July 8, 2025
The IRS said in a new court filing that clergy and houses of worship should be allowed to make political endorsements, a potential move away from an 71-year-old tax policy that banned the mixing of religion and politics.
Banning nonprofits — including congregations — from participating in political campaigns violates the First Amendment’s protection of the right to the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech, IRS Commissioner Billy Long said in a court filing Monday in a Texas federal court case.
Nonprofits should be allowed to make political endorsements and not lose their tax exemption, the IRS said in the court filing. Religious congregations, the filing said, are like families and communication between them should not be deemed “participation” in a campaign.
“When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith, it neither “participate[s]” nor “intervene[s]” in a “political campaign,” within the ordinary meaning of those words, according to the filing.
A voice message left with the IRS was not immediately returned, and it isn’t clear whether the agency can unilaterally change the policy. The filing was first reported by the New York Times.
In a lawsuit filed in a Texas district court earlier this year, two religious groups, the National Religious Broadcasters, an evangelical industry organization, and Intercessors for America, a conservative Christian advocacy group, sued the IRS to challenge the 1954 Johnson Amendment. The provision in the U.S. tax code bans nonprofits, including congregations, from participating in political campaigns. The amendment, named after its main sponsor, then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas), is unconstitutional, the groups argued.
In its filing Monday, the IRS said it agreed.
For a decade, President Donald Trump has promised members of his conservative Christian base that he would end the Johnson Amendment. In 2019, he falsely claimed at times to have “gotten rid of it.”
The IRS rarely enforces the Johnson Amendment, and polls show most Americans are wary of their clergy or houses of worship explicitly endorsing political campaigns.
In a 2019 Pew Research poll, 76 percent of Americans said “churches and other religious organizations … should not come out in favor of one candidate over another.”
In 2024, Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention that provides research on U.S. Protestants, found that just 2 percent of Protestant pastors had endorsed from the pulpit. But Protestant congregants were becoming more open to their church leaders making political endorsements in recent years, Lifeway found.
“As the nation becomes less religious, Americans have less concern about the church’s influence over politics,” Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, said in a Lifeway press release about the poll. “Yet the majority of Americans still don’t want official candidate support coming from churches.”