The Johnson Amendment Is Officially Dead — And Churches Are Becoming Political Machines

[0:02] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. We correct a Toledo Blade editorial about a failed merger of two grocery chain behemoths. We get an update about a lawsuit filed by LifeWise Academy against the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. And finally, the Christian nationalist fever dream has come true. True, the IRS officially won’t be enforcing the Johnson Amendment. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:44] Music.

[0:59] If you follow liberal or progressive political content on the Internet, one of the commentators that I’ve been listening to and watching for quite some time is Robert Reich. He is the former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton back in the 90s. He’s a lawyer.

[1:27] Some people say an economist, but that’s not his training. He’s a lawyer and a political commentator, and he’s written several books, including and focusing on capitalism and income inequality. He has a lot of good things to say, at least things that I agree with. And I think a lot of people that are concerned about progressive movements and making sure that we help as many people as we can and hurt the least number of people would appreciate a lot of his commentary. He recently had announced that he was going to retire. He’s teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, and he’s been teaching there for several years, and he recently announced that he’s retiring. So they made a documentary about him preparing for his last class. The title of the documentary is called The Last Class. And his content creation company.

[2:34] Is allowing local groups to host a showing of this documentary for like, for people with like-minded views that share those views. And, and you can use it as a sort of a fundraiser if you get enough people to show up. And so the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie here in Toledo signed up. And so we are hosting a showing of the documentary, The Last Class, tentatively, because the way it works, we didn’t have to really, we weren’t required to pay any money up front. It’s going to be shown at the Franklin Park Mall movie theater. And so normally, if you want to do that, is you have to rent the theater, you have to pay money to book the film, etc. et cetera, and set up the ticketing and things like that. Well, we weren’t required to pay any money up front.

[3:43] However, we have a certain amount of money, something like it was like $1,200 or something like that, that you have to pay for hosting this screening. And I get it. You know, people need to get paid. The people that produced it need to get paid. The theater that’s hosting it. They have employees that they need to pay. I get that. I’m not saying it should have been free. But what it does is because we’re a small group and we don’t have a lot of money, we can’t just cut a check for this film. And so we have to depend on people buying tickets. And the theater limit, the number of people we can fit in the theater is about 90 people. But in order to have this showing, we have to sell 60 tickets. And we have to do it before the end of August.

[4:44] So, like I said, it’s a good film, a good documentary. I think it played at Sundance and places like that. And I’ve seen the trailer. It looks really nice. And I really like the guy, Robert Reich. I really like his take on the economy and wealth inequality and income inequality, and I agree with a lot of the things that he talks about, and I think humanists would agree with a lot of the things that he talks about. So here’s the blurb, all right? So join us for a screening of the last class at Cinemark Franklin Park 16. The last class is a nuanced and deeply personal portrait of Master Educator Robert Reich, teaching his final course and reflecting on a period of immense transformation, personally and globally. It is a love letter to education. The former Secretary of Labor might be famous for his public service, best-selling books and viral social media posts, but he always considered teaching his true calling. Now, after over 40 years and an extraordinary 40,000 students, Reich is preparing for his last class.

[5:59] Over the course of the film, Reich confronts the impending finality in his own aging, he’s 79 years old, with increasing candor, introspection, and ultimately emotion. He displays a rawness of feeling he has never shared publicly before. Drawing on his lifetime in politics, he uses his class Wealth and Poverty to offer us all a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. And currently we are seeing that. We are seeing those risks.

[6:37] And in this blurb here, we added humanists support education based on the truth, facts, and data. We also support social justice issues that Robert Reich talks about. And we are also concerned about income inequalities. So if you would like to attend this showing and help us, promote the topics that Robert Reich talks about, please purchase a ticket. And we have a website or it’s part of the organization that we worked with to book it. It’s their website and their ticketing system, and you can reach it at bit.ly slash lastclass-Toledo2025. That’s bit.ly slash last class hyphen Toledo 2025. And it should be a good time and you really will enjoy it.

[7:44] Music. Before I forget, I wanted to give you an update to an update to an update. If you remember last episode, I was talking about how LifeWise Academy, the Christian Nationalist group here based in Ohio that wants to spirit kids off public school grounds for Bible class, had sued the Ohio Civil Rights Commission over complaint filed by a former employee about wrongful termination. And they had wanted the Ohio Supreme Court to rule that the Ohio Civil Rights Commission had no jurisdiction because the employee was covered under the ministerial exemption, framework. And what that means is that churches, particularly churches, can.

[7:46] You’re listening to the Glass City Humanist podcast.

[8:51] They don’t have to comply with certain labor laws when it comes to their employees because they’re churches and the government rules don’t apply. And so that’s what LifeWise wanted to do, even though they are not a church and they’ve never been incorporated as a church. They just happen to be an educational group, which is what they claim. They’re an educational group that happens to teach the Bible. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission responded to the lawsuit on July the 1st and said that they had closed their investigation and given the employee a letter, permission to sue, life-wise, saying that they were done with their investigation. Because normally they would have to go through the whole investigatory process and determine if there was a violation and so forth. And they elected to do that in consultation with the employee. The employee withdrew their complaint because they want to sue for damages in a regular court. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission then filed their brief about this and said that the case is moot. And so they wanted it dismissed because there is no complaint anymore. There’s nothing for LifeWise to file suit about.

[10:16] So when I left you the last time, I said, that’s the process and it probably won’t be picked up again. And but it could be. Well, LifeWise responded to Ohio Civil Rights Commission’s brief and filed on July 11th, asking the court not to dismiss it because it’s moot, because they say that there’s still issues that need to be decided. This issue needs to be decided and that they still don’t and they just rehash their entire argument in this brief and ask the court not to dismiss it. So that’s the update to the update to the update. So I will keep you guys informed as we move forward in this very slow process about the legal stuff.

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[11:13] Only low-information people, people who repeat conservative talking points, would believe that the editorial board for the Toledo Blade is liberal or a bastion of liberalism because it’s not. A lot of the editorials and comments that they make as part of the editorial board are to the right of a majority of people that live in the city of Toledo. Trust me. And they had a doozy the other day. It was on the 12th, July the 12th. They had an editorial, and the title of it was FTC to Blame for Closed Stores. And what it was is it was an editorial complaining about the failed merger of the Kroger Company and Albertson’s grocery chains. Just for people that don’t know the merger was blocked by a federal judge who ruled that the merger was not in the best interest of consumers and at the time at the time that the well the judge ruled this year but the federal trade commission during the biden administration had opposed the merger or maybe not opposed the merger but they weren’t they weren’t enthusiastic about it, you know, because they’re trying to do that balancing thing.

[12:41] And so what happened was that Kroger and Albertson sued the FTC and it went to trial. The federal judge ruled in favor of the FTC and the merger was blocked. And then what happened was that Albertson then sued Kroger to recover money, because usually in these big mergers, the company that, if it doesn’t go through, the company that lost the most or didn’t initiate it, but was coming along, they could get damages back. It’s all big money, big money.

[13:22] And so the editorial board decided to take it upon itself to weigh in on this failed merger. And I do want to point out, too, that it was during this trial over the merger that a Kroger management person admitted that Kroger’s had jacked up prices during the pandemic without needing to. They had no real supply chain issues at the time, but they jacked up the prices because they could. That came out at trial. But here’s what the Blade wrote. I’m not going to read the whole thing because I don’t want to do that. But it says, The former Biden administration’s action to block the merger of two large grocery chains because of alleged anti-competition is having its logical consequence closure of grocery stores. Kroger has announced plans to close 5% of its stores about 60 locations. It is yet to be released if one or more of those stores will be in Toledo. If it does turn out to be in Toledo, it will be a big loss for the city, which is well served by a quality supermarket chain inside the corporate corporate limits. And it said Kroger two years ago launched a twenty four point six billion dollar takeover of the Albertson chain, but was blocked by the Federal Trade Commission, which saw the merger as a threat to competition.

[14:48] And blah, blah, blah, blah. So it goes on from there.

[14:53] Says here, and then they finished up with blocking mergers. It’s not always in the consumer’s interest. This is an example of a merger that should not have been blocked. Well, the editorial board, I got to give them some credit. You know, at least they stayed with the talking points. First of all, the FTC did oppose the merger, but it was a federal judge that ultimately blocked it because they went to trial. Kroger sued, so it never completed. So to blame the FTC for closing stores is ludicrous. Also remember that Kroger is the fourth largest grocery store chain in the country, and Albertsons is the fifth largest chain. The editorial is like a fantasy, a cake of fantasy beliefs. Anyone who believes a merger between two of the four largest grocery chains would lead to more competition and lower prices really needs to have their mental health tested.

[15:59] And just for an example, Kroger had $148 billion in revenue in 2023, with almost 500,000 employees working in over 2,700 stores under more than 20 different brand names. Kroger is not a struggling mom-and-pop grocery store. In the Toledo area, Kroger is the dominant chain in a number of locations. And in 2021, Kroger had 43% of the Toledo market, while Walmart, who the Blade editorial said that they couldn’t compete with, only had 12%. So it sounds like Kroger was doing pretty good. In fact, the attorney general in Washington state also sued to block the merger because had the merger taken place, the combined company would have controlled more than 50% of the grocery market in that state because Albertson is really big in Washington state and in the Northwest.

[17:07] And so I did a little bit more digging and the closest Albertson’s affiliate is in Indiana. So here in Toledo, we would not see any lower prices or increased competition. It’d be status quo, where you’d have Kroger as one of the top, Walmart nipping at its heels, and Meyers, and some of the lesser ones like Churchill’s and some other ones.

[17:36] Chains like Kroger also like to grease their results by including remodels of stores and call them new stores. And they do close underperforming stores. So closing 5% of stores, 60 locations, is a drop in the bucket. It’s a little pinprick on the skin for a chain like Kroger. You know, it’s not a big deal. The editorial also took a swipe at unions by claiming that places like Walmart get an advantage from non-union workers. But they failed to point out the fact that many Walmart employees have needed public assistance like food stamps to make ends meet. Now, personally, I’m more than happy to pay more for my grocery bill if I know that that cost, that extra cost, is getting passed on to union members in their wages or their benefits. Because you take care of the employees and they’re going to take care of you. You know, it’s always so much better to have your people that work for you to be able to shop at your place or to buy your product.

[18:50] And so I was just reading that editorial, and it was just par for the course for the Toledo Blade. But, man, they got so much of it wrong. It wasn’t even funny. And I just decided that I needed to straighten some of that out.

[19:06] Music.

[19:15] For more information about the topics in this episode including links used please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[19:24] Music.

[19:36] As a palate cleanser, because I think maybe I’m talking about politics too much, what I’m going to do is I’m going to play a couple of clips narrated by the actor Stephen Fry. These clips are from Humanist UK, and they talk about a couple of humanist topics, what happens when we die, and how can we be happy. What should we think about death? One thing we can be sure of is that we will die. Everybody will.

[20:12] Some people do not like the thought of this and don’t accept it. They prefer to think that death is not the end of us, but that we might live on, perhaps in another life on earth or in another place where people are rewarded or punished. But wanting something to be true is not the same as it being true? And there is no evidence to support the idea that our minds could survive the end of our bodies. What sense could we make of the things that we value, love, experience, communication, achievements, the warmth of the sun on our face, if we were disembodied? And if life were eternal, wouldn’t it lose much of what gives it shape, structure, meaning, and purpose? Think about reading a good book or eating a delicious cake. These may be great pleasures, but one of the things that makes them pleasures is that they come to an end. A book that went on and on forever, and a cake that you never stopped eating, would both soon lose their appeal. Death is a natural part of life.

[21:21] It makes sense for us to try not to be afraid of this, but instead to come to terms with it. Then we can focus on finding meaning and purpose in the here and now, making the most of the one life we know we have and helping others to do the same, choosing good over evil without the expectation of reward in some other place. When we do die, we will live on in the work we have done and in the memories of the other people whose lives we have been part of. Our bodies will break up and become part again of the cycle of nature. The atoms that form us now will go on to form other things, trees and birds, flowers and butterflies.

[22:04] Music.

[22:13] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit lastcityhumanist.show.

[22:21] Music.

[22:34] How can I be happy? Some people believe that there is one single meaning of life. They think that the universe was created for a purpose, and that human beings are part of some larger cosmic plan. They think our meaning comes from being part of this plan and is written into the universe waiting to be discovered. A humanist view of meaning in life is different.

[23:03] Humanists do not see that there is any obvious purpose to the universe, but that it is a natural phenomenon with no design behind it. Meaning is not something out there waiting to be discovered, but something that we create in our own lives. And although this vast and incredibly old universe was not created for us, all of us are connected to something bigger than ourselves, whether it is family and community, a tradition stretching into the past, an idea or cause looking forward to the future, or the beautiful wider natural world on which we were born and our species evolved.

[23:41] This way of thinking means that there is not just one big meaning of life, but that every person will have many different meanings in their life. Each one of us is unique, and our different personalities depend on a complex mixture of influences from our parents, our environment and our connections. They change with experience and changing circumstances. There are no simple recipes for living that are applicable to all people. We have different tastes and preferences, different priorities and goals. One person may like drawing, walking in the woods and caring for their grandchildren. Another may like cooking, watching soap operas, savoring a favorite wine or a new food. We may find meaning through our family, our career, making a commitment to an artistic project or a political reform, in simple pleasures such as gardening, in hobbies, or in a thousand other ways, giving rein to our creativity or our curiosity, our intellectual capacities, or our emotional life. The time to be happy is now, and the way to find meaning in life is to get on and live it, as fully and as well as we can.

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[25:17] One of the longtime battles in the war and separation of church and state waged by the right-wingers, the Christian zealots, is over the Johnson Amendment. And for those that are not familiar, the Johnson Amendment is part of the IRS tax code governing 5013C charities. These are the groups that get tax exemptions. Churches and religious groups are under that. And one of the stipulations for getting a tax exemption from the IRS is that a 5013C-recognized group is not allowed to endorse candidates or intervene in political campaigns. Now, naturally, that seems reasonable, right? You get a tax exemption from the federal government, then you should not use that in order to influence government.

[26:18] I am part of a 5013C group, and one of the things that we do is we do issue campaigning. We can talk about and lobby for issues, particular issues. There are still dollar amounts, or not dollar amounts, but percentages of resources that we’re allowed to give to that. So our group can’t, let’s say, do voter right campaign 90 percent of the time because then we would run afoul of the Johnson Amendment. Now, what some of these right wing Christian nationalist groups want to do away with, they want to do away with it so that they can endorse candidates and launder campaign contributions through churches. So it’ll be tax deductible. It’s obviously that’s what they want to do.

[27:12] And they make a First Amendment claim that it is violating the free speech, the pastor’s free speech. And back when President Obama was in office, they did a number over several years called Pulpit Freedom Sundays, where some pastors, some evangelical pastors would actually violate the Johnson Amendment and report themselves to the IRS in order to create a case that would go to a court so that they get to Supreme Court to overturn that part of the text. code. Of course, the problem was that the Johnson Amendment has not been enforced in decades.

[27:56] The Johnson Amendment was created in the 1950s by Senator, at the time, Senator Lyndon Johnson, and it was passed on a bipartisan thing. They didn’t even have any, it wasn’t even controversial. There wasn’t any debate on it. There wasn’t any protests or anything. And I think part of the reason was that it had some foundation in the anti-Catholic amicus that existed in this country in the 1950s and 60s, with the growing power of the Catholic Church in the United States, including the Kennedy family, John F. Kennedy.

[28:41] There was people that were against him because he was Catholic. And I think part of that, and you see that with also something that’s called Blaine Amendments, some states where they have something in their state constitutions that don’t allow direct funding of religious groups because it was meant to go against Catholic churches or Catholic schools and things like that. So the Johnson Amendment’s been around for about 70 years, and it has not been enforced consistently. And Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist actually went back and took a look at some records. And he writes in his blog, says, in fact, he writes, in fact, over the past few decades, the IRS has only followed its own rules once. Just before the 1992 elections, a group called Branch Ministries ran it, a full page newspaper ad urging people not to vote for Bill Clinton. The IRS revoked the group’s tax-exempt status. There was a lawsuit. The IRS won. The Congressional Research Service, a government-backed public policy research institute, said another church also lost its tax exemption in 2012, but there aren’t any further details that Hemick could find.

[30:04] So over 70 years of the Johnson Amendment, maybe two ministries that were punished by the IRS for violating it. And the reason why it hasn’t been violated or hasn’t been enforced is because the IRS is afraid of the evangelical Christians and the Christian nationalists. Like I said before, there was a thing back during President Obama’s time when the IRS was looking at domestic groups and denying tax exemptions of conservative groups that they thought were a danger to domestic terrorism. Right-wing lost their minds, and there was congressional hearings and threats of a lawsuit and things like that, so they backed off. So, for 70 years, they’ve been really walking on eggshells when it comes to enforcing the Johnson Amendment against religion. I know for a fact that during a recent state election, I reported a local church near me. Because they were having a campaign event for a candidate, and I never even got a response back from the IRS.

[31:21] Now, the IRS claims that they just don’t have enough people to do that, and the priority is less. Their priority at the time, not so much now, their priority at the time was, you know, like white-collar crimes and tax evasions and things like that.

[31:39] Churches violating the The Johnson Amendment was low on the totem pole, so they were trying to balance their resources. And so that’s the thing. You know, the groups that I follow, like Americans United and American Human Association, they came out with these statements recently about the Johnson Amendment. And the reason why was that in a court filing, in a lawsuit, the current IRS, the Trump IRS, said that they said it was okay for pastors to tell their parishioners who to vote for as long as they did it as a sermon or in their usual communications, the church communications. Here is Rachel Lazar of Americans United for Separation Church and State. She was recently on the Politics Nation show on MSNBC explaining why the Johnson Amendment is important for religious freedom. The Johnson Amendment is a critical law. It’s been around for 70 years, and it had bipartisan endorsement when it passed.

[32:53] And today, it is very popular. It is supported across political divides. It’s supported by clergy. It’s supported by Republicans. And it’s supported by evangelical Christians, by all. I want to talk about why it’s important for really two reasons. Number one, it protects the integrity of elections.

[33:13] It ensures that we don’t have even more dark money funneled into elections. Think Citizens United on steroids, right? That’s something that we all want to avoid. And number two, it protects churches and other houses of worship. And it does so in this way. Number one, it ensures that churches don’t become even more divided, right, in very divided times. No one wants their house of worship to be corrupted by partisan politics. No one wants their house of worship to be subject to being beholden to the state, right? The church, as Dr. King told us, should be the conscience of the state. And it can’t be that when it’s officially entangling itself with the state. They’re unilaterally and radically reinterpreting this law. He declared from the moment he ran the first time that he was out to destroy the Johnson Amendment because he is in this transactional relationship with a lot of white evangelical churches who he wants to officially endorse him and his cronies. I do agree with Rachel in a lot of the arguments about why it’s important to have the Johnson Amendment to keep churches, states separate.

[34:33] And the Johnson Amendment, it covers all charities, all 5013C charities, not just churches, But it also covers groups like the one I’m in. It covers groups like the people that help run this radio station and other nonprofits. They’re also not allowed to endorse candidates. The thing is that this lawsuit that these religious broadcasters brought about, and these pastors brought about, is carving out one exception to the Johnson Amendment for churches. And that’s where we have a sticky wicket.

[35:24] And now, if that was all that we had to worry about, I don’t see a problem with it. That sounds like a reasonable carve-out, because there are some free speech claims that kind of are valid in that regard. I don’t think that the government should tell a pastor what he can and can’t say, obviously, just like they shouldn’t tell anybody else what to say. But the problem that I see is the coordination. You’re going to have these right-wing, mostly Republicans, are going to be partnering with these megachurches, and they’re going to launder huge amounts of money to particular candidates. They’re going to endorse particular candidates, and it’s just going to make the church or people associated with that church just all nice and oily and sticky for getting involved with that stuff. Is the churches are not required to report anything to the IRS.

[36:28] My group, we have to file a 990 every year that goes into details who our contributors were, where the money went, how we spent the money, etc. Churches are not required to do that. In fact, that is one of the things. And also, churches automatically become tax-exempt. As soon as they incorporate as a church, they are automatically tax-exempt according to the IRS. Other 5013C groups, we have to apply and pay several hundred dollars, and the process takes several months or even years to complete. So it’s highly unfair that these pastors and preachers and ministers can get the tax exemption and endorse candidates, and the rest of us cannot. That is where it’s unfair. I think if you’re going to have a rule, you either enforce it or you get rid of it completely.

[37:31] And the right has tried to get rid of it for many years, and now it’s possibly going to happen this time that they’re actually going to be able to get rid of it. Thank you for listening.

[37:42] Music.

[37:49] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[37:58] Music. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.

[38:03] Show Lee can be reached at humanistswle.org.

[38:21] Music.