by Marissa Greene, Fort Worth Report and Report for America

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This article is co-published with Fort Worth Report and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Texas Rep. Nate Schatzline recently stood before a gathering of conservative activists just outside Fort Worth, recapping legislative wins and previewing what’s next at the Capitol. On this day, however, he was speaking not only as a lawmaker but also as a pastor.

A week earlier, the Internal Revenue Service decided to allow religious leaders to endorse political candidates from the pulpit, effectively upending a provision in decades-old tax law barring such activity. Schatzline, a longtime pastor at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, was excited. The IRS affirmed “what we already knew,” he said at the July 14 meeting: The government can’t stop the church from getting civically engaged.

“There is absolutely no reason that a politician should be more vocal about social issues than your pastor, and so I need pastors to stand up,” Schatzline told the crowd made up of members of True Texas Project, a Tarrant County-based organization that is a key part of a powerful political network pushing lawmakers to adopt its hard-line opposition to immigration and LGBTQ rights and to advance conservative education policies.

“We need pastors to be bold.”

For decades, pastors like him have fought for the right to speak on political issues and actively endorse candidates in their capacity as religious leaders. Now, before a judge has weighed in on whether to allow the IRS policy change, some religious leaders are already calling on congregations to demand greater political involvement from their churches.

While the tax agency’s stance applies to churches nationwide, Texas is expected to be where it will matter most, said Ryan Burge, a political and religious expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

More than 200 megachurches call Texas home. In the Lone Star State, pastors seem to have a larger profile in social, political and religious discussions. “Texas will be the epicenter for testing all these ideas out,” he said.

Schatzline said as much in a follow-up interview with Fort Worth Report. A nonprofit that Mercy Culture Church previously created to help elect candidates to political office is working with President Donald Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board to expand that work and to mobilize churches and pastors to get them more civically engaged, the state representative said.

Officials from the White House and the advisory........

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