New IRS rules give Texas pastors more power than ever

Texas Rep. Nate Schatzline recently stood before a gathering of conservative activists just outside Fort Worth, recapping legislative wins and previewing what’s next at the Capitol. On this day, however, he was speaking not only as a lawmaker but also as a pastor.

A week earlier, the Internal Revenue Service decided to allow religious leaders to endorse political candidates from the pulpit, effectively upending a provision in decades-old tax law barring such activity. Schatzline, a longtime pastor at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, was excited. The IRS affirmed “what we already knew,” he said at the July 14 meeting: The government can’t stop the church from getting civically engaged.

“There is absolutely no reason that a politician should be more vocal about social issues than your pastor, and so I need pastors to stand up,” Schatzline told the crowd made up of members of True Texas Project, a Tarrant County-based organization that is a key part of a powerful political network pushing lawmakers to adopt its hard-line opposition to immigration and LGBTQ+ rights and to advance conservative education policies.

“We need pastors to be bold.”

For decades, pastors like him have fought for the right to speak on political issues and actively endorse candidates in their capacity as religious leaders. Now, before a judge has weighed in on whether to allow the IRS policy change, some religious leaders are already calling on congregations to demand greater political involvement from their churches.

While the tax agency’s stance applies to churches nationwide, Texas is expected to be where it will matter most, said Ryan Burge, a political and religious expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

More than 200 megachurches call Texas home. In the Lone Star State, pastors seem to have a larger profile in social, political and religious discussions. “Texas will be the epicenter for testing all these ideas out,” he said.

Schatzline said as much in a follow-up interview with Fort Worth Report. A nonprofit that Mercy Culture Church previously created to help elect candidates to political office is working with President Donald Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board to expand that work and to mobilize churches and pastors to get them more civically engaged, the state representative said.

Officials from the White House and the advisory board did not respond to a request for comment.

While Schatzline said pastors can choose not to be vocal about candidates, congregations like his may feel differently. “Especially our conservatives across America, they have an expectation that their pastor is going to speak to the issues of truth,” he said.

For more than 70 years, churches and other religious institutions in the United States were told to steer clear of “any political activity” or risk losing their tax-exempt status. That federal measure, the Johnson Amendment, was added into IRS tax law in 1954 and named after its author, Lyndon B. Johnson, then a Texas congressman.

In August 2024, during the last months of the Biden administration, an association of religious broadcasters and two East Texas churches sued the IRS, arguing that the Johnson Amendment infringed upon their freedom of speech and religion.

Nearly a year later, the IRS, now under Trump, and the plaintiffs filed a proposed joint settlement outlining in the agreement that when a house of worship speaks to its congregation about “electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith,” it neither participates nor intervenes in a political campaign and so doesn’t violate the amendment. The court must now consider their proposal.

IRS officials did not respond to a request for comment on what prompted its decision.

The biggest implication of the proposed legal agreement is a push on pastors to be “more political than they want to be,” said Burge, a former Baptist pastor who is now a professor of practice at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.

“It all comes down to the 5% of people on each side of the political spectrum who are the loudest and are trying to drag you into their fervor,” said Burge, adding that congregants could threaten to leave a church if their pastor doesn’t talk about their political stances.

A previous investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune highlighted 20 examples of churches that were seemingly violating the Johnson Amendment. That was more than what the IRS itself had investigated in the previous decade. Thirteen of those congregations were in the North Texas area, including Mercy Culture, where Schatzline was ordained a pastor in 2024.

The tax agency largely abdicated enforcing the amendment, the newsrooms previously reported.

For example, in the mid-2000s, the IRS investigated a little more than 100 churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, after citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Agency officials didn’t revoke the tax-exempt status of any churches, instead sending warning letters.

Following the filing of the proposed settlement in July, the Fort Worth Report identified at least three churches in Texas whose leaders openly praised the IRS decision, including Mercy Culture and Sand Springs Church, one of those involved in the lawsuit that sparked the IRS change.

The day after the court filing, Mercy Culture Church posted a screenshot on Instagram and Facebook of The New York Times article detailing the news and noting it was “time for the church to get loud!”

“We will not be silent on issues of righteousness, life, liberty, or leadership. We don’t endorse parties — we stand for the Kingdom!” the post read.

In Athens, less than 100 miles south of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Sand Springs Church senior pastor Erick Graham told congregants during a July 9 Bible study that the IRS ruling is “encouraging.”

He told congregants during the teaching, which was livestreamed on Facebook and reviewed by the newsroom, that the church was not going to comment on the IRS court filing until the judge’s final ruling approving or denying the proposed settlement.

“A powerful tool”

Megachurches with the means to livestream services online or by broadcasting “could be a powerful tool for promoting political candidates,” said David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and an adjunct professor at Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University.

In North Texas, First Baptist Dallas draws about 16,000 members to attend worship in person or through several streaming methods, according to the church’s website. Nondenominational Mercy Culture Church draws thousands of worshipers to its flagship location in Fort Worth, The Washington Post has reported. Since its inception, the church has formed other campuses in east Fort Worth, Dallas, Waco and Austin.

First Baptist Dallas’ lead pastor, Robert Jeffress, an avid Trump supporter, thanked the president on Facebook for the IRS’ recent interpretation of the Johnson Amendment.

“This would have never happened without the strong leadership of our great President Donald Trump! Honored to get to thank him personally today in the Oval Office,” Jeffress wrote in his July 9 post. “Government has NO BUSINESS regulating what is said in pulpits!”

Religion News Service reported this spring that Jeffress was one of multiple pastors who told Trump during a White House Easter service in April that the IRS had investigated their churches for their political endorsements. Jeffress told The New York Times he believed the conversation was a “tipping point,” in the new IRS interpretation of the Johnson Amendment, something Trump himself promised to do during his 2016 presidential campaign.

He did not respond to requests from the Fort Worth Report for comment. A spokesperson for the church said he was out of town.

Different religious traditions may respond to the policy change in distinct ways, said Matthew Wilson, a religious and politics professor at Southern Methodist University.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United Methodist Church, for example, both announced they would maintain their stances on not endorsing or opposing political candidates. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national nonprofit advocating for separation between church and state, announced July 30 it is joining others in condemning efforts to ignore or weaken the Johnson Amendment.

While some religious leaders may be reluctant to engage in politics, white conservative churches, which generally support Republican candidates, and African American churches, which historically have favored Democrats, have “come right up to the line” of the provisions in the Johnson Amendment — “if not sometimes crossing it,” Wilson said.

“Those religious organizations have spoken in more explicitly political terms for a long time, and this [IRS decision] frees them even more to do that,” he said.

Mansfield Mayor Michael Evans, who has been pastor for 30 years at Bethlehem Baptist Church, southeast of Fort Worth, said he doesn’t plan to endorse candidates for the congregation because it could only lead to more division. At his predominantly African American church, congregants come from both ends of the political spectrum, he said.

While the candidates put forth by political parties and their philosophies may change, Evans said, “the word of God remains the same.”

Mercy Culture Church is already well down the path of exerting its political influence. Schatzline launched its nonprofit For Liberty & Justice in 2021 after a church elder unsuccessfully ran to become the mayor of Fort Worth. The organization partners with local churches in grassroots campaigning efforts to “promote Godly candidates for local government,” according to its website.

The nonprofit created an online program called “Campaign University,” designed to train people of faith on how to run for office. The organization’s “liberty rallies” have “influenced the decisions of local school boards and city councils to lead with Christian values in Tarrant County,” according to its website.

For Liberty & Justice has supported 48 candidates since its inception. One was Schatzline.