When Donald Trump introduced Mike Pence as his Vice Presidential nominee to-be, the speech was noted by the press in general as incoherent, narcissistic, and confused. In other words, as nothing special.
However, I kept hearing that it was an extra special layer of crazy sauce.
When James Fallows wrote,
I think this event rivals and even surpasses his “I hate mosquitos!” speech, described here, in raising concerns about Trump’s basic fitness to govern, at the temperamental and emotional level.
I thought I should check it out. Most of the coverage of the speech has been about how Trump couldn’t keep a single thought together, how he kept playing “Psych!” with the news media by pretending to introduce Pence, only to go back to rambling about some glory of Trumpian genius or demon of Trumpian nightmare or flight of e-mail. All of that is accurate.
However, while I read other things, I put on the speech, and I heard Donald Trump praising LBJ. “Huh?” I thought. Why was he praising the second most liberal president of the 20th century? Well, that was a set up.
1. Here is the whole speech on C-Span. Experience it in IMAX.
2. The bit we’re concerned about today and here is at 13:36 ff.
the Johnson amendment, where he took away from the evangelicals...
Ok. . . he took away from the evangelicals what, Donald?
3. 14:19:
And I said -- and I said for the evangelicals, that we're going to do something that nobody's even tried to do. You have the Johnson amendment passed by Lyndon Johnson and his group. And he was a powerful president. He knew how by Lyndon Johnson and his group. And he was a powerful president. He knew how to get things done.
And we call it the Johnson amendment, where you are just absolutely shunned if you're evangelical, if you want to talk religion, you lose your tax-exempt status. We put into the platform, we're going to get rid of that horrible Johnson amendment. And we're going to let evangelicals, we're going to let Christians and Jews and people of religion talk without being afraid to talk.
And they said, it started because of Lyndon Johnson. And he actually had a problem in Texas with a certain religious leader. And he did this, and he got it done. And we're going to undo it, so that religious leaders in this country, and those unbelievable people, and not because they backed me in such large numbers, but so that religion can again have a voice, because religion's voice has been taken away. And we're going to change that. OK? All right.
Ummm, no, not alright.
Did you guys catch all of that? The Johnson amendment is to the tax code. It is the amendment that simply says that any religious institution that tells people how to vote loses its tax exemption. That’s all.
No one goes to jail. No one is pressed between two doors until they die. No one has a cord wrapped around his head and has it twisted until death. You just lose your tax exemption.
The Donald is a little confused about the subject, though. Go to 15:56:
And I looked out the window. I was in Trump Tower, and I pointed to people walking down the street. I said, well, they have the right to speak, but you don't. That means they're more powerful than you are. We have to do something about it. How did it start? How did it start?
That’s right: religious people do not have first amendment rights, in the narrative scramble Trump offered America. According to him, religious people are being persecuted because of the Johnson amendment.
Donald J. Trump has made the abolition of the Johnson amendment part of the GOP platform this year. It’s a core principle that he claims he personally inserted. Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but what’s going on here is something pretty scary.
Who, exactly, has made this a priority? Well, our good theocratic friends at the ADF have. Here is one of their bloggers on the subject. So, who is this Alliance Defense Fund? Well, it has tobacco money, just like Mr. Pence. The ADF is also the legal team behind the anti-trans bathroom bills. It was started, after all, to be a “family values” answer to the ACLU.
If you go over to the “evangelical” web, you’ll see a horde of triumphalist blog posts about a “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” that the ‘movement’ put together specifically to fight the Johnson amendment. This was, of course, simply coincidentally in the election year of 2012. The evangelical web claims over 1,500 pastors took part. Articles after the event put the number below 1,000. When they were denied their martyrdom by the Infidel Obama administration, I’m sure they were more disheartened than emboldened.
However, Trump is shifting the Overton window. Before now, this was an issue for some groups.
I am a Christian, a mainline protestant, and I’m very serious about it. I’m even religiously conservative. (I know: it’s supposed to be impossible, but here I am.) I go to church for what is holy, and Luther said that the priesthood of all believers means that I, with the scripture and the Holy Spirit, do not need my pastor to tell me how to vote. When we gather for lunch after church, we’ll talk politics, or not, but we won’t have our priest or pastor telling us why we have to vote for a candidate.
We need to remember the dangers of Father Coughlin, who nearly led the US to pogroms. We need to remember Amy Semple McPherson, who never strayed far into politics but had the capacity to move a city or more. If history won’t do, we can look around the world at Modi in India, who supported groups that said that India was the home of Hindus only and burned mosques, or we can look at any one of a dozen Islamacist leaders who can propel believers into conflating national goals with religious ones.
I’ll conclude with Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by and approved by many of the framers of the U.S. Constitution:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen (Muslims); and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan (Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
We have a profound respect for religion in the United States. That is why we must protect it from politics, and from becoming political.