
I'm running for county supervisor and I've been endorsed by the state senator in this district or in this place.
We are now going to have candidates who are going to say, I'm endorsed by these pastors in town or in my state or in my district.
And that's different.
The pay-to-play issue really does scare me because it's basically saying we can put religious leaders on the payroll and we can find ways for them to become paid third-party actors who wield their influence by way of a financial game.
A few weeks ago, the IRS submitted a court filing in a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an Association of Christian Broadcasters that declared churches and other religious entities can now endorse political candidates.
We've talked about this on the show.
I know that you've read op-eds and think pieces about it, but there's a need to go deeper about this because it could really open the floodgates for a new landscape when it comes to the entanglement of religion and politics.
In order to figure this out, I spoke to David Korn, the Washington Bureau chief of Mother Jones.
We get into all the hypothetical situations of ways that churches and pastors may now become funnels for dark money, the ways that churches are going to be recruited by political candidates, and what this means for the separation of church and state.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
As I just said, it's great to welcome a new guest, and that is David Korn, Senior Bureau Chief in Washington, D.C. from Mother Jones.
So David, thanks so much for joining me.
Great to be with Sweet American White.
It's when I got into journalism years ago.
I never anticipated Mo White.
There it is.
We don't think Jesus was straight white or American, but we try to figure out why so many people do.
And nonetheless, we're here to talk about something we've talked about on our show a couple of times already, but I think your piece recently at Mother Jones set the stage for thinking through some scenarios that are really startling, I think, and in some ways terrifying.
We're talking about the Johnson Amendment and the IRS last month giving the go-ahead for churches and other houses of worship to endorse candidates, basically overturning a policy that had been in place for about 70 years.
And the question today for us is, does this matter?
And I've been asked that question for a couple.
I've been asked that question on several occasions since this happened.
And I want to ask you that too.
But before we go there, give us a little primer.
Remind us, what was the Johnson Amendment?
Why was it instituted in the first place?
The Johnson Amendment was patched to legislation by a guy named Lyndon Johnson.
This is when he was a senator a few years before he became vice president and then president.
At the time, it applied to nonprofits, basically nonprofits who are tax-exempt.
And as a tax-exempt organization, they were considered to be outside of politics.
If it starts to make a donation to you, we don't want it to be a backdoor contribution to politics.
And the characteristic category of nonprofit include churches and synagogues, which themselves are organized as tax-exempt nonprofit organizations.
So this was about, this wrapped everybody into this.
It wasn't just about churches and mosques and synagogues.
It was about all nonprofits, any organization that doesn't pay taxes.
Well, we're going to subsidize you, which is what we're doing by saying you're not paying taxes.
Then we don't want you to be directly involved in politics otherwise, because political contributions are not supposed to be tax-deductible.
You give money to Comboy Harris and Donald Trump.
You don't deduct that from your taxes.
So my guess is that the thinking was they didn't want to create this other conduit for tax-deductible political contributions if you gave money to the ACLU or to a church and they explicitly used it for electioneering.
So that was put forward and implemented into law in 1954, I believe, or the mid-50s.
And it's that way, as you noted, for just about 70 years.
It does make sense that if you have tax exempt status and your organization does not have to pay taxes, but people can give you money as a donation and deduct that from their taxes.
If that money is then turned around and given to a political candidate, it seems as if you found a way around the idea of political donations not being tax deductible and a basically third party.
It also speaks to this danger, and I want to get into some of these, of what can happen when political influence and religious authority mix explicitly.
But before we go over some scenarios about what could happen here in the next months and years with the Johnson Amendment no longer in place, I want to ask a question which I think is something we have to get out of the way.
Does this matter?
I mean, people have been doing this, right?
Who cares?
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship that wanted to be involved in politics in some manner, shape, or form have been.
We all know that.
The Christian coalition hands out voter guides that basically say the guy they like is close to Jesus and the other person is the devil.
It's almost always Republicans.
They give these out in churches.
The churches give them to their congregants.
And then they can see that County Today gets the A-plus rating from the Christian Coalition and County B, the liberal feminist Nazi Democrat, gets an F. And you don't have to say that we're endorsing one candidate or the other.
It is a tacit endorsement.
And we've seen black churches be very active in bringing into the church candidates who they prefer and giving them a chance to speak to the flock, right?
And that's a way of saying we approve we think this person's okay.
So there have been actions like that.
And churches have been mobilized for voter referendum.
So there's been a lot of politicking going on in churches and synagogues and mosques to a lesser degree for a long time now.
So this takes down the final barrier.
Up to now, you could not say from the pulpit or in your church newsletter that I want you to vote for Jim Jordan.
I want you to vote for Donald Trump.
You could say, we do an interview with Jim Jordan.
We can say, here is a voter guide, compares Trump to Kamala Harris on biblical issues, but you couldn't say that.
And yes, it's not a tremendous revolution to say now you can, but I do believe it will lead to activities.
We probably can only foresee some of them at this stage that will change the nature of politics and religion.
If you look at the reasoning that Trump's IRS gave for making this exception, and again, this exception only applies to religious entities.
Other nonprofits, as we discussed earlier, still cannot endorse candidates explicitly.
This is only for churches and other religious entities.
And the reasoning given was when a church tells you who to vote for, it's kind of like, this is their words, a family discussion.
So it's like you telling your aunt, I think you should vote for this person.
And it seems like the way they describe it, it's just going to stay amongst the churchgoers or the people who come to the synagogue that day or the people who come to the mosque.
You just have this kind of private conversation and say, we really think this candidate is better for our community.
That's not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is that these endorsements will likely become very big deals.
You're going to have ministers, say, who run super churches, mega churches with 5,000 people.
They have their live stream TV show that goes out to tens of thousands, if not more.
They are going to make these announcements, make these endorsements, and they're going to be turned into commercials on TV, campaign literature, social media posts, and they will become a big part of campaigns for candidates who want to use them this way.
They'll be part of independent expenditure campaigns.
This minister says that Kamala Harris is the devil, and Donald Trump is the Jesus to save us, and that's why you should vote for him.
And so they're going to become very explicit and used explicitly in that way.
And that's going to create competition amongst candidates to bring on these endorsements.
And it could even lead to some forms of pay to play.
If you want me to endorse you, sir, you know, we need a new rec center at the church.
I mean, there would be a lot.
I think a lot of trade-offs and bargaining from above board, some below board, to get these leading figures among different religions into politics.
So the answer is really yes and no.
There's always been a lot of politicking.
People can still do that.
But now it's going to go, well, to bring in a spinal tap reference, it's going to go up.
It's going to go up to 11.
Spinal tap reference is always welcome on this show.
In your piece, you quote Lloyd Hitoshi Meyer, who's a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, saying, this tells churches that you can support candidates.
Okay, we've been over that.
But he also says, if you're a political candidate, now it's time to recruit some churches.
And I think that's exactly what you're saying here is we all know what happens when someone runs for office.
They say, hey, I've been endorsed by this union.
I've been endorsed by this other candidate.
I'm running for county supervisor and I've been endorsed by the state senator in this district or in this place.
We are now going to have candidates who are going to say, I'm endorsed by these pastors in town or in my state or in my district.
And that's different.
So I think that's one.
As I was thinking about your piece, that's one thing that stood out.
I think another thing that sticks out here is that the pay-to-play issue really does scare me because it's basically saying we can put religious leaders on the payroll and we can find ways for them to become paid third-party actors who wield their influence by way of a financial game.
And for all we all know that mega church pastors and others have been have been gaining financially for a long time, it's not like they haven't figured out how to do that.
But this is something different.
I mean, this is a new dimension to that.
And the thing, too, that I don't have the answer to this, and perhaps it's knowable, is if a church, can a church now spend money to promote its endorsement of a candidate?
I mean, can you see churches taking out campaign ads?
And if this doesn't quite allow that, it certainly takes us a step in that direction.
And getting back to an early point that you raised, if churches are allowed to do that, then donations, which are tax deductible, can go to the churches.
So if churches become substitutes for other political action committees and for campaigns themselves, you can see this funneling of money into churches where people will now get a tax deduction when they wouldn't otherwise.
And this will be used to subsidize political campaigning.
So I'm not sure that that's permissible under these new IRS laws, but it brings us closer to that because after all, I can see, and churches have long been fighting in the courts for these, for these powers.
So this is a big victory.
And it came out of a challenge that two churches and the National Association of Religious Broadcasters brought.
So they've been trying to get this power.
So now I'm just thinking from a constitutional point of view, If you say it's okay for a church to endorse a candidate, can you say it's not okay for a church to spend money promoting that endorsement, its own endorsement?
And if you can, if they can do that, then that opens the floodgates for money coming in.
It will be tax deductible.
And churches don't have to report their contributors.
I'm just going to go as we talk.
If I give money or you give money to a political action committee or to a campaign and it's more than $250, it gets recorded.
People can say, oh, look who's giving money.
Elon Musk is giving $130 million.
We can see that on the campaign finance reports.
But you give money to a church.
A church doesn't have to say who its funders are in a synagogue or mosque.
I'm not going to pick on Christians here.
You know, it doesn't have to say with a monies conference.
So if you want to give like really dark money, not have it be known, you give a million, $10 million, $130 million to a small church.
And then they take out all these ads.
I mean, this could really cause havoc.
Two things strike me.
One is there's an analogy here to the rules that were initially set up for paying NCAA athletes.
And the reason I bring that up is because, and the rules are changing now, right, a little bit.
But, you know, when that was initially set up, the NIL, if I was a super fan of the University of Nebraska football, we could have a booster club such that the booster club would find name and image and likeness sponsorship deals for the linebacker who was coming to play, but it wasn't coming from the University of Nebraska's bank account.
It was, hey, we recruited you to play here, but our buds over here, the local car dealership owner and the financier who graduated 20 years ago, they're going to be making sure you get seven figures every year.
You play football for us.
Which you're describing is, all right, we're a mega church with reach that goes far and wide in terms of a mailing list, in terms of advertisements, in terms of our live stream reaching 50 or 100,000 people every week or every month.
We have churches that reach millions of folks in this country.
So what if we have a situation where you get 10 or 15 donors who are giving to that one church, that that church is then running ads, essentially, that go wide and far for a political candidate.
Those deductions, I'm sorry, those donations are now tax deductible.
The candidate is getting all of this press and this marketing.
And it's really a skirt around the IRS in ways that Lyndon Johnson probably will roll over in his grave if it happens.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, let's say you're a mega church and you have a live stream that goes out to 10,000 people every day, every Sunday, every service.
Now, if you have money for advertising, you can buy more service.
You get yourself, you can pay to be in other live streams.
So if a candidate, if that church is talking about a particular candidate favorably or his opponent or her opponent negatively, once you stop someone who's given money already to the candidate, say, okay, you know what?
You can give $50,000 to this church and expand their reach and they will do what is essentially an ad for us.
And this is where it also gets back into pay to play.
If a campaign comes to a minister and says, I'd like you to endorse our candidate and talk about it from the pulpit, that person can say, I see you're raising a lot of money.
Perhaps one of your donors would like to support us as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
And all that money, as you've noted, will be tax deductible and non-transparent.
Yes.
It's dark money.
That's dark money.
And I want to get to a couple of other dimensions of this whole thing.
But the last part I want to think about here is just we have a situation where folks potentially could pay to play, but we're also going to have, as we mentioned earlier, these endorsements.
And I just think that people need to get ready for the checklist of mega church pastors and others who are going to be on a list of, did you hear that so-and-so just endorsed?
So I'm thinking like, here's Robert Jeffers.
Here's Rob McCoy.
Here's Dutch Sheets and on down the line.
And one of the things this reminded me of, and as I was reading your piece over again today, I was thinking about, to me, there's a precedent here.
And you might think I'm crazy when I first say this with COVID.
And COVID was the first candidate that was either endorsed or not endorsed by a pastor.
So hear me out.
It's 2020.
It's 2021.
We have all the COVID lockdown and restrictions.
And the pastor has to make a decision.
Am I going to follow what I'm supposed to do?
Hey, we're going to be only online.
We're not meeting in person.
And then later on, we can meet in person, but you got to wear a mask and you got to be six feet apart and blah, blah, blah.
Or am I going to come out like a lot of churches did and say, screw you, government, screw you, Governor Newsom, screw you, Joe Biden, whoever, and come and arrest me over my dead body.
Those churches grew.
Those churches did great.
The COVID regulation followers often lost people.
I bring that up because what if your church is not endorsing candidates?
What if your church is not fighting the holy war?
What if your church is not fighting the good fight?
What if you go to church and they're not doing everything they can to get the local PTA or school board person or state assembly person winning because they're the person who's fighting a holy war for Jesus?
I think you're not only going to see pastors recruited and endorsements being a big deal.
I think you're going to see migrations happening as to which churches are sufficiently involved in the political holy war.
How does that sound to you?
That's an interesting point because you could see some ministers, pastors, actually making that a selling point and even criticizing churches that don't engage in this.
Now, some people may not want to be involved in this.
Some people may just, even if their own pastor does it, may tune out.
But we've seen since Jerry Fallo came to power in terms of organizing your religious right in the mid-1970s, late 1970s, that many religious figures, particularly on the conservative side, want political clout, which is why in the story I wrote from other Jones, I said this applies to all churches.
It's particularly a boost for Christian nationals because they're the ones who say that only fundamental Christians, people hold those tenets dear and true, should be in elected office.
Some of them are dominionists who believe that far-right Christians need to have dominion over culture, business, education, and government.
And so for anyone who believes that this ruling empowers them is encouraging to them.
And again, it's not just because someone can say from the pulpit, I endorse their candidate so-and-so.
It's because of all these things that you're talking about.
How they'll be able to leverage these endorsements, how this will increase their influence within American politics.
And it will work both nationally and locally.
You can have a pastor in Ohio preach about a Senate race in New York State, California.
And it could also be about raising money for candidates, right?
I endorse this candidate.
And the way I'm supporting this candidate is by sending $3,500 to their campaign or to pack supporting them.
And which I encourage you to do the same.
So you can have not just people in their own state trying to get local mega church pastors, but people from other states coming in to do this.
And the point that you just referred to is important as well.
Local elections, you know, you're talking about a school board, city council, county executive, state representative, state senator.
These races often have very low turnout.
Exactly.
Very low turnout, which means it doesn't take a lot of effort to bring a toll of voters in to one side or the other and completely flip the switch and have a run across them sort of across the table.
This actually happened in San Diego in the 80s, I think maybe 80s, when the Christian coalition was first coming together.
They got behind all these candidates for local elections in the San Diego area.
They didn't tell anyone this.
They didn't do it publicly.
They mobilized.
They got their mailing list of churches and church memberships.
The churches did not endorse candidates directly because they couldn't, but they turned out people.
And all of a sudden, all these far-right candidates who had never been involved in politics and whose name was largely unknown to the electorate in these areas won these local elections.
So a mega church pastor intervening in a local city council race or a school board election can have a tremendous supersized impact on the outcome.
I'm thinking of two things here.
One is I interviewed some local education activists a couple of months ago who are at the school boards in Southern California in San Diego, Tim LaHaye country, also Orange County.
And what they talked about there is, look, when you show up to these school board meetings, you're almost always outnumbered.
And it's not because your position is unpopular with the school community, with the parents at your school.
It's because the local megachurch often organizes an army of people to come out to get the speaker slots and to take over the meeting.
And you're up against this organized crew coming from the church up the road that is going to make sure that they have their army ready to speak and raise ruckus at the school board meeting.
I'm thinking of someone additionally from my hometown in Southern California, who I went to high school with and who is now on the school board where we grew up is a MAGA person.
And he attends a local mega church with about 5,000 people.
So now I'm picturing that church endorsing him for school board.
That's going to be huge for him in the town where I grew up.
I'm also envisioning that church sending out mailers in town that are like, hey, come to the Labor Day service or the Mother's Day service or whatever it is.
And on the back is his picture saying, and don't forget to vote for Todd for school board in a couple of weeks.
Like it's those scenarios on the local level that I think we've really got to dig into.
Yes, the presidential stuff, the senator stuff.
You will pay for Todd.
I mean, we got great use of Todd's campaign dollars to give it to the church to pay for those mailers.
You know, more important than probably paying for his own mailers.
A mailer like that probably would have more impact than just a mailer for his campaign.
Yes.
So now, you know, Todd can say, here's $5,000 to cover the cost of the mailer.
And they may say, thank you very much, but how about, can you make it 10?
Of course.
So let's clear something else up, too.
And I think you make this clear in the piece.
I think you alluded to it a minute ago, but all right.
So I'm playing devil's advocate.
I'm the MAGA person who's like, who cares?
If you have a liberal church, a mainline church, if you have a reformed Jewish synagogue, if you have a place full of progressives, a house of worship full of progressives, whether it's Muslims, Unitarians, they can do this too.
Who cares?
You make the point in the piece, and I think you've alluded to it already.
Yes, but those communities do not have a worldview that says it's their mission to occupy the government and root out anyone who disagrees with their religious imposition, whereas the Christian nationalists does.
And therefore, while everyone might be able to do this, the motivation for this kind of politicking is going to be different on either side.
Does that seem fair to you?
Yeah, I think you put it.
I mean, this is an equal opportunity for everyone.
And it may come to pass that progressives and people who are left of center or centrists might have to be drawn into this, even if they don't want to be, if they see it happening from the conservative side.
Because we have rising Christian nationalism, and they are very explicit in saying they believe that people of their faith should run the government and that people who don't adhere to their values and beliefs are not qualified to hold office.
And so this gives them, for all the reasons we've enumerated, more opportunity now to put that into practice and to be even more explicitly political and organized in an outright political fashion to put their fellow believers into these positions of power.
And as I said earlier, traditionally, some black churches, New York City and South and other places, have been very politically minded.
So they presumably will find a way to make use of these new liberties as well.
But as people do, as churches and religious institutions do this, it will definitely put pressure on those who would rather not.
Because if you don't play, you're going to be at a disadvantage.
So this is going to put tremendous pressure on a societal level across denominations to become involved in politics.
This is really, I think you and I have done a pretty good job of gazing into the crystal ball, but this is definitely one of those type of things where you can't see all the consequences that are going to occur here.
There are things that even our powers of imagination cannot fully fathom yet.
But I do think this will, there'll be, politics is often about gravity.
And this will create a gravitational pull.
Some people will dive into this wholeheartedly, but it will just put a lot of pressure on churches.
And I think in some ways, given how polarized our society has become, that might be bad for churches overall, but that if churches become more politicized, I mean, if some are already highly politicized, on both the right and the left,
churches have traditionally been one of the places in our society where people of various political views and of different parties can gather together in a common purpose that's aside from politics.
Now, I know I'm being a little Pollyannish here, and that has shifted a lot over the last 20, 30, 40 years as our society is self-segregated along political lines, and you're less likely to have that sort of multi-denominational spirit politically within churches as you used to have.
But it's still there in a lot of places.
And a move like this will make that decline even more.
I'm thinking of a church where I spoke last year in Omaha, Nebraska.
And Omaha just elected a black Democrat mayor.
It was a big surprise.
But when I spoke at that church, what I was struck by was a United Methodist Church.
And there were definitely folks who you could describe as politically progressive.
And I don't mean liberal or Democrat in the Hillary Clinton vein.
I'm talking about progressives, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mamdani type of progressives in that church.
There were others who I would call left of center, and they were there.
But when I came to speak, there were also some folks who had gave a mouthful to the pastor because they said, hey, we've listened to this guy's podcast and read his book, and he's way too liberal for us.
And the pastor told me about this, and the lesson was that there was people at this church at Omaha, which is this place that is a blue dot, bluish dot in a very red state, where you had Republicans, Democrats, people who probably think the Democratic Party's too corporate.
And they were all still in that church.
I do not envision that church wanting to endorse candidates because it will completely splinter that fragile coalition they have.
They don't want to do that.
But will they?
Yet there will be members of the church who advocate for it and members of the church who advocate against it.
So now this will become a point of contention.
And I hope churches and synagogues that end up in that position are able to work things out well and not have this Trump their purpose, right?
They exist for other reasons.
But I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and I went to a synagogue that was one of the largest in the country outside of New York City and White Plains, New York.
And it had a very, very liberal rabbi.
His name was Maurice Davis.
And he marched the rights.
He marched against Vietnam.
That was two years before I came under his wing.
But still when I was in the 70s, and he would give very, I wasn't religious then, I'm not religious now, but I liked his sermons because they were very much on current affairs, current events, and very much at the here and now.
And very, it had a very strong political component and indeed a progressive component.
Although he found a way to talk about things without being explicitly political, but it's clear what message he was sending.
And there was a constant debate within the synagogue, with the parents, the older folks, about whether he was going too far, being too political or not.
And he would address these concerns and people would end up on different positions.
But it never, you know, to my time there in my high school years, it never blew up.
It was, there was a conflict.
There was dissension, but it was discussed.
And again, it was a side thing.
The more you give houses of worship the opportunity to get involved in politics, the more our politics are divisive and tribalized.
I mean, Trump is out there every day demonizing Democrats.
And this is where you probably didn't think we'd get to this, but this is where the Jeffrey Epstein scandal fits into Auburn.
It's about this idea that was first with Pete Segate and QAnon that Democrats are not just wrong.
Yep.
They're satanic.
They're anti-Christian.
They're cannibalistic.
They're pedophiles.
And they have these conspiracies that allow them to rule the world.
They're busy doing that, but they still have time to sex traffic children globally.
And so Democrats just aren't misguided in terms of policy.
They are part of the evil satanic force.
So this is what's happening within our political realm.
And I still think a lot of people don't fully understand that.
And that's why Jeffrey Epstein was so important to the MAGA right, because he was what they thought was an example of this conspiracy theory that comes out of QAnon that about a quarter to a 40% of Republicans tell posters they agree with.
And so here is the chance for Trump and Caspertelle and Dan Vangino and Pam Bondi to finally prove that this anti-Christian, satanic, cannibalistic pedophilic conspiracy exists.
And that's why people are mad that they have found out he's not going to get evidence of their fevered fantasy here.
But so this is with politics becoming dominated by such conspiracy theories, which are religious in nature, and which do lead to the demonization and basically equating political opponents on the left and Democrats with Satan and the Antichrist.
It's more that churches, synagogues, and mosques get drawn into it.
The more they're going to find themselves crashing on the shoals of these politics of hate and vilification.
And that's going to make it, for some churches it will be easy, but a lot of churches, it's going to make it a problem.
It's going to have a hard time navigating this.
I mean, you already got me thinking about some things that I didn't consider when I was writing this article.
And my view of this is even darker now than it was when we started talking.
I have that effect on people, so you're welcome.
Let's finish with this.
And you got to Epstein, which you said, hey, maybe we didn't expect to go there today.
But let me go somewhere else that is on my mind.
I don't think it's really part of the mainstream coverage of it.
of anything anymore right now but that's the the political assassination of representative hortman in in minnesota if you want to listen to the rest of this episode you'll have to subscribe you can find all the info in the show notes or go to axis mundie a x i s mundie mu n d i dot us axismundie.us it costs 5.99 a month less than that latte you bought on the way to work today and guess what if you subscribe to bonus content from our show not only do you
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