The twisted history Trump’s White House is using to redefine religious freedom

When the Founding Fathers began their work to unify the colonies, America’s religious landscape looked nothing like today’s marketplace of ideas. Mainline Protestants — Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Puritans, Quakers, and Lutherans — dominated the budding nation, and Protestant Christianity was fused with public life.

To talk of religious liberty back then was a question of how to handle these various Protestant denominations and, essentially, keep them from killing or oppressing each other. There were hardly any Catholics; there were very few Jewish people; there were essentially no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. What the Founding Fathers eventually arrived at was a plan for tolerance — an early version of freedom from official religions and a freedom to exercise faith without being punished.

Yet a new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life.

Late last week, the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, housed within the Department of Justice, released a draft 224-page report pushing the idea that belief in God should be the bedrock of American law and society, and proposing dozens of policy proposals and legal recommendations to restore the place of religion in daily life. It argues that when the Founders chose to declare independence, drafted up the Constitution, and debated the Bill of Rights, they “drew from religious traditions of man being made in the image of God,” and that belief in a Christian God was the starting point for individual rights. “The uniquely American approach to religious liberty,” they argue, is one “in which religion is not merely indulged by the government, but rather honored as a natural right, fundamental to the flourishing of a free society.”

It’s this privileged position for religion that was corrupted in the 20th century by “a new [European] philosophy,” which “laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty which persist even today.” In this telling, it’s philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre who rejected God, inspired American thinkers and leaders to embrace relativism, and constructed a “‘Berlin wall’ of separation” that restricts religious life today and must be corrected. As a result, the government took an “increasingly hostile view towards those who embrace Judeo-Christian values” and interpreted the law to shut down practices like school prayer and open displays of religious texts in public buildings.

Using this history, the commission calls for the creation of a national religious liberty violation hotline, creating a DOJ task force to enforce freedom and hear claims of violations, and appointing federal judges who err on the side of religious liberty, as they define it.

They cite examples of religious oppression and anti-Christian bias in schools, workplaces, the military, and the healthcare system: restrictions on teachers, coaches, and students leading prayers, limits on students wearing religious symbols and delivering religious speech, limits on displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools, the pushing of “gender ideology” on Christian students, and requirements for faith-based college groups to accept non-believers. They cite COVID-19 vaccine mandates as violations of religious liberty in the military, coercion for religious medical providers to offer care that conflicts with their beliefs, and overly restrictive rules for military chaplains.

In all, it calls for a plethora of policy and legal changes rooted in an alternative history that government should be welcoming religion into daily public life, not concerned with limiting or restricting it, even if it’s in the name of religious pluralism. To deny this is to attack religious liberty.

But this history is wrong.

The federal government has grown more secular in some ways since its founding. But the story of America’s relationship with religion is the story of the Founders’ vision in action, of religious pluralism at work and evolving with a changing nation. It’s a tale of how political and legal leaders tried to apply those core values in response to growing and new religious communities in America who arrived after the revolution.

At its core, the report argues that American law and society have veered too far away from what the Founders intended, that they have been infected with the ideology of liberal secularism, and that the government has gone too far in subsuming the church to the state. That Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state, they argue, is a myth, and religion instead should have a privileged place that creates a “bridge” between the faithful and the government.

But that’s a fundamental misreading of both colonial views of religious liberty and the modern landscape that they are critiquing, historians argue.

Let’s start with where they all agree. These commissioners are right to point out that Protestant Christianity did infuse every part of American life in the colonial era, and that colonists believed it should continue to do so, the historian Matthew A. Sutton told me.

“You can find example after example of the government endorsement of not just religion, but a very particular kind of religion, Protestant Christianity,” he said. “But there really wasn’t religious liberty for those too far outside the boundaries.”

The commission’s document acknowledges this context, but goes on to argue that the founders took a more pluralistic approach while still advocating for a government that encourages widespread public adoption of faith.

It pulls the story of the First Continental Congress in 1774, where colonial leaders gathered, put aside their religious differences, and, inspired by Samuel Adams, prayed together as they prepared for war. In retelling the writing of the Declaration of Independence, they similarly argue that belief in a Christian God was the bedrock of individual liberty and the cause for independence. And in drafting the Constitution, religious liberty was the “first freedom” from which other liberties could flow.

But Sutton, whose new book “Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity” traces this history, told me that this historical account of colonial America and the Framers’ intent is oversold. The thinkers who helped to establish America were responding to very real and practical concerns — how to unite the colonies — not necessarily to push a unified vision of religious pluralism, with state encouragement for faith.

“The First Amendment is also about a practical response to the fact that you have 13 colonies that you need to unify, and many of them have established churches, but they’re different churches,” Sutton said. “The First Amendment is not this kind of high ideal about freedom of religion. It’s simply about how can we keep these people from killing each other when we know for the last 300 years, different groups of Christians have killed each other in Europe.”

In trying to figure out how to keep these various colonies together in a united nation, they reached a negative clause, Sutton said: “There will be no establishment of religion.”

Sutton told me that the reference to the First Continental Congress’s prayer is selective — just a couple of years later, Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion to start the meetings of the Constitutional Convention with prayer would be shot down.

“In 1774, it’s not clear there’s going to be a revolution. They have not left, and the clergyman they chose for this prayer is a member of the Church of England. They were trying to signal to England that they did want to maintain their unity, that they wanted to keep their religious bonds together. It was very practical,” Sutton said. “But this is the selective cherry-picking that the Trump people do. They didn’t have a prayer at the Constitutional Convention. So you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to talk about when you do, you need to talk about when you don’t and see those as equally valid.”

To speak of the founders wanting anything in common is itself a bit preposterous, the politics and religion scholar Dave Campbell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, told me, since the leading thinkers of the time had different visions of the relationship between the government and various churches: Jefferson wanted the wall of separation; Washington wanted mutual support between the state and Protestant Christianity in general; Madison wanted competition between sects and a marketplace of ideas free from government punishment. And all of these are very different from both the version of religious liberty we have today and the one the commissioners claim has been distorted.

“It’s a misnomer to speak of the Founders as though they had one view. They had different views, but they did agree, even though they had to compromise, on the wording of the First Amendment,” Campbell said. “Whatever this amorphous group that the Founders is, they disagreed, and yet they nonetheless could come to consensus that there should be no established religion, which was very novel at the time, and there should be as much latitude given to the free exercise of religion as possible.”

It’s this “latitude” that the commission argues has been overly restricted since the turn of the 20th century. And they argue that European existentialists and post-modern continental philosophers have perverted religious liberty in the quest to destroy organized religion.

“This new [secular] ideology gave ‘complete prioritization…to individual autonomy, [the idea] that we decide value, we decide meaning, we decide purpose,” the report’s authors write, and it’s this dangerous ideology that has led to a crisis of religious oppression today, the commissioners argue.

But this retelling is ahistorical, Sutton told me. The driving force behind a more secular interpretation of the law was that America’s religious makeup changed, with millions of Catholics and Jews entering the country in the 19th and early 20th century, along with the spread of new religions like Mormonism. American leaders and thinkers were responding to these trends, not modern and postmodern European intellectuals.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s definitely not those guys,” Sutton said. “The courts were moving in the 1880s, 1890s, toward slowly recognizing that the nation is growing more diverse, and as they do that, they begin to think about the ways in which the free exercise clause can be protected, guaranteed, and applied.”

Instead of this being some project of post-war secular liberals to try to rein in organized religion and religious practices, Sutton and Campbell told me the modern iteration of religious liberty was more of a practical and realist project from American legislators and courts: Protestant Christians were no longer the only group that needed protection.

“It starts in the 1880s, 1890s, where some of the states are working towards taking out established prayers from public schools and reducing the kinds of explicit Protestant curriculum in their education,” Sutton said. “And so it’s not European intellectuals or secularists or any kind of global conspiracy that are driving this. It’s about how do you build laws to govern an ever more diverse country.”

This shift continued into the 20th century, and especially in post-World War II America, when demonstrating tolerance in contrast to hateful and antisemitic Nazi Germany became a more urgent priority. By then, the country had further integrated its newer immigrants and religious groups across generations, which helped reinforce the idea of secularism as a sign of mutual respect between differing faiths, rather than an attack on religion.

To the authors of the White House-led report, this modern trend has been a new kind of oppression: a stripping of faith of all kinds from the public space.

But a major reason these newer interpretations of secularism and religious liberty took off was a concern over how a predominant faith could end up dictating or setting the rules of engagement for other minority religions, particularly as new faith traditions entered the fray. Without this more neutral approach, a majority faith community might still be able to, in practice, define what a pro-religious government policy or attitude could look like. In America, this typically means Protestant Christianity.

That tension continues to this day: many of the religious liberty disputes the report cites involve the dynamic of a Protestant community action being roped back a bit because of the potential infringement it could have on non-Protestant Christians. In an overwhelmingly Protestant community, school prayer in practice could be used to pressure or isolate non-Protestants with different prayers or rituals. Displaying the Ten Commandments in a community where religious minorities are facing prejudice could end up infringing the ability for non-Christians to freely exist in their faiths. In Texas, for example, leaders are pursuing mandated Bible excerpts in schools at the same time there’s a statewide political backlash against Muslim communities.

That’s one reason there has been so much suspicion of this particular commission, which was presented as an interfaith group but was dominated by members who neatly fit into the stream of Christian nationalist sentiment that has infused the White House and its partnerships in the Trump era. In many cases, adherents support linking the US to a specific interpretation of Christianity as the nation’s state religion, of rooting laws and regulations in Biblical teaching, and of prioritizing and elevating Protestant evangelicalism as the preferred way to view Christianity.

“To them, religious freedom means not respecting all religions equally, but instead ensuring that Christianity and particularly their flavor of Christianity has a favored place in the public square and in law,” Campbell said.

This is the context in which the report is landing. Though not an explicitly Christian nationalist document, it fits into the social, legal, and political framework that has been ascendant in the second Trump term.

“The Bremerton decision on the high school football coach being allowed to pray [at games], the recent debates about whether or not Christian charter schools are going to receive state financing, debates about the Ten Commandments on school grounds — we can see just a concerted effort by attorneys through these religious organizations that have made this kind of document essentially marching orders and used it to try to reestablish or bring us back to a world in which the Protestant majority can try to impose its will on everybody else,” Sutton told me. “The courts seem more open to that than they have been in a couple of generations.”

The version of religious liberty the Founders ended up signing might have been written in an era when intra-Protestant conflicts were their chief concern, but it proved flexible enough to protect the growth of non-Protestant faith traditions. That protection is now being tested, but as we celebrate 250 years of our nation’s history, it has survived until now alongside a still-thriving faith community that’s unique to our country.

“You don’t have to read Tocqueville for that,” Campbell told me. “Just ask these people visiting for the World Cup, and they’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a lot of religion around here.’”