The Internal Revenue Service, once a bulwark against the corrosion of church-state boundaries in the United States, has become a wrecking ball against that very system.

Under a new “legal” interpretation issued under Donald Trump, the IRS has effectively gutted the Johnson Amendment, the decades-old provision that prohibited tax-exempt churches from endorsing political candidates.

The decision wasn’t passed through Congress, wasn’t debated in the open, and certainly wasn’t demanded by the American public. It was delivered quietly through a court filing. But make no mistake, it marks a seismic betrayal of the separation between church and state.

What the IRS has done is to grant political license to houses of worship while letting them keep their tax-exempt status — a luxury other politi

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