When President Donald Trump announced an executive order last year creating a Religious Liberty Commission stocked with his religious-right supporters, People For the American Way President Svante Myrick warned that Trump was attacking the foundations of church-state separation, which protects religious liberty for all Americans.
The Commission’s actions over the past year have proved the accuracy of that warning. During one of the Commission’s public hearings, chair Dan Patrick, the Lt. Gov. of Texas, called separation of church and state “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.”
The Commission published its draft report on June 26, 2026. Journalist and author Sarah Posner called the report “at once an homage to Christian nationalism and a roadmap for the United States Department of Justice to embrace.”
Comment by People For the American Way
On June 2026 Draft Report of the Religious Liberty Commission
July 10, 2026
People For the American Way is a national progressive advocacy organization that inspires and mobilizes Americans to defend freedom, justice, and democracy from those who threaten to take them away.
We are writing to comment briefly on the draft report published June 26, 2026 by the Religious Liberty Commission that was created by President Donald Trump’s May 1, 2025 executive order.
We note that an interfaith coalition has challenged the legality of the commission, whose membership does not come close to reflecting the breadth and diversity of America’s religious landscape. Like the Christian nationalist ceremony to “rededicate” America to God as part of the Freedom 250 celebrations, the Commission is made up almost entirely of Trump-aligned conservative Christians.
Undermining Separation of Church and State
For more than 45 years, People For the American Way has promoted religious freedom and defended the separation of church and state, which advances peaceful pluralism and protects religious liberty for all Americans. Church-state separation has fostered a vibrantly diverse flourishing of religious practice in the U.S
Unfortunately, the make-up of the Commission, the comments of its leadership, and the recommendations in its report make it clear that a primary purpose of the commission has been to undermine church-state separation in line with the goals of the Christian nationalist movement that is politically aligned with the president. Journalist and author Sarah Posner has called the Commission’s report “at once an homage to Christian nationalism and a roadmap for the United States Department of Justice to embrace.”
The American Historical Association has noted that the Commission’s report “relies on distorted accounts of American religious history to advance a constitutional interpretation that challenges long-established understandings of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.”
That purpose has been clear since the White House event celebrating the Commission’s creation, at which the president stated that church-state separation “may not be a good thing.”
At the commission’s April 13 hearing, Commission Chair Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of Texas, asked, “Would it not be a good recommendation that every school, every university, every business, has to have that one sheet on the bulletin board about protecting people’s religious liberty, and that the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding?”
That comment has been given form in multiple recommendations by the Commission that schools and workplaces be required to post information about the religious rights of students, educators, and employees. In theory, informing people of their legal rights is not a problem, but in practice, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. The rhetoric and actions of the administration and commissioners are cause for concern that any such materials created by the administration would include misleading propaganda that privileges one particular religious worldview.
The Commission urges the Justice Department to defend communities that “adopt laws, policies, or practices reflective of their religious cultures and are consistent with the historical practices and understandings underlying the Establishment Clause.” It is all too easy to imagine the ways that phrases like “reflective of their religious cultures” could be used by local government bodies to benefit a dominant religious group and marginalize and stigmatize religious minorities.
The Commission calls for overturning the Johnson Amendment, which restricts churches and other nonprofit organizations from using tax-exempt contributions for electoral politicking. Eliminating the Johnson Amendment is a goal of religious-right political organizers keen to turn conservative churches into even more aggressively partisan voter turnout operations; doing away with the Johnson Amendment was a campaign promise Trump made to win the support of religious-right leaders in his first run for the presidency.
Undermining Public Education
Public education has been a major target of the Christian Right political movement in the U.S. The Commission’s report advances two of the movement’s strategies: to undermine and defund public schools by diverting education funds to private religious schools; and to use public schools as venues for religious indoctrination. The Commission’s use of “government-run schools”—a term used as a pejorative by groups hostile to public education—is a clear sign of an ideological agenda at work.
The Commission argues that “universal school choice” is a religious liberty and parental rights issue; in reality, it is a mechanism for diverting billions of dollars from public schools into unregulated and unaccountable religious schools. Arizona’s universal voucher program has become a budgetary sinkhole, with the benefits going disproportionately to wealthy families whose children were already attending a private school. According to U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, universal school vouchers “have been a bad deal for education in Arizona.”
The Commission’s report is disingenuous when it comes to parental rights. It calls for policies requiring maximum deference to parental wishes over what is taught in the classrooms—including the means to opt out of “any school instruction, activity, policy, or practice that substantially interferes with the authority of the parents to direct the religious upbringing of their child.”
At the same time, in the name of preserving “national religious heritage,” the Commission urges the Justice Department to engage in “strategic litigation” to uphold laws that require schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. A recently enacted law in Texas requires every public school classroom to post an official government-edited and government-approved version of the King James Version of the Ten Commandments, which is clearly interfering with the authority of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children.
Anti-public-education forces in Texas recently passed a school voucher law there, with the intention of using tax dollars to fund private Christian schools. The state initially refused to allow Muslim parents to use vouchers to send their children to Islamic schools; it took a lawsuit and court order for the state to stop discriminating on the basis of religion.
Despite its deployment of “parental rights” as a means of controlling classroom content, the commission calls for policies that allow teachers and school officials to ignore and override the wishes of parents who are supportive of their transgender kids.
The report repeatedly calls for punishment of school districts that disagree with Trump administration guidance. The American Historical Association concluded that the report “recommends policies that would encourage states to expand religious instruction and displays in public schools while creating new mechanisms to investigate and sanction educators and institutions accused of violating students’ religious liberty.”
Weaponizing the Courts
The religious-right legal movement has taken advantage of their success in gaining ideological domination of the Supreme Court to redefine religious liberty and undermine the Establishment Clause.
We have referred to this reactionary legal movement as turning religious liberty from a shield meant to protect everyone’s exercise of religion into a sword to be wielded against anti-discrimination laws and other efforts to promote the common good. Religious studies professor Charles McCrary, having assessed the commission’s draft report, concluded, “Religious liberty is a banner under which the administration and its allies will continue to undermine other civil rights, dismantle public goods, and insulate certain favored citizens from public accountability.”
The report repeatedly calls for the nomination and confirmation of judges with the “courage” to continue the ideological crusade to dismantle separation of church and state, and for the Justice Department to push the Supreme Court to overturn multiple precedents upholding church-state separation.
Rhetoric vs. Reality in the Trump Era
Given the increasingly aggressive and exclusionary Christian nationalism that is flourishing on the Right, it is good that the Commission’s report includes language recognizing that religious liberty applies to all people and that religious pluralism is a defining aspect of American law and culture. The report includes welcome denunciations of antisemitism and religious bigotry, and calls for promoting a cultural “recommitment to peaceful pluralism.”
At one point the report summarizes the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections by saying, “In practical terms, that means that the government may not officially prefer one religion over another, take over the functions of a church, or coerce religious observance.” We agree, though we would add that it also means the government must not privilege people of any faith over the growing number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. And we undoubtedly disagree with some of the ways the Commission and administration would apply those principles in the real world.
Notably, in its zeal to portray secularism as a threat to religious liberty, the report fails to acknowledge the exclusionary and discriminatory goals of influential right-wing activists who insist that the U.S. is and must remain a “Christian nation” and who call for the government to privilege their preferred forms of Christianity.
The Religious Liberty Commission could provide a valuable public service, and make it clear that the report’s praise for pluralism and religious liberty is more than lip service, by challenging Christian nationalist leaders who call for overt religious discrimination against Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish Americans, and in some cases against Catholics or liberal Protestants. But that might run afoul of the White House and its Office of Faith, which provide those leaders with access to the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and other national platforms, giving their discriminatory positions credibility they do not deserve.
