Commentary
The Trump administration decreed Monday that churches can endorse political candidates, carving out a special exemption from a legal ban on nonprofit organizations politicking with tax-exempt dollars. The action, announced in an IRS legal filing, is a major gift to Trump’s Christian nationalist and dominionist supporters, who celebrated the new policy. Religious-right groups are likely to use the ruling to mobilize grassroots pressure on conservative pastors who have so far resisted turning their churches into de facto political campaign operations.
Intercessors for America, a network of ardently pro-Trump spiritual warriors, was a plaintiff in the case the IRS used to announce the new policy via a proposed consent judgement, along with the National Religious Broadcasters and a couple of churches. The filing claims that endorsing politicians from the pulpit does not count as participating in or intervening in a political campaign, which tax-exempt nonprofits are prohibited from doing. It’s not the only tortured reasoning in the IRS memo.
“The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like ‘a family discussion concerning candidates,’” The New York Times reported.
That “family discussion” analogy is a bad joke in the modern media age. For megachurch pastors whose every word is streamed online and promoted on social media—churches’ “usual channels of communication” in the words of the IRS filing—there is no speaking from the pulpit just to a church’s congregants like a private family matter.
Religious-right political groups have long urged pastors to turn their congregations into voter registration and turnout operations, and have spent many millions to elect Trump and other right-wing politicians. The position staked out by the Trump IRS seems likely to further open the floodgates for political campaign money to be laundered through churches as tax-exempt contributions. It could free Christian nationalist political groups to forego the pretense of distributing slanted and supposedly nonpartisan voter guides and simply use churches as a conduit for overt campaign materials.
The impact of the decision could be broadened by a trend over the past decade of religious-right political advocacy groups getting the IRS to reclassify them as churches to evade regulations and disclosure laws that apply to other nonprofits.
