Theatre of the Absurd: The Trump Administration's "Anti-Christian Bias" Report

Plus: An invitation to join The Convocation Unscripted + Live event this Thursday.

May 05, 2026

“Only a coward survives the absurd.”
-Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise (2021)

Last Thursday, the federal government’s “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” released a massive 500-page report, which allegedly “details the Biden Administration’s radical efforts to punish Christians and highlights President Trump’s efforts to restore religious liberty.” The task force—involving 17 federal agencies and headed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (who took over after Pamela Bondi’s ouster) was created by President Trump’s Executive Order 14202 (issued shortly after Trump took office in February 2025).

I won’t try your patience by detailing the litany of half-truths, cherry-picked details, and misleading stories that pepper the report. But here’s just one example—my favorite—of the flimsy scaffolding on which this report is built. The report makes this claim in “Key Finding 14”: “The Biden Administration regulated and suppressed religious speech that it did not like and curtailed Christians’ ability to jointly worship and study the Bible.” As evidence of this claim, the report makes this assertion: “In 2023, a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma was told to extinguish the flame of a religious candle or risk losing its participation in Medicare and Medicaid, including Children’s Health Insurance Program funding.”

Sounds terrible, right? But what’s the real story? Saint Francis Health System, a Catholic hospital system in Tulsa, kept a sanctuary candle burning in its chapel as a Catholic devotional practice. A 2023 accreditation review cited “a lit candle with open flame burning unattended 24/7” in a hospital environment with oxygen equipment as a fire safety issue. The devotional candle was never targeted by the government as a religious practice. The government’s concern was with the safety of patients at the Catholic hospital.

Moreover, as the task force’s own report notes on p. 139, after legal and public pressure, and additional safeguards put in place by the hospital, the government ultimately issued a waiver to allow the candle remain. It was never “snuffed out.” Rather, the Biden administration and the hospital reached a reasonable agreement that ultimately balanced religious liberty concerns with safety concerns. This is how government regulation is supposed to work. But in the hands of Trump’s disingenuous task force, this episode is twisted into a blatant account of anti-Christian bias. I could go on and on with such misleading examples.

But it’s worth asking, “What’s really going on with Trump’s creation of a massive 17-agency-wide Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias, headed by the Department of Justice?” In the short term, it’s a partisan political weapon squarely aimed at the Democratic Party, designed for messaging in the fall midterm elections. But in the long game, it is part of a broader program to ensconce the idea of “anti-Christian bias” in legal and public parlance, as part of Trump’s attempt to define those who criticize him or his white Christian nationalist supporters as “domestic terrorists” (see Trump’s National Presidential Security Memo 7).

If we take a few steps back, you can see just how absurd the entire project is. I wrote the following in an article for The Contrarian just after Trump rolled out his original executive order:

Notably, while Trump’s executive order is peppered with references to religious liberty, it makes no mention of any other religious groups. Only Christians—who comprise approximately two thirds of the U.S. population—are singled out as particular victims deserving special protections. Never mind that according to the 2023 Hate Crimes Report compiled by the FBI, out of 2,833 hate crimes motivated by religious bias, only 10% (290 cases) were motivated by anti-Christian bias. By contrast, 71% (2,006 cases) were motivated by antisemitism, and 19% (537 cases) involved bias against members of other non-Christian/non-Jewish religions and atheists/agnostics. In other words, adjusting for their smaller percentage of the population, Jews were more than 200 times more likely than Christians to be the target of a hate crime in the US in 2023. Trump’s executive order is clearly not about protecting the religious liberty of a persecuted minority or the religious groups actually experiencing the most violence.

Moreover, I pointed out Trump’s own hypocrisy. He himself has attacked a number of Christian groups who aren’t his favored group of conservative white evangelical Protestants (Reminder: white evangelical Christians comprise only 13% of the general population and only one in five Christians).

Trump’s ludicrous posturing as the defender of the Christian faith has already been undermined by his own administration’s actions in the opening weeks of his presidency, which have explicitly targeted Christian leaders and groups. Trump called Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde “nasty” (his favorite epithet for women he finds threatening) for preaching at the Washington National Cathedral a sermon about mercy, and he allowed Elon Musk to disparage and gut funding from Lutheran and Catholic groups who have provided social services to immigrants and refugees for decades. His encouragement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue arrests of undocumented immigrants even in sensitive locations like churches and synagogues has made his Department of Homeland Security the target of a lawsuit filed by 27 Christian and Jewish organizations, and his inhumane mass deportation program has earned him a rare pointed rebuke from Pope Francis, who called it “a disgrace.”

Finally, the report uses the term “traditional Christians” and “people of faith” throughout as if these terms refer to some identifiable majority of Christians. But even a cursory look at contemporary survey data shows that the actual views of American Christians are far from what the task force assumes.

First, the premise of the entire project—that discrimination against Christians is as big a problem as discrimination against other groups—is an idea that only has majority of support among white evangelical Protestants.
Even on so-called culture war issues, white evangelicals are outliers. Most other Christians support the legality of abortion in all or most cases, support allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry, and reject patriarchal conceptions of hierarchical gender roles.
Even more telling, while Trump’s favorability remains at nearly seven in ten among white evangelical Protestants, only 37% of all other Christians hold a favorable view of the president.

Actual American Christians also hold views at odds with Trump’s obsession issue, immigration.

While white evangelicals are more sympathetic to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, about six in ten Christians say they believe that the U.S. immigration system should allow immigrants who are living in the country illegally a way to become citizens, provided they meet certain requirements.
And nearly seven in ten Christians say they oppose allowing Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) officers to regularly conduct surveillance and arrests at sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, places of worship, and social service locations. Even a slim majority of what evangelicals oppose such a radical policy, which Trump unleashed the first week of his presidency.

Put another way, given what American Christians actually believe, policies that outlaw abortion and marriage equality, or use the power of the state to favor traditional hierarchical gender roles, cannot be accurately characterized as Christian. Nor can inhumane immigration policies that deny undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship or that target them for arrest at places of worship or other sensitive locations.

It’s clear that we won’t see Trump’s Department of Justice showing any concern for these Christian values, even if they do comprise the majority views of Americans who identify as Christian.

However, in this administration, one uniquely at war with the truth, advancing the bold absurdity—the Big Lie—is the point. It is a predictable strategy for advancing authoritarianism and suppressing public criticism. In the coming days, if this vision is embraced, we will almost certainly see heads of institutions and even private citizens forced to testify before Anti-Christian Bias government committees. And we are likely to see many forced to choose between affirming this irreality and being labeled domestic terrorists because of their alleged anti-Christian bias.

The Center on Faith and Justice hosted a press briefing to discuss concerns about a Department of Justice report on anti-Christian bias, with panelists arguing the report was politically motivated and fundamentally flawed. Former White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Executive Director Melissa Rogers testified that the Biden administration worked extensively with Christian leaders and communities, contradicting the report's claims of anti-Christian bias. Amanda Tyler from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty criticized the report's misunderstanding of religious freedom principles and constitutional law, while Guthrie Graves Fitzsimmons from Interfaith Alliance highlighted the report's hypocrisy and noted their organization's legal challenges against the administration's Religious Liberty Commission. Robert Jones from Public Religion Research Institute presented data showing that while Christians make up a majority of Americans, there is significant diversity within Christian beliefs, with white evangelical Protestants being the only group supporting the report's claims of anti-Christian bias. The panelists argued that the report incorrectly characterized "traditional Christians" and failed to consult with former Biden administration officials before publication.

ICYMI, Announcing My Forthcoming Book, BACKSLIDE

An Invitation

Come join The Convocation Unscripted team for our monthly LIVE webinar, where we’ll discuss the ongoing threats to our democracy, bringing our combined expertise in religion, history, and politics to the discussion. We hope you can join us LIVE on May 7 at 5:00 PM ET. It’s free, but you’ll need to register below to receive the Zoom link.