Speaker Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson (R-LA) has become speaker of the House. His inaugural speech mentioned religion and the Declaration.

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA): "Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: God is the one that raises up those in authority. All of us ... [Marxism and Communism] begin with the premise that there is no God." pic.twitter.com/VCh4kKHdQC

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) October 25, 2023

The republic, not a democracy thing and the separation of church and state

Mike Johnson in 2016: "What’s happened, Alex, over the last 60 or 70 years, is that our generation has been convinced that there is a separation of church and state. Most people think that that’s part of the Constitution, but it’s not.”

(It is: See The Establishment Clause). pic.twitter.com/yP0vsl7rC1

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) October 26, 2023

Not Enforcing the Johnson Amendment

John R. Vile at The First Amendment Encyclopedia:

.The Johnson Amendment is an addition, adopted in 1954, to the Internal Revenue Code, 501(c)(3). As a condition for maintaining exception from income taxes and other taxes, charitable organizations including churches and affiliated groups, were forbidden from participating or intervening in “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office” (Davidson 1998, 17).

The amendment is named after then Senator (later President) Lyndon B. Johnson, who introduced the amendment out of concern about the Facts Forum and the Committee for Constitutional Government. Both were tax-exempt organizations that had imitated the tactics of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R., WI) in campaigning against politicians like Johnson who were more liberal in their political orientations

Jeremy Schwartz and Jessica Priest at The Texas Tribune:

At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, is greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.

In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.

...

Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.

Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at the University of Indiana-Purdue, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”

Church and State

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

Michael Flynn: “I’m encouraged by pastors who are part of our effort .. and pastors who have stood up and fought back against this takeover by the govt. There’s no separation of church and state. The church and the state are one.” pic.twitter.com/pbMk6Zxs4r

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) October 29, 2022

Peter Wehner at The Atlantic:

In November, Flynn told a packed sanctuary at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God.” He has described this as “a moment in time where this is good versus evil.”

“Mike Flynn has emerged as a martyr and a mascot for the far-right contingent of the Christian-nationalist movement in the United States,” Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, a scholar of Christian nationalism, and himself a person of the Christian faith, told Frontline.

What is being done by many people on the American right in the name of Jesus is a desecration of the actual Jesus—the Jesus of the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, and the parable of the Good Samaritan; the Jesus who shattered social, cultural, and religious barriers and hung out with the “wrong” crowd; the Jesus who was drawn to the forsaken and the despised, the marginalized and the outcast; the Jesus who demonstrated profound mistrust of political power and who declined Satan’s offer of the kingdoms of the world. The Jesus who said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” and “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of the Lord.” The Jesus who won, even if haltingly and imperfectly, the affections of my heart many years ago.

It doesn’t seem to have dawned on too many Christian nationalists and MAGA “culture warriors” that the people with whom Jesus clashed most intensely, and who eventually crucified him, were those who wielded political and religious power.

Trump's Own Words Hinder His Travel Ban

Josh Gerstein reports at Politico:

A federal judge in Hawaii issued a worldwide restraining order against enforcement of key parts of President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban executive order just hours before the directive was set to kick in, backed up by a second federal judge in Maryland who put out his own ruling blocking parts of the order. 

U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson ruled Wednesday that the state of Hawaii and a local Muslim leader had “a strong likelihood of success on their claim” that Trump’s order intentionally targets Muslims and therefore violates the Constitution’s guarantee against establishment of religion.

From the order:

The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable. The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed. The Court declines to relegate its Establishment Clause analysis to a purely mathematical exercise. See Aziz, 2017 WL 580855, at *9 (rejecting the argument that “the Court cannot infer an anti-Muslim animus because [Executive Order No. 13,769] does not affect all, or even most, Muslims,” because “the Supreme Court has never reduced its Establishment Clause jurisprudence to a mathematical exercise. It is a discriminatory purpose that matters, no matter how inefficient the execution” (citation omitted)). Equally flawed is the notion that the Executive Order cannot be found to have targeted Islam because it applies to all individuals in the six referenced countries. It is undisputed, using the primary source upon which the Government itself relies, that these six countries have overwhelmingly Muslim populations that range from 90.7% to 99.8%. It would therefore be no paradigmatic leap to conclude that targeting these countries likewise targets Islam. Certainly, it would be inappropriate to conclude, as the  Government does, that it does not.

...
A review of the historical background here makes plain why the Government wishes to focus on the Executive Order’s text, rather than its context. The record before this Court is unique. It includes significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor. For example—

In March 2016, Mr. Trump said, during an interview, “I think Islam hates us.” Mr. Trump was asked, “Is there a war between the West and radical Islam, or between the West and Islam itself?” He replied: “It’s very hard to separate. Because you don’t know who’s who.”

SAC ¶ 41 (citing Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees: Exclusive Interview With Donald Trump (CNN television broadcast Mar. 9, 2016, 8:00 PM ET), transcript available at https://goo.gl/y7s2kQ)). In that same interview, Mr. Trump stated: “But there’s a tremendous hatred. And we have to be very vigilant. We have to be very careful. And we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States. . . [a]nd of people that are not Muslim.”

At The New York Times, Michael Shear explains that Trump is digging himself a deeper hole:

“Let me tell you something,” Mr. Trump told his enthusiastic supporters, echoing the simpler days of the campaign, when courts did not get in the way. “I think we ought to go back to the first one and go all the way. The danger is clear, the law is clear, the need for my executive order is clear.”

And yet, even now, the president may not fully appreciate the power — and the implications — of his words.

At the rally, Mr. Trump offered more verbal ammunition to support the critiques of the travel ban. The president called his latest effort to restrict entry merely “a watered-down version” of his first attempt, which was also blocked by the courts.

Those words could easily serve to undermine his own lawyers, who have argued strenuously that Version 2.0 of the travel ban is different enough that it should pass legal muster.

In the near future, the president may find an appeals court judge once again citing his words in support of a ruling that he doesn’t like.

National Day of Prayer: Constitutional Issues

A federal district judge has ruled that the statute creating the “National Day of Prayer” (36

U.S.C. section 119) violates the establishment clause of the United States Constitution.

It goes beyond mere “acknowledgment” of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context. In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience. “When the government associates one set of religious beliefs with the state and identifies nonadherents as outsiders, it encroaches upon the individual's decision about whether and how to worship.” McCreary County, 545 U.S. at 883 (O’Connor, J., concurring).

The ruling, however, does not take effect until the appeals process runs its course.

At the Los Angeles Times, Michael McGough disagrees:

Like Michael Newdow's challenge to "In God We Trust" on U.S. coins, the Freedom From Religion Foundation's lawsuit against the Day of Prayer might be justified on a purist 1st Amendment theory about the establishment of religion.

But there is a doctrine in the law known as "de minimis," from a Latin maxim that basically says that government officials shouldn't concern themselves with trivialities. The National Day of Prayer is a pretty good candidate for the "de minimis" rule.

Not throwing a constitutional fit about what is sometimes called "ceremonial deism" makes it easier to oppose serious breaches of the wall of separation, like official prayers in public schools. In the culture wars, as in real ones, sometimes you need to choose your battles.