{"id":577,"date":"2024-11-11T09:31:09","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T09:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/trump-makes-a-disturbing-vow-at-a-gathering-with-christian-leaders-in-georgia\/"},"modified":"2024-11-11T09:31:09","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T09:31:09","slug":"trump-makes-a-disturbing-vow-at-a-gathering-with-christian-leaders-in-georgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/trump-makes-a-disturbing-vow-at-a-gathering-with-christian-leaders-in-georgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump makes a disturbing vow at a gathering with Christian leaders in Georgia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Speaking to Christian leaders<\/a> in Georgia on Monday, Donald Trump<\/a> said the U.S. would be better off if they were more powerful, and he promised to try to permanently remove restrictions that bar churches from keeping their tax-exempt status if they engage in blatant politicking.<\/p>\n

The Atlanta-area event was hosted by far-right televangelist Paula White-Cain and the National Faith Advisory Board, which she launched after serving as Trump\u2019s spiritual adviser<\/a> in the White House. Mother Jones published a dispatch<\/a> from the event highlighting some of the extremist faith leaders in attendance.<\/p>\n

White-Cain has painted Trump\u2019s opponents as part of \u201cdemonic\u201d networks<\/a> out to get him and raved about \u201csatanic pregnancies,\u201d<\/a> and she often portrays Trump as ordained by God.<\/p>\n

At Monday\u2019s event<\/a>, Trump praised the faith leaders in attendance, saying:<\/p>\n

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You are so important. You do such an incredible job \u2014 and you keep the country together. And the more powerful you become, the better the country is going to be. So I\u2019m just with you all the way.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m sure people who\u2019ve had to deal with the deadly abortion bans sought by conservative Christians, and the gay or trans children condemned in many far-right churches, have a different take on that.<\/p>\n

But Trump told these Christian leaders that he would help heighten their political power. One way he said he\u2019d do this is by trying to \u201cpermanently\u201d do away with the so-called Johnson Amendment, a provision of the U.S. tax code aimed at preventing charity groups and churches \u2014 which receive tax-exempt status \u2014 from endorsing political candidates.<\/p>\n

Trump told these Christian leaders that he would help heighten their political power.<\/p>\n

Scrapping this amendment<\/a> \u2014 a priority of Christian nationalist politicians, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson<\/a> \u2014 would effectively allow the many Christian nationalist leaders aligned with Trump to feel unencumbered in turning their churches into more obvious MAGA propaganda machines.<\/p>\n

As The Washington Post has noted<\/a>, the Johnson Amendment \u201cis seldom enforced by the IRS and is widely disregarded by clergy.\u201d It also affords fairly broad latitude for faith leaders to still weigh in on political matters.<\/p>\n

Yet the MAGA faithful want more.<\/p>\n

Trump falsely said<\/a> Monday that he \u201cgot rid\u201d of the Johnson Amendment during his presidency, adding that \u201cthey\u201d \u2014 the ominous \u201cthey\u201d \u2014 \u201cdidn\u2019t want you to speak to people.\u201d In reality, he simply signed an executive order telling the Treasury Department to be even more <\/em>lenient in its enforcement.<\/p>\n

But it sounds like he\u2019s now making plans to attack the Johnson Amendment more aggressively, potentially blurring the lines between church and state and empowering the extreme Christians who use the pulpit to help him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ja’han Jones<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Ja’han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He’s a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Speaking to Christian leaders in Georgia on Monday, Donald Trump said the U.S. would be better off if they were more powerful, and he promised to try to permanently remove restrictions that bar churches from keeping their tax-exempt status if they engage in blatant politicking. The Atlanta-area event was hosted by far-right televangelist Paula White-Cain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}