Last night, the New York Times broke one of the most important stories for faith-based political advocacy in decades: (click here or on image for story)

“I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit.”
— David Fahrenthold, July 7, 2025

For years, the left’s weaponization of the Johnson Amendment—meant to muzzle religious speech—has cast a chilling effect on churches that dared to speak truth about culture and politics. But in a landmark development, the IRS has now stated unequivocally that pastors may endorse candidates to their own congregants without violating federal tax law.

As the IRS wrote in its court filing:

“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.”

This is not only a win for churches — it is a long-overdue correction. Our nation’s founders never intended to protect the government from religion. They wrote the First Amendment to protect religion from the government.

Twenty-four years after I first oversaw getting 14 million candidate comparisons to voters nationally in my first Presidential effort, we launched the Wisconsin Faith and Freedom Coalition with that principle front and center, when we debuted with a December 2023 Newsweek op-ed on the War on Christmas:

“The liberal secularist argument … contradicts ‘or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’… Using the government to make sure there are no signs of religion around Christmas is in fact a war on Christmas.”
— John Pudner, Newsweek, Dec 21, 2023

While we have always remained compliant in our voter guides — comparing candidates on values but never issuing endorsements — it has been a tragic irony that secular institutions faced no such scrutiny. For two decades, religious groups were told to stay silent while left-wing nonprofits became unofficial arms of political machines.

Now, the tide is turning.

Earlier in 2024, the Federal Election Commission added another piece to this long-overdue correction. In Advisory Opinion 2024-01, the FEC ruled that nonprofit canvassing efforts — even if coordinated with federal campaigns — do not violate campaign finance laws unless they result in direct, below-market-value contributions. This opens the door for far greater cooperation between conservative values-based nonprofits and federal campaigns who share their goals.

Together, the IRS and FEC rulings give religious conservatives legal breathing room that was denied for far too long.

In Federal races we believe the Faith and Freedom ground game to be in some aspects the largest and most ambitious and far‑reaching ground game project by a conservative organization outside the Republican party in history, and other conservative organizations feel the same about their organizations which put important information in the hands of conservatives to encourage them to register to vote between elections and in turn to cast ballots at election time.

There is overlap between the issues faith-based voters want to consider and those who simply want Republicans to win, just as there are differences between faith-based values and libertarian conservatives on other issues. But the secular attempt to make faith-based voters who choose to go to a given church NEVER hear from their Pastor on which candidates are supporting the values they hold dear is a true attempt at “voter suppression.”

Those on the left who use that term may remember the old adage “you tend to accuse others of doing things that you would do yourself if given the chance.” For too many on the left, “voter suppression” means denying the 70 percent who want photo Voter ID requirements to prevent someone from voting in their place or cancelling their vote, while the same leftist believes the decades of threatening Pastors into silence about elections is not voter suppression.

We have no issue with a powerful sermon at an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in the South or a United Church of Christ congregation in the Northeast or Midwest encouraging liberal political engagement, any more than liberals should have stifled generations of attendees at Evangelical or Pentecostal churches — or among traditional Catholics, Orthodox Christians, conservative Lutherans, practicing Jews, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — from speaking out when political agendas clash with their moral convictions.

We do not presume to know how, or even whether, political issues are discussed among those who attend the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, MI — the largest mosque in North America — or whether such conversations influenced the fact that only 36 percent of Muslim voters in Dearborn supported Kamala Harris in 2024, roughly half the level of support Joe Biden received in 2020. Nor should we know. The point is that government has no place monitoring whether or how people of faith discuss whether or how to vote while in a synagogue, church, mosque, Hindu temple, or any other house of worship.

Of course, these victories will draw fierce pushback. Liberal groups are already warning of dire consequences, but the real tragedy was the one we’ve faced for years: an aggressive push to erase Judeo-Christian values from the public square and intimidate faith leaders into silence.

Let the pastors preach. Let the churches speak. And let freedom — true First Amendment freedom — ring again.

P.S. While unrelated, it was the second straight day the NY Times had a story of great interest to us (click here). The day before they recounted the event that resulted in our first Fox News TV appearance, the candidate that National Review announced I had recruited for something that had never been done before, Dave Brat …

Mamdani’s shocking victory in last month’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York, it’s worth recalling another upset, which took place 11 years ago and some 300 miles to the south, in a Republican congressional primary near Richmond, Va. In 2014 Dave Brat, a little-known economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, challenged Eric Cantor, who was then the House majority leader. Mr. Brat was outspent by a margin of more than 10 to one. Despite that, he won by 11 percentage points, thus becoming the first primary challenger to oust a House majority leader in American history.

Ideologically, Mr. Brat and Mr. Mamdani have little in common.