A consent judgment can narrow a rule for the parties who signed it without rewriting the rule the agency still publishes. To see the gap, read the decree against the guidance the IRS has not yet changed.

The paper's June 27 piece reported that an IRS consent decree narrowed the pulpit endorsement ban, carving pastor-to-congregation speech out of what counts as campaign intervention. That carve-out lives in a filed judgment. The general rule still lives, in broader language, on the agency's own website.

The IRS keeps a public guidance page on the restriction of political-campaign intervention by 501(c)(3) organizations, stating that these groups are "absolutely prohibited" from directly or indirectly participating in any candidate's campaign. [1] That page is the rule a church is measured against in ordinary practice, and on its face it is far wider than the channel the consent judgment protects. A reader who wants to know what the IRS still tells charities should start here, not with a sermon clip.

The case that narrowed it is on the docket under the new defendant. National Religious Broadcasters v. Bessent, 6:24-cv-00311 in the Eastern District of Texas, records the broadcasters' and churches' suit and the proposed consent judgment in which the IRS agreed that good-faith speech to a congregation through usual channels is not campaign "intervention." [2] The judgment binds the case; the guidance page shows the agency has not generalized it for everyone.

The statute remains the anchor under both. Section 501(c)(3) exempts most churches and charities on the condition that they not participate or intervene in campaigns for or against candidates. [3] The consent judgment reinterprets that condition for pulpit speech; it does not delete it. The honest reading sits between two overstatements — that churches may now endorse anyone, and that nothing changed.

This is the divergence. X turns a pulpit into a conspiracy diagram, where one passage proves a hidden apparatus. Mainstream political coverage runs the opposite simplification, treating religion as campaign atmosphere. The records are narrower and more useful: read the guidance the IRS still publishes, the judgment that narrowed it for one case, and the statute under both.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington