Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at the impact of an I.R.S. decision allowing houses of worship to endorse political candidates.
Houses of worship have for decades been barred from endorsing political candidates, but that prohibition is a thing of the past thanks to a decision this week by the Internal Revenue Service.
Now if a church or a synagogue endorses a candidate, the I.R.S. says it would view the matter as a private one, likening the backing by a pastor of a politician on a Sunday from the pulpit to “a family discussion concerning candidates.”
What this decision means for the country — and for the New York region — is not entirely clear.
“There are so many different ways it could play out,” said David Gibson, the director of the Center for Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “The separation of church and state was designed to protect churches as much as it was designed to protect the state in this country.”
New York City, to borrow a phrase from the writer Milan Kundera, is a place of maximum diversity in minimum space.
The city is home to religious institutions devoted to nearly every faith on earth, from Black Baptist churches and Islamic high schools to Hasidic synagogues and gay-friendly parishes run by dissident Catholic orders.
When it comes to religion, that diversity was quantified in a 2023 study by the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that two of New York City’s five boroughs — Brooklyn and Queens — were among the 10 most religiously diverse counties in the United States.
The other three boroughs — Staten Island, Manhattan and the Bronx — were not far behind.
The research institute’s survey results showed just how different each borough is from one another.
Catholicism is the city’s biggest religion, with almost one-third of New Yorkers belonging to the faith. Hispanic Catholics make up 30 percent of the Bronx and nearly 23 percent of Queens, while in Staten Island, white Catholics are the largest group. There, roughly 30 percent of people identify as both white and Catholic, a nod to the borough’s status as the city’s whitest.
Black Protestant churches have long been socially and politically influential in New York, and many of their members live in the Bronx and Brooklyn, according to the data. Black Protestants make up 14 percent of the Bronx and a slighter lower share (more than 13 percent) of Brooklyn.
The data also reflects New York City’s status as a center of Jewish culture. Brooklyn, which is home to large Hasidic communities, is the most Jewish borough, with 12 percent of the population identifying as Jews. In Manhattan, the figure is 7 percent.
With so many faiths and cultures all together in one place — a place that contains a handful of congressional districts and one mayoral jurisdiction — endorsements from the pulpit could lead to all sorts of political jostling.
That is especially true now at the height of a mayoral campaign in which religion has played a significant role, not least because a Muslim candidate, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, won the Democratic primary for the first time.
But the race has also been marked by other religious dynamics that are new to New York. They include the mobilization of Muslim voters by progressives and a dip in the influence wielded by Black churches, which for the first time in recent memory favored a candidate, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who went on to lose the Democratic primary.
There have also been heated debates over the best way to combat antisemitism, whether it is antisemitic to criticize Israel and Zionism, and whether those questions are being directed at Mamdani, who has received Islamophobic threats and verbal abuse, as a result of anti-Muslim sentiment.
The I.R.S. decision is unlikely to lead to shocking endorsements because there is little doubt about how some religious groups, like the Catholic Church, feel about larger political issues like abortion or immigration. The same could be said for local issues, too, Gibson said.
“Do we really have any doubt about where mosques in Queens, say, stand on Zohran Mamdani?” he said. “Probably not.”
The I.R.S. rule change, on Monday, came in response to a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters.
Some religious groups reacted to the change with wariness or outright alarm, including the Union for Reform Judaism, a pillar of religious life in New York City, which is the municipality with the world’s largest Jewish population.
(New York, which has about 1.3 million Jews, is often referred to as the city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. But no city in Israel comes close to the size of New York’s eight million people, roughly equal to Israel’s entire population.)
In a statement, Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said the I.R.S. decision was bad news for houses of worship because it could wreak havoc on the lives of their communities.
First and foremost, he said, the decision introduces explicitly political debates into the religious life of a congregation that is supposed to be a place of refuge and spiritual shelter for all its members.
The decision also creates an opportunity for politicians to persuade a house of worship to endorse them by making a donation, which could then be portrayed as a tax-deductible charitable contribution.
That was especially dangerous now because of the “hyperpartisan” nature of American politics, Rabbi Pesner said, when the risk of splintering a congregation or pitting its members against each other could be high. Introducing those tensions into a house of worship could get in the way of a clergy member’s “sacred duty to teach, guide and inspire,” he added.
Weather
Expect a mostly cloudy day with temperatures reaching 83. There’s a high chance of showers and a thunderstorm in the afternoon and evening, with a low around 73.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 3 (Tisha B’Av).
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METROPOLITAN diary
Batting practice
Dear Diary:
It was July 1984. My brother and I had just landed in New York from Paris. It was our first trip to the United States, and we were standing outside Yankee Stadium.
It was hot, really hot, and we had only one thing on our mind: to see Don Mattingly or Dave Winfield take batting practice.
Under the cool, dark overhangs inside the stadium, we could hear the sharp “shlacks’’ of balls being hit before even seeing batters in the cage.
We climbed the shadowy stairs up to the empty stands along the third-base line. Then, sudden light. The grass was a fluorescent green.
No sooner had we stepped into the sun when there was another “shlack,” and we saw a foul ball flying our way.
It took one bounce before my brother blocked it with his stomach like a genuine third baseman. Welcome to the Yankees.
That night, back in our room, he lifted his shirt. The red seams of the ball were etched into his skin.
He smiled.
— Pierre Callewaert
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. — L.S.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Ama Sarpomaa, Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
The post How Endorsements From Pulpits Could Play Out in New York appeared first on New York Times.
