How conservative Christians cracked a 70-year-old law

In the Blue Room of the White House, once the cameras recording the Easter prayer service cut off, the conversation at President Donald Trump’s dinner table turned to one of the biggest political goals for conservative Christian activists — eliminating a law that banned churches, and other tax-exempt charitable groups, from endorsing political candidates.

Seated across from Trump that April night, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, told the president about how his church faced an IRS inquiry over its tax-exempt status under the Biden administration, after hosting a rally with political figures.

Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, who runs a large ministry with his father’s name, chimed in that his groups had faced similar IRS inquiries during President Barack Obama’s tenure.

At Trump’s request, Jeffress’ church sent the White House Faith Office a seven-page letter outlining what it called “wrongful weaponization” of the law and the “unlawful targeting of our church.” The letter, obtained by The New York Times, included recommended actions and a mention of a Texas lawsuit, which offered a vehicle to declare that the law was wrong.

Three months later, conservative Christians scored a major victory.

Earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service reinterpreted the ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, saying for the first time that churches could endorse candidates from the pulpit. The change, which came via a legal settlement, functionally nullifies a core tenet of the law, giving Christian conservatives their most significant victory involving church political organizing in 70 years. Their ultimate goal is still to totally eliminate the law, through Congress or the Supreme Court, removing all its limits on their political activities.

“Now churches are free,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, which has been working to challenge the law for years. “The leash is gone.”

The IRS’ new approach is the latest in a string of triumphs for conservative Christian groups, which are leveraging their alliance with Trump to redraw boundaries between church and state.

For now, the implications of this latest victory are unclear. On paper, the new IRS policy appears narrow. It grants more freedom only to houses of worship, which the agency already seemed disinclined to police.

The ban on endorsements by churches and other tax-exempt groups dates to 1954, when it was inserted into a tax bill by Lyndon B. Johnson, then a senator, bypassing any debate on the matter. His motives were hardly lofty: Johnson was reacting to efforts by nonprofits that were supporting his rival in a primary.

The Johnson Amendment became an enduring part of nonprofit law, seen by some as an appropriate wall between charities and churches and the dirty business of politics.

But many conservative Christian activists — as well as some independent legal scholars — saw it as a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

“Putting the IRS inside what a church says is a bad fit for the IRS or even for government,” said Benjamin Leff, a law professor at American University who has argued that the law should be more forgiving. He believes that nonprofits should be allowed to say what they want but not allowed to spend significant money to get that message out.

But Leff and other nonprofit scholars said that the IRS needed to be more specific about when and to whom the new policy applies. If the agency leaves it vague, they said, churches could exploit that ambiguity to become more like political action committees.

“The IRS is going to need to enforce that border, to keep it from just swallowing everything up,” Leff said.

Conservative Christian political and legal activists tried for more than 15 years to find an effective strategy to end the Johnson Amendment’s restrictions, from lawsuits to legislation to lobbying.

“It’s not that people or churches want to endorse candidates all the time, but what we do want is the government to stay out of regulating any speech that comes from the pulpit,” said Jeffress, the Dallas pastor. “What a pastor says in a church service is none of the government’s you-know-what business.”

Starting in 2008, a group now called the Alliance Defending Freedom, which worked in recent years to help overturn Roe v. Wade, tried to manufacture a court challenge to the constitutionality of the law. The group organized pastors to speak about candidates and elections from the pulpit, a plan intended to provoke the IRS into a legal confrontation with churches for speaking out in violation of their tax-exempt status.

Among the advocates of that plan was Mike Johnson, then a conservative lawyer and now the speaker of the House.

“I think we would defend that as a constitutional right to free speech,” Johnson, R-La., said in 2008 about the effort.

Over four years, the group organized some 4,000 pastors in the campaign, including some who sent their sermons to the IRS, inviting a crackdown.

But the IRS did not take the bait. Legal experts said the agency appeared to enforce this rule infrequently, allowing candidates of both parties to campaign in churches. In a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center, in fact, more churchgoers said they had heard their pastors endorse Hillary Clinton than Trump.

For the conservative Christians seeking to nullify the Johnson Amendment, minimal enforcement was a kind of victory, but not the one they wanted. The law was still in effect, and the IRS could always choose to enforce it.

Next, they tried politics.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he asked evangelical leaders for their endorsement but learned that the law prevented it. “I didn’t know about the Johnson Amendment,” Trump said this month at a lunch for business leaders organized by the White House Faith Office, recounting the meeting. “I said, ‘You got to be kidding.’”

Conservative Christian leaders pressed him to repeal the amendment once in office, and Trump promised to eliminate it, one of several promises that allowed him — a thrice-married candidate with few Christian bona fides — to consolidate evangelical support. “‘You have more power than anybody, but you aren’t allowed to use your power,’” he remembered telling them.

Republicans added a call to repeal the amendment to their party platform in 2016. Once in office in 2017, Trump vowed to “totally destroy” the law and directed the IRS to not take “any adverse action” against those who violated it. But the law did not change. Republicans in Congress attempted to repeal it but failed when the Senate parliamentarian blocked language for the change.

By the 2020 election, a Pew survey found that evangelical churchgoers, who are mostly Republican, were the most likely congregation to hear a sermon discussing the election but that Black Protestant pastors were the most likely to preach on voter registration and turnout.

Under President Joe Biden, the groups returned to a strategy focused on the courts.

Last year, the National Religious Broadcasters, along with two churches in Texas, sued the IRS. They said they had not violated the rule. But they wanted to — and they wanted a federal judge to let them, by declaring that the First Amendment allowed all tax-exempt groups to endorse candidates.

“There’s a reason we went to the 5th Circuit,” said Perkins of the Family Research Council, who said his group worked to find pastors to be part of the case. “It’s the most conservative circuit in the country.”

The apparent goal was to get that case before the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority. But that would take years.

Then, when Trump won the presidency again, conservative groups saw a chance for a quicker victory.

Jeffress said he believed that the Easter dinner conversation with Trump was a tipping point.

“He determined to do something,” Jeffress said.

On July 7, the IRS said that it had agreed to settle the suit and that it agreed that the Johnson Amendment should not affect “communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith.”

Those conversations, the IRS said, were not campaigning. Rather, they were akin to a private conversation among family members.

The statement applied only to religious houses of worship; it did not change the rules for other tax-exempt nonprofits, like charities and universities.

“President Trump is very proud of this victory for leaders of faith across the country protecting their First Amendment rights,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson.

The IRS statement does not yet have the force of law, even in this specific lawsuit. A federal judge in Texas still has to decide whether to approve it and whether to issue a ruling that would bind the agency to this interpretation of the law.

But nonprofit experts said it seemed clear that the IRS was expressing a belief that was broader than this case and could change the way it enforces the law nationwide. What had been a tacit policy of ignoring pulpit endorsements now appeared to be a formal rule, with unclear limits.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is trying to intervene to block the IRS from carrying out its new policy.

“Most Americans just don’t want their houses of worship to turn into political action committees,” said Rachel Laser, president of the group.

Faith Stevelman, a law professor at New York Law School, said the IRS statement raised other questions. “Who counts as the speaker? The house of worship? The congregation? What counts as a matter of faith or not?” she said.

After all, Stevelman said, modern worship does not happen only inside a physical house of worship. It can be online, on television, in newsletters and Bible studies. She said the IRS needed to detail exactly when the rule applies, and to whom, and when they would be going too far.

“To get out of a land mine about a candidate’s endorsement, you just created half a dozen land mines,” she said.

The IRS declined to answer questions about the policy change. Johnson praised it as a “landmark development” and urged the federal court in Texas to quickly accept the IRS judgment. He wrote that he hoped it would be “a teachable moment” about the separation of church and state, “one of the most misunderstood subjects in our culture.”

“The Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” he wrote.

Already, some evangelical activists are planning to leverage the changes and organize churches ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The Family Research Council has about 18,000 pastors in its network and is vetting additional lists of evangelicals pastors to contact in hopes of “letting them now know that they are free to speak to the issues,” Perkins said.

Note to readers • This article originally appeared in The New York Times.