Here is a fun exercise. Name the religion of every American president. Take your time. I’ll wait.
Done? Good. Now name the religion that roughly six in ten American adults still identify with, the religion whose holidays are federal holidays, whose God is on the money, and whose book gets hands sworn on it in courtrooms from Bangor to Bakersfield.
That is the religion the United States Department of Justice has decided is under siege. Not discussed. Not debated. Decided, in writing, with your tax dollars, across two executive orders, two federal bodies, more than four hundred combined pages of official reports, and an enforcement division that has been gutted and rebuilt to march in this exact direction.
This is not a culture war think piece. This is a paper trail. So let’s walk it.
The paperwork of persecution
It started on February 6, 2025, when the president signed Executive Order 14202, charmingly titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” The order created a federal task force chaired by the Attorney General, directed to sweep every department and agency for anti-Christian conduct, demand that offending policies end, and recommend presidential action to advance its version of religious liberty. Seventeen federal agencies were conscripted into the effort.
Sit with that for a second. The federal government of a constitutionally secular nation created an interagency apparatus, on day seventeen of an administration, dedicated to one religion’s grievances. Not a task force on religious discrimination. A task force on anti-CHRISTIAN bias, by name, in the title.
On April 30, 2026, that task force delivered its homework: a 200-page report, over 1,100 footnotes, 300-plus pages of exhibits, from all seventeen agencies, concluding that the previous administration ran a systematic campaign against Christians. The alleged instruments of this persecution? Fines against Christian universities for consumer protection violations. Title IX interpretations. Vaccine policies. Trans people existing in locker rooms. The Acting Attorney General announced that the devastation of Christian Americans had ended with the current president, which is a remarkable sentence to type about the most politically powerful religious demographic in the hemisphere.
Then came phase two. Executive Order 14291, signed May 1, 2025, established the Religious Liberty Commission, housed inside the DOJ, chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick with Ben Carson as vice chair, and scheduled to wrap up by July 4, 2026, because nothing says subtle like timing your theocracy report to the nation’s 250th birthday.
The commission’s composition tells you everything about its conclusions before you read a word: eleven Christians, most of them political allies of the president, plus one Orthodox rabbi as the diversity garnish. No Muslims. No Sikhs. No Hindus. No Buddhists. No atheists or humanists, who make up a larger share of the country than several of those groups combined. A coalition of interfaith, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu organizations sued over the commission’s makeup. The report came out anyway.
What the report actually says, in its own words
On June 26, 2026, the commission released its 224-page draft report, and credit where due: they stopped pretending. The report attacks the wall of separation between church and state directly, treating Jefferson’s metaphor as a myth to be corrected, and proposes instead that “religious liberty acts as a bridge between church and state.” A bridge. The load-bearing metaphor of the entire American experiment in secular government, demoted to an inconvenience, replaced with infrastructure for traffic between the pulpit and the state.
Patrick himself said the quiet part at the commission’s final hearing, asserting that the Constitution does not mandate separation of church and state. The man chairing the federal government’s official religious liberty review does not believe in the Establishment Clause’s central function. That is like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire code review because he has strong opinions about buildings.
The recommendations read like a Christian nationalist wish list because that is what they are. A federal hotline for public school teachers to report perceived religious liberty violations, which is a snitch line for the church-state boundary. A joint DOJ-HHS Parental Rights Task Force. Rolling back the Johnson Amendment so churches can pour tax-exempt money into political campaigns. Expanding voucher programs that route public money to religious schools with no safeguards for religious minorities. Letting religious claims override civil rights protections and patients’ access to health care. And, I am not making this up, a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty, because persecution complexes apparently come with award ceremonies now.
The public got fifteen days to comment on all 224 pages. Those fifteen days were scheduled across the July 4th holiday weekend. Nothing says we welcome your input like a comment window designed to close while you are at a barbecue.
The muscle behind the memo
Reports are just paper. What makes this a legal project rather than a rhetorical one is the DOJ Civil Rights Division, historically the crown jewel of the department, the office that desegregated schools and enforced the Voting Rights Act.
Under its current leadership, the division issued a new mission statement elevating religious liberty, the fight against anti-Christian bias, opposition to trans athletes, and the dismantling of DEI programs into its core priorities. Career attorneys left in waves. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade wrote that the division has been recast “to attack the very interests it once protected.” A sitting senator documented in an October 2025 oversight letter that the division’s staff had been decimated and its congressional mandate subordinated to the president’s political agenda.
And to be scrupulously fair, because this site does fair even when it is inconvenient: some of what the division now does is legitimate religious liberty work. Suing a city for using zoning law to keep out a church it dislikes is exactly what RLUIPA exists for. Fighting pandemic-era rules that treated hair salons better than houses of worship was a genuine free exercise win, and the Supreme Court agreed. If the project stopped there, this article would not exist.
It does not stop there. The tell is not that Christians get defended. Christians deserve defending, same as everyone. The tell is the pattern of who never does. Critics have documented for over a year that the commission ignored Islamophobia entirely while cataloguing every Christian grievance down to the last bake-my-cake case. Interfaith groups describe a body reflecting a “narrow, Christian nationalist worldview.” When your religious liberty apparatus produces liberty for exactly one religion, it is not a liberty apparatus. It is a concierge service.
Why this is not religious freedom, and never was
Religious freedom is one of the few genuinely radical ideas America contributed to the world, and it has a simple architecture. Two clauses, one sentence, First Amendment. The government cannot establish religion, and it cannot prohibit the free exercise of it. The two clauses are not rivals. They are load-bearing walls in the same house. Knock either one down and the roof comes down on somebody, and history says it always comes down on the smallest faiths first.
Freedom OF religion means the Sikh, the Muslim, the Wiccan, the atheist, and the Southern Baptist all stand in the same relationship to the state. Nobody’s God gets a parking spot at the Justice Department.
What this administration has built is something with a different architecture entirely, and secular and interfaith advocates have named it precisely. The Secular Coalition for America called the commission’s report “a roadmap for expanding religious privilege.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation described the project as redefining religious freedom into a special privilege for conservative Christianity. A First Amendment scholar at the University of Virginia reviewed the report and called it an embarrassment.
Here is the visceral, blunt version you came here for. Privilege is when your beliefs exempt you from laws everyone else must follow. Privilege is when your faith gets a federal task force and seventeen agencies while the mosque down the street gets a security grant application and a prayer. Privilege is when “religious liberty” means your right to deny someone else’s health care, override their civil rights, route their tax dollars to your schools, and campaign from your tax-exempt pulpit, while their religious liberty means the right to quietly exist and hope your snitch line doesn’t ring.
And establishment, the thing the First Amendment forbids in its opening breath, is when the state picks a winner. It does not require a crown and a cathedral. It requires exactly what is happening: official government bodies, staffed by one faith, producing official government findings that one faith is the persecuted protagonist of the American story, backed by official government lawyers instructed to litigate accordingly. The Founders did not fear establishment because they hated religion. Most of them were religious. They feared it because they had watched what state-favored churches do to everyone else, including to other Christians. Ask a colonial Baptist how much fun established Anglicanism was.
The part where I tell you why you should care even if you love Jesus
If you are Christian and reading this with your hackles up, one question: which Christianity gets the privilege? Because it will not be all of them. It never is. The commission’s eleven Christians were not drawn by lottery from America’s 200,000 congregations. They were ideologically aligned allies of one political movement. The Episcopal church that blesses same-sex marriages, the Quaker meeting that shelters migrants, the Black church preaching liberation theology, the Catholic parish that takes the Pope’s line on refugees over the party’s: when religious liberty becomes a government-issued credential, those congregations will discover they hold the wrong denomination of it. State-established religion has never protected Christianity. It has only ever protected the state’s favorite version of it, and fed the rest to the same machine, one heresy at a time.
Their defenders will tell you this is all restoration, not privilege, that faith was driven from the public square and is merely being invited back. Take that argument seriously for a moment, because millions sincerely believe it, and some of the underlying cases, the zoning fights and the shuttered churches of 2020, were real. Then ask the only question that matters: does the invitation extend past the church door? When the government’s religious liberty machinery has processed exactly one religion’s complaints for eighteen months, the answer is on the record, in their own 424 pages, with footnotes.
Religious freedom belongs to all of us or it is not freedom. It is a fence, and the only question left is which side of it you are standing on when it finishes going up.
Yup. I said that.
Sources
DOJ Office of Public Affairs, Task Force Publishes Report on Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias and Restoring Religious Liberty, April 30, 2026. justice.gov/opa/pr/task-force-publishes-report-eradicating-anti-christian-bias-and-restoring-religious-liberty
U.S. Department of Education press release on the Task Force report, April 30, 2026. ed.gov
HHS press release on the 2026 Task Force report, April 30, 2026. hhs.gov
Congressional Freethought Caucus, summary of Executive Order 14202 (signed Feb. 6, 2025). freethoughtcaucus-huffman.house.gov
Congressional Freethought Caucus, summary of Executive Order 14291 establishing the Religious Liberty Commission (signed May 1, 2025). freethoughtcaucus-huffman.house.gov
Religion News Service, Four key takeaways from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission Report, June 30, 2026.
Central Oregon Daily / wire coverage, Controversial Trump religious liberty commission releases report, June 2026.
Talking Points Memo, Morning Memo: White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases “Embarrassing” Report, June 2026.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Religious Liberty Commission draft report advances Christian Nationalism, July 2026. au.org
Interfaith Alliance, statement on the Religious Liberty Commission draft report, July 2026. interfaithalliance.org
Freedom From Religion Foundation, New White House report twists religious liberty into Christian privilege, July 2026. ffrf.org
Fox 26 Houston, Patrick-led commission’s report outlines ways to strengthen religious liberties, June 2026 (includes Patrick remarks on separation of church and state).
Washington Examiner, Harmeet Dhillon upends DOJ Civil Rights Division, 2025 (includes McQuade op-ed quotation).
Sen. Peter Welch, oversight letter to AAG Harmeet Dhillon, Oct. 6, 2025. welch.senate.gov
DOJ Office of Public Affairs, Justice Department Files Religious Liberty Lawsuit Against Troy, Idaho, June 2025.
Fox News, coverage of the Task Force report and FACE Act pardons, April 30, 2026.
