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'Dangerous for Democracy': Trump IRS Says Nonprofit Churches Can Make Political Endorsements
"Holy shit, a real masks-off moment," said one professor. "The divide between church and state is already falling. The divide between church and political group will disappear."
Jul 08, 2025
"This is another dark day for our democracy."
That's what American Humanist Association (AHA) executive director Fish Stark said in a Tuesday statement responding to a move from U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to allow houses of worship to endorse political candidates.
When former President Lyndon B. Johnson was a senator, he introduced a provision of the U.S. tax code that bans organizations from participating or intervening in campaigns for public office as a condition for keeping their nonprofit, tax-exempt status.
The National Religious Broadcasters and Intercessors for America and two Christian churches—Sand Springs Church and First Baptist Church Waskom—wanted a federal court in Texas to strike down the Johnson Amendment. Instead, according to a Monday filing from the plaintiffs and Internal Revenue Service intended to settle the case, the IRS created a formal exception for houses of worship.
Noting the definitions of participate and intervene, the filing states that "bona fide communications internal to a house of worship, between the house of worship and its congregation, in connection with religious services, do neither of those things, any more than does a family discussion concerning candidates."
"Thus, communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted," the document continues.
R.I.P. The Johnson Amendment, 1954-2025
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— Robert Downen (@robertdownen.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 12:16 PM
While the court could reject the plan laid out by the Trump IRS and plaintiffs in this case, observers responded to the settlement document by declaring the 1954 Johnson Amendment "essentially overturned" and "effectively DEAD."
Like many critics of the decision, the court filing acknowledges that its new interpretation "is in keeping with the IRS' treatment of the Johnson Amendment in practice," as the agency "generally has not enforced the Johnson Amendment against houses of worship for speech concerning electoral politics in the context of worship services."
Also highlighting that "it's been clear that many churches were both collecting tax deductions while engaging in partisan politics, so this merely formalizes the practice," Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, wrote on social media, "Holy shit, a real masks-off moment."
"There is already a problem of political operations pretending to be churches," he added, citing 2022 ProPublica reporting. "The divide between church and state is already falling. The divide between church and political group will disappear."
Christa Brown—whose memoir Baptistland tells the story of abuse she endured in her Texas childhood church—said that "churches were already doing this but now it's going to get a lot worse. Bad for the country, dangerous for democracy, and terrible for the separation of church and state. Inevitably, heaps of dark money will now get funneled through churches to influence elections."
AHA's Stark issued a similar warning, saying that "the Johnson Amendment, though weakened over the years by lax enforcement, is the small but mighty dam standing in the way of a torrent of dark money influencing our elections. Now that the Trump administration has opened the door to pastors and houses of worship explicitly backing candidates for office, all bets are off."
"There will be little to stop billionaires from funneling money through churches to buy our elections—and they will get a tax write-off for doing it, all subsidized by American taxpayers," Stark continued. "Weakening the Johnson Amendment to consolidate political power has long been a priority for Christian nationalists—and now they have the megaphone they've been waiting for for decades."
Americans United for Separation of Church and State president and CEO Rachel Laser said Tuesday that "the Trump administration's radical reinterpretation of the Johnson Amendment is a brazen attack on church-state separation that threatens our democracy by favoring houses of worship over other nonprofits and inserting them into partisan politics. It's President Trump and his Christian nationalist allies' signature move: exploiting religion to boost their own political power."
"For more than 70 years, the Johnson Amendment has reflected the will of the American people, the majority of whom want to protect the integrity of our elections and shield our houses of worship from the corrupting influences of partisan politicking," Laser added, urging the court "to reject the administration's latest gambit to rewrite the law through the judicial system."
Trump’s IRS just declared churches can endorse political candidates from the pulpit.This move upends a core protection for church-state separation, AND erodes the freedom and independence of churches.www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/u...
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— Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons (@guthriegf.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, also criticized the "deeply concerning" court filing for "furthering an assault on the bedrock principle that charitable organizations must remain nonpartisan in law, fact, and purpose in order to serve their missions and communities."
"This action—long sought by President Trump—is not about religion or free speech, but about radically altering campaign finance laws," Yentel argued. "The decree 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."
Some political leaders also weighed in. Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said that "this is really bad. The merger of tax-exempt conservative churches with the MAGA Republican Party is complete. It started with endless rightwing attacks on the IRS, leading to partisan political operations like Family Research Council posing as 'churches,' and now this. American taxpayers are now subsidizing both partisan (mainly GOP) politics and religion."
California state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-25) concluded that "if churches can make political endorsements and make political donations, they can pay taxes."
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'Nonprofit Killer' Pulled From GOP Tax Bill—For Now
"Because authoritarians love using censorship to silence opposition, it's likely gonna keep rearing its head," warned one rights group.
May 19, 2025
While welcoming the removal of legislation in House Republicans' budget reconciliation package that would empower U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it deems supportive of a terrorist organization, rights groups on Monday urged vigilance, warning that GOP lawmakers could slip the contentious provision back into a future draft of the legislation.
In an unusual late Sunday night session, the House Budget Committee voted 17-16, with four Republicans voting "present," to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—named in an act of GOP fealty to Trump's description of the proposal—which would extend the president's 2017 tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited ultrawealthy households and corporations while slashing vital social programs upon which tens of millions of people rely.
The latest version of the proposal no longer contains an amendment based on the language of the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, or H.R. 9495—which critics have dubbed the "nonprofit killer."
"The removal of the nonprofit killer bill from the House Republicans' advanced tax package is a promising sign, not a victory."
According to the advocacy group Free Press Action, the bill allows the treasury secretary "to accuse any nonprofit of supporting terrorism—and to terminate its tax-exempt status without due process."
Civil liberties defenders say the proposal's lack of clarity regarding the determination of whether and how a nonprofit supports terrorism would enable Trump to follow through on his threats to cancel the tax-exempt status for organizations with which he disagrees, including universities, advocacy groups, media outlets, charities, religious institutions, and others.
Organizations that support Palestinian rights or oppose Israel's annihilation of Gaza—which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case—have been particularly concerned about the bill, citing the Trump administration's moves to defund universities and other institution that oppose crackdowns on Gaza protests and the arrest and detention of foreign nationals, including green-card holders, for constitutionally protected protests.
The Nonprofit Killer Bill was pulled from the GOP tax package, but this is no victory. It could return at any moment. If we want to protect the right of nonprofits to speak truth to power, we must act now. 🛑 Tell Congress: Keep the Nonprofit Killer Bill OUT 👉 action.cair.com/a/nonprofit-killer-bill
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— CAIR (The Council on American-Islamic Relations) (@cairnational.bsky.social) May 19, 2025 at 12:58 PM
While welcoming the removal of the measure from the reconciliation package, groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) warned of the possibility that Republican lawmakers could re-insert the provision in the reconciliation package, which is scheduled for consideration by the House Rules Committee later this week.
"The removal of the nonprofit killer bill from the House Republicans' advanced tax package is a promising sign, not a victory," CAIR government affairs director Robert S. McCaw said Monday. "This provision could come back at any time, and if Americans want to preserve the right of nonprofits to speak truth to power, now is the time to flood Congress with messages demanding they keep this language out of the bill."
"We are defending nothing less than the future of nonprofit advocacy and our core constitutional freedoms," McCaw added.
While it is uncertain why the proposal was removed from the reconciliation bill, ACLU senior policy counsel Kia Hamadanchy told The Intercept that "it's possible they took it out to rewrite it in some way, because we know that this package is going to be amended."
"But for now, it's not in the text of the bill, and that's an improvement from where we were at last week," Hamadanchy added.
Addressing everyone who contacted their federal lawmakers or took other action in opposition to the bill, the digital rights group Fight for the Future said on the social media site Bluesky that "pressure from YOU is making a difference."
"We killed this bill in the fall, but because authoritarians love using censorship to silence opposition, it's likely gonna keep rearing its head," the group added, referring to the legislation's failure to receive a Senate vote before the previous congressional term ended.
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Trump’s Illiberal Democracy Threatens Our Foundational Moral Principles
This administration rejects American values as it embraces bribes from foreign dictators, harasses journalists, imprisons op-ed writers, and threatens judges.
May 19, 2025
At its deepest level, government is a moral force grounded in a moral view of the world.
It may not comport with morality as most of us view it; the Saudi oppression of women, the Russian violence against the queer community, and the Iranian brutal suppression of that nation’s democracy movement are all examples of things most Americans consider immoral.
But each is grounded in a particular moral worldview that those governments and their leaders have adopted.
While America has experienced many dark moral episodes throughout our history, we’ve always held or at least espoused a basic set of moral principles:
- That all people are born equal under the law; that power should flow up from the people rather than down from elected leaders;
- That a free press, free speech, and freedom from religion are essential to liberty; and
- That defending the basic rights of all people to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is the core function of a democratic republic.
Until now.
Republicans in the House of Representatives just inserted into their must-pass “Big, Beautiful” multi-trillion-dollar-tax-break-for-billionaires legislation a provision that would enable the president to designate any nonprofit—from Harvard to the American Civil Liberties Union to your local Democratic Party—a “terrorist-supporting organization” that then loses their tax-exempt status, effectively putting them out of business.
And who decides who gets that designation? The president. And he gets do to it in secret.
When we abandon our own stated principles in foreign relations, those first laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the results are almost uniformly bad for us, for them, and for democracy around the world.
This is exactly how both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán first destroyed dissent and free speech in Russia and Hungary.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been pursuing this for a decade, from his trying to designate Antifa a “terrorist organization” to his attacks on our universities to his use of Stalin’s phrase “enemy of the people” to describe journalists and opinion writers like me.
One level above these core democratic principles—of free speech, the right to protest, and the power of the people in free and fair elections to change our leadership—are two major reformations that came about after major national upheavals.
The first was after the Civil War, when the nation (at least in principle) embraced the humanity and citizenship of nonwhite people with Reconstruction and the 13th through the 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The second was during the Republican Great Depression, when FDR rebooted our republic to become the supporter of last resort for the working class, producing the world’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class.
Now Trump, Elon Musk, and their cabal of right-wing billionaires are trying to dissolve virtually all of this, replacing it with the sort of “illiberal democracy” we see in Russia and Hungary, where there are still elections (but their outcome is pre-determined), still legal protections for the press and free speech (but only when that speech doesn’t challenge those in power), and only the wealthy can truly enjoy safety and security.
After the Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari governments each gave the Trump family massive gifts in the form of billion-dollar development and Trump hotel or golf course licensing deals, Trump made a speech in which he abandoned our 250-year history of advocating democracy around the world.
Of course, as mentioned, we’ve often failed at that mission in the past. Former President Ronald Reagan’s support for the death squads in Central America haunt our southern border to this day; former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s embrace of the Shah of Iran still rattles the Middle East; and former President Richard Nixon’s tolerance of Chinese brutality led us to, in the name of capitalism, help that nation’s communist leaders create the most powerful and medieval surveillance state in world history.
But these exceptions prove the rule: When we abandon our own stated principles in foreign relations, those first laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the results are almost uniformly bad for us, for them, and for democracy around the world. And it becomes even more destructive when this administration rejects American values as it embraces bribes from foreign dictators, harasses journalists, imprisons op-ed writers, and threatens judges.
This issue of morality in government has been at the core of our political debate for centuries. Then-President Harry Truman was explicit about it way back in 1952:
Now, I want to say something very important to you about this issue of morality in government.
I stand for honest government… To me, morality in government means more than a mere absence of wrongdoing. It means a government that is fair to all. I think it is just as immoral for the Congress to enact special tax favors into law as it is for a tax official to connive in a crooked tax return. It is just as immoral to use the lawmaking power of the government to enrich the few at the expense of the many, as it is to steal money from the public treasury. That is stealing money from the public treasury…
Legislation that favored the greed of monopoly and the trickery of Wall Street was a form of corruption that did the country four times as much harm as Teapot Dome ever did. Private selfish interests are always trying to corrupt the government in this way. Powerful financial groups are always trying to get favors for themselves.
Tragically, for both America and democracy around the world, this is not how Donald Trump was raised and does not comport with the GOP’s current worldview. Fred Trump built a real estate empire through racism, fraud, and deceit. He raised Donald to view every transaction as necessarily win-lose, every rule or regulation as something to get around, and every government official as somebody to be influenced with threats or money.
The GOP embraced a similar worldview with the Reagan Revolution as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes in his must-read Substack newsletter:
But starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, record levels of inequality, near-stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.
Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors became more important than good jobs with good wages. Corporate profits more important than the common good.
Greed is a type of moral stance. It’s not one that open, pluralistic, democratic societies embrace beyond their tolerance of regulated capitalism, but it is a position that expresses a certain type of morality, one most famously expounded by David Koch and Ayn Rand.
It’s inconsistent with the history of humanity itself, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living. From Margaret Mead pointing out how healed leg bones in hundred-thousand-year-old skeletons show that ancient societies cared for their wounded to the ways Native American tribes dealt with people who stole or hoarded even without the use of police or prisons, the triumph of greed has historically been the exception rather the rule.
When Donald Trump said, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” it was one of the few honest bits of self-appraisal he’s ever tendered. And it should have warned all of us.
Greed and hunger for power are, ultimately, anathema to our traditional American values.
And it’s high time we began to say so, and to teach our children the difference between a moral nation that protects its weakest citizens while promoting democracy around the world and an “illiberal democracy” like Russia, Hungary, and the vision of today’s GOP.
We’ve been better than this in the past, and it’s high time we return to those moral positions that truly made America great.
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