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christian nationalism
Religious “Liberty” Commission Just Another Buffoonish Trump Reality Show
We need to call this what it is: a sham, a joke, a mendacious misuse of the fundamental American principle of religious liberty meant to lay the groundwork for the obscene Christian Nationalist policies this administration wants to implement.
Sep 30, 2025
As a kid, I’d ask to stay up late to watch the Celebrity Apprentice.
Donald Trump was a master of putting washed-up celebrities in absurd situations: Kevin Jonas fighting with Geraldo Rivera over a TV commercial for a digital scanner. Clay Aiken and Penn Jillette arguing over how to manage a distracted and frenetic Lou Ferrigno while trying to film a viral video to promote a spray mop.
Trump’s latest celebrity sideshow—featuring Dr. Phil and a former Miss USA runner-up, is the federal government’s “Religious Liberty Commission.” It’s about religious liberty in the same way the Celebrity Apprentice was about business. Which is to say, in name only.
It’s sad, because as someone who runs a nonprofit that protects atheists, agnostics, and other religious minorities from discrimination, I can imagine a Religious Liberty Commission that could actually do something useful. Houses of worship have to deal with the constant threat of gun violence. People still get discriminated against at work for not participating in group prayers. Kids still get proselytized in public school.
A Religious Liberty Commission that was truly interested in ensuring that every single person in America has the right to follow whatever religious tradition is right for them—or none at all—could be a great thing.
When Trump says he wants America to be “more religious”... What he wants, it appears, is more people who worship a specific type of Christianity—the kind of conservative Evangelical Christianity that is increasingly loyal to and organized behind him.
But that’s not the Religious Liberty Commission we got. Instead, we have Dr. Phil rambling about a “cultural war,” former Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean bemoaning that “morality has dropped across America” since we took a 430-year-old Christian textbook called the New England Primer out of schools, and eleven other right-wing Christians (and one right-wing rabbi) interviewing guest speakers who call atheists “demonic” and insist that government’s proper role is to promote “public recognition of truths about divine realities.”
In other words, it’s the state’s job to tell you God is real.
This isn’t new. Even before he started trying to plug a Christian prayer app with in-app purchases in his speeches, Trump said "we’re bringing religion back to America” and has explicitly written that he wants to make America “more religious.”
On Trump’s commission, Dr. Phil and Miss Not-Quite-USA are flanked by third-rate religious scholars who insist our Founders—who fought a war to break away from an empire with a state religion and immediately declared that America would have no such thing, ever—intended for America to be a religious nation from the very beginning, citing a vague reference to a “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence.
That would have been news to the Declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson, who coined the term “wall of separation between church and state” and famously said “the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”
To understand why the Founders were so preoccupied with protecting religious freedom, it’s worth considering what exactly Trump means by “more religious.” This is, after all, a man who called an Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde a “so-called Bishop” and “not very good at her job” when he disliked her sermon, who publicly agreed with one of his cronies that Doug Emhoff was a “crappy Jew,” who misquotes the Bible and compared it to “a great, incredible movie.”
When Trump says he wants America to be “more religious,” he doesn’t mean more of Mariann Budde’s Christianity, or Doug Emhoff’s Judaism. What he wants, it appears, is more people who worship a specific type of Christianity—the kind of conservative Evangelical Christianity that is increasingly loyal to and organized behind him.
We’re going to see the right-wing Christians on the commission argue that our tax dollars should be used to push their religion on other people’s kids.
The Commission’s membership tells the story. Thirteen right-wing Christians and a token right-wing rabbi. No effort to include any of America’s other minority faiths—Islam, Unitarian Universalism, Buddhism, or Hinduism. And absolutely no representation for the 30% of Americans who aren’t religious at all, but face discrimination for their nonbelief. Trump put Penn Jillette—a famous atheist and advocate for church-state separation—on the Celebrity Apprentice twice, but somehow lost his number when it was time to cobble together the Religious Liberty Commission.
So if the Religious “Liberty” Commission is a sham, why make a big deal about something so asinine?
Because just as the Celebrity Apprentice helped Trump make the argument that he was a successful businessman people could trust, the Religious Liberty Commission is designed to make arguments for several key policies that have nothing to do with religious liberty—and everything to do with making America a Christian Nationalist hell on earth.
For instance: multiple speakers at the first Religious Liberty Commission meeting, including Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick, argued that historically—before things like Social Security and Medicare—social services were provided not by the government but by religious institutions. The subtext was clear: the government shouldn’t be doing things like taking care of the sick and elderly; the church should.
Rather than focusing on how to teach kids math and science, we’ll focus on teaching them that gay people and religious minorities—maybe even their own families—are going to Hell.
Multiple other speakers used the specific language of “unjust laws.” But religious institutions have claimed—and Trump’s Supreme Court has backed them up—that “unjust laws” include things like…paying into unemployment benefits for their own employees. We’re going to see the Trump administration create more and more “religious” exemptions to laws that are meant to protect consumers or employers—where anyone’s claim to being religious becomes a “get out of jail free card” to mistreat your workers or discriminate against consumers.
Finally, the first Commission meeting was hyper-focused on prayer and Christian teaching in schools. We’re going to see the right-wing Christians on the commission argue that our tax dollars should be used to push their religion on other people’s kids. Rather than focusing on how to teach kids math and science, we’ll focus on teaching them that gay people and religious minorities—maybe even their own families—are going to Hell.
The commission’s latest meeting took place Monday, September 29th—150 years, to the day, after President Ulysses S. Grant gave a speech declaring that America should “leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school…keep the church and state forever separate”—what can we do now?
We can’t stop Trump from putting on celebrity sideshows. It’s what he’s done his whole career.
But we can call it what it is: a sham, a joke, a mendacious misuse of the fundamental American principle of religious liberty meant to lay the groundwork for the obscene Christian Nationalist policies this administration wants to implement, which would fundamentally change America by making us the kind of religious government our founders fled and fought.
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Critics Warn Trump's 'Religious Liberty' Panel Wants to Impose 'Christian Nationalist Agenda' Nationwide
One critic warned that the Trump-created Religious Liberty Commission is "working to obliterate church-state separation, turn public schools into Sunday schools and misuse religious freedom as a license to discriminate."
Sep 29, 2025
Church-state separation advocates on Monday issued new warnings about the Religious Liberty Commission established by US President Donald Trump earlier this year.
Ahead of the commission's meeting that took place on Monday morning at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that Americans should be particularly worried by the commission's focus on public education.
"Yet again, President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission demonstrated that its true purpose is to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda and impose one narrow religious view on the nation’s public school children," Laser said.
Laser went on to highlight some of the featured speakers at the gathering, including one teacher who has said she's engaged in "spiritual warfare" against the LGBTQ+ rights movement and a former high school football coach whom the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found created "a deceitful narrative" about coercing his players to pray with him.
Laser went on to charge that "the majority of speakers at today’s hearing are affiliated with Christian Nationalist organizations," which she said were "working to obliterate church-state separation, turn public schools into Sunday schools, and misuse religious freedom as a license to discriminate." She further said the commission was "an outright assault on our country’s promise of church-state separation."
Laurel Burchfield, advocacy director for Mainstream Coalition, also warned about the commission's ambitions in an editorial published earlier this year by The Missouri Independent.
In addition to citing the concerns raised by Laser about the commission's effort to influence public school curriculum, Burchfield argued that it would also attempt to "rewrite history" to justify false claims that the US was founded as an exclusively "Christian nation."
She also said that the commission has ambitions to "promote religion in all parts of American culture, politics, and public life."
Monday's Religious Liberty Commission meeting began with a tribute to slain right-wing activist and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, before moving on to a series of panels whose stated goal is to "understand the historic landscape of religious liberty in the educational setting, recognize present threats to religious liberty in education, and identify opportunities to secure religious liberty in this context for the future."
"These individuals were hand-selected for holding a worldview that advances the Christian Nationalist agenda and threatens any religious beliefs that fall outside of this ideology," said Burchfield.
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The US Has a Religious Fundamentalism Problem
We condemn extremism abroad while ignoring the holy mandates shaping law, policy, and life right here at home.
Sep 28, 2025
I was a political science student in college when 9-11 happened. Almost overnight, the air in our classrooms thickened with talk of the Middle East—of regimes and sects, of the supposed sickness in other people’s faith. At the same time, I sat in lectures on American government, absorbing lessons on freedom, the separation of church and state, and the principles that anchor a democracy. The story was tidy: Extremism existed “over there,” and here was civility, rationality, liberty.
But even then, I felt the story was too neat. We were trained to see extremism as foreign, an affliction of others. No one asked us to look for it in our own pulpits, in our own chambers of power, where faith is wielded not only as belief but as authority.
For decades, we were told that extremism abroad is born of poverty, oppression, and lack of democracy. That dignity and fair governance could inoculate against violence. Yet here at home, the extremists are not poor. They are not desperate. They are wealthy, white, and privileged, carrying Bibles in one hand and power in the other. These are the people shaping foreign policy, writing the rules of engagement, and insisting that God Himself is on their side.
It is easy to sneer at fundamentalism when it wears a beard and prays to a different God. We do this without noticing how our own leaders claim the same divine sanction. Take Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who recently said, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed,” a statement guiding policy on the basis of religious prophecy. As a result, borders are drawn and redrawn, not by maps or treaties, but by the conviction that scripture demands it. Tanks move forward because some believe the end times will be hastened by the blood spilled today. I have heard lawmakers speak of Israel not as a nation among nations, but as a ticket for their own salvation—a stage for the rapture. Lives are traded away for a promise written in ancient ink. Too often, it is prophecy, not policy, that carries the weight of law.
The divine is always invoked to conquer, to exclude, to strip away the humanity of others.
Charlie Kirk was another voice in this chorus. His platform rested on the claim that his words bore the imprint of Jesus Himself. And that is the mark of fundamentalism: not just to speak, but to declare speech holy. Not just to pass laws, but to claim the laws come from God. When movements convince their followers that every act of war, every border drawn, every vote cast is sanctified, fundamentalism is no longer a fringe—it is the system itself.
This is America’s problem. We imagine fundamentalism as the product of religion alone, but in truth it is about power. It thrives in systems that punish dissent and demand obedience. It flourishes where inequality is already deep, where racism already wounds. Whether it calls itself Christian nationalism or Zionism, the fruit is the same: oppression disguised as divine order.
Christian nationalism, in particular, is theater. Fear of the stranger is the script. The Gospels are props—quoted when convenient, discarded when not. The gun becomes holy; violence is celebrated as sacrament; scripture appears only to bless white entitlement and empire. And somehow, the divine is always invoked to conquer, to exclude, to strip away the humanity of others.
“Love the stranger as yourself” has been rewritten into “expel the immigrant.” “Turn the other cheek” has become “press his cheek into the ground.” The inversion is so stark you can only call it blasphemy.
It is time to see the truth we’ve trained ourselves to ignore: that the politics of faith are not a distant problem but a domestic one. That prophecy and scripture are invoked to shape our laws, and our laws shape our lives. That the moral high ground, so often claimed, is little more than a thin veneer of power and entitlement.
We are not exempt from the damage. We are participants in it. And we cannot keep pretending that America’s fundamentalists are not pulling the strings.
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