Faith Leaders and the Fight for Voting Booth Access

Four months before the 2026 midterms, a group of clergy stood at the Minnesota State Capitol and made an announcement that was less about politics than about real estate. "Our churches, our mosques, our synagogues, our places of worship will become democracy hubs," said Minister JaNaé Bates Imari, co-executive director of the interfaith group ISAIAH Minnesota, at a July 7 news conference reported by Religion News Service. Dozens of other clergy stood behind her. Similar gatherings happened the same day in eight other states.

That word, hub, is doing a lot of work. A hub is not a pulpit. It is not a place where a message gets delivered downward to a congregation. It is a place where people pass through, connect, and get sent onward. In my view, the choice of word tells you something important about what this movement thinks a house of worship is for right now: not a source of political instruction, but a piece of civic infrastructure that happens to have pews.

What the "Faith in Us" Movement Is Actually Asking For

The coalition behind the July 7 announcement calls itself Faith in Us. It is not asking congregants to vote a particular way, and it is not naming candidates. It has organized coordinated events in nine states so far, representing more than 1,500 congregations, with a stated goal of reaching 300 clergy signatures in each of eighteen states. The centerpiece of the effort is a public letter, signed by more than 1,700 faith leaders as of early July, addressed to election administrators and secretaries of state. The letter's core ask, according to reporting from Religion Unplugged and Religion News Service, is that officials commit publicly to protecting the mechanics of the vote itself: ballot access, mail voting, and district maps that don't quietly disenfranchise the people these congregations serve.

Two specific concerns show up repeatedly in the coalition's public statements: an executive order that restricts vote-by-mail, and what the letter describes as rapid, racially discriminatory redistricting in several states. Bates Imari framed the stakes in explicitly moral terms rather than partisan ones: "We are going to step up and lean into our moral authority to ensure that we will not allow any kind of federal intimidation or overreach to try to break any of our constitutional rights to have a say in our vote and in our voice." The campaign's public name for its national day of action, "Standing for Human Dignity," reinforces the same framing. Dignity, not party, is the word doing the organizing.

This is a careful needle to thread, and I don't think the carefulness is accidental. Faith in Us includes Christian, Jewish, and Muslim organizations, and it has gone out of its way to describe itself as nonpartisan. That's a meaningful choice, because the legal ground under this kind of work just shifted beneath everyone's feet.

The Rule That Used to Govern This, and the Rule That Just Changed

For seven decades, the outer boundary of what a congregation could do in an election season was set by something called the Johnson Amendment. Enacted in 1954 and named for then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, it bars 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, churches included, from endorsing or opposing candidates for office. Voter registration drives, issue education, and "get out the vote" campaigns were always allowed, as long as they stayed nonpartisan. Naming a candidate from the pulpit was the line nobody was supposed to cross.

Here is the part that makes this year different from every other midterm cycle in living memory: in July 2025, the IRS told a federal court, in a joint filing with the National Religious Broadcasters Association, that a pastor endorsing a candidate from the pulpit during a worship service would not, by itself, cost a congregation its tax exemption, so long as the endorsement was communicated as an expression of religious belief rather than a stand-alone political statement. Legal experts who reviewed the filing noted that it mostly formalized what had already been unofficial IRS practice for years. The agency had rarely enforced the amendment against houses of worship even when the rule was on the books unambiguously. But formalizing an unspoken exception is not the same as leaving it unspoken, and religious nonprofit law has treated the filing as a real shift, not a technicality.

So the pulpit door that Faith in Us could, in theory, now walk through, stands open wider than it has in decades. And the coalition is visibly choosing not to walk through it. It is organizing around ballot access and election-administration integrity: the plumbing of democracy, not the candidates running through it. That's a real institutional choice, made at a moment when the easier, more attention-getting choice was sitting right there.

Three Models of Church Civic Engagement, Compared

Faith communities mobilizing around elections is not new. What's worth noticing is how differently three eras of this work have defined their own legal and moral footing.

The middle row is instructive precisely because it failed on its own terms and succeeded on someone else's. Alliance Defending Freedom recruited pastors for over a decade to deliberately preach candidate endorsements, daring the IRS to strip their tax exemption and daring them into a First Amendment fight. As best as public reporting shows, the IRS never took the bait: no church lost its exemption over a Pulpit Freedom Sunday sermon. The strategy didn't win in court, because it was never really allowed to get there. It won by attrition, and then it won again, quietly, in a 2025 court filing that gave pastors the very latitude the campaign had spent seventeen years demanding. The institution didn't have to fight for the door. It just had to wait, and the door opened on its own.

Faith in Us is operating in the shadow of that history, whether its organizers frame it that way or not. And I think that's exactly why its restraint matters. Choosing not to use new latitude, when you clearly could, is itself a form of institutional signaling. It says: our authority rests on being trusted referees of the process, not players in it.

The Public Doesn't Actually Want the Endorsement Anyway

Here's the wrinkle. Even with the legal door open, most Americans don't want their clergy walking through it. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in April 2026 found that 79 percent of Americans say churches and other houses of worship should not endorse candidates for public office, with 74 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats agreeing, a rare instance of bipartisan consensus on anything involving religion and politics. The same survey found that roughly two-thirds of Americans think churches should keep out of day-to-day political and social questions altogether, and Pew notes that these numbers have barely moved in years.

That's the contrast worth sitting with. The legal barrier just came down. The cultural barrier never did. Faith in Us appears to be building its entire strategy around that gap: doing the thing the public still trusts religious institutions to do, civic mobilization and moral appeal to fairness, while deliberately avoiding the thing the public has never trusted them to do, telling people who to vote for. Whether that distinction holds up over four months of a contentious midterm cycle, from an executive-order fight over mail ballots straight through to a Nov. 3 election day, is the real test this movement is signing up for.

I have come to think that this is where a lot of institutional credibility actually lives: not in the rules an institution is allowed to break, but in the ones it chooses to keep even after nobody is making it. A church that could legally endorse a candidate and doesn't is making a claim about what it thinks its own authority is for. That claim is worth more than a name on a letter. It's a bet that moral standing, kept intact, outlasts any single election.

What This Signals About Institutional Trust More Broadly

Turnout itself is the backdrop against which all of this is happening. U.S. voter turnout in the 2020 general election reached 66.8 percent of eligible voters, the highest rate since 1900, according to Census Bureau data, which means the country is already voting at something close to a historic ceiling even before anyone builds a single democracy hub. That's worth naming, because it complicates the simplest version of the story. This isn't primarily a turnout campaign aimed at apathetic voters. It's an access campaign aimed at structural barriers, mail ballot restrictions and redistricting, that can suppress turnout regardless of how motivated people already are.

That distinction matters for how you read the whole effort. A campaign to get more people excited about voting and a campaign to stop the rules of voting from being quietly rewritten are different projects wearing the same clothes. Faith in Us is unambiguously the second kind. It is easy to mistake it for the first, because "get out the vote" language and imagery are so familiar from decades of Souls to the Polls organizing. But the letter to secretaries of state isn't asking anyone to knock on more doors. It's asking officials to hold a line that other actors are actively trying to move.

Institutions defending a line, rather than pushing an agenda, tend to be more durable, and more trusted, than institutions doing the opposite. Whether Faith in Us can hold that posture through a full election season, with all the pressure a midterm cycle brings to blur it, is the open question nobody, including the coalition itself, can answer yet in July.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean for a church to become a "democracy hub"?

In this context, it means the building functions as a civic access point rather than a source of political instruction: a place for voter registration help, information about polling locations and mail-ballot deadlines, and community accountability around whether local election officials are keeping the process fair. It does not mean the congregation endorses candidates.

Is it legal for churches to do voter engagement work?

Yes. Nonpartisan voter registration, education, and turnout efforts have always been permitted for 501(c)(3) organizations, including houses of worship, under the Johnson Amendment. What changed in 2025 is narrower: the IRS indicated in a court filing that a pastor's direct candidate endorsement, delivered as part of a religious service, would not automatically cost a congregation its tax exemption.

Did the Johnson Amendment get repealed?

No. The 1954 law is still on the books and still applies to 501(c)(3) organizations generally. The 2025 IRS filing addressed a specific, narrow scenario involving pulpit speech during worship services and mostly formalized enforcement practice that had already been unofficial for years. It was not a repeal, and it does not extend to secular nonprofits.

Is the Faith in Us movement partisan?

The coalition and its organizers describe it as nonpartisan, and its public materials focus on ballot access, election administration, and opposition to specific policies like mail-ballot restrictions and contested redistricting, rather than on any candidate or party. Whether observers read that framing as genuinely neutral often depends on their view of the underlying policies themselves.

What is "Souls to the Polls"?

It's a decades-old tradition, rooted especially in Black church communities during and after the Civil Rights era, of congregations organizing members to vote together, often on a designated Sunday before or on Election Day. It has generally operated within strict nonpartisan boundaries and is the closest historical precedent for what Faith in Us is now attempting at a larger, interfaith, multistate scale.

Last updated: 2026-08-01