The Internal Revenue Service decided that churches will no longer be punished for pushing political candidates onto worshippers during sermons, just as God intended.
In a court filing released Monday, the IRS reversed the long-term ban on religious establishments that kept religious leaders from endorsing political candidates. Previously, they would have lost their tax-exempt status if they were to make an endorsement.
This is something that President Donald Trump has been fiending after for quite some time. In 2017, he vowed to “destroy” the ban to allow religious establishments to endorse and oppose candidates as much as they liked.
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Of course, given the strong presence of Christian nationalism in his Cabinet—with the establishment of an anti-Christian bias taskforce and the appointment of a faith adviser—this latest move isn’t much of a shock. But experts are worried about how this will shape actions in the future.
The court filing argues that, technically, religious leaders are endorsing candidates in the same way that a family member might in the privacy of their own home. But Ellen P. Aprill, a professor emeritus at Loyola Law School, told The New York Times that this brings into question how far these endorsements can actually go.
Sure, church sermons are typically held in the privacy of a chapel, but they are often made available to the public online, too.
“It’s not going to be limited to just their membership. Even Las Vegas doesn’t stay in Las Vegas these days. Everybody has a web page,” Aprill said.
The separation of church and state is getting a little murkier these days, but there was one surprising victory. In May, the Supreme Court shot down a proposition for a public Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. With a 4-4 deadlock—in which Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself—the religious school is not allowed to use public funding.
Still, with churches now free to endorse political candidates without paying their fair share of taxes, the line separating religious institutions from government is only becoming more difficult to discern.