Churches can now endorse and contribute to political candidates.
This is bad news. The Johnson Amendment no longer applies to churches.
The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code, since 1954, that prohibits all 501 non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. This amendment kept churches from supporting political candidates and keep their non-profit status. The President backed the Internal Revenue Service in a court filing which has cleared a way for churches to endorse political candidates.
This is wrong. No church should EVER endorse political candidates. The pulpit is not the place for politics. This is not the mission of the church. This ruling is going to effectively divide churches even further.
So with this ruling, you will now have Republican churches and Democrat churches. Personally, I will never be involved in church who supports a political candidate - even if they support my candidate.
The church stage should never be a platform for a political candidate of any party. This is not the place for it. Unfortunately our current President has stirred the waters of the evangelical community in pandering their support and has forever changed the church.
What’s next? Sermons about how you can’t be a Republican/Democrat and be a Christian? They have already been doing it but now what held most back has been loosed. This is certainly a slippery slope that the church is sliding into.
When Jesus came, people wanted a political leader but that wasn’t what He was sent to do. He came to establish an eternal kingdom. Political entities are not the savior of the world. The salvation for all mankind has been manifested in Jesus Christ. God knew that our world needed saving long before any national government was ever founded. He demonstrated to the world that redemption could not be accomplished through the power of man, economic strength, military might, or politics. Peace of mind, contentment, hope, and joy—and the salvation of mankind—are provided only through Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Some may see the changes to the Johnson Amendment for churches to be further evidence of religious freedom but is it really? We are dangerously close to churches being controlled by the government. It is crucial that we follow Christ and not a preacher’s choice of political candidates.
