Following up on my previous post, IRS Says Churches Can Endorse Political Candidates From The Pulpit:  New York Times, How Conservative Christians Cracked a 70-Year-Old Law:

The I.R.S. recently said that churches could endorse candidates from the pulpit, a shift from a longstanding interpretation of American nonprofit law.

In the Blue Room of the White House, once the cameras recording the Easter prayer service cut off, the conversation at President Trump’s dinner table turned to one of the biggest political goals for conservative Christian activists — eliminating a law that banned churches, and other tax-exempt charitable groups, from endorsing political candidates.

Seated across from Mr. Trump that April night, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, told the president about how his church faced an I.R.S. inquiry over its tax-exempt status under the Biden administration, after hosting a rally with political figures.

Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, who runs a large ministry with his father’s name, chimed in that his groups had faced similar I.R.S. inquiries during President Barack Obama’s tenure.

At Mr. Trump’s request, Mr. Jeffress’s church sent the White House Faith Office a seven-page letter outlining what it called “wrongful weaponization” of the law and the “unlawful targeting of our church.” The letter, obtained by The New York Times, included recommended actions, and a mention of a Texas lawsuit, which offered a vehicle to declare that the law was wrong.

Three months later, conservative Christians scored a major victory.

Earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service reinterpreted the ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, saying for the first time that churches could endorse candidates from the pulpit. The change, which came via a legal settlement, functionally nullifies a core tenet of the law, giving Christian conservatives their most significant victory involving church political organizing in 70 years. Their ultimate goal is still to totally eliminate the law, through Congress or the Supreme Court, removing all its limits on their political activities.

“Now churches are free,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, which has been working to challenge the law for years. “The leash is gone.”

The I.R.S.’s new approach is the latest in a string of triumphs for conservative Christian groups, which are leveraging their alliance with Mr. Trump to redraw boundaries between church and state.

For now, the implications of this latest victory are unclear. On paper, the new I.R.S. policy appears narrow. It grants more freedom only to houses of worship, which the agency already seemed disinclined to police. …

“Putting the I.R.S. inside what a church says is a bad fit for the I.R.S., or even for government,” said Benjamin Leff, a law professor at American University who has argued that the law should be more forgiving. He believes that nonprofits should be allowed to say what they want, but not allowed to spend significant money to get that message out.

But Mr. Leff and other nonprofit scholars said that the I.R.S. needed to be more specific about when and to whom the new policy applies. If the agency leaves it vague, they said, churches could exploit that ambiguity to become more like political action committees.

“The I.R.S. is going to need to enforce that border, to keep it from just swallowing everything up,” Mr. Leff said.

Conservative Christian political and legal activists tried for more than 15 years to find an effective strategy to end the Johnson Amendment’s restrictions, from lawsuits to legislation to lobbying.

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