openpolitics.com

When the White House wants to gather evangelicals for one of its many issue-specific “listening sessions,” the Rev. Johnnie Moore is often one of the first to hear.

It wasn’t always clear that Mr. Moore, a 34-year-old Southern Baptist minister who was a co-chairman of the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board, would be a frequent White House guest.

.. Not a day goes by when there aren’t a dozen evangelical leaders in the White House for something.”

.. On Thursday, Mr. Moore will join what he calls the “Super Bowl for peacemakers” here: the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where around 3,000 clergy members, politicians and business leaders will eat, network and listen to speeches, including one from President Trump.

.. Mr. Trump will stand before an audience that has cheered the president’s first-year agenda as its own:

1. announcing that the American Embassy in Israel would move to Jerusalem,
2. anointing a national “prayer Sunday,”
3. appointing Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court,
4. signing anti-abortion legislation,
5. opening a “conscience and religious freedom division” at the Department of Health and Human Services and
6. fighting to end the Johnson Amendment, which threatens religious organizations with the loss of their tax-exempt status if they endorse political candidates.

.. Mr. Moore, a former Liberty University vice president

..

The group, which also includes

1. Tim Clinton,
2. Robert Jeffress,
3. Darrell Scott,
4. Samuel Rodriguez and
5. Paula White, who has been called Mr. Trump’s personal “spiritual adviser,”

is a frequent and influential voice in the ears of senior administration officials.

.. Jennifer Korn, who as a deputy director of the public liaison office manages contact between the White House and faith groups, sends out invitations to policy briefings and the “listening sessions.”

.. Ms. Korn invites senior West Wing advisers such as Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway to visit the groups, which range from 20 to 100 guests and are often tied to specific faith-related legislation, executive orders and court appointments.

.. Mr. Jeffress, another core member from the campaign board, has been one of Mr. Trump’s most reliable evangelical advocates

.. “I can’t look into the president’s heart to know if he really personally believes these positions he’s advocating, or whether he thinks it’s smart politics to embrace them because of the strong evangelical influence in the country,” Mr. Jeffress said in an interview. “But frankly, I don’t care. As a Christian, I’m seeing these policies embraced and enacted, and he’s doing that.”

.. He and Mr. Moore are sympathetic to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, that shields young undocumented immigrants, which is often viewed as a progressive cause.

.. When he is in the Oval Office with faith leaders, Mr. Moore said, they try to “personalize” issues for Mr. Trump, including in a recent discussion on DACA, when the group told the president that he should view the issue as a father and grandfather.

.. evangelical advocacy in the White House also helped expedite the confirmation of former Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas as ambassador for international religious freedom, a post for which he and the core group of evangelical voices in the White House had long pushed.

.. The Rev. A. R. Bernard, the pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn and a member of the campaign board, announced that he was no longer associating with the White House evangelical group after Mr. Trump’s failure to condemn white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August.

.. saw Mr. Trump as largely indifferent to faith leaders’ to-do list.

“There was nothing hidden. He wanted that voting bloc. He wanted their votes,” Mr. Bernard said

.. “It was transactional. He wanted to do whatever he thought would get those votes.”

.. When reports emerged last month that a pornographic-film actress was paid $130,000 to keep quiet

.. “He’s not the pastor of our country,” Franklin Graham

.. Tony Perkins, the president of the evangelical Family Research Council, said that evangelicals would give Mr. Trump a “mulligan.”

Mr. Jeffress agreed.

.. “Evangelical support for President Trump has always been based on his policies, not on his personal piety,” he said.

.. Mr. Scott, a pastor at the New Spirit Revival Center in the Cleveland  .. aid Mr. Trump’s interest in evangelicalism stemmed not from opportunism but from wanting to atone for a life largely devoid of conventional religiosity.

.. Mr. Trump would often apologize if he cursed in front of them.

.. “I find his reverence for clergy very old-school,” Mr. Scott said. “When he’s in the room with clergy, he adopts the position of the lesser. He seems to regard the clergy as the greater.”

.. Mr. Trump has the view of “while you guys were off pursuing a higher calling, I was off building buildings,” Mr. Scott said. “Now it’s time for me to catch up.”

.. “People sort of think of evangelicals as these bumpkins. That always drives me crazy,” Mr. Moore said before he dashed out of a downtown Washington cafe. “I think we are far more informed than people give us credit for.”

 

the Republican-controlled House has passed a tax bill that, should it become law, would unleash another tidal wave of change. It would permit churches, charities and foundations to engage in candidate-specific politicking and enable donors to reap tax breaks for political contributions for the first time.

.. What the House bill really amounts to is throwing open an entirely new channel for campaign money to politicize churches, charities and foundations.

.. What if these donors are tempted to give their money to a 501(c)3 organization that beckons with a tax deduction and no disclosure?

.. The change is unwanted by large numbers of tax-exempt groups, who fear the corrosive impact.

.. The change would also set a dangerous precedent, offering a federal subsidy — the tax deduction — for those making political contributions.

The churches, charities and foundations already enjoy the right to advocate for issues. There is no need to give these groups a new cash window and make them servants of special interests seeking to further warp the nation’s electoral politics.

While lawmakers are likely to give attention to key aspects of the legislation, there are some little-known provisions in the 400-plus-page bill meant to appeal to social conservatives.

One of the biggest wins – particularly for pro-life activists – is language in a provision related to college savings plans, otherwise known as 529 plans. The provision explicitly lets parents set up a plan for an “unborn child,” defined in the legislation as a “child in utero.”

“This is a concrete recognition within the U.S. tax code that a fetus is an unborn child,” said Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute.

.. Another provision would get rid of the Johnson Amendment – which prohibits tax-exempt religious organizations like churches from endorsing candidates or engaging in other political activity.

“It’s almost purely political because none of it actually affects the amount of revenue raised or the amount of revenue lost,” Jones said.