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A few weeks ago, the IRS announced churches and other houses of worship can now endorse political candidates during their services and still keep their tax-exempt status.

This is a rule that has been in place since 1954.

And until now, it was unclear if an endorsement given during a sermon counted as campaign activity.

IRS officials say the new policy fixes it.

It doesn't count.

And in the day since the announcement, people have wondered what this technical change to a rule that was often ignored anyway might mean for religious life in this country.

Here in Utah, officials of the LDS Church didn't give a direct comment about the change. A spokesman did clarify the church takes political neutrality very seriously.

So it seems clear at least this religious organization isn't going to be endorsing candidates from the pulpit.

But the historian Benjamin Park told us it wasn't always that way.

There were times he said when leaders moved more freely between faith and

politics. In the wake of the 1932 presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

immediately implemented his New Deal, a series of federal interventions to try to pull

America out of the Great Depression.

Among those who saw this New Deal program as federal overreach was J. Ruben Clark,

who had just joined the first presidency at that very moment.

And in his first general conference in April of 1933,

he was aghast at seeing several other general authorities of the LDS Church,

praising FDR's New Deal.

The world is moaning in tribulation.

I do not know the cure.

...