IRS Approves Endorsing Candidates From Church Pulpits

In an entirely predictable development that is nonetheless a sad landmark in the ongoing collapse of church-state separation, the IRS has signed on to a court filing stipulating that it will no longer even pretend to frown on ministers or other officials of tax-exempt churches for endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. The New York Times reports:

The I.R.S. said on Monday that churches and other houses of worship can endorse political candidates to their congregations, carving out an exemption in a decades-old ban on political activity by tax-exempt nonprofits.

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

“Thus, communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted,” the agency said, in a motion filed jointly with the plaintiffs.

The ban on campaigning by nonprofits is named after former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who introduced it as a senator in 1954. 

Even though the Johnson Amendment has been on the books for many decades, the IRS has become increasingly reluctant to enforce it against churches who claim it abrogates their First Amendment religious liberty. It was once mainly an issue for Black churches that carried out “Souls to the Polls” voter-mobilization drives on Sundays before elections, though they rarely issued explicit candidate endorsements. More recently, conservative Evangelical churches have been pushing the envelope in their zeal for (typically) Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. A 2022 investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found plenty of examples of blatant Johnson Amendment violations:

Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.

Trump campaigned on revoking the Johnson Amendment in his first presidential run as a way to attract conservative Evangelicals unhappy with his heathenish ways and has occasionally (if inaccurately) boasted that he’s killed it. But now the IRS, under his direction, may be turning fiction into fact.

What’s most interesting about the development is the strange “family discussions” rationale for letting churches endorse political candidates. Revoking the Johnson Amendment altogether, as the IRS has been urged to do by many conservatives, would have been far more straightforward. Perhaps the IRS’s political commissars wanted to highlight the good news to their religious constituencies before wading into broader Johnson Amendment issues. But quite possibly the narrower position was intended to create space for the Trump administration’s ongoing threats to revoke the tax-exempt status of universities like Harvard, which are alleged to have promoted disfavored ideologies and causes.

In any event, whatever lingering inhibitions religious leaders might have about browbeating their flocks into voting for candidates deemed to be blessed by God can be expected to dissolve just in time for a wave of church-based politicking during the 2026 midterm elections. While this may be welcomed by some on the Christian left who would love to campaign for Democrats from the pulpit, the IRS is mostly sanctioning a full-on crusade for conservative Republicanism from right-wing churches bent on banning abortion, reversing marriage equality, and restoring a patriarchal family structure as God’s will on earth. It’s going to get very politically noisy on Sundays next year.