Freedom won big today! In a victory for religious liberty and free speech, the IRS has determined that pastors can endorse candidates for public office from the pulpit.

REACH PRO-LIFE PEOPLE WORLDWIDE! Advertise with LifeNews to reach hundreds of thousands of pro-life readers every week. Contact us today.

The announcement was the result of the IRS agreeing to settle a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches challenging the Johnson Amendment, a regulation that muzzles nonprofit groups when it involves political speech. This settlement would not have happened if Kamala Harris controlled the IRS.

The Texas churches asked a federal court to create a broad exemption for all nonprofit groups, secular and religious, to make endorsements to their members. The IRS met them halfway by agreeing to exempt only religious nonprofits. In court filings, the IRS declared:

“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 as properly interpreted.”

In other words, pastors are free to endorse candidates from their pulpits during Sunday services. As the New York Times put it, such endorsements would be viewed as “a private matter, like ‘a family discussion concerning candidates.’”

And to that I say, “AMEN!”

The “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Left has perverted the First Amendment to mean not freedom of religion but freedom from religion. Our Founding Fathers would be mortified.

They never meant to keep faith out of our government. They meant to keep the government out of our churches!

LifeNews.com Note: Gary Bauer is the president of American Values, a national pro-family organization and is the former president of the Family Research Council. Bauer ran for the Republican nomination for president and appears frequently on radio and television programs.

The post Pastors Can Now Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit appeared first on LifeNews.com.