Last month the Internal Revenue Service did something remarkable: It proposed allowing houses of worship to engage in political speech and even endorse candidates without jeopardizing their ability to accept tax-deductible contributions.

This proposal — which comes in the wake of years of advocacy by conservative Christian activists — constitutes a major reinterpretation of the so-called Johnson Amendment, the rule that since 1954 has prevented charities, including churches, from endorsing candidates. To its critics, the proposal threatens to transform houses of worship into political action committees, enabling donors to influence elections by funneling tax-deductible money through them.

But the core of the I.R.S.’s proposal is correct, and you don’t need to be a conservative evangelical to think so. It’s a central liberal principle that government should not restrict political speech. The I.R.S. can and should revise the Johnson Amendment to protect the speech rights of charities without creating a campaign finance loophole.

Granted, striking that balance is tricky. On the one hand, it seems obvious that the First Amendment should prohibit the government from telling rabbis, for example, what they can and can’t say to their congregants during a synagogue service. On the other hand, the government shouldn’t force taxpayers to subsidize political speech they may not agree with — which, in effect, is what allowing tax-deductible contributions to fund political campaigning would do.

The solution, I believe, is to permit charities to endorse candidates, but to limit as much as possible the charities’ use of funds to promote that endorsement. One way to do that is to limit political speech to internal communications — specifically, face-to-face discourse among congregants or members. Charities should be prohibited from engaging in political speech in outside settings. For example, a pastor should be able to endorse a political candidate in a sermon, but not if that sermon is posted on a church website. Nor should the pastor’s church be allowed to publicly campaign for a candidate.

This would be a fair and constitutional compromise. The First Amendment requires that charities have some way of expressing their political views — namely, inside their organization — but they are not permitted to engage in politicking at the taxpayer’s expense.

The good news is that the I.R.S.’s proposal is roughly along these lines. The bad news is that the agency is going about this in the wrong legal venue, with too narrow a focus and without adequate definitions of key terms. As a result, this right-minded endeavor threatens to foster confusion and create the very campaign finance loophole that critics worry about.

Start with the legal venue. Instead of revising the Johnson Amendment by issuing official regulatory guidance through the I.R.S. or the Treasury Department, the I.R.S. is floating this significant policy change as part of a court filing to settle a single federal lawsuit in Texas, in which two churches and an association of Christian broadcasters sued the I.R.S. to allow the churches to endorse candidates to their members.

This is an awkward and misguided way to overhaul a major law that applies to so many organizations, especially since existing I.R.S. guidance says the opposite. Technically, the rule change would apply only to the two churches that were among the plaintiffs in the case. Yet other houses of worship and charitable organizations will understandably see this decision as representing the I.R.S.’s guidance on how to act in future elections.

And that’s assuming the judge in the case adopts the I.R.S.’s recommendation; he could modify it as he sees fit, creating a different suggestion of what the broader law is. Government agencies and their regulations are viewed with suspicion by many on the political right these days, but this kind of fine-tuning of legislation is exactly what bureaucratic agencies — and not district courts — are designed for.

Compounding the awkwardness of the legal venue, the I.R.S.’s proposal in the court filing is too limited in scope. It would allow houses of worship — and only houses of worship — to endorse candidates. But the Johnson Amendment applies to all charities, including hospitals, universities, soup kitchens and organizations devoted to educating the public about important issues. It would be unconstitutional for the government to discriminate between churches and secular organizations when allowing or barring political speech.

The I.R.S.’s language is also vague. The proposal indicates that allowing for political speech applies only to “internal” communications — which, again, I think is the correct approach. But the I.R.S. provides little guidance as to what “internal” means. Many charities, including churches, communicate with their members electronically, and sometimes they share these communications broadly with nonmembers through websites or social media. Which of these communications are internal (and therefore permitted) and which are not?

I think it’s necessary that “internal” means only live, in-person interactions. Otherwise charities will be able to use their funds to disseminate their views about candidates broadly — through videos, websites, mailers and so forth — creating the loophole that would allow donors seeking to influence elections to funnel tax-deductible money through charities. Unless the I.R.S. specifies what “internal” means, I fear the loophole will get wider and wider. And because of the way a tax deduction works (its value increases as you move up in the tax brackets), permitting deductible funds to be used for campaign speech would greatly magnify the speech of the wealthiest taxpayers and provide little or no benefit to everyone else.

In an ideal world, the I.R.S. would simply issue its own guidance on how to understand the Johnson Amendment — guidance that would be clear and applicable to all charities. It still could. But until then, a single federal judge has the choice of adopting the I.R.S.’s poorly drafted recommendation or issuing an order of his own that better clarifies the nature and limits of this long-overdue change in the law.

I hope he does the right thing.

Benjamin Leff is a law professor at American University.

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