Five years after a worship service landed his church in hot water, Dallas megachurch leader Robert Jeffress brought his grievances to a religious freedom commission set up by President Donald Trump.
Jeffress, the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas and longtime supporter of Trump, testified on Wednesday at a meeting of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission in Dallas as part of a broader hearing on religious freedom in the military. During the meeting, Jeffress and other executives from his church railed against the Johnson Amendment, which prevents nonprofits from making political endorsements.
At issue was a 2020 service at First Baptist during the height of the pandemic, when the church hosted then-Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Ben Carson, a member of Trump’s cabinet at the time who now sits on the religious liberty commission. At the service, Pence urged Americans to mask up and wash their hands to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a secular nonprofit, filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service over the event that summer, saying that it “crossed the line from pastoral to political.”…