Last week the Internal Revenue Service broke with decades of precedent to rule that churches can endorse political candidates without risking their tax-exempt status.

Since 1954, when Congress adopted the Johnson Amendment to the U.S. tax code, 501(c)3 organizations had been prohibited from pulpit proclamations favoring a single political party.

The abrupt, unexplained reversal is alarming given the Christian Nationalist agenda scripted by Project 2025 that is now being implemented by the Trump administration. This agenda calls for rolling back gay rights, erasing marriage equality, further restricting reproductive freedom (including birth control), funneling tax dollars away from public schools and toward private religious academies, and eliminating the Department of Education – now an established fact.

The Johnson Amendment had never been perfectly observed or implemented, but was in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution's framers who wanted a healthy distance between state power and religious fervor. The practical effect of the new rule will be to further embroil political and policy debates with theological and even apocalyptic overtones, as when Trump told voters last fall that he had been chosen by a "supernatural hand" and that he was "saved" from a failed assassination attempt last year to fulfill a divine mission. The electoral battle ground will shift from the party in power and a loyal opposition to a contest between Good and Evil, the Children of Light and the Offspring of Darkness.

Pastor Joene Herr, retired from Christ Lutheran Church in Santa Fe, says that she never endorsed any specific candidate during her years of ministry, and the same is probably true for most mainline Christians and Jews. The Reverend Talitha Arnold of Santa Fe's United Church calls the IRS ruling one that "leads the country, faith communities and clergy down a very slippery slope." Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders, on the other hand, have been far readier to express their enthusiastic support of the 47th President. Now those churches will be able to function like political action committees, receiving tax exempt donations to funnel toward Trump and MAGA office seekers, without the financial reporting requirements that fall on party organizations.

You can learn more about Christian Nationalism, the assault on the separation of church and state, and how to fight back on Wednesday, July 23, at 7:00 pm, when Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, speaks at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe, 107 W. Barcelona Road. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School, she has served as senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center and directed the Culture Program at Third Way, a progressive Washington, D.C. think tank dedicated to reaching across religious divides to find shared values among Americans of all creeds. RSVP for this free program at act.au.org/santa-fe.

Thanks to our framers and the separation of church and state, America today is the most religiously diverse nation on earth and has, for most of its history, avoided the sectarian warfare that has plagued so many other lands. Christian Nationalism threatens to unravel that legacy.