The Biden administration's Internal Revenue Service opened multiple investigations into Christian churches over the content of their sermons, while apparently ignoring liberal houses of worship that openly endorsed Democratic candidates, a new Justice Department report concluded Thursday.
The findings come from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, which President Donald Trump created by executive order last year. Chaired by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the task force reviewed internal discussions, case files, and prosecutorial decisions across 17 federal agencies. Its conclusion: the Biden-era IRS enforced the Johnson Amendment along ideological lines, targeting congregations whose beliefs aligned with conservative positions while looking the other way when left-leaning faith leaders did the same or more.
The report, first detailed by Just the News, describes a pattern that goes beyond a few isolated complaints. It documents a federal tax agency that demanded sermon transcripts, scrutinized church websites, and assessed excise taxes on a Virginia congregation, all while more than 1,600 faith leaders who endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate in October 2020 drew no apparent enforcement interest whatsoever.
The Johnson Amendment, a 1954 provision in the tax code, prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. The Justice Department noted the provision has been "sporadically enforced" over the decades. But the task force said the Biden IRS applied it with a clear thumb on the scale.
The report stated:
"The Biden IRS... [opened] multiple investigations into Christian churches focused on the content of their sermons. The IRS asked these churches for detailed information about their operations, not just about the alleged violations."
That alone would raise questions. What makes the pattern harder to dismiss is what the task force said it did not find: any evidence that the Biden administration pursued nonprofits or churches considered liberal, or congregations that endorsed Biden for the presidency.
The task force put it plainly:
"But during the same time, when other houses of worship gave sermons that reflected different scriptural interpretations on culture war issues, or prayed for Democrat candidates, the Biden IRS appeared to take no action."
The administration, the report concluded, treated traditional Christian teachings as though they amounted to political support for Republican candidates. That framing turned a tax-code provision into a tool for viewpoint discrimination, a serious charge, and one that fits a broader pattern of institutional overreach that has defined recent Washington fights.
The report walks through specific cases. In 2024, the IRS informed New Way Church in Florida that it was reviewing the congregation's compliance with the Johnson Amendment. The alleged offense: hosting a candidate for a local school board race two years earlier.
The IRS asked New Way Church to provide information about the candidate's visit, including attendance figures, the purpose of the invitation, and whether the church had participated in any other political events. On the advice of legal counsel, the church refused to answer. The IRS ultimately dismissed the investigation.
That same year, Grace Church in St. Louis, Missouri, received an IRS letter raising concerns that information published on its website in 2022 might "constitute political activity." The church had posted material about positions local candidates held and encouraged its congregation to take an active role in politics.
The IRS asked Grace Church whether it had published any "flyers or guides" urging votes for or against candidates, whether it had invited candidates to speak, and what function its "Civic Engagement groups" served. Again, after the church obtained legal counsel, the IRS dropped the probe.
A third case involved a church in Northern Virginia. The task force said the Biden-era IRS assessed excise taxes on the congregation for alleged political expenditures after a sermon in which the pastor said the Republican Party platform aligns closer with Biblical values. The report did not name the church.
In each case, the churches either fought back with lawyers or absorbed the financial and emotional cost of a federal investigation. The investigations themselves were eventually dropped or resolved, but as the task force noted, pastors felt the probe itself was the punishment. That tracks. A small congregation facing IRS scrutiny does not need to lose a formal ruling to feel the weight of the federal government on its back.
The report's most damaging contrast is not between two churches. It is between two sets of facts that the Biden IRS apparently weighed very differently.
In 2008, under the Obama administration, 30 pastors instructed their congregations on how to vote according to their interpretation of scripture. The IRS appears to have opened an investigation into just one pastor, and then dropped it without enforcement action. That episode, while not a Biden-era event, set a precedent for selective enforcement that the task force said continued and intensified.
Then there is October 2020, when more than 1,600 faith leaders endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate. The task force found no indication the Biden IRS pursued any of them. Not one.
A Florida church hosts a school board candidate and gets an IRS inquiry two years later. Sixteen hundred clergy publicly endorse a presidential candidate and nothing happens. That is not sporadic enforcement. That is selective enforcement, and the selection criteria appear to track political alignment, not the law.
The growing concern over federal agencies wielding broad powers with minimal accountability is not new to conservative voters. But the IRS occupies a special place in that concern, given its history.
Americans who remember the Obama-era IRS scandal will recognize the pattern. That episode, in which the IRS singled out Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, produced congressional hearings, a criminal referral, and lasting distrust of the agency.
Lois Lerner, who directed the IRS exempt organizations division at the time, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation. Tea Party-related groups, including True the Vote and NorCal Tea Party Patriots, filed lawsuits alleging unconstitutional targeting.
The House committee kept Lerner under subpoena even after her attorney asked that she be excused. Chairman Darrell Issa, as the Washington Free Beacon reported, pushed ahead with the subpoena, underscoring the seriousness of the allegations. The IRS eventually settled with targeted groups, but no senior official faced criminal prosecution.
The lesson from that era was supposed to be that the IRS cannot be trusted with discretionary enforcement power over political speech. The Biden administration, if the task force's findings hold, did not learn that lesson. It repeated the mistake, this time aimed at churches.
The task force report does not limit its findings to the tax agency. It describes what it calls an overall anti-Christian bias throughout the federal government during the Biden years. The FBI's targeting of traditional Catholics is cited. So is the Department of Education's unequal targeting of Christian universities for compliance settlements. The task force also pointed to Department of Health and Human Services rules designed to exclude Christians from being foster parents based on traditional views on gender and sexuality.
The report concluded that the Biden administration sought, but ultimately failed, to eliminate statutory protections for Christians in federal law. When legislative efforts stalled, the administration turned to policy and regulatory means to try to achieve the same goal, the task force said.
Acting Attorney General Blanche framed the findings in direct terms:
"No American should live in fear that the federal government will punish them for their faith. As our report lays out, the Biden Administration's actions devastated the lives of many Christian Americans. That devastation ended with President Trump."
The task force's concluding assessment was measured in its language but pointed in its implications. It stated that "at a minimum, there are questions with respect to the evenhandedness of the enforcement of the Johnson Amendment against particular viewpoints under the Biden IRS, which creates the appearance of disfavoring congregations and pastors whose doctrinal beliefs and related policy views did not align with the Democrat Party."
That careful phrasing, "at a minimum" and "creates the appearance", is the language of investigators who believe the evidence supports a stronger conclusion but are staying within what they can document. The cases they lay out do the talking.
Several questions remain open. The report does not name the Northern Virginia church that was assessed excise taxes. It does not identify the specific candidate who visited New Way Church. And it does not detail which statutory protections for Christians the Biden administration allegedly tried to eliminate through legislation before turning to regulatory workarounds.
What the report does establish is a documented pattern: conservative churches investigated, liberal churches left alone, and a tax provision used as a lever against congregations whose beliefs the prior administration found politically inconvenient. The broader Republican political landscape has long warned about this kind of institutional bias. Now there is a 17-agency review backing it up.
Whether Congress acts on these findings, through Johnson Amendment reform, IRS oversight, or something more, will determine whether this report changes anything or joins the long shelf of Washington investigations that document a problem and then gather dust.
The political realignment underway in this country has many causes. But when the tax man comes for your pastor and not theirs, people notice, and they remember.
A government that polices sermons by viewpoint is not enforcing the law. It is picking winners and losers among the faithful, and that is exactly the kind of thing the First Amendment was written to prevent.
