Saying the same thing over and over again does not make it true. Yet that is what the Trump administration is trying to do with its repeated but inaccurate assertions that Christians in America are being persecuted for their beliefs.
Last year, President Trump signed an executive order creating a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. The task force is made up of members of 17 federal agencies, and its purpose is to root out alleged “anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians,” specifically investigating actions taken during the Biden administration. The task force’s title and stated purpose should have been a warning that it would not be an objective body seeking out true bias, but rather a partisan attempt to portray the healthy workings of a pluralistic democracy as discrimination against Christians.
Last week, the task force released a nearly 200-page report titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government.” The report’s pages are filled with specious claims and incendiary language describing alleged discrimination against Christians during the Biden administration that simply do not hold water.
Here are a few facts to set the record straight.
- Abortion: Like previous administrations, the Biden administration continued to enforce a decades-old federal law that protects abortion clinics and patients from threats, physical obstruction, and violence. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act was passed overwhelmingly by a bipartisan Congress in 1994 after a spate of anti-abortion violence, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn outside a Florida clinic in 1993. Notably, the law is facially neutral with respect to religion. Some of the people prosecuted by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice included those who entered abortion clinics, blocked doorways and refused to leave, verbally harassed patients and staff, and injured clinic staffers. Yet the Biden administration also prosecuted pro-choice activists for spray-painting threats on anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers in Florida.
- LGBTQ+ equality: In 2024, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services published a rule* to protect LGBTQ+ youth in foster care by prioritizing their placement with families who commit to a supportive environment, are trained in LGBTQ+ youth needs, and facilitate access to age- and developmentally appropriate services. The rule required that children age 14 or older be notified that these placements exist and allowed for an LGBTQ+ child to request such a designated placement and gave that request “substantial weight.” However, the rule did not require any provider to become such a designated placement or mandate that any child be moved out of a non-designated home. Importantly, the rule also included an explicit religious freedom, conscience, and free speech carve-out and nonpenalty provision. However, the task force report claims that this protection discriminated against Christians with conservative beliefs—even though they remained welcome to foster children.
- Vaccines: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration mandated that federal workers be vaccinated in accordance with health guidelines, with certain exceptions for those with sincerely held religious beliefs. But the task force report claims that people who refused the vaccine because they believed it contained the cells of aborted fetuses were unfairly refused a religious exemption. It should be noted that this belief is erroneous and has been widely debunked; the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna do not contain any fetal cells. Furthermore, with regards to how the mandate affected Catholics, their own church’s highest doctrinal leadership—the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—declared the vaccines “morally acceptable.” Where federal agencies or private employers failed to accommodate bona fide requests, Title VII enforcement was available. However, employees with a political, social, economic, or personal objection to the vaccine did not qualify, and it is the denial of exceptions on these grounds that is contested in the report. During a deadly pandemic, though, the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning in Prince v. Massachusetts applies: “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.”
The list of grievances goes on and on, even as the facts on the ground do not support the allegations of religious bias. The task force report even claims anti-Christian bias among federal regulators who told a Catholic hospital to put out its chapel candle because it was a legitimate safety hazard, especially to patients on oxygen. Regulators later allowed the hospital to keep the candle lit if it put up a barrier and a sign.
In addition to making misleading claims, the task force report ignores the many robust religious protections instigated and enforced by the Biden administration. One of these was a policy that protected houses of worship, among other sensitive locations, from intrusion by government immigration forces, thus providing safety for people to worship. The Trump administration rescinded this religious protection, sparking fear in immigrant communities and reducing congregation size in many churches.
It should also be noted that the Trump administration has displayed hostility to faith leaders with whom it disagrees, including Pope Leo XIV, and has canceled government contracts with faith-based groups, such as Catholic Charities, that provide essential services to children, poor people, immigrants, and the sick.
Biased report meets widespread criticism
Immediately following its release, the task force report was met with a barrage of criticism. Jim Simpson, executive director of the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, said the report is “advocacy dressed up as investigation.” Simpson added that the report wrongly claims that Christians are “a persecuted minority despite being the country’s largest and most politically influential religious group.”
Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee said, “With the release of this one-sided report, the administration continues to show that it is interested in advancing the interests of some at the expense of everyone else’s freedom.”
Rev. Paul Raushenbush of Interfaith Alliance said, “Trump’s radical […] new report is abominably hypocritical. […] The report and the task force behind it are a political stunt designed to promote the lie that American Christians are a persecuted group, while providing justification to target anyone deemed out of step with their Christian nationalist agenda.”
And Melissa Rogers, who headed the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships during the Biden administration, called the report absurd. Rogers is a constitutional lawyer and expert on issues of religious freedom. She told NPR that the report does not try “to present even an arguable allegation of targeting and discrimination but rather point[s] to certain differences over law and policy between an administration and certain religious communities.”
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These critics are right. The task force report represents the views of a narrow, highly partisan slice of Christians who are intent on foisting their theological doctrines onto people with different beliefs. They claim to speak for the whole of Christianity, when, in fact, they fail to represent a majority of Christians on a myriad of issues, including abortion and LGBTQ+ equality.
It seems clear that the goals of the task force report are at least twofold: to energize the Trump administration’s base with fears of persecution and to establish a strong narrative in the public mind that Christians are being discriminated against by radical, leftists who hate God.
But here is the truth: Policy disagreements are an essential aspect of a pluralistic democracy. People argue their views and try to persuade others. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. In a healthy democracy, people who have lost work hard to organize supporters and persuade opponents so they can increase their numbers and win the next time. But if and when they do win, public servants in a healthy democracy recognize that they represent people of diverse beliefs and backgrounds who deserve to live with dignity side by side—a worthy goal made harder by the misleading, polarizing task force report.
*Author’s note: The final rule was vacated by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in June 2025, after which the rule was formally withdrawn by the Department of Health and Human Services.