When the IRS announced in July that it was reinterpreting a decades-old law barring churches from making political endorsements, the Rev. Jonathan Barker of Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who has a history of political activism, welcomed the change.

Barker, who led Grace Lutheran for nine years, has participated in hunger strikes and was arrested for protesting climate change outside a 2024 Republican presidential candidate debate. He invited Joe Biden in 2020 after racial unrest following the police shooting of a Black man.

When he heard the news, Barker seized the opportunity and planned to be among the first church leaders in the U.S. to take advantage — until his denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told him that making an endorsement from the pulpi

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