Take the Money
In 1954, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas – then embroiled in a contentious reelection campaign in which tax-exempt organizations were supporting his opponent – proposed an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code that prohibited all 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches, from participating in or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. The penalty for churches that disobeyed this rule was the loss of their favorable tax status. Churches that refused to self-censor would have to pay taxes. The amendment was slipped into the tax code without a single hearing, without a single minute of floor debate, and without a single recorded vote. It passed in silence – and the churches received it in silence.
If the Pharisees had offered Jesus money in return for his agreement to stop criticizing them, how would he have reacted? The word ‘fury’ and ‘anger’ do not do justice to the outrage he would have expressed. Now fast forward to 1954. American churches were given the same choice: stay true to the word of God – or take the money.
They took the money.
Not one major denominational body objected. Not one prominent Christian leader raised a public alarm. Not one organized campaign of resistance materialized. A provision that effectively placed a gag order on the pulpits of America – prohibiting pastors from speaking to the important issues of the day in the way that ministers had done for centuries – was accepted without so much as a murmur of dissent. The message to the people was clear – the secular state was higher, more powerful, and superior to the church. And by example, the church taught its people that, when faced with the choice between money and the word of God, take the money. The irony is staggering: for the first 165 years of the American republic, pastors had spoken freely on all important and relevant matters of the day. Now they quietly accepted censorship in return for tax breaks.
The churches’ acquiescence to the Johnson Amendment was not a one-time failure. It established a pattern of self-censorship and subservience to the state that deepened with each decade. Pastors learned to avoid all topics that could even remotely be connected to politics. Congregations learned not to expect moral leadership from the church on the urgent questions of the day. The separation was so thorough that when the Alliance Defending Freedom began organizing “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” in 2008 – encouraging pastors to deliberately violate the amendment by preaching political sermons – the IRS did not even bother to comment, so accustomed had everyone become to the silence. The gag was no longer necessary. The churches had internalized it.
This is the tragic irony at the heart of the misrepresentation. Jesus did not call his followers to be passive. He called them to be gentle in the real sense, to possess power and wield it with wisdom, to stand firm without being cruel, to engage the world with strength under control. The very quality that should have made Christianity formidable in every era – a disciplined, purposeful force that could confront injustice without becoming unjust – was reinterpreted, through the slow drift of a single English word, as a mandate for withdrawal. And the church withdrew. From the political arena. From the public schools. From the great moral debates of the twentieth century. It withdrew not because Christ told it to, but because it chose to.
With the Christian church in decline, the Christian world soon followed. Today we find the West in the midst of mass societal suicide. As Muslims flood into Europe at the invitation of European leaders and the rest of the world is invited to march across America’s southern border by America’s own politicians, the West is committing suicide at a frenetic pace. The momentum of this trajectory is so powerful, so widely embraced by the media, and so well funded by Western elite that it is hard to imagine it reversing. The timidity of the Western church became the timidity of the Western world. Today the West is dying because the Christian church, the foundation of the West, has died.