Critics say Trump's religion agenda will benefit conservative Christians
the most
[May 19, 2025]
By PETER SMITH
White House Faith Office. A Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.
A Religious Liberty Commission.
President Donald Trump has won plaudits from his base of conservative
Christian supporters for establishing multiple faith-related entities.
“We’re bringing back religion in our country,” Trump said at a recent
Rose Garden event, on the National Day of Prayer, when he announced the
creation of the Religious Liberty Commission. “We must always be one
nation under God, a phrase that they would like to get rid of, the
radical left.”
But others, including some Christians, are alarmed by these acts —
saying Trump isn't protecting religion in general but granting a
privileged status to politically conservative expressions of
Christianity that happen to include his supporters.
What's up with the ‘separation of church and state’ debate?
Critics are even more aghast that he's questioning a core understanding
of the First Amendment. “They say ‘separation between church and
state,’” Trump said at the prayer day gathering, when he talked about
establishing the White House Faith Office. “I said, all right, let’s
forget about that for one time.”
Trump's creation of these various bodies is “definitely not normal, and
it's very important to not look at them as individual entities,” said
the Rev. Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, a
progressive Christian advocacy organization.
“They are indicative of an entire system that is being constructed at
the national level,” she said. “It’s a system specifically designed to
guide and shape culture in the U.S.”
Fleck worries about the combined effect of Trump administration actions
and a spate of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years. The
court, now with three Trump appointees, has lowered barriers between
church and state in its interpretations of the First Amendment's ban on
any congressionally recognized establishment of religion.
“My freedom of religion runs right up to the point when yours begins,
and if I am then trying to establish something that’s going to affect
your right to practice your faith, that is against the First Amendment,”
Fleck said.
But religious supporters of Trump are happy with his expansion of
religion-related offices.
“We were a nation birthed by prayer, founded on the Judeo-Christian
ethic to ensure that people could worship as they wished,” said Texas
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, at the Rose Garden ceremony where he
was announced as chair of the Religious Liberty Commission. Many members
are conservative Christian clerics and commentators; some have supported
Trump politically. The event featured Christian praise music along with
Jewish, Muslim and Christian prayers.
White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers, via email, said the
commission is ensuring “that all Americans’ God-given right is
protected, no matter their religion.” Rogers said the criticism is
coming from anti-Trump advocacy groups that are trying to undermine his
agenda.
A closer look at the new religious entities
The three entities created under Trump overlap in their marching orders
and, in some cases, their membership.
In February, Trump established the White House Faith Office, led by
evangelist Paula White-Cain as a “special government employee,”
according to the announcement. She's resuming a similar role she held in
the first Trump administration.
White-Cain — who also serves on the new Religious Liberty Commission —
was one of the earliest high-profile Christian leaders to support
Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and is considered Trump's spiritual
adviser.
Her office is designed to consult “experts within the faith community”
on “practices to better align with the American values.” It also is
tasked with religious-liberty training and promoting grant opportunities
for faith-based entities; and working to “identify failures” in federal
protection for religious liberty.
Also in February, Trump created a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian
Bias, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi with representatives from
several federal departments.
Its mandate is to expose and reverse what Trump claims were “egregious”
violations of Christians’ rights under former President Joe Biden. Many
of those claims have been disputed, as has the need for singling out for
protection the nation’s largest and most culturally and politically
dominant religious group.
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A White House action focused on a specific religion is not
unprecedented. The Biden administration, for example, issued
strategy plans to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. Both Trump
administrations have issued executive orders on combating
antisemitism.
An April hearing of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias
featured witnesses from across federal departments, alleging that
Christians during the Biden administration faced discrimination for
such things as opposing vaccine mandates or “DEI/LGBT ideology” on
religious grounds. Some claimed that schools' legal or tax
enforcement actions were actually targeted because of their
Christian religion.
The State and Veterans Affairs departments have asked people to
report alleged instances of anti-Christian bias.
The White House said the Justice Department formed specific task
forces to respond to what it called a “concentration of bias”
against Christians and Jews, but that it's committed to combating
discrimination against Americans of any faith.
The latest entity to be created, the Religious Liberty Commission,
has a mandate to recommend policies to protect and “celebrate
America’s peaceful religious pluralism.”
Patrick, the chair, has supported legislation requiring Texas school
districts to allow prayer time for students and says he wants his
state to emulate Louisiana in requiring the Ten Commandments to be
posted in public school classrooms.
Among the commission's mandates: to look into “conscience
protections in the health care field and concerning vaccine
mandates” and government “displays with religious imagery.”
Among the commissioners are Catholic bishops, Protestant
evangelists, a rabbi and attorneys focused on religious liberty
cases. Its advisory boards include several Christian and some Jewish
and Muslim members.
A commission member, author and broadcaster, Eric Metaxas, supported
its work in a column Friday for the conservative site Blaze Media.
“This commission’s goal is to strengthen the liberty of every single
American — regardless of that person’s faith and even of whether
that person has any faith,” he wrote. “It also aims to restore those
liberties attacked by hostile and misguided secularists.”
Fulfilling a priority for Trump's conservative Christian backers
Charles Haynes, senior fellow for religious liberty at the Freedom
Forum, a nonpartisan foundation focused on First Amendment rights,
said the various entities reflect Trump's attempt to fulfill an
agenda priority of his conservative Christian supporters.
He said the entities' work reflects their long-standing contention
that the First Amendment has "been misapplied to keep Christians out
of the public square, to discriminate against Christianity, by which
they mean their understandings of Christianity.”
Trump's moves and recent Supreme Court cases are reversing a
consensus dating at least to the 1940s that the First Amendment
strictly prohibits government-sponsored religion at the federal and
state levels, Haynes said.
He said the First Amendment actually provides broad protections for
religious expressions in settings such as public schools. He helped
write a Freedom Forum guide on religion in public schools, endorsed
by groups across the ideological spectrum. It notes that within some
limits, students can pray on their own time in schools, express
their faith in class assignments, distribute religious literature,
form school religious clubs and receive some accommodations based on
religious belief.
But Haynes noted that the Supreme Court is now considering allowing
Oklahoma to pay for a Catholic charter school, which he said could
erase a long-standing standard that public-funded schools don't
teach a particular religion.
“It’s a very different day in the United States when both the
Supreme Court and the president of the United States appear to be
intent on changing the arrangement on religious freedom that we
thought was in place,” Haynes said. “It’s a radical departure from
how we’ve understood ourselves.”
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