98% of evangelical leaders say pastors shouldn't endorse candidates in the pulpit

The shocking survey results from the National Association of Evangelicals ignore the reality of how evangelical churches operate

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98% of evangelical Christian leaders say pastors should not endorse candidates from the pulpit, according to a new survey released by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). But that shocking number appears to obscure the reality of the situation.

Cross on the American flag (screenshot via YouTube)

The NAE itself presented the survey result as if it wasn’t surprising at all. The purpose of church is to spread the Gospel message, he said, so telling people how to vote would be unnecessarily divisive:

“The pulpit should be used in a prophetic manner, bringing the gospel to bear on today’s complex cultural issues,” said Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). “Church leaders should inform, uplift and draw people into deeper discipleship that impacts how they engage in their communities, including how they vote. Endorsing a political candidate is rarely helpful and most often breeds division.” 

The 98% number, the NAE says, is up from 89% back in 2017.

That sounds perfectly sensible but it ignores how pastors—usually white evangelical ones—push politics in church even if they don’t take the explicit step of telling the congregation what to do on Election Day.

We know there’s no shortage of pastors who spread messages that are anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-civil rights, anti-women, etc. None of that is directly political, per se, but Republicans often run on those “culture war” issues rather than more anodyne ones like economics precisely because they know it’s much easier to fire up their base by demonizing groups outside their fold. When pastors focus on who they hate—or which supposed “sins” are more damning than others—they’re effectively telling their churches who to vote for. There’s no need to give them a name when the winks serve the same purpose. Even if they’re not going all in on culture war battles, they will often use code words that achieve the same goals.

But some pastors do it anyway because they know there are no consequences.

As I’ve written about before, the IRS has very lenient rules when it comes to what non-profits are allowed to do (and not do) if they want to maintain their tax-exempt statuses. One of those rules, known as the Johnson Amendment, says non-profits cannot tell people how to vote. Plenty of conservative pastors, however, still argue that the rules are too onerous and they’ve deliberately tried to goad the IRS into revoking their tax-exempt status just so they can file a lawsuit over it.

For several years during Barack Obama’s presidency, hundreds of evangelical churches participated in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” where they proudly endorsed Republican candidates and then, just to make sure their actions weren’t ignored, sent videos of those sermons directly to the IRS.

The IRS had every reason to take action and revoke the churches’ tax exemptions. They never did.

Over the past few decades, the IRS has only followed its own rules once. Just before the 1992 elections, a group called Branch Ministries ran full-page newspaper ads urging people not to vote for Bill Clinton. The IRS revoked the group’s tax exempt status. There was a lawsuit. The IRS won. (The Congressional Research Service, a government-backed public policy research institute, said another church also lost its tax exemption in 2012… but no further details are available.)

But that’s it. 70 years of the Johnson Amendment… and maybe two ministries that were punished by the IRS for violating it.

By the time Donald Trump was in office, the violations were even more egregious. There was no need for a concerted effort to endorse candidates because it was apparent to everyone that the IRS wasn’t going to punish pastors for telling church members how to vote.

It didn’t help that Trump claimed he got rid of the Johnson Amendment… even though that was a lie. Churches have just been endorsing candidates ever since. While some churches have also endorsed Democrats, this is overwhelmingly a conservative/Republican issue. They’re the ones with the most to lose if the Johnson Amendment was ever enforced.

In 2022, ProPublica published a damning piece attempting to get to the bottom of what the IRS was actually doing about these churches that violated the Johnson Amendment. What they discovered was that no one was minding the store.

At least not publicly.

They found 18 churches over the previous two years explicitly violating the Johnson Amendment. (It’s almost certainly many, many more.) These were churches where the actions of the pastors weren’t at all ambiguous. If the IRS enforced its own rules, these churches would have instantly lost their tax exemptions. None of them did, and that’s because the IRS didn’t seem to care:

… The IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.

In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.

Why was the IRS acting like the CIA? No clue. They were saying they couldn’t confirm or deny investigations into churches that were openly and brazenly violating the law as if enforcing rules that were purposely broken amounted to some sort of national security issue.

It didn’t help that the IRS needed a high-level official signing off on such investigations for a while, and that no one was employed in that position, “leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.” Nor did it help that the IRS just stopped looking at churches’ political activity for several years during the Obama administration.

Which brings us back to the NAE’s survey. They didn’t respond to my request for the underlying data, but all they say about their respondents is this:

The Evangelical Leaders Survey is a monthly poll of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Evangelicals. They include the CEOs of denominations and representatives of a broad array of evangelical organizations including missions, universities, publishers and churches.  

The Board of Directors consists of 118 people, many of whom are not regularly in the pulpit. So the survey is hardly representatives of the actual people who deliver sermons every week. It’s easy for them to say pastors should focus on the Gospel because that’s the company line. But saying that is as ridiculous as a commentator saying basketball stars should “shut up and dribble” instead of speaking out on political issues. Or a neighbor who says they’re just focused on their schools or families and pay no attention to elections. Our lives can’t be untangled from politics! Everything you care about is inherently political.

And as many pastors can tell you, promoting Jesus-like ideas such as helping the poor and feeding the hungry sounds like Socialism to many believers. A sermon that seems uncontroversial can be misconstrued by conspiracy theorists. It creates the kind of backlash that can suffocate a church.

So should we believe the 98% number? Not a chance. A much more honest response can be found in a 2020 Pew Research Center survey that asked believers how often they heard politics in the pulpit. Their responses were very different.

67% of people said their churches mentioned politics in a sermon, including 71% of evangelicals. And while mentioning politics and endorsing candidates aren’t synonymous, it’s not hard to assume there’s a huge overlap. Even of the sermons that were published online and analyzed by researchers, 48% of election-related evangelical sermons specifically talked about candidates or issues (as opposed to, say, telling people to vote).

What’s shocking, then, about the NAE’s press release isn’t just the near unanimity of board members who say pastors shouldn’t endorse candidates from the pulpit. It’s the number of board members who seem to ignore just how often that happens anyway, who say the Gospel message transcends political parties, and who think staying “centered on biblical truth” can be separated from telling people which party to support.

If the NAE actually gave a damn about this and wanted churches to avoid politics, they could always announce that pastors who endorse candidates will have their churches kicked out of the NAE. At the very least, the NAE could publicly condemn churches that try to tip the scales for a particular candidate.

That’s never going to happen. Many conservative Christian churches are now nothing more than an arm of the Republican Party and Donald Trump. They exist to spread misinformation and make members of the congregation feel like victims. That’s why Jesus is an afterthought at so many churches; there’s too much at stake in the political arena to waste any time on him.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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