Mandel wants churches freed to endorse, raise funds
In announcing his “faith outreach team” on Tuesday, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel took up a fight already declared by President Donald Trump.
Mandel, who is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, said the faith team’s top goal would be to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law prohibiting churches and other nonprofit organizations from endorsing political candidates or raising money for them.
Mandel and other opponents of the law say it unfairly limits religious groups’ political speech, and at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said he would “totally destroy” it.
But supporters say it keeps partisan politics from totally infecting churches and other nonprofit organizations.
“It would be a whole new level of dark money,” said Robert Maguire, a political-nonprofit investigator for the campaignfinance website OpenSecrets. org. Maguire was referring to untraceable political money spent by nonprofits that are supposed to be devoting most of their energies to “social welfare” efforts but often are largely engaged in partisan politics.
Mandel has benefited from at least $300,000 in dark money this year.
The Johnson Amendment applies to churches and nonprofits covered by another section of the Internal Revenue Code — 501(c)(3). The amendment’s restrictions are wrong because “the IRS is constitutionally prohibited from policing or censoring speech based on religious conviction or beliefs, and therefore we urge the repeal of the Johnson Amendment,” the 2016 Republican Party Platform said.
In a statement Tuesday, Mandel echoed that sentiment.
“This piece of overreaching federal legislation, passed in 1954, regulates the free speech of religious organizations, churches and pastors,” he said.
A member of Mandel’s faith outreach team, Fremont Baptist Temple Pastor Gary Click, agreed that the Johnson Amendment violates the Constitution.
“What right does the government have to regulate churches’ speech?” he said.
Churches and nonprofits have a right to speech, but they don’t have an automatic right to a tax exemption, said Maggie Garrett, legislative director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonpartisan organization that says separation is essential to religious freedom.
Garrett said the Johnson Amendment’s restrictions are fairly narrow. Clerics can discuss social issues from the pulpit, and they can discusses electoral politics in their personal capacity; they are barred from making endorsements from the pulpit or using church resources to raise campaign funds, she said.
If they were allowed to, one might see Trump supporters attending one church and Hillary Clinton supporters another, Garrett said. Government grants might depend on which candidates a nonprofit supported in an election, she added.
“I don’t think anyone wants their charities and houses of worship to be torn apart by political campaigns,” Garrett said.
More than 4,000 religious leaders signed on to a letter this month asking Congress to keep the Johnson Amendment in place, Garrett said. More than 5,500 nonprofits — including 106 in Ohio — have signed a similar letter, she said.
OpenSecrets.org’s Maguire said that if churches are allowed to engage in electoral politics, their activities would be even more opaque than if most other nonprofits were allowed to. Unlike most charities, churches don’t have to disclose who their contributors are.
“It’s not just a matter of disclosing donors,” Maguire said. “Churches don’t have to file much information with the public anywhere.”
That “opens the door for churches to be glorified super PACs,” Maguire said, referring to political-action committees that can raise unlimited funds from corporations, unions and other organizations in support of or opposition to political candidates.
Brown, Mandel’s opponent, opposes scrapping the Johnson Amendment.
“I don’t want to politicize Sunday mornings, and I don’t want to see churches generally politicized,” Brown’s office quoted him as saying in February.