TAX RELIGIOUS CHARITIES

IRS Ends 70-Year Gag Rule, Says Churches Can Now Endorse Political Candidates

 July 9, 2025 

By CNA

By Daniel Payne

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) this week backed off a decades-old rule first established during the Eisenhower administration, declaring for the first time since the 1950s that churches and other nonprofits can openly endorse political candidates without risking their tax-exempt status.

The order resolves a lawsuit launched in August 2024 by a coalition of religious broadcasters, one that challenged the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which says that 501(c)(3) nonprofits may not “participate in or intervene in” political campaigns.

Advocates have argued that the rule shields the nonprofit industry from caustic politics. The National Religious Broadcasters, meanwhile, said in its suit that the tax rule punished churches by “silenc[ing] their speech while providing no realistic alternative for operating in any other fashion.”

In a filing on Monday with the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Texas, the IRS agreed with the religious broadcasters in that “communications internal to a house of worship, between the house of worship and its congregation, in connection with religious services” do not run afoul of the amendment’s prohibition on “participating in” campaigns.

The rule “imposes a substantial burden on plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion,” the filing states.

The document points to numerous nonprofits that are allowed to opine on political candidacies even as churches remain barred from doing so. The Johnson Amendment is “not a neutral rule of general applicability,” it says.

Religious entities “cannot fulfill their spiritual duties to teach the full counsel of the Word of God if they fail to address such issues and to inform their listeners how the views of various political candidates compare to the Bible’s position on such matters,” it states.

The Monday filing asked the court to accept the agreement, which will bar the IRS from enforcing the rule. The court accepted the decision shortly after its filing.

The National Religious Broadcasters did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump said at the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast that he aspired to “get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

When proposed in 1954, the Johnson Amendment was passed with no debate, according to the congressional record.

A 2017 effort in the House of Representatives to repeal the amendment died at committee.

CNA

The Catholic News Agency (CNA) has been, since 2004, one of the fastest growing Catholic news providers to the English speaking world. The Catholic News Agency takes much of its mission from its sister agency, ACI Prensa, which was founded in Lima, Peru, in 1980 by Fr. Adalbert Marie Mohm (†1986).

 

Less Snow Makes Trees Absorb Less Carbon

Each sectioned-off research area, like the one above, has 21 to 24 individual trees, with two-and-half miles of cable laid underneath the artificially heated zones. CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Pam Templer/BU

 July 9, 2025  

By Eurasia Review

Since trees take in and use carbon dioxide to grow, they’re one of our most important natural resources for capturing planet-warming greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Since laying the cables, Templer and her colleagues have returned to the outdoor laboratory multiple times a year, watching as patches of forest mimicked climate change effects that are projected to worsen in coming decades. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they show that warmer summer temperatures increase tree growth, but less snow on the ground slows this growth significantly—meaning that New England forests’ ability to store carbon in future climate scenarios is likely overestimated. 

“We know from past work that there are several negative effects of lessening snowpack, and we know that temperatures are warming and the snowpack is shrinking,” says Templer, a College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor and chair of biology. “We wanted to look at the interactions between climate change across the year, and we wanted to be as realistic as possible about the future climate our forests will experience.”

We typically think of snow making the ground colder, but for the forest floor, the opposite is true. Snow acts as a blanket—the more snow, the more insulated the soil and root systems remain throughout the winter. If there’s less snow on the ground and the air is below freezing, the soil will freeze, then thaw as snow accumulates, then freeze again as it melts, then thaw again as the season goes on. At the same time, warmer summer temperatures are expected to increase the rate of tree growth due to heat speeding up decomposition in the soil. To see how these shifts ultimately balance out, Templer and her team studied what happens to trees as the seasons change.

“When we think about climate change, it’s not just warmer temperatures in the summer or warmer temperatures overall. We need to account for these changes throughout the year that can differ from season to season,” says Emerson Conrad-Rooney (GRS’26), a fifth-year PhD student in Templer’s lab and lead author of the paper. 

The experimental forest consists of six plots, each one measuring 36 by 44 feet. In four of the plots, underground cables warm the soil by 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), and two of those plots have a portion of snow removed in the winter to induce the freeze-thaw cycle. (The two remaining plots are left unaltered.) Conrad-Rooney and other lab members visited each section multiple times a year to check the electrical components and measure the trees’ dendrometer bands—spring-loaded metal bands that wrap around a tree’s trunk to measure growth. They are then able to use those measurements to calculate the total biomass of the tree and how much carbon is now stored in the trunk.

Trees in the artificially heated plots that were insulated by snow grew 63 percent larger than those in the unaltered plots. But the trees that went through more freeze-thaw cycles and experienced less snowpack grew only 31 percent larger over the decade-long study. That means that having less snow slowed down their growth and carbon uptake by about half. 

“Many Earth system models, which predict how much carbon forests can store, aren’t incorporating the complexities of winter climate change that we’re highlighting here,” says Conrad-Rooney. “This means that models might be overestimating the carbon capacity of these temperate forests.” 

 Now that they’ve seen the patterns aboveground, their next step is to peer below the soil. The back-and-forth of freezing and thawing stresses tree roots that are adapted to New England winters, according to Templer. To test this, in 2023, Conrad-Rooney installed thick mesh cylinders, called root ingrowth cores, under the soil to measure the rate of root growth in each plot. After years of waiting, they will analyze the results of the experiment at the end of this year.

“We’re going to keep this work going as long as we can,” Templer says. “We’re so fortunate to have this long-term study because we learn so much the longer we keep going. Right now, we see a warming-induced response from the trees, but maybe that’s temporary—maybe the trees will acclimate and their growth will slow down. We don’t know. That’s really the value of having long-term data.”  

Templer and others at BU have found that trees grow at different rates along forest edges and in cities, but it’s unclear if these effects are temporary or permanent. Biologists and ecologists, including Templer, are actively figuring out how to synthesize so many shifting factors—air pollution, carbon dioxide concentrations, temperature, snowpack, insect loss, diseases, forest fragmentation—in an unstable climate in order to best predict the future of our planet. 

“There are so many global changes happening at the same time,” Templer says. “It’s impossible to get at everything all at once, so we each do what we can. The reason we could do this work at all is because others before us monitored the climate. Getting to contribute to long-term science with this study is just amazing.”  

‘The Land Of Performance’: Trump Wanted A Perfect War, A Headline Showstopper – OpEd

An Air Force B-2 Spirit prepares for Operation Midnight Hammer at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., June 21, 2025. Photo Credit: DOD

 July 9, 2025 

By Alastair Crooke

“Depending on who you ask, the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan was either a smashing success that severely crippled Tehran’s nuclear programme, or a flashy show whose results were less than advertised … In the grand scheme of things, all of this is just drama”.

The big issue – second only to ‘what next in Iran’ and how they might respond – says Michael Wolff (who has written four books on Trump), is “how the MAGA is going to respond”:

“And I think he [Trump] is genuinely worried, [Wolff emphasises]. And I think he should be worried. There are two fundamental things to this coalition – Immigration and War. Everything else is fungible and can be compromised. It’s not sure those two elements can be compromised”. 

The signal from Hegseth (‘we are not at war with the Iranian people – just its nuclear programme’) clearly reflects a message being ‘walked back’ in the face of MAGA pushback: ‘Pay no attention. We’re not really doing war’ is what Hegseth was trying to say.

So, what’s next? There are basically four things that can happen: First, the Iranians can say ‘okay, we surrender’, but that’s just not going to happen; the second option is protracted war between Iran and Israel with Israel continuing to be attacked in a way that it has never been attacked before. And thirdly there is attempted regime change – although this has never been successfully achieved by air assault alone. Historically, America’s regime changes have been accompanied by mass slaughter, years of instability, terrorism and chaos.

Lastly, there are those who warn that nuclear Armageddon is on the table with the aim of destroying Iran. But that would be a case of self-harm, since it likely would be Trump’s Armageddon too – at the midterm elections.

“Let me explain”, says Wolff;

“I have been making lots of calls – so I think I have a sense of the arc that got Trump to where we are [with the strikes on Iran]. Calls are one of the main ways I track what he is thinking (I use the word ‘thinking’ loosely)”.

“I talk to people whom Trump has been speaking with on the phone. I mean all of Trump’s internal thinking is external; and it’s done in a series of his constant calls. And it’s pretty easy to follow – because he says the same thing to everybody. So, it’s this constant round of repetition …”.

“So, basically, when the Israelis attacked Iran, he got very excited about this – and his calls were all repetitions of one theme: Were they going to win? Is this a winner? Is this game-over? They [the Israelis] are so good! This really is a showstopper”.

“So again, we’re in the land of performance. This is a stage and the day before we attacked Iran, his calls were constantly repeating: If we do this, it needs to be perfect. It needs to be a win. It has to look perfect. Nobody dies”. 

Trump keeps saying to interlocutors: “We go ‘in-boom-out’: Big Day. We want a big day. We want (wait for it, Wolff says) a perfect war”. And then, out of the blue, Trump announced a ceasefire, which Wolff suggests was ‘Trump concluding his perfect war’.

And so, suddenly – with both Israel and Iran apparently co-operating with the staging of this ‘perfect war headline’ – “he gets annoyed that it doesn’t run perfectly”.

Wolff continues:

“Trump, by then, had already stepped into the role that ‘this was his war’. His perfect war. Television drama at the highest level: War to create a headline. And the headline is ‘WE WON’. I’m in charge now and everybody is going to do what I tell them. What we saw subsequently was his frustration at the spoiling of an outstanding headline: They’re not doing what he tells them”.

What is the broader ramification to this mico-episode? Well, Wolff for one believes Trump is unlikely to get sucked into a long complex war. Why? “Because Trump simply does not have the attention span for it. This is it. He’s done: In-boom-out”.

There is one fundamental point to be understood in Wolff’s analysis for its wider strategic import: Trump craves attention. He thinks in terms of generating headlines – each day, every day, but not necessarily the policies that flow from that headline. He seeks daily headline dominance, and for that he wants to define the headlines via a rhetorical posture – moulding ‘reality’ to give his own showstopping Trumpian ‘take’.

Headlines then become, as it were, a sort of political dominance which can subsequently metamorphose into policy – or not.

Nonetheless, it will not be quite as easy as Wolff suggests for Trump to simply ‘move the spotlight on’ from Iran – although Trump is a master at finding a new point of contention. For fundamentally, Trump has committed himself to the ancillary headline of ‘Iran will never have a bomb’. Note that he does not define that in policy terms, but gives himself wiggle-room for a possible later victory claim.

Yet, there is another fundamental point here: The Israeli attack on Iran on 13 June was supposed to collapse Iran like a house-of-cards. That is what Israel expected – and what Trump clearly expected too: “[Trump’s phone calls on the eve of the Israeli surprise attack] were all repetitions of one theme: Were they going to win? Is this a winner? Is this game-over? [The Israelis] are so good! This is really a show–stopper”. Trump foresaw the possible collapse of the Iranian State.

Well … it wasn’t ‘game over’. Israelis may be hugging themselves in excitement at the Mossad pièce de théâtre on 13 June; at the ‘professionalism’ of Mossad-led decapitations; the assassinations of scientists, the cyber and the sabotage attacks. Mossad is acclaimed by many in Israel – yet all were tactical achievements.

The strategic objective – the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ of it – was a bust: The ‘House-of-Cards’ did not implode. Rather, it powerfully rebounded. Instead of Iran being rendered weaker, the attack succeeded in firing-up Shia and Iranian national identities. It has ignited a largely dormant national fervour and passion. Iran will be the more resolute in the future.

So, if the Israeli 13 June assault didn’t succeed, why would the plan go any better second time around and with Iran fully prepared? A long attritional war with Iran may be Netanyahu’s preference to fuel his own hoped-for ‘Great Victory’ headline. But Netanyahu cannot now pursue such delusions (neither can Israel survive an attritional war) – without substantive American help (which might not be forthcoming).

Though Trump’s very evident queasiness (as painted by Wolff’s interlocutors) over whether the Israeli sneak attack would prove to be a quick win or not, is suggestive of Trump’s inner temper: “Is this a winner? Is this game-over? It needs to be a win: It has to look perfect: In-boom-out”. 

These repetitive enquiries to those around him spell more a lack of self-confidence, rather than suggest that he wants – or has the attention span – for a long-drawn out slug-match, bereft of a clear ‘game over’ moment.

Too, he will be rightly fearful of the effect on his MAGA base of a long war, as well as on young Trump voters (who are already beginning to drift away from Trump – as focus group polls suggest). Trump’s majorities in both Houses are incredibly precarious. $300m could tip them either way.

Recall too, the second fundamentally important point is that Israel was attacked in a way that it has never been attacked before. Israel still hides the extent of the damage inflicted by Iranian missiles; but even senior Israeli security watchers – as they digest the incrementally exposed extent of damage done to Israel – are drawing the bitter lesson that the Iranian ‘programme’ may not be able to be destroyed by military means. But only through a diplomatic agreement of some sort – if at all.

Regime Change also has been revealed as a chimaera. Iran has never been as united and as steadfast as it is now. The threat to kill the Supreme Leader also completely backfired. Four Shia leading religious authorities (Marja’iyya), including the celebrated Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, have issued rulings that any attack on the Supreme Leader would trigger a jihad fatwa obligating all of the Ummah (community) to join with religious war on America and Israel.

Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran reaching an agreed outcome seem far off. The IAEA has made itself a major part to the problem, rather than forming any part of a solution. Trump’s attention span on the Ukraine ‘ceasefire’ ploy seems to be ebbing – and this possibly might be the eventual outcome with Iran too. Long negotiations leading nowhere, as Iran quietly re-starts its enrichment programme. And presumably Israel launching further assaults on Iran, leading to Iran’s inevitable response – and escalation.

• This article was published by Strategic Culture

Alastair Crooke
Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.