Should pastors endorse candidates? The Johnson Amendment fight, argued fairly

Let me tell you about the most efficient piece of lawmaking in the history of the tax code. By most accounts it took no hearings, no witnesses and no debate to speak of. A senator stood up on the floor, offered a few lines, and they were adopted by voice vote. Seventy years later, pastors still plan their sermons around it.

That is the Johnson Amendment, and the fight over it is one of the odd ones in conservative politics, because the people who agree about almost everything else, from the role of faith to the size of the IRS, do not agree about this. Some want it repealed tomorrow. Others, including some pastors, want it kept. I'm going to give you both sides at full strength and then tell you what I think.

What it actually says

Start with the text, because most of the arguments about the Johnson Amendment are arguments about a law the arguers have not read.

The amendment is not a separate statute. It lives inside Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, the section that grants tax exemption to organizations "organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific" and similar purposes. The exemption comes with conditions. The relevant condition says the organization may 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."

Three things to notice.

1. It is about candidates. The rule bars intervening in a campaign for or against a candidate for public office. It does not bar speaking about issues, abortion, marriage, taxes or the Ten Commandments. A pastor may preach on every policy question that matters.
2. It binds the organization, not the person. A pastor may endorse a candidate as a private citizen, on his own time, in his own name. What he may not do, under the IRS's reading, is use the church's pulpit, newsletter or money to do it officially.
3. The penalty is loss of exemption. And the exemption matters. A church that loses it can have the contributions its members make stop being deductible, and in principle its own income becomes taxable.

One more wrinkle: churches get automatic recognition as tax-exempt and do not have to apply for 501(c)(3) status the way other charities do, but they are still covered by the conditions.

How it got there

The story, as it is usually told, goes like this. In 1954 Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate's Democratic leader and a candidate for re-election in Texas, was reportedly irritated by two tax-exempt groups, Facts Forum and the Committee for Constitutional Government, that had supported his opponent in the Democratic primary. On the floor of the Senate, on July 2, 1954, during the debate on the big rewrite of the tax code, he offered an amendment adding the language about political campaigns. It was accepted without much discussion, and it went into the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. (The words "or in opposition to" were added later, in 1987.)

I want to be careful here, because historians differ about how much of Johnson's motive was personal and how much was general. What is not in dispute is the method: a floor amendment, adopted without hearings, with no one asking what it would mean for churches. The campaign ban went in as a floor amendment, not as the product of a considered study.

Notice that the founders did not do things this way. The Constitution's design assumes that a law that burdens speech gets argued over. This one slid through. That fact alone does not make the rule wrong, but it ought to make us a little suspicious of anyone who says it came down from Sinai.

Enforcement, in fact

How often has the rule been used against churches? Seldom. The best-known case is Branch Ministries v. Rossotti, decided by the D.C. Circuit in 2000. A church in New York, the Church at Pierce Creek, placed a full-page ad in USA Today and The Washington Times in 1992 urging Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton. The IRS revoked its exemption, and the court upheld the revocation, calling the church's constitutional and statutory objections without merit. The church could still operate. It lost the tax treatment, though the court noted it could regain exemption by staying out of campaigns.

Beyond that, the enforcement record is thin, which is one reason both sides can argue their case. Opponents say a law that is rarely enforced but always feared is the worst kind, because it chills speech without ever being tested. Defenders say that a law rarely violated needs no repeal.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday and the push for repeal

In 2008 the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-liberty law group, began an annual event it called Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Participating pastors deliberately preached sermons about candidates, in violation of the IRS's reading, then sent the recordings to the agency, daring it to act. The point was to provoke a test case and, failing that, to show the rule was unenforceable. Hundreds of pastors took part over the years. The IRS has not taken direct legal action against churches over the event.

Politically, the push has had a champion at the top. President Trump promised at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2017 to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, and in May of that year signed an executive order that told the Treasury that churches should not be found guilty of implied endorsements where secular organizations would not be. An executive order cannot repeal a statute, however, and it did not. In a July 2025 court filing, the IRS itself said that churches may endorse candidates in their usual channels of communication without tax consequences, but a filing is not a statute either. The text of the law remains in Section 501(c)(3). Amending it would take an act of Congress.

The case for repeal, as strong as I can make it

Here it is, numbered.

1. It is a speech restriction written as a tax rule. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. A rule that tells a church what it may say about candidates, on pain of losing its exempt status, is a law affecting both.
2. The government should not be sitting in judgment of sermons. To enforce the rule, an IRS agent has to read, or listen to, what a pastor said and decide whether it crossed from "moral issue" to "support for a candidate." That is precisely the kind of entanglement between government and religious speech that the Constitution should make us nervous about. Imagine the audit: a revenue agent parsing a homily on Ruth and Boaz for hidden electoral meaning. Folks, that is not a hypothetical I made up to be funny. It is where the logic of the rule leads.
3. The exemption is not a subsidy the government can condition. Churches were never taxed in this country. The Supreme Court in Walz v. Tax Commission (1970) upheld property-tax exemptions for churches on the ground that exemption created only minimal involvement between church and state, far less than taxing churches would. Exemption is the default, not a grant. To treat it as a favor that comes with strings is to get the history backward.
4. Other nonprofits speak up, and so do the press. Newspapers, which have corporate and tax privileges of their own, endorse candidates routinely. So do labor unions, which are exempt under a different section of the code. Only the 501(c)(3) charities, a category that includes churches, are gagged. If a church's endorsement is a danger to the republic, the question is why a newspaper's is not.
5. The rule is not applied evenly. Critics on the right say churches that are plainly political on one side of the aisle have been left alone while others have been warned. I cannot prove that, and the IRS record is thin enough that it is hard to test. But the possibility alone is a reason to doubt a rule that depends on the discretion of an agency.

The case against repeal: the pastors' own argument

Now the other side, which I think is more interesting than people on my side of the aisle admit. Some of the strongest defenders of the status quo are pastors and religious leaders themselves, and their reasons are theirs, not the IRS's.

1. The pulpit is not a campaign office. A congregation includes people of every party. A pastor who endorses a candidate makes every member who disagrees feel unwelcome, and he turns a shared altar into a partisan one. Many pastors say the rule gives them a useful excuse: "I'm not allowed to," they can say to the pressure groups that want to use the pulpit.
2. Political endorsements corrupt the message. History offers a warning. When a church is allied with a party, it tends to become the party's servant. The established churches of Europe did not fare well when they became tools of governments. The Black Regiment of the American Revolution preached about liberty, not about which man to elect. A church that is known for who it endorses will be known for little else.
3. The money. If churches could endorse and spend on campaigns, donations that are now tax-deductible would be flowing into politics. That raises a question about whether the taxpayer should be subsidizing electioneering. A repeal would turn the churches into the largest, least transparent pool of political organizing in the country. Whether it would is open to debate, but the concern is not silly.
4. The rule protects churches from the state. Some religious leaders argue the opposite of what the repeal side says: the ban keeps the government from claiming a right to see into the church's politics. A church that endorses candidates invites the government to regulate its campaign activity, reporting and spending in the way it regulates every political committee. Better a clean wall than a messy partnership.

Those are real arguments, made in good faith, by people who love their churches.

My verdict

Here's what I think. Both sides are half right, which is why it is a fight.

The pastors are right about the pulpit. A sermon is not a rally, and a church that turns into a precinct operation has lost something it can't buy back. I would counsel any pastor, as a matter of wisdom, to preach the whole counsel of Scripture and trust the congregation to vote its conscience. That is advice, not law.

But advice is the point. The question is who decides. If a pastor chooses to say from his own pulpit that a candidate is unfit, that is a decision for him and his congregation, and the Constitution gives it to them. The government has no business asking a church to prove it kept its mouth shut on the right subjects in order to stay in good standing. The right fix is not to force the church to be partisan or to bar it from being partisan. The right fix is to take the government out of the sermon.

That means Congress should amend the statute. A narrow repeal, protecting speech by a church to its own members through its ordinary channels, with the spending and organizational rules for campaign activity staying where they are, would answer the free-speech objection without opening the door to a flood of tax-deductible political money. Whether a particular proposal strikes that balance is a matter of drafting, and you should read the text of any bill before you cheer for it.

What conservatives should not do is pretend that the question is easy, or that the other side consists of enemies of religion. Some of the people defending the amendment are pastors and have given their lives to their flocks.

How this fits the larger argument

The fight over the Johnson Amendment is a small piece of a larger issue: how much the government should be able to condition benefits on the surrender of a right. You see the same pattern in Bob Jones University, the IRS and the question it left every church, where the question was whether tax exemption could be conditioned on policy, and in A thought experiment where the IRS fact-checks every Sunday sermon. For the American tradition of clergy speaking on public questions, read The Boston sermon of 1750 that taught colonists when to resist a king and pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement. The text of the First Amendment is in the Constitution, and you can follow how the IRS and Congress spend your money at the national debt clock.

The case in brief

1. The Johnson Amendment is a 1954 floor amendment, adopted without hearings, that bars 501(c)(3) organizations, churches included, from intervening in campaigns for or against candidates.
2. It does not bar speech on issues, and it does not stop a pastor from endorsing as a private citizen; the penalty is loss of exemption, as the D.C. Circuit held in Branch Ministries v. Rossotti (2000).
3. The case for repeal is the First Amendment, the history of church exemption, and the oddity that newspapers and unions can endorse while churches cannot.
4. The case against repeal comes from pastors who want the pulpit kept for the whole congregation, and from the concern about tax-deductible money flowing into campaigns.
5. The best resolution is a narrow statutory fix that takes the government out of the sermon, while pastors exercise restraint by choice and not by IRS command.

What you can do: read the text of Section 501(c)(3) on Congress.gov, then ask your own member of Congress where he or she stands on amending it.