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.
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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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Peter Smith, The Associated Press
