Trump Administration Intensifies Religious Liberty Agenda With A Christian Focus
(ANALYSIS) The young Donald Trump administration is unusually focused on the issue of religious liberty — operating through two newly formed organizations that emphasize concerns raised by those conservative Catholics and Protestants who are a crucial element in the president’s political “base.”
First came Trump’s Feb. 6 executive order that established an unprecedented “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” that will investigate federal government policies and actions. Then a May 1 executive order created a federal Religious Liberty Commission.
The task force released its first report on Sept. 5. With a distinctly partisan edge, the document’s 48 pages review and decry what’s called the “anti-Christian bias that pervaded the federal government during the Biden administration.” The task force contends that the Democrats “marginalized” Christians’ beliefs, “targeted” Christian communities and imposed “a systematic pattern of discrimination.”
READ: Trump Vows To Defend Religious Liberty Ahead Of Nation’s 250th Birthday
Many of the specifics deal with denial of religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccine mandates and transgender rights programs that vexed traditionalist Christians. Despite the Christian emphasis, the task force does say under Trump “every religion will be treated with equality in both policy and action.”
The task force is as high-powered as a government panel could be, chaired by Attorney General Pam Bondi alongside the Cabinet secretaries heading the departments of Education, Health, Homeland Security, Housing, Labor, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and (newly renamed) War; plus seven other high federal officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel. They are commissioned to investigate, rid their agencies of any offending policies and issue a final report by February, 2027, after which Trump will decide whether the effort continues.
Separately, Trump’s RLC is assigned to compile a report on these issues by the time the nation celebrates its 250th birthday next July 4. Again, it will be up to Trump whether the RLC continues to operate after that. This commission is not to be confused with the government’s permanent Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was created under President Jimmy Carter in 1998.
Trump’s appointees to the new RLC include only one non-Christian, a prominent Orthodox Jewish rabbi. None of the Christian members advocate strict “separation of church and state” as the way the nation should protect religious liberty (though it’s possible RLC advisory panels would include some such dissenters). Trump spoke at an RLC hearing this month where all the witnesses were Christians, including pupils who recounted hostility against their faith. However, the commission does plan a future hearing on antisemitism.
Turning to detail in the new task force report, intense COVID-19 disputes at three agencies loom large. The Centers for Disease control states that this, the most deadly epidemic in U.S. history, has taken the lives of 1,234,777 Americans (noting that it was only a “contributing cause” in 13% of these cases). The emergency led to mandatory vaccination and testing in hopes of preventing transmission, but experts later emphasized the value of vaccines to mitigate illness and prevent deaths.
The difficulties with religious exemptions are typified by task force criticism of the University of Virginia, which is entangled in a pending federal lawsuit for firing several hundred employees who wanted religious exemptions from vaccination. The school only granted exemptions to followers of a defined religion with such scruples.
The one clear example is Christian Science, which shuns conventional medicine. The task force says this created a “favored faith” list. The same policy long governed exemptions from the military draft for pacifist religions, but in the Vietnam War era a unanimous Supreme Court recognized conscience claims by unaffiliated individuals in the Seeger ruling.
Other task force allegations include: IRS action against preachers for favoring candidates (a recently ended policy under Trump), disproportionate Education Department fines against Liberty and Grand Canyon universities, rejection of student aid at other Christian colleges, devout Navy SEALS allegedly denied promotions, removal of Catholic priests at Walter Reed medical center, biological men given access to women’s facilities and shelters, realtors association discipline against a member for endorsing man-woman marriage and offending public school “gender ideology” policies.
Also, the Justice Department prosecutions of anti-abortion protesters, medical personnel forced to participate in abortions or gender “transition” surgery, mandatory abortion coverage in religious agencies’ insurance, rejection of religious foster care agencies over LGBTQ issues, disputes on observance of Christian holidays, workplace bans on religious t-shirts, banks refusing service to Christian agencies, a V.A. facility demanding prior approval of a chaplain’s sermons, excluding religious agencies from federal disaster loans, barring aid if social service programs include religious activities and a host of faith-related conflicts reported at foreign diplomatic posts.
Another Trump-era initiative is the July 28 policy memorandum from the federal Office of Personnel Management titled, “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace.” This month, Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote 19 agencies contending that this interpretation of the law is rife with “misinformation” and published a competing “Know Your Rights” guide for federal government workers.
While the two Trump panels pursue Christian issues, the Anti-Defamation League’s latest annual accounting of U.S. antisemitism, released this past April, has significant and bleak numbers. During 2024, the ADL documented 9,354 incidents of anti-Jewish bias, the highest total in the 46-year run of these reports.
That marks a 344% increase over the past five years and 893% over the past decade. The Trump administration has employed antisemitism as one reason to assail prominent universities. On the campus aspect, the ADL count includes 1,694 antisemitic incidents at colleges in 2024 — an 84% increase over the prior year and a historically high of 18% of the year’s incidents. The ADL said synagogues and other Jewish institutions have been targeted with hundreds of bomb threats and hundreds of threats of other types.
Also there’s this. In March, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued its annual report on discrimination and civil rights complaints from U.S. Muslims that says “Islamophobia” had reached “an all-time high across the country.”
The organization received 8,658 such complaints during 2024, the largest number since its annual reports began in 1996 and a 74% increase over 2023. CAIR depicts growing concern over “viewpoint discrimination” targeting those “who advocated against Israel’s military occupation, apartheid, and genocide of Palestinians.” Muslims also contend that job discrimination is a major problem.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.