President Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission wasn’t created to protect religious freedom for all Americans—it’s about securing religious privilege for a select few by eroding the separation of church and state. Rooted in Christian Nationalist myths and rhetoric, the Commission pushes a warped version of religious freedom that privileges one specific version of Christianity above all other faiths and the nonreligious.

When Trump announced the creation of the Religious Liberty Commission during a White House National Day of Prayer ceremony on May 1, he dismissed the importance of the separation of church: “They say separation between church and state … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time…” 

When viewed in conjunction with Trump’s “Anti-Christian Bias Task Force,” his renaming of the “White House Faith Office,” and numerous executive orders and proposed policies that give preference to one narrow, conservative Christian viewpoint while rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people, women, religious and racial minorities, public school students, the nonreligious, and others, it’s clear the Religious Liberty Commission is part of an administration-wide effort to advance Christian Nationalism – the dangerous belief that our laws and policies must reflect the lie that America is, and must remain, a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants.

Religious Liberty Commission consists almost exclusively of Christians

The commission was established by Executive Order 14291 on May 1, 2025. Despite the guidelines set by law through FACA, the commission’s membership consists exclusively of Christians, except for one Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, all of whom collectively represent the narrow perspective that America was founded as a “Judeo-Christian” nation and must be guided by Biblical principles. No members of the commission represent other minority religions, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Sikhism, or non-religious Americans, and the commission’s meetings have expressly adopted and promoted purportedly Judeo-Christian ideals and viewpoints, with members routinely expressing their views during meetings that the United States is a Judeo-Christian or Christian nation.

Congress enacted FACA in 1972 to curb the executive branch’s reliance on secretive and biased advisory committees, and the law establishes strict requirements for the creation and conduct of committees that are intended to influence national policy. Every advisory committee must meet public transparency requirements, be in the public interest, be fairly balanced among competing points of view, and be structured to avoid inappropriate influence by special interests.

“The Religious Liberty Commission isn’t about protecting religious liberty for all; it’s about rejecting our nation’s religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative ‘Judeo-Christian’ beliefs,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United. “The commission’s public meetings – most of which have been held at the Museum of the Bible and have been dominated by a very specific brand of Christian faith, Christian prayers, and predominantly Christian speakers – are a vivid example of this favoritism. The commission’s true purpose and operations can’t be squared with America’s constitutional promise of church-state separation.”

The same week AU and allies sued the commission, Carrie Prejean Boller was ousted from the commission. Boller, a former Miss California who gained notoriety for her anti-LGBTQ+ views and converted to Catholicism shortly before she was appointed a commissioner, accused Commission Chairman Dan Patrick of religious discrimination and claimed she was fired “for her Catholic faith.”