How have federal courts ruled on the Johnson Amendment in recent cases since 2024?

1. Historic baseline: courts have generally upheld the Johnson Amendment

For decades federal courts have treated the Johnson Amendment—Section 501(c)’s ban on candidate endorsements by tax‑exempt charities—as a valid constraint, with appellate and district decisions over the years sustaining restrictions on political intervention by nonprofits and religious organizations ^{[1] [4]}.

2. The new test case: Texas plaintiffs, IRS consent judgment, and the July 2025 filing

A coalition of plaintiffs including two Texas churches and the National Religious Broadcasters sued the IRS in August 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas claiming the Johnson Amendment violates the First Amendment and related protections, and on July 7, 2025 the IRS and those plaintiffs filed a joint motion seeking entry of a consent judgment that would prevent the IRS from enforcing the Johnson Amendment against those churches for certain in‑service, in‑congregation endorsements ^{[2] [5] [3]}.

3. What the IRS conceded—and what the consent judgment would do—according to filings

In its joint filing the IRS reframed pulpit endorsements as allowable when delivered “in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication” and analogized such communications to a “family discussion concerning candidates,” effectively creating a narrow exception for a house of worship’s internal political speech without automatic tax consequences ^{[6] [4] [1]}.

4. The litigation posture: court approval, intervention and amici are complicating the outcome

The proposed consent judgment is not a settled nationwide precedent yet; the Eastern District of Texas must approve the judgment, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been given time to file an amicus brief and seek intervention to defend the Johnson Amendment’s enforceability after the government declined to contest plaintiffs’ claims in this instance ^{[2] [3]}.

5. Competing narratives in lower courts and commentary: narrow fix or sweeping rollback?

Advocates for the plaintiffs and sympathetic outlets describe the consent judgment as a long overdue vindication of religious speech rights and report that the judgment “enjoins” enforcement against the plaintiff churches for specified speech ^[5], while nonprofit groups and separation‑of‑church‑and‑state advocates warn this shift, even if narrow, signals a dangerous politicization of houses of worship and note that prior IRS practice had already been lax in enforcement of the Johnson Amendment for sermons ^{[7] [8] [1]}.

6. Parallel and pending judicial fights: Tax Court petitions and scholarly debate

Separately, litigants such as the SAFE SPACE petition have sought review in Tax Court, sparking scholarship and analysis arguing the IRS’s interpretation may be unconstitutional but urging caution about sweeping remedies; those filings and academic pieces signal that the Johnson Amendment question could be litigated in multiple fora beyond the Texas district court even as courts to date have been reticent to declare the statute unconstitutional wholesale ^{[9] [10]}.

7. Bottom line for the law: precedent unchanged nationally, but narrow exceptions are emerging and litigants will press the issue

As of the most recent reporting, federal appellate precedent continues to reflect longstanding judicial deference to the Johnson Amendment’s nonpartisanship rule ^{[1] [4]}, but the Eastern District of Texas case and the IRS’s consent filing create a potentially binding district‑court judgment and an administrative interpretation that—if approved and not reversed on motion or appeal—would carve a new, narrow enforcement exception for internal church endorsements while leaving the broader statutory text untouched ^{[2] [3] [4]}.