For more than 70 years, federal law has prohibited pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams from endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. Now the IRS is letting it be known that it has no intention of enforcing that ban.

Good.

In a court filing last week, the IRS affirmed that it regards what is known as the Johnson Amendment — a provision of the tax code that threatens nonprofit organizations with the loss of their tax-exempt status if they engage in partisan electioneering — as unconstitutional when it comes to houses of worship. The legal provision, which was sponsored by then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, stipulates that charitable organizations can lose their privileged tax status if they “participate” or “intervene” in any political campaign.

Critics have long maintained that such a ban was at odds with the First Amendment’s protection of religion. The IRS now agrees. “When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith,” the agency said in its legal filing, it is neither “participating” nor “intervening” in electoral politics as those terms are generally understood.

The IRS’s shift is significant as a matter of policy, but in practical terms little is likely to change.

In all the decades since the Johnson Amendment was enacted, it has been successfully deployed just once to strip a church of its tax exemption. That was in 1995, after a congregation in Binghamton, N.Y., took out full-page newspaper ads urging Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, there have been innumerable cases over the years of churches and their spiritual leaders openly supporting (or opposing) political candidates. Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris took their presidential campaigns to the pulpits of Black congregations, for example, while Donald Trump was publicly blessed by evangelical pastors and promoted in conservative megachurches. Yet the IRS almost never attempted to enforce the regulations against such activity.

That is as it should be.

Don’t misunderstand me. As a personal matter, I am staunchly against letting politics infect religious services. If the rabbi of my synagogue began using his pulpit to lobby for or against political candidates, or even to take sides generally in partisan battles, I would find a new congregation. When I go to synagogue, I am there to pray, to reflect, and to learn — not to be lobbied on behalf of a politician or party.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute, that is how most religious Americans feel. When the institute polled the question in 2023, it found that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to the endorsing of political candidates by churches and clergy. A solid majority line up against partisan endorsements in every major religious and racial subgroup, including white evangelicals (62 percent opposed), Black Protestants (59 percent), white mainline Protestants (77 percent), white Catholics (79 percent), Hispanic Catholics (78 percent), Hispanic Protestants (72 percent), and Jews (77 percent).

Count me among the millions of Americans who believe that a house of worship is no place for politics, and that it trivializes the word of God to try and make it fit a partisan template. The teachings of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism are neither Republican nor Democratic. There are religious liberals and religious conservatives; they may well be sitting in the same pew and listening to the same sermon, and many would be dismayed to hear an explicitly “red” or “blue” message delivered from the pulpit.

Communities of the faithful ought to transcend the hostility and divisiveness of electoral contests, not wallow in it. The more faith entangles itself with electoral politics, the less effective it will be at conveying the timeless truths that religion exists to transmit, and the more likely that its transcendent values will be perverted into hypocrisy.

All the same, as a matter of fundamental constitutional law, the government has no business dictating what may or may not be preached from a church’s pulpit or taught in a synagogue’s sanctuary. Clergy and congregations have the right to decide for themselves — free of IRS influence — whether to speak about politics and elections.

There will always be a tension between the freedom to speak and the prudence to know when to remain silent. If you ask me, it is never wise for clergy to turn the sanctuary into a campaign platform. But the First Amendment doesn’t exist to guarantee wisdom, and liberty is not the government’s to bestow or deny. The Johnson Amendment has always been problematic. Bravo to the IRS for acknowledging at last what should have been obvious all along.