The Justice Department lent a listening ear on Tuesday to conservative Christians with stories of investigations, fines, and bitter clashes with the Biden administration.
A task force established by President Donald Trump to address anti-Christian bias in the federal government met for the first time—gathering Attorney General Pamela Bondi, Faith Office leaders Paula White-Cain and Jennifer Korn, and several members of Trump’s cabinet to discuss previous cases of Christian discrimination in their agencies.
The meeting follows department-level directives issued this month urging State and Veterans Affairs employees to report instances of bias against Christians or policies seen as hostile to Christian views.
The task force heard a defense of a suburban Washington, DC, church that faced Internal Revenue Service (IRS) review over a sermon favoring Trump as a candidate. The Johnson Amendment, a provision in the federal tax code, currently bars tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing politicians.
Michael Farris, the former head of the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said his church, Cornerstone Chapel, “had been investigated and punished by the IRS for our (outstanding and courageous) pastor Gary Hamrick’s 2020 election sermon.”
Farris also serves as counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters and named Cornerstone’s case in the group’s 2024 lawsuit against the IRS over the Johnson Amendment.
Currently the prohibition on political endorsements doesn’t get consistently enforced; pastors have even violated the ban deliberately en masse as a demonstration of free speech. A congressional bill introduced last month proposes allowing nonprofits to make campaign statements if they come in the “ordinary course of carrying out its tax exempt purpose.”
Liberty University provost Scott Hicks spoke against record-high Education Department fines issued against the two biggest Christian colleges in the country: Liberty and Grand Canyon University. Neither case directly involved the schools’ Christian convictions, but each maintained that it received unfair treatment from the Biden administration.
The Education Department fined Liberty $14 million last year over campus safety violations in its response to sexual assault. The amount was triple the highest previous fine for such violations, issued to Michigan State University due to Larry Nassar’s abuse of student gymnasts.
“Many of the department’s methodologies, findings, and calculations in the report were drastically different from their historic treatment of other universities,” Liberty said in a statement at the time. “Liberty disagrees with this unfair treatment.”
Grand Canyon, based in Phoenix, faced a $37.7 million fine in 2023 for misrepresenting the cost of graduate programs. The university sued and accused several federal agencies of “extreme government overreach in what we believe is an attempt to harm a university to which individuals in these agencies are ideologically opposed.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial surmised the regulatory oversight might be from progressive regulators who don’t like to see enrollment on the rise at a conservative Christian school.
The examples of anti-Christian bias evoked by the task force and Trump administration officials mostly come from conservative Protestants and Catholics who say they experience discrimination for expressing their faith, as well as their views on topics like LGBTQ issues and abortion.
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted during Trump’s previous term, Americans on the political right are over twice as likely (70%) as those on the left (32%) to say evangelical Christians are subject to discrimination.
“I have chaired meetings in the past where the top Christian litigators shared our most outrageous cases and where we were making plans to fight back,” Farris wrote on Facebook Tuesday. “Today’s meeting had that same spirit but with one major difference. These people actually run our government and were swiftly [taking] the kind of action that for a long time Christians have believed were demanded by justice. I was amazed and encouraged deeply in my soul.”
The White House Faith Office, now specifically tasked with addressing anti-Christian bias, has developed what some Christians see as a narrower network of church and ministry leaders who align with Trump.
Critics worry that the initiatives overstate the threat of Christian persecution over religious liberty overall. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty expressed concerns that the task force “could be weaponized to enforce a theological conformity that will harm everyone’s religious freedom, including those of Christians.”
After the meeting, the Faith Office director, Korn, pledged to “protect all faiths” and “have government protect Christians, not punish them.”
Earlier this year, current ADF president and CEO Kristen Waggoner applauded Trump’s executive order to address anti-Christian bias and called out “the Biden administration’s deliberate targeting of Christian beliefs through discriminatory policies,” referencing cases “from foster parents barred from providing loving homes to children in need due to their faith, to targeted overregulation of ministries and the weaponization of the FACE Act against pro-life advocates.”
Cabinet members brought up some of those examples at the meeting as they shared further complaints, including religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, treatment of Christian homeschoolers in foreign service, and challenges to classroom instruction around gender.
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