Lakepointe Church senior pastor and host of the “Live Free” podcast, available on BlazeTV, Josh Howerton is calling on his fellow pastors to fight back against “intimidation” efforts from secular activists and to speak forthrightly about the “moral asymmetry” between the two major political parties in America ahead of the upcoming midterms.
Howerton — who discussed the misconceptions about the separation between church and state earlier this year on “Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey” — also implored fellow pastors in Texas and across the nation, via social media, to encourage their congregants to vote and not be afraid of the threat of lawsuits from organizations like the Freedom from Religion Foundation that use IRS complaints to intimidate pastors to remain silent.
‘No church in US History has ever had their tax exempt status removed for a sermon, much less for a separate podcast.’
Howerton claimed in the post that millions of Christians in Texas may not vote in the 2026 midterm elections that could be decided by a few hundred thousand votes. Howerton said, “Pastors, consider encouraging your people to vote real quick in announcements next couple weeks.” He then told those pastors that their congregations were comprised of “salt of the earth” people who want their pastors to do this.
Days after this initial exhortation, Howerton identified Ashley Wooldridge, the senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley in Arizona, as a pastor who has been delivering the goods.
Responding to a video where Wooldridge urges followers of Christ to go vote, Howerton wrote, “People who don’t come from ‘pastor world’ won’t understand this, but Pastor Ashley will get crushed just for doing this (his church is over 50k people). And every member of his church should have his back and be proud he’s their pastor for doing it.”
In the interview earlier this year with Allie Beth Stuckey, Howerton explained what the so-called separation of church and state does not mean.
“Morality is all that gets legislated. Every law that has ever existed legislates a morality,” he continued. “So separation of church and state doesn’t mean a separation of morality and state, and separation of church and state doesn’t mean a separation of politics and religion. That’s actually impossible and clearly not what the founders desired.”
Howerton knows firsthand what backlash awaits those conservative Christians who dare to raise their voices during an election year.
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Howerton spoke forcefully about matters of faith, morality, and political agency, emphasizing that “if the church won’t disciple people, the world will.” In particular, one of his sermons evidently got under the skin of the secularists at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a tax-exempt progressive advocacy group that works zealously to remove all signs and sounds of Christianity from public spaces.
While the secularist group acknowledged that Howerton wasn’t explicitly endorsing a presidential candidate in the sermon, it nevertheless asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Lakepointe Church and terminate its tax-exempt status.
Drawing on his experience with the FFRF’s 2024 complaint and what he regards as pastor-focused “harassment and intimidation,” Howerton noted last week that “progressives selectively report churches to the FFRF every year and FFRF selectively threatens only one side with (toothless) lawsuits.”
The Internal Revenue Code has long prohibited churches and other tax-exempt nonprofit organizations “from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”
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Congress has yet to repeal the Johnson Amendment and related legal battles are ongoing, but the IRS said last year that pastors could formally endorse political candidates from the pulpit without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status under the Johnson Amendment.
After suggesting that FFRF turns a blind eye to pro-Democratic messaging in progressive churches, Howerton emphasized that “no church in U.S. History has ever had their tax exempt status removed for a sermon, much less for a separate podcast, and that goes triple for cases in which no candidate has even been endorsed and QUADRUPLE for simply encouraging your people to vote and bringing clarity of moral asymmetry of policy proposals.”
“In the words of a couple knowledgeable guys I consulted with, it’s a harassment and intimidation tactic to silence pastors,” said Howerton.
The FFRF did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.
“There is NO threat from this whatsoever, you are 100% free to be clear with your people about the (radical) moral asymmetry between the current proposed policies and ideologies of the parties AND to encourage your people to vote as an application of the command to be ‘the salt of the earth’ (Matt 5:13) and to ‘seek the welfare of the city’ (Jer 29:7) and to ‘love your neighbor’ (Mk 12:31),” continued the pastor. “Stand firm.”
Howerton is not alone in asking Christian faith leaders to step up.
In an interview on Fox News earlier this month, Southern Baptist Convention President Willy Rice similarly urged pastors to engage in the political process “because there are many political issues that are, at their heart, theological issues and moral issues that strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”
“I think throughout American history, pastors have had a strong voice at key moments in American political history,” added Rice.
Rice also observed that theologically conservative pastors retreated from public political fights in recent years, leaving a “vacuum” that was exploited by “those on the theological and political left.”
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Faith, Josh howerton, Blazetv, Freedom from religion foundation, Texas, Politics
