In 2016 Donald Trump made a promise. In churches and in schools, with celebrity preachers like Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell, Jr., and, most famously, on stage while accepting the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Trump vowed to do everything in his power to nullify the section of the 501(c)3 Internal Revenue Code commonly referred to as the Johnson Amendment.

Adopted in 1955 to little resistance or fanfare, the Johnson Amendment, on its most basic level, limits the political speech of not-for-profit organizations. Ever since then, non-profits have essentially traded their right to lobby and influence elections in exchange for tax exempt status. Of course, churches are included under this umbrella, but so are all other 501(c)3 organizations –schools and hospitals, the United Way and the Boys and Girls Club, the Rockefeller Foundation and the NFL.

The Johnson Amendment was originally intended to be one of a number of walls erected at mid-century in order to isolate – not necessarily to punish – non-profits as a developing “third sector” economic force in American society. It was a way to keep non-profits separate from for-profit industry as well as state and federal government. And though we are more accustomed to hearing him threaten to build walls than destroy them, Trump is merely the most recent in a long history of leaders who have attempted to topple this legal barrier.

At last year’s National Prayer Breakfast he promised attendees, “This financial threat against the faith community is over. You’re now in a position to say what you want to say…. No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors…. [I vow to] get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” Despite countless reports that the Protestant ministers to whom many of these promises have been addressed couldn’t care much less about the amendment’s repeal, these promises have had a powerful pull on Republic lawmakers in Washington.

Every time the Republicans propose a new tax bill, they put the Johnson amendment on the block, and every time it makes headlines. When it came time for this past winter’s showdown over tax reform, the House did propose removing the limit on churches’ political speech from the revenue code – though in its final review, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the measure violated budgetary reconciliation procedure.

Nonetheless, using the Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty, President Trump has directed the Department of the Treasury to ensure that “churches…not be found guilty of implied endorsements where secular organizations would not be.” And, in doing so, he has formally entered into a decades-long debate over the rights and shifting corporate identities of not-for-profit institutions.

The irony in much of this is that the original legislation these battles are fought over was introduced and adopted without a hiccup in the 1950s.

Introduced in 1954 by then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, this amendment to the Internal Revenue Code was an act of political retribution. The measures came about immediately after a reelection campaign in which right-wing non-profits spent vast sums of money trying to unseat Johnson and install in his place the millionaire rancher and oil tycoon Dudley Dougherty. In response, Johnson’s proposed amendment struck at any organization exempt from federal taxation.

Under the law Johnson passed, churches and other non-profits “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” They can’t raise funds for political candidates and clergy can’t endorse particular parties from the pulpit. And while we think of the 1950s as a period of virulently anti-communistic politics – as the period in which a patriotic Judeo-Christian tri-faith model both hardened and flourished – it’s helpful to remember that this type of separation of institutions and “pure” market forces was seen by the majority of Americans as a very good thing, as a quality that separated the United States from “godless,” state-centric Soviet systems. The average American, as well as the average legislator, did not want Wall Street bankers, K Street lobbying firms, and Main Street churches involved in similar or overlapping activities. As evidenced by the easy and lasting acceptance of Johnson’s amendment, Americans at mid-century proclaimed – at least on one level – to prefer separate spheres of influence for different types of corporations.

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It may be obvious why, today, in an era of Citizens United and Super PACs, both sides of the political aisle are fighting over the tax status of churches and other not-for-profit groups and their abilities to lobby. What would happen, we might ask ourselves, if priests and rabbis could not only explicitly tell their congregants who to vote for, but could also collect money in service of particular candidates? In order to fully grasp what is at stake in this fight over the seemingly dry question of tax statutes, it helps to look more deeply at the history of non-profit family philanthropic foundations and the courses they set for themselves in navigating these issues related to politics, profit, and the legal limits of their influence. These foundations are absolutely central to the story of how religion, capital, and political power have never been fully separable within American politics.

In the teens and twenties, only a small number of philanthropic foundations filed for incorporation. But when the Revenue Acts of 1934 and 1935 passed, the philanthropic floodgates opened and a number of successful businessmen with conservative Protestant beliefs began to formalize their charitable giving through articles of incorporation, leaving behind their more personal, less “rationalized” forms[1] of charitable giving in the process. Luce, Lilly, Olin, Sloan, Ford, and Pew, among others, created foundations for the transfer, protection, and disbursement of their fortunes in ways that spoke directly to their political, economic, and religious interests. Newly-minted non-profit corporations could enjoy the same pooling of resources as for-profit corporations but with added tax benefits symptomatic of the state’s privileging of these benevolent organizations.

As the wealth kept by non-profits has ballooned throughout the twentieth century, they have, in exchange for such privileges, accepted certain limitations on the ways in which they can express themselves in the political sphere. And while these foundations may have bristled at particular tax burdens, even the most conservative politicians and businessmen in the country have thought that separating different types of institutions this way was prudent. Pew, Luce, and Lilly provide particularly vivid examples of the ways in which non-profits, revenue code, and the legislation surrounding our current tax regimes are not only influenced by religion, but are in fact saturated in it (something I am exploring at greater depth in my dissertation).

Among this cohort of defenders of a free and unfettered market, none was more conservative than J. Howard Pew. A graduate of Grove City College, Pew was a lifelong ally of Billy Graham and other members of the evangelical establishment. He supported the John Birch Society, the American Liberty League, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and spent decades of his life drafting tirades against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (Pew was against Roosevelt’s attempts to destroy what he saw as the divinely ordained perfect economic competition achieved through a combination of high taxes and the concomitant loopholes privileged free market players used to evade them.) His conservative bona fides were strong.

But in a way, his particular mid-century logic sheds light on how individuals across the political spectrum viewed the role of religion and religious institutions throughout much of the twentieth century. As an example, Howard Pew fought two telling legislative battles emblematic of this desire to keep separation between market and religious forces.

At the time, churches could own and earn tax-exempt income from businesses unrelated to the church itself – such as gas stations and factories. Pew’s first big legislative fight was to get rid of the tax exemption for those earnings. In the fall of 1955, Pew received a letter from one of his personal financial advisors at the Fidelity-Philadelphia Trust Company alerting him to the fact that the national offices of the Baptist Church had just purchased twelve filling stations in California. This letter came to Pew on the heels of news that the Catholic Church had recently secured the rights to a brick factory in Arizona, as well as a reminder from the Episcopal Church that its local parishes and national governing body owned acres on acres of rentable land in the hearts of some of America’s most expensive cities. And none of them were paying any income taxes on the revenue earned by these holdings.

For decades Howard Pew had overseen the enormous twentieth-century growth of his family business, Sun Oil, and along the way both created and managed countless charitable foundations and family trusts. The news about the Baptist Church’s new filling stations upset Pew in particular, though.

On the one hand, he found religious control of profit-making businesses distasteful and believed Presbyterians could enjoy a moral superiority by not engaging the practice. But on the other, the endowments of the Presbyterian Church and its eponymous foundation were falling behind those of other denominations.

Rather than try to win by joining the game, Pew went about trying to change the rules.

He organized a trans-denominational battle against tax-free church and charity ownership of unrelated businesses, helping to remove this popular tax exemption from the Internal Revenue Code that would have saved millions for the very charities and foundations that he designed and led.

The second battle Pew chose to fight was about how bequests to charitable organizations (both religious and otherwise) could be taxed. As one of the wealthiest men in America, Howard Pew would have had more reasons than many to wage a full-scale assault on the state and federal inheritance tax. But his family’s wealth was never a primary concern for Pew. While Rockefellers, Fords, and Luces before them worked to ensure the easy transfer of wealth and corporate control across generations, the Pews believed in the importance of the “self-made man” and cared less about securing the finances of future Pews.

In this fight, Pew had in mind the health of two different corporate bodies: the Pew family trusts, designed to collect family assets after each member’s death, and his own Presbyterian Church. In terms of the work that Pew was doing, the line between the two in was not always clear – often lessons learned on behalf of the Presbyterian Foundation could be applied to the family trusts by Pew, and vice versa. And ultimately, in this attempt to make it possible for as much gifted money as possible to go to the church, Pew did not fight inheritance tax as a concept. Rather he took issue with a particular code (the Pennsylvania Inheritance Tax on Charitable Bequests) that taxed both individual citizens and corporate persons who received monetary gifts after the death of a donor.

Believing the arrangement as it stood to be unjust to wealthy individuals and to their favored institutions, Pew set about to both change the law (with a multi-stage approach involving a public relations campaign, grooming state legislators, and gathering his friends in the business community around the cause) and to circumvent it through a novel financial device known as the Life Income Plan.

As I said, for the Pews, the act of endowment was always less about securing the future of their heirs and more focused on supporting the causes they held most dear while dodging the specter of government interference. So it was to these ends that Howard Pew created a financial instrument that would do just that: avoid any significant bequest benefits to blood relations while empowering the churches, charities, and philanthropic foundations closest to him through an innovative avoidance of state and federal taxation. The resultant Life Income Plan, a type of charitable gift-cum-annuity originally marketed to members of the Presbyterian Church, further exemplifies the slipperiness of the secular. Through it, a non-profit foundation owned by (but not itself) a church, could market a novel financial instrument for the tax-savvy investor to shield his assets from government’s intrusive and morally suspect Tax on Charitable Bequests.

And Pew eventually did win out in the Pennsylvania state legislature also, striking down the state’s tax on charitable bequests; any monetary gifts a Pennsylvania non-profit receives after a donor’s death has, since then, been tax-exempt. As a result, creating and giving to endowments has become both an act of political protest and an example of spiritual devotion (even if the pot is sweetened with quarterly dividends). Endowments afford individuals the ability to live on past death and to grant material power to individual or corporate bodies into perpetuity. And in that act of endowment, certain virtues – either genetic or moral – are rewarded.

Ultimately, the legislative line in the sand regarding charitable bequest taxation and the creation of the Life Income Plan both serve as evidence of Pew’s belief in a particular kind of religious freedom and his desire to limit the powers of the state in dictating the terms of religious and charitable giving.

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Historical developments like these help us to both make sense of a particular moment in time while also shining a brighter light on our current political environment. By paying close attention to Pew and men like him we learn even more about what it meant to be a political conservative in this mid-century moment of rabid anti-communism and corporate redefinition. By using tax law to perform their adherence to a web of Christian ideals – from charity and thrift to self-reliance and right stewardship – Pew and other conservative philanthropists of his time helped to define the proper role of the church in the political sphere and to dictate where the boundaries of the free market were to be drawn within a murky, purportedly secular, environment.

The Pews were neither the first nor the last to push the boundaries of for-profit and non, or charity and church, in order to gain the type of political influence they desired. Even without a change to the embattled Johnson Amendment, religious organizations and individuals still test the limits of political speech, often through ingeniously creative means and labyrinthine corporate structures. The Greene family of Hobby Lobby fame, for instance, has created a museum, a foundation, a for-profit crafting empire and a number of well-funded academic programs—from elementary school curricula through postdoctoral research fellowships—throughout the country. But the central location of their Museum of the Bible in the nation’s capital shows just how intent they are on inserting their opinions into the heart of a particular set of national debates.

At times, I think, it should be hard to feel more secular than one does when speaking about U.S. tax code or to feel more religious than when referencing the speech of churches. But revenue code has the ability to tell us a great deal about the webs of institutions and actors whose allegiances are rarely stable and whose privileges always evade simple labels. And within the same debates, the privileges of religious corporations can become powerful political pawns. During another historical moment at which what it means to be a Republican, or even a conservative, is up for debate, we owe it to ourselves to pay close attention to the ways in which our nation privileges particular types of speech at the expense of others and distributes both capital and power, influence and air time.

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[1] Here I’m making the distinction between earlier models of giving where individual donors simply gave to the causes they wanted when they wished to one more guided by a “science” of restrained, responsible giving and specialized armies of bureaucratic non-profit administrators.

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Andrew Jungclaus is a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Religion. Andrew received his bachelor’s degree in American studies and English literature from the College of William and Mary, his master’s degree in theology and history from the University of Oxford, and holds master’s degrees from Columbia in the study of religion. Andrew previously worked as a research assistant at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, exploring the concept of theodicy within American civil rights struggles. Andrew’s dissertation research focuses on the evolution of philanthropic models within a history of capitalism.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.