Pastors ponder how best to exercise new freedom to politick

Within hours of a quiet court filing this week, conservative activists put American pastors on notice. On Monday, the Internal Revenue Service notified key religious groups that it would no longer prohibit nonprofit organizations from participating in electoral politics.

“Of course, every pastor with a spine already knew this – and was speaking freely from his pulpit,” conservative commentator Eric Metaxas posted on X. “There is now officially no excuse. If your pastor is being timid, FIND ANOTHER CHURCH. Or be complicit in evil.”

The IRS changes are part of a settlement with the National Religious Broadcasters, Intercessors for America, and two Texas churches. The groups preemptively sued the IRS over the Johnson Amendment, which makes staying out of electoral politics a condition for maintaining tax-exempt status under 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. The status makes charitable nonprofits exempt from paying federal income tax and lets donors deduct donations to those organizations from their taxable income. Now, the IRS will consider political endorsements by pastors a “family discussion” within a church.

Free speech advocates are cheering the federal reinterpretation of the Johnson Amendment, though some pastors worry that it will usher in a new wave of politicization in the church.

“I love the fact that churches can endorse a political candidate,” President Donald Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “I think it’s great if a pastor, minister, priest or rabbi … if somebody of faith wants to endorse, I think it’s something that I’d like to hear. [The Johnson Amendment] was a very severe penalty. Those people were not allowed to speak up, now they’re allowed to speak up.”

Then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, D-Texas, sponsored the amendment, which passed in 1954. It prohibited not only churches but also any 501(c)3 tax-exempt organizations from participating in political campaigns. If they do, the IRS may revoke the tax-exempt status and fine the organization. The amendment was added to the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 under President Ronald Reagan.

“The language is a little cloudy on what it means to intervene in a political campaign involving elective office,” said Jon Whitehead, a Kansas City–based attorney. He frequently represents pastors and religious groups in free speech and taxation cases.

Even though the amendment is only supposed to apply to political candidates and their campaigns, Whitehead said some religious communities have assumed it blocks all political speech.

“The Johnson Amendment never should have applied to legislative issues or legislation or constitutional issues,” he said. “But because the language was fuzzy, many pastors got it in their head, ‘Well, I can’t talk about politics.’ And that’s caused lots of confusion in American pulpits and churches over the time it’s been in action.”

Since its enactment, the IRS has only used the Johnson Amendment to revoke tax-exempt status from a church once. In 1992, it penalized the Church at Pierce Creek, a New York church that ran an advertisement opposing Bill Clinton in the presidential election. In 2009, a Minnesota church successfully blocked an IRS audit that launched because the pastor endorsed former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. A district court determined the audit authorization was not approved by a qualified individual. The IRS fined Cornerstone Chapel Senior Pastor Gary Hamrick after he hosted a political tour at his Leesburg, Va., church in 2020 and said Democratic politics were evil. Since then, Hamrick has publicly endorsed several Republican candidates.

In 2008, Alliance Defending Freedom launched the Pulpit Freedom Initiative, which set aside one Sunday each year for pastors across the nation to discuss politics from the pulpit. Then the ADF sent copies of the sermons to the IRS, hoping to spark a legal battle and spur the Supreme Court to overturn the law. Only 35 churches joined that year, and none were fined. Hundreds more joined in following years but were likewise not investigated. ADF no longer runs the initiative.

In 2017, Trump vowed to repeal the Johnson Amendment outright and signed an executive order prohibiting the Treasury Department from punishing religious organizations that spoke on political issues. At the National Prayer Breakfast this year, he again promised to take aim at the Johnson Amendment.

At the Justice Department’s first hearing of the Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias in April, former ADF CEO Michael Farris testified on behalf of Cornerstone Church in Leesburg, Va., where he attends. Farris claimed at the hearing that the IRS under the Biden administration was biased against Christians.

“This is one area where Donald Trump made campaign promises and is keeping them quickly, vigorously, and with his enthusiastic support,” Farris posted about the task force hearing on Facebook.

Farris is also lead counsel for National Religious Broadcasters in its current case against the IRS. He told me that the complaint included several videos of churches endorsing former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and other prominent Democrats.

“The complaint said that the real rule in effect was we will not enforce the law against churches that say good things about Democrats, but we will enforce the law against churches that say good things about Republicans,” Farris told me.

Even before the IRS’s updated guidance, some conservative groups have traveled the country specifically to train pastors on how to be politically active without running afoul of the Johnson Amendment. Richard Vega is a pastor of Community Transformation Church in Houston, Texas. He is also an advisory board member for the Harris County Republican Party and frequently travels to Washington for events with the White House Faith Office.

“I made my mind up years ago that I was either going to abide by the word of God or abide by the 501(c)3,” Vega told me. He said he felt like the Johnson Amendment prohibited his church but not him from personally getting involved in politics. But he said the threat of losing the tax-exempt status serves as a chilling effect for pastors to engage in politics at all. “Their voices aren’t to remain silent. They can speak. I’m glad that the IRS said they’re changing this, because now pastors will feel more at liberty to speak truths.”

Vega holds training sessions with other pastors, encouraging them to join local political boards and speak out on political topics in a personal capacity. With the updated guidance from the IRS, he said his work just got that much easier.

“There are political candidates in all of our communities, but if they don’t align with Biblical beliefs and values, pastors need to be able to address that from the pulpit and not be silenced,” Vega said.

Because political activity by churches has continued even under the Johnson Amendment, the effect of the rule change is unlikely to alter politics on a national scale. But some pastors fear that it will place undue pressure on the American church.

“I could think of at least a dozen pastors who were run out of their churches for not openly supporting Donald Trump,” said Chris Davis, pastor of Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. “I think pastors do best when we retain that posture as speaking the word of the Lord, speaking about the kingdom of God, and just like Jesus, not entrenching ourselves into the minutia of politics.”

Davis said that his church is openly pro-life and prays in front of abortion centers. He’s also spoken on immigration and some political matters from the pulpit, but he said he does not talk about specific policies. His purpose is to promote the kingdom of God, not the government of man, he said.

“Your vote is one way to love your neighbor as yourself,” Davis said. “I don’t want all the other ways to love our neighbors to be compromised by wading into the very complex realities of saying you have to vote for this one person.”

Michael Wear, CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, says he’s concerned that political activists have already used the lack of Johnson Amendment enforcement to pressure pastors into expanding beyond their mission. He said the Johnson Amendment also provided some protection for pastors from political interest groups seeking a foothold.

“I’m concerned about the ways in which this will open up religious congregations and pastors to not just coercion, but what I’m most concerned about is this undermining of the trust and authority of the pulpit,” Wear said. “This accelerates a culture in which one would be skeptical that the pastor is forming their view in line with God’s Word or wondering what politicians they spoke with.”

The Faith and Freedom Coalition, one of the largest evangelical grassroots organizations, mobilizes pastors for conservative causes. Madgie Nicolas, a former Trump administration adviser and current national strategist for the FFC’s African American Voices, hosted a roundtable of Christian conservatives at the organization’s annual conference in Washington last month. At the time, she told me she often urged pastors to address politics from the pulpit, even when the threat of an IRS investigation was a possibility.

“I go out there speaking on behalf of Christ, and everywhere that I go, in every church, I tell the pastor if you have fear to speak out, you are not working for the kingdom, and I would appreciate that you pray about it and go find another position,” Nicolas said. “If Jesus was a coward, he would never have died for us. … It needs to be faith over fear.”