Trump's play on church and state threatens the foundations of both

The Trump administration is very good at ignoring the law. Now it is encouraging pastors and churches to do the same.  

Earlier this month, the Trump IRS announced in a legal filing that churches can endorse political candidates. That is directly contrary to federal law, which states that tax-exempt nonprofit groups, including churches, can’t use those tax-exempt funds for electoral politics. 

In other words, the Trump administration is inviting its conservative Christian allies to defy the law by announcing in advance that the government won’t enforce it.  

This is about power. It’s about President Trump making good on a corrupt deal he offered religious-right leaders to get their support for his 2016 run.  

Back then, Trump promised that if they told their followers to vote for him — ignoring his lack of character and record of amorality — he would give them two things. He’d give them a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade and pledged to make them more politically powerful by eliminating the ban on politicking by churches. 

One Christian writer at the time compared it to the biblical story of Satan tempting Jesus in the desert with the promise of worldly power. Church leaders, he said, should not take the deal Jesus rejected.

Narrator: They took the deal. 

Religious-right leaders played a big role in Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories. Now he’s counting on them to provide massive turnout operations for Republicans in next year’s midterms to preserve his compliant congressional majorities. That will be a lot simpler if they can turn conservative megachurches into cogs in the MAGA machine even more than they already have. 

Despite the rhetoric from the White House and its allies, this is not about religious liberty. Churches are not singled out by current law. They just have to play by the same rules as other tax-exempt groups.  

Those rules don’t silence anyone. They don’t prevent pastors or anyone else from bringing their values into the public arena or addressing issues they care about.  

It is ridiculous for Trump to claim that he is bringing religion back into our public life. It never left!  

Christians and other people of faith have always played a role, sometimes as prophetic leaders of justice-seeking movements, and sadly, sometimes as apologists for cruelty, unjust policies and corrupt politicians.

Separation of church and state — or as Jesus put it, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s — protects religious liberty and individual freedom for everyone.  

As the National Council of Nonprofits noted about the recent IRS move, this is “not about religion or free speech, but about radically altering campaign finance laws.”  

The IRS is inviting corruption. It is inviting a flood of political campaign money to be laundered through churches, as tax experts have noted, “making houses of worship a way to avoid both taxes and transparency for campaign finances.” 

That’s not just speculation. In recent years, the IRS has allowed right-wing political advocacy groups to dishonestly reclassify themselves as churches or church associations, a legal fiction that lets them avoid disclosure rules and evade oversight and accountability.  

Some people I respect have suggested that the new policy is not such a big deal, because in practice, the IRS hasn’t done much to enforce the provision against pastors and churches who violate it. I think they’re wrong. 

The law has been a deterrent. It has buttressed pastors who don’t want to turn their churches into right-wing political operations. 

Now those pastors will come under extreme pressure from religious-right political groups, right-wing pundits and MAGA politicians to get on board, as Trump's religious-right allies have themselves admitted. 

All this is especially troubling when Trump’s Christian nationalist allies are getting bolder in promoting their divisive and un-American vision of our future.  

This month, for example, Christian nationalist Doug Wilson planted a church in Washington, D.C. Its goal, in the words of a Wilson associate, is to “calibrate” the Christians working in the Trump administration into Wilson’s worldview, which he currently promotes through a publishing house and networks of churches and “classical Christian” schools.  

Sitting in the congregation for the new church’s opening service was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who goes to a Wilson-affiliated church in Tennessee and sends his kids to one of Wilson’s schools. 

Here’s why that’s scary: Wilson wrote a book downplaying the evils of slavery. He preaches that giving women the right to vote was a bad thing. 

In the “Christian republic” he envisions, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other non-Christians would not be allowed to hold public office — not even liberal Christians. There would be no public expressions of other faiths allowed, because “the public spaces would belong to Christ.” 

In America, at least for now, the public spaces belong to no one faith. They’re open to all of us. Let’s keep it that way. 

Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.