The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said Monday in court documents that churches should be permitted to endorse political candidates.
The move creates an exemption linked to a ban on political activity when it comes to nonprofits, the New York Times reported.
The ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, got its name from former President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 2012, Breitbart News reported that churches endorsing political candidates violated a federal statute, but that statute was unconstitutional. The report also said Johnson was an “extreme liberal” who shoved the United States to the far left.
The outlet continued:
When serving in the Senate on July 2, 1954, Johnson pushed through the Johnson Amendment on the Senate floor without any committee hearings or discussion, making it illegal for nonprofit tax-deductible entities to speak in any manner intended to influence an election.
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The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution protects the ability of churches–including pastors and lay Christians–and adherents of other faiths–to freely live out their faith through participating in the political process. And the Supreme Court has made it clear for more than a century–most recently in 2010 in Citizens United v. FEC, that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment guarantees that citizens can speak as freely through a corporate entity (such as a church) as they can individually about political and social issues.
Per the Times article, the IRS’s recent statement was in a court filing to settle a lawsuit from a pair of churches in Texas and a group of Christian broadcasters who had sued the agency and “previously asked a federal court in Texas to create an even broader exemption — to rule that all nonprofits, religious and secular, were free to endorse candidates to their members.”
The IRS has agreed to what the Times referred to as “a narrower carveout” in the matter. The newspaper continued:
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.
In February 2024, President Donald Trump vowed to defend Christian voters across the nation against political persecution and listed wins for that faith group during his first administration, per Breitbart News.
According to the outlet, one of them was “blocking the IRS from using the Johnson Amendment to interfere with pastors’ freedom of speech.”
The Trump administration is planning to modernize the IRS to be more efficient.
Read the full article here