Tax agency says it won't enforce ban on political speech by religious groups
July 15, 2025
In a proposed legal settlement, the Internal Revenue Service has agreed that it will abandon enforcement of longstanding restrictions on religious organizations' political activities, which it says it hasn't been enforcing anyway.
Once the settlement of a lawsuit is accepted by the court, churches will be able to freely discuss political campaigns and candidates during worship services without risking their tax-exempt status, the agency said. The settlement stems from a 2024 lawsuit by the National Religious Broadcasters and other religious organizations.
Rather than defend the bipartisan Johnson Amendment enacted71 years ago the IRS accepted arguments that religious organizations should have the same rights as other groups that are not tax-exempt.
Nonprofits said in a Bloomberg News reportthat the decision"could open the floodgates for political operatives to funnel money to their preferred candidates while receiving generous tax breaks at the expense of taxpayers who may not share those views."
The Johnson Amendment
The Johnson Amendment has been around since 1954, when a youngish Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas) offered an amendment to the tax code prohibiting not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity.
Even as evangelicals have become a massive force in politics in recent decades, Congress has left the Johnson Amendment alone and has, in fact, strengthened it. In 1987, it amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.
A pastor cant tell his flock that Jesus hates Trumps opponent, for example.
As currently written, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
But now the IRS says it has been systematically failing to enforce these crucial protections anyway. Former IRS communications officer Terry Lemons's dismissive comment that "the reality is the IRS hasn't taken much action in this area" isn't a defense.
A last-minute objection
The proposed consent decree is still awaiting approval from U.S. District Court J. Campbell Barker, a process that Citizens United for the Separation of Church and State (AU)hopes to derail.
The Trump administrations radical reinterpretation of the Johnson Amendment is a flagrant, self-serving attack on church-state separation that threatens our democracy by favoring houses of worship over other nonprofits and inserting them into partisan politics, said AU President and CEO Rachel Laser.
President Trump and his Christian Nationalist allies are once again exploiting religion to boost their own political power. Were intervening in this case so we can urge the court to reject the administrations latest gambit to re-write the law.
Some religious leaders called the action "a major step forward in restoring religious freedom in America."
Richard Harris, executive director ofTruth & Liberty, said the Johnson Amendment "has been used to silence pastors from fulfilling their God-given and historic duty to speak the truth on all issues of life.
"The pullback by the IRS implicitly recognizes that historical role of the church. It should be celebrated as an appropriate, albeit long overdue and incomplete, step toward the restoration of Constitutional freedom of religion," he said.