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When, back in 2015, Donald Trump promised to kill the Johnson Amendment, the pledge was described as one of the top reasons evangelicals would support a philandering, biblically illiterate businessman. The amendment, an Internal Revenue Service rule from 1954 that banned tax-exempt nonprofits, including churches, from directly endorsing political candidates, has been a matter of grave concern to major evangelical leaders for years. During Trump’s first campaign, Mike Pence promised that Trump would “free up the voices of faith” by repealing the amendment.
Now, a decade later, the Trump administration has finally made good on that promise—not by killing the Johnson Amendment altogether, but by reinterpreting it to exclude churches. On Monday, the New York Times reported that in a filing for a lawsuit brought by conservative evangelical groups, the IRS said that it will now allow pastors to promote candidates to their congregations without risking their institution’s tax-exempt status. According to the IRS, churches can now be as partisan as they want.
But despite being a major coup for certain Christian groups, the news was met with very little public fanfare. A few leaders of the evangelical right, such as the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, described the ruling as a “big deal” for freedom of religion, given that “churches will now be unshackled.” But there wasn’t a flood of evangelical enthusiasm, like there was after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Republican politicians didn’t take to the airwaves to celebrate a victory. Trump himself didn’t mention it on social media.
This may seem odd, given how long evangelicals have sought this change, and given that the ruling changes the entire government perception of how churches are allowed to act. And for Republicans, particularly, the rule change holds political promise. Because donations to churches are tax-deductible, and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures, the change may, critics have argued, open another avenue for dark money to make its way into our elections, with churches as a campaign ground. Churches can, after all, draw many thousands of attendees and stream services to even larger audiences. For white evangelical megachurches, there’s no question where that political energy would go.
But there are a few reasons that the news of the rule change has landed so quietly. First, despite the claims from evangelical leaders that the Johnson Amendment stifled religious speech, the majority of Christians seem not to have agreed.
A poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in 2023 found that a majority of all religious groups, including white evangelicals, opposed allowing tax-exempt churches to endorse candidates. Similarly, 62 percent of evangelical Christians polled in a 2019 survey from Pew Research Center said that religious leaders should not endorse candidates in churches.
As William Wolfe, a noted conservative Southern Baptist leader and former Trump administration official, argued in a social media post: “Here’s a dirty secret: Many Southern Baptist elites (seminary professors, megachurch pastors, etc.) aren’t excited about this. For as much as they talk about ‘religious liberty’ they actually loved the Johnson Amendment because it gave them an excuse to avoid politics.”
Wolfe, a self-identifying Christian Nationalist, is representative of the only group that does actually favor politics in the pulpits, per the PRRI survey. This demographic—people who, in the PRRI poll, agree with statements such as “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation”—is most robust in white evangelical and nondenominational charismatic churches. But as popular as Christian Nationalism is, it doesn’t encompass all of white evangelicalism; this mission doesn’t have quite the popular appeal of fighting Roe.
But more importantly, a lot of leading evangelicals had long ago stopped seeing the Johnson Amendment as a matter of genuine concern. That’s because there’s one very important fact about the Johnson Amendment that evangelical leaders often failed to mention when they complained about it: Only two churches have ever been punished under it.
The first case in which a church lost its tax-exempt status because of a violation of the Johnson Amendment occurred when a New York church put out a newspaper ad against Bill Clinton in 1992. We don’t know the details of the second, which, according to the Texas Tribune, occurred in 2012.
Anthea Butler, chair of the Religious Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that without any actual history of enforcement, the Johnson Amendment never really served as a deterrent to campaigning in churches. She pointed to the conservative political campaigns, such as that by Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, that brought campaign events to churches in swing states. (The Johnson Amendment did not bar churches from inviting candidates or other political speakers; pastors crossed the line when they voiced their own endorsements.) At those events, megachurches became pro-Trump rallies. A prominent megachurch in Dallas, the First Baptist Church, has a choir that performs a song titled “Make America Great Again.”
“They’re pretty damn bold already,” Butler said. “I don’t know how much more bold you could get.”
It is true, though, that the IRS has investigated churches for violations. In April, Trump told reporters that seven or eight evangelical pastors had told him at a dinner that they had been “targeted” by the IRS during the Biden administration. The Religion News Service, which reported on that claim, was unable to confirm the details, but Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, told the publication that his church had been investigated by the IRS over Johnson Amendment violations, costing him “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
So it’s hard to know how many pastors stayed quiet out of fear of being investigated. During the first Trump administration, there was little reason for concern, given that Trump signed an executive order that told the IRS to stop investigating such cases. (Trump often falsely claimed that he had eliminated the Johnson Amendment by doing this.) But anxieties may have re-emerged in the Biden era.
But most experts Slate reached out to said they believed the rule change would make little difference: Any pastors who wanted to speak out about candidates could have done so already, either explicitly or through guest speaker proxies. Black churches in America have long been a driver of political activism, inviting politicians and Civil Rights leaders to their pulpits. White conservative evangelicals drove the campaign against the Johnson Amendment, and white conservative evangelicals have significantly more funding and political power, but Black Protestants have some of the highest levels of comfort with clergy endorsing candidates, per the Pew poll. So this change, at least, won’t only concern right-wing evangelical churches.
Still, there’s something symbolic about the new rule, particularly when it comes as the result of a campaign from white evangelicals. In some ways, one scholar argued, the Johnson Amendment was a holdover of an older and politer era, in which pastors approached these worldly matters with caution.
“I put this in the category of the old pieties that people used to observe,” said Seth Dowland, a professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University.
According to Dowland, before Trump, conservative churches often still tried to entertain the idea that it was legitimate for Christians to vote in different ways. Pastors might still share their views, but in a restrained way that allowed for disagreement. But when Trump first ran for office, the evangelical voters were often much more enthusiastic about Trump than their pastors were, as Trump didn’t fit the mold of the standard figures of the religious right. Some pastors were punished for their hesitation to vocally support Trump, as their members relocated to churches with more full-throated MAGA pastors. Soon, other pastors began to realize that they would be rewarded for leaving the old prudence behind.
“The Trump era has blasted away any subtlety or circumspection that might have existed previously,” Dowland said.
For now, the end of the Johnson Amendment may excite the fraction of pastors who built their brands around supporting Trump. For the next few years, that additional freedom may offer them bigger flocks, bigger donations, and greater access to the halls of power.
But it’s hard to know if these pastors will be as excited when the first post-Trump Republican primary comes around. Without the defining figure of the MAGA movement, and without a unified Republican party, having the freedom to endorse candidates might turn out to be more of a burden than anything else.
