Republicans across the country are not taking their historic midterm beatdown in stride, and according to a recent report from Right Wing Watch, a notably MAGA-linked pastor has taken his despair a step further, calling for “another January 6.”
Lorenzo Sewell is the leader of 180 Church, a non-denominational Christian church based in Detroit, and has become increasingly connected with GOP and MAGA politics in the last several years. In 2024, he was a guest speaker at the Republican National Convention, and in 2025, he conducted one of the benedictions at Trump’s second-term inauguration. Recently, reports have even suggested that he is considering running for public office himself as a Republican.
Right Wing Watch’s report this week also described Sewell as “an ardent stolen election conspiracy theorist whose obsession with exposing alleged voter fraud has become too extreme even for the Trump White House.” Now, his rejection of election results that are unflattering to Republicans and the MAGA movement has continued, as during an appearance on the “FlashPoint” podcast after the midterm blue wave, he once again called the elections fraudulent and suggested Trump’s followers should rise up against them.
Sewell’s argument for why fraud must have taken place in the midterms echoed the common right-wing misconception about elections, often lampooned with the phrase “land doesn’t vote.” Often, conservatives might share electoral maps of certain states with more counties colored red, and argue that this must be an indication that the state should elect Republicans in state-wide races, despite the fact that Democrats tend to win counties that are more heavily populated, giving them the edge.
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church tax exemption needs to fucking end. or churches need to end. try the first. if it’s too hard, try the second.
It’s unpopular, but I disagree. Just because people are currently biased against Christianity (for good reason) does not mean tax exemption against places of worship should end. There’s still a lot of churches of multiple different faiths that feed the hungry, house the unhoused, and clean the unkempt. Until there’s a reliable safety net in place to do that, taxing the good will of congregations that genuinely trust their church more than government (for good reason) to care for those in need is moving backward.
All of these should be publicly funded social services with accountability for every cent used, not some independent entity with no accountability that uses the needs of our most vulnerable to spread some 2000+ year old fairy tale.
Yeah, in an ideal world that would be the case, but as it stands, America is about 100 years behind Europe in the infrastructure required to provide these social services. What I’m suggesting is building pilot programs to help rollout and build them out over time. As these programs start to become readily available, then we can kick churches off the exempt list. Taking them away suddenly would just cause undue harm to people in need because you have an axe to grind.
Plus doesn’t this whole argument send the message that taxation is a form of punishment?
Those services should be tax exemptions/credits [write offs] just like they are for everyone else. Need to prevent the next Joel Osteen tax the fuck out of churches except the money they truly do use for good.
I feed the hungry. I’m not tax exempt. most people I know who do that aren’t. I used to work to get people housed. I wasn’t just not tax exempt; I was a criminal. I literally used to set up warm camp shower setups for people. no tax exemption for anyone involved-i don’t know if it was illegal, but I’ve seen organized crime with worse opsec than our shower gang. plus, I’ve never hooked a car battery up to a 7 year old girl or raped anyone of any age. two things I can’t say about the Christians i grew up around.
so, the people who tortured me as a child and raped most of my friends, and also never fed clothed or housed anyone, never let anyone crash at their place while they detoxed then helped them get clean, never walked anyone through a bad trip, never provided healthcare to anyone, never hid anyone from the genocide police and in fact sometimes were the genocide police, deserve better status than me in the eyes of the government? the world is better off without you. you believe in heaven, why the fuck are you defiling us all with your continued presence here?
I mean fuck, by your logic, why not make punk bands tax exempt?
That’s circular logic.
To build trust in government you have to have working social safety nets. To build social safety nets you have to tax. To tax you have to remove tax exemptions. That’s the opposite of backwards.
Eitherway fewer and fewer people attend church anymore so those charities are going away regardless in the coming years. Why wait for that crisis to materialize?
You can’t in good faith argue that the United States doesn’t have enough tax revenue to provide these services. We spend $950 billion a year on the military. We would barely have to put a dent in that to fund these programs.
They can itemize and write those off like any other business.