Jerry Falwell Sr., speaking at a politically inflected rally in 2006 from a stand engraved with a cross — but apparently not orating in his capacity as a pastor, legally speaking. Courtesy of Getty Images
By Mira Fox
July 9, 2025
For over half a century, religious bodies — or any other tax-exempt organization — have been prohibited from endorsing political candidates for election, thanks to a little piece of tax code called the Johnson Amendment, added to the IRS in 1954 by then-senator Lyndon B. Johnson.
But the Internal Revenue Service, which was in charge of enforcing these limits, said Monday in a court filing that it would consider endorsements from the pulpit to be like a private “family discussion.”
It’s a huge change that could see an increasing amount of political influence driven by the political right. At least that’s what pundits are saying. Except for the fact that tons of churches have been endorsing candidates the whole time.
Prior to the new IRS filing, the rules about endorsements were loose; the pulpit was more or less the only place that a religious official could not make an endorsement. The theory was that religious leaders could speak anywhere else without their views being ascribed to their office.
A 2007 copy of the IRS Revenue Rules poses the hypothetical example of a well-known minister, recognizable throughout the community, giving his endorsement at a candidate’s campaign event. The Revenue Rules state that because the minister is not making his endorsement at an official church function, it is not campaign intervention by the church.
Of course, in practice, nearly everyone — especially that hypothetical minister’s parishioners — will interpret his endorsement as part of his church teachings. Religious influence is not limited to services, and religious institutions provide guidance and community beyond sermons. People look to their religious leaders for far more than just spiritual guidance.
Besides, it never took much to get around the Johnson Amendment.
The separation of church and PAC
Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist who died in 2007, rose to fame as a pastor; he headed a megachurch and ran a gospel TV program. But he is even more famous for his influence on politics — he founded the Moral Majority, which was, in its heyday in the 1980s, the largest Evangelical political organization in the country, and which played a major role in shaping numerous elections, and helped put Ronald Reagan into office.
The Johnson Amendment kept him from using his massively profitable televangelism enterprise to directly raise money for the Moral Majority’s electoral PACs. (He did it anyway, however, and was fined $50,000, barely a drop of the more than $90 million his TV ministry had raised in the audited time period.)
What he could — and did — do, legally, was blur the line between his church and his political activism. Falwell might not have technically endorsed Reagan from his literal pulpit, but he was a major figure with a following built in that pulpit, and they listened to him as a religious leader regardless of where exactly he delivered his sermon.
Black churches also utilized the leniency of the Johnson Amendment. The Black Slate and Fannie Lou Hamer Political Action Committees were founded by church leaders, and endorsed candidates that were perceived to be best for the Black community. The fact that these PACs were founded by well-known reverends and birthed from specific parishes did not result in an IRS crackdown on those churches. After all, legally, the PACs are separate entities from the 501(c)(3) churches, no matter how clear it may be that they are, in fact, related.
It wasn’t even necessary to use a separate PAC to skirt the Johnson Amendment, as long as you had enough devoted followers. That was true of Falwell. And it is true of Haredi leaders as well; it’s a well-known fact of New York politics that anyone who wants to win the mayoral or gubernatorial races needs to court Haredi voters, who largely vote as a bloc according to the rabbis’ endorsements. The fact that the rabbis’ slate is not necessarily read off at the bima of a synagogue has little to do with the impact those endorsements have.
Unenforceable rules
Beyond the normalcy of religious endorsements that might as well be declared from the pulpit, in recent years, many churches have quite literally endorsed candidates from the pulpit.
In 2017, during his first term, Trump issued an executive order preventing the IRS from auditing churches for political activity. And since then, with the Johnson Amendment basically unenforceable, churches have not only endorsed candidates from the pulpit — which many have done — but functioned as PACs themselves.
Because churches do not have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, and because they have been able to engage in political activism since 2017, politically motivated donations to churches have become a tax deductible way to influence elections.
“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told The Texas Tribune in 2022, for an investigation into numerous churches endorsing candidates.
It’s so hard to step over the line that there’s only one instance of a church actually losing its tax exempt status — so notable that the IRS links to the decision on its page. Branch Ministries, a New York-based church, ran two full-page ads in major national newspapers, urging voters to reject Bill Clinton and reelect George H.W. Bush. “Christian Beware,” the ads said. This overstep made Branch Ministries the only religious organization to ever get more than a fine.
If you ask some people, like my mother — a retired nonprofit tax lawyer — this is because people mostly have toed the line, knowing that political endorsements were illegal; only Branch Ministries ever behaved badly enough to lose its 501(c)(3) status. Indeed, many rabbis have already said that they will continue to keep politics out of their prayer, despite the IRS changes.
“It wasn’t very enforced, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an effect. It was the law,” she told me of the Johnson Amendment.
But if you ask me, it’s because it’s too hard to draw the line between religion and political advocacy; religion so often informs people’s political values, just as it informs and shapes other parts of their cultural understandings and values. Someone who religiously opposes abortion will likely vote for a candidate who also opposes abortion. Someone whose religious values emphasize feeding the poor might vote for someone who proposes expanding funding for food stamps.
Or not — not everyone votes according to their religious values, or interprets their demands in the same way. But if they do look to God — or God’s representative in the pulpit — for political guidance, it has never mattered if they were preaching at a church or at a political rally. If they are the kind of wise leader you trust to know the ways of God, you have to assume they’re hewing to the same values in a sermon or a campaign speech. Or at least, I’d hope so.
