Trump’s panel fighting alleged bias against Christians focuses on pet peeves
List of persecution claims abounds with those holding Trump-type views
If you were to believe the words of the recently formed federal Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, you would think the President Joe Biden, himself a Christian, had the persecution of Christians as its highest priority.
“Biden’s Department of Justice abused and targeted peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi told the task force at its first meeting last week, according to a written statement by President Trump’s Justice Department Office of Public Affairs.
But the substance of the 1,000-word statement makes clear that the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias isn’t about eradicating anti-Christian bias at all. It’s about retaliation for the Biden administration action’s involving some of Trump’s pet peeves such as vaccine mandates and the so-called ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
It’s also about privileging certain viewpoints — viewpoints that are favored by certain slivers of Republican-backing American Christianity, not by Christianity as a whole. We’re not seeing anti-persecution efforts seeking to protect mainstream Catholicism nor mainline Protestantism — only Christian nationalists and other conservatives supporting MAGA viewspoints..
Half-truths used to support claims of bias
And in an administration known for its mendacity, it shouldn’t be surprising that the statement included misinformation and half-truths.
Here are some of the alleged instances of anti-Christian bias highlighted during the meeting and the facts behind them:
🟪 Scott Hicks, provost and chief academic officer at Liberty University, said that LU and Grand Canyon University, both of them conservative-leaning evangelical schools, were singled out “due to the schools’ Christian worldview.” The fact is that legal action against LU involved alleged safety violations including failure to report sexual assaults, not its religious beliefs. The school agreed to pay a $14 million fine last year as it acknowledged serious deficiencies in meeting legal requirements. And if GCU was ever “singled out,” that occurred in 2019, during Trump’s first term, when the Department of Education determined that GCU should be treated as for-profit entity, leading to a long legal battle that didn’t end until last year, when a federal appeals court agreed with the school’s legal position.
🟪 Michael Farris, an activist and well-known attorney frequently representing Christian conservatives, referred to his own church, Cornerstone Chapel of Leesburg, Va., claiming that the church had been “investigated and charged by the Internal Revenue Service” for violating the Johnson Amendment, which prevents nonprofits from endorsing political candidates. He seemed to be referring to a 2020 incident that has been reported by right-wing media but not verified elsewhere, raising skepticism about what really happened. None of the right-wing media accounts stated the nature or amount of any fine, only that one was levied. In any case, the incident, if it occurred, dates to the Trump administration, not the Biden years.
🟪 One of the witnesses, Navy SEAL Phil Mendes, cited his relief from duty during the Biden administration because he refused for religious reasons to take the covid-19 vaccine. However, vaccine mandates were not the invention of the Biden administration; as early as 1905 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination. The court had the opportunity during the covid epidemic to review a case based on that ruling, but it declined to hear the case.
🟪 Kash Patel, the FBI director, highlighted a 2023 internal FBI memo that Republicans have for the past two years claimed was part of a anti-Catholic campaign. That memo was the subject of a four-month review ordered by Congress; Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, found “no evidence of malicious intent” nor evidence that it was part of a campaign to target Catholics, although he did find that it “failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards.”
🟪 Concerns about anti-Christian bias raised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio frequently involved those involved in political issues not traditionally related to Christianity, such as vaccine mandates and DEI initiatives.
🟪 Others citing “anti-Christiaṇ” policies pointed to Biden administration efforts that contrast with the Trump administration’s perspectives on LGTBQ issues. The press statement gave no indication of concern raised by Catholics and mainline Protestants that ministries have been hindered by anti-immigration policies that discourage immigrants from attending churches, nor their concerns that cutbacks in various kinds of humanitarian assistance have affected Christian ministries receiving significant portions of the funding from the federal government.
🟪 The executive order signed by Trump complained that the “Biden Administration declared March 31, 2024 — Easter Sunday — as ‘Transgender Day of Visibility.’” But Biden never picked the day — the day of visibility has been held on March 31 ever year since the commemoration begin in 2009.