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Shameless Radical Religious Leaders Have Now Corrupted Government

It’s time to cut them off from the “free lunch” of tax exemption

Thom Hartmann
4 min readJan 16, 2021
Photo by Marc Schaefer on Unsplash

It’s time for average Americans to stop being forced to subsidize politically radical religious leaders.

Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and heir to the multimillion-dollar Graham fortune, just publicly said that the 10 Republicans voting to impeach Donald Trump and the US House of Representatives were like Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.

“And these ten, from [Trump’s] own party, joined in the feeding frenzy,” he wrote. “It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”

Franklin Graham is a multimillionaire in large part because neither he nor his family have to pay any taxes on their family’s business’ income or even pay property taxes on the land and buildings their business owns.

Instead, you and I and the taxpayers of his town and state pay extra taxes to subsidize him and his “ministry.”

Back in the 1950s, the John Birch Society put up billboards all across America demanding that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren be impeached because he’d signed off on the Brown v Board decision that required schools be racially integrated.

Image from https://i.redd.it/ttsd9w6cax831.jpg

White churches across the country, along with wealthy industrialists like Fred Koch, helped fund the effort, arguing that school integration was the first step to full-blown to communism in America.

Preachers ranted from the pulpit about the dangers of school integration, and the issue birthed the modern “religious right.” Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell and others started all-white schools to defy the decision, often claiming that because their schools were “Christian” they were exempt from federal oversight and thus didn’t have to comply with the Supreme Court’s dictum.

Into this firestorm stepped Senator Lyndon Johnson, who proposed in 1954 that it was fine if churches wanted to engage in politics or argue that Jesus would have been against racial…

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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann

Written by Thom Hartmann

America’s #1 progressive talk show host & NY Times bestselling author. Thom’s writings also appear at HartmannReport.com.

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