Religious Freedom for Some

Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
By Staff

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Buffalo newspaper publishes bishop’s op-ed against National Prayer Breakfast

Photo provided by The Council for Global Equality

The Buffalo News published an op-ed from a faith leader calling for an end to congressional involvement in the National Prayer Breakfast. 

Interconnected Justice founder and President Bishop Joseph Tolton, who resides in New York City, urged in his piece that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand step down from her role as co-chair of this year’s National Prayer Breakfast. The event took place on Feb. 5. 

“The National Prayer Breakfast, to be held Thursday, has never been a gathering for reflection. It has operated as a place where religious identity is fused with political power and access,” Tolton writes in the piece. “That reality has intensified sharply in recent years. Last year, President Trump used the breakfast to lay out a MAGA Christianity agenda, claiming divine sanction for his leadership, asserting that the nation must bring religion back much stronger and casting political authority as a religious mission.”

Tolton explains the powerful connections the prayer breakfast has fueled, and how dogmatic policies have emerged in its wake: 

The same networks that shape the prayer breakfast have helped strengthen anti- democratic and anti-LGBTQ+ forces abroad. Uganda’s extreme anti-LGBTQ+ law did not emerge in isolation. It was reinforced by international religious actors who framed repression as a moral obligation and exported ideology developed through the National Prayer Breakfast network.

These dynamics now intersect directly with American diplomacy. In recent years, U.S. foreign policy has increasingly blurred the line between state authority and sectarian religious advocacy. Human rights have been reframed through a narrow theological lens aligned with conservative Christian legal movements. A specific religious worldview is promoted globally under the banner of U.S. engagement.

Tolton ends his column by calling for leadership through reason, not belief: “Stepping away from the National Prayer Breakfast would affirm that faith does not require proximity to political power and that prayer does not need a government stage to be meaningful. It would signal respect for the diversity of belief she represents — and for democratic institutions that rely on religious neutrality.”

You can read the full op-ed here.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 42,000 members and several chapters nationwide, including over 2,100 members and a chapter in New York. FFRF’s purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

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FFRF condemns Speaker Mike Johnson’s role in Christian nationalist gathering

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is rebuking House Speaker Mike Johnson for using his government office to promote Christian extremism at a recent get-together in the nation’s capital.

The second annual 2026 National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance (co-founded by Johnson and organized by the Family Research Council), held Feb. 4 at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., featured two dozen members of Congress alongside far-right pastors and religious activists who framed American politics as a form of “spiritual warfare.” Speakers urged Christians to “bind demonic forces,” “tie the hands of Satan” and reclaim control over American culture, government and law — rhetoric that openly rejects democratic pluralism and constitutional governance.

Johnson addressed the event and led prayers, identifying himself as Speaker of the House and repeatedly asserting that the United States derives its freedom, success and legitimacy from Christianity and a “biblical foundation.” He framed the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary as an opportunity to restore Christian dominance in public life and prayed for divine guidance so Congress would govern “in a way that is pleasing” to God.

FFRF Legal Counsel Chris Line has warned Johnson in a letter that his conduct at the gathering crossed clear constitutional boundaries.

“When the Speaker of the House substitutes theology for constitutional authority, he crosses the critical line between private belief and public office,” he writes. “That line exists to protect the religious liberty of all Americans, including the many who do not share your faith.”

Unlike the longstanding National Prayer Breakfast, which falsely bills itself as ecumenical and nonpartisan, the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance is explicitly and unabashedly ideological. Speakers repeatedly characterized abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality, environmental protections and secular governance as “sins” and “demonic attacks” on the nation. The repentance urged by speakers focused less on personal morality than on the supposed failure of Christians to exert power over those who do not share their beliefs.

Among the featured speakers were leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, a radical Christian nationalist movement teaching that believers have divine authority to “take dominion” over governments and institutions. Pastor Ché Ahn, who spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally preceding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, lamented that Christians had failed to “occupy” positions of power. Other speakers preached that America is under siege by pagan gods and demonic entities that must be expelled from the halls of government.

Several members of Congress directly embraced this rhetoric. Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., prayed to “bind the demonic forces” seemingly possessing the United States of America. Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., declared that “each person” in the country would serve and praise Jesus Christ, explicitly framing America as a Christian nation by divine design. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., explicitly asked God to cleanse the government of nonbelievers: “And God, I pray that you would put godly people in places of authority and take those people out of those places that are not godly, Lord.”

Johnson offered no criticism of these extremist statements. Instead, he praised the prayers of lawmakers as evidence that there is still “salt and light” in Washington and prayed for God to grant him wisdom to carry out divine will through legislation.

FFRF has emphasized to Johnson in its letter that the United States was not founded on the bible, Christianity or religion in general. It was established on Enlightenment principles of individual liberty, popular sovereignty and a deliberate rejection of religious governance. The Constitution is a godless document by design. The First Amendment expressly forbids the government from endorsing, advancing or favoring religion precisely because the Founders understood the dangers of sectarian power fused with the state.

“At a moment when Christian nationalism is increasingly used to justify discrimination and the erosion of civil rights, your words matter. They legitimize the false narrative that the government derives its authority from God rather than from the people, and that American law should serve religious ends rather than constitutional ones,” Line writes. “The Constitution does not ask government officials to be faithful to God. It asks them to be faithful to the law.”

FFRF is calling on Johnson to respect the constitutional limits of his office and to cease promoting sectarian ideology under the mantle of governmental authority. If he cannot uphold the law without regard to whether it comports with his personal religious beliefs, then FFRF suggests that he must resign immediately.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.

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Freethought Radio – February 12, 2026

FFRF Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence reports about a high school softball team in Missouri that had religion pushed on it, and how FFRF was able to put a stop to this. Then, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman reviews this year’s National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. and provides some insight into future plans for the Congressional Freethought Caucus.

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FFRF castigates EPA’s Orwellian attempt to ‘repeal’ climate science

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is decrying the Trump administration’s recent anti-science action that will erase the scientific foundation for federal climate protections.

The White House has ordered a repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, which recognizes a basic scientific reality: Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. This determination triggered the EPA’s duty under the Clean Air Act to regulate pollutants that “cause or contribute to” dangerous air pollution — until now.

“You cannot repeal a fact,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “No administration, no matter how hostile to science, can nullify atmospheric chemistry or legislate away the laws of physics. Greenhouse gases  trap heat — whether politicians acknowledge it or not.”

By revoking this finding, the administration is not merely revising policy; it is attempting to nullify the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, human-caused and already inflicting catastrophic harm. In an Orwellian maneuver, the agency charged with protecting our environment has declared that a documented public health threat no longer legally “exists.”

Rescinding the Endangerment Finding strips the EPA of its core authority to address greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and other major polluters. It dismantles the legal backbone of climate regulation and signals open season for fossil fuel interests while communities across the country endure intensifying heat waves, stronger hurricanes, worsening wildfires, rising seas and climate-driven disease.

The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to regulate emissions from new motor vehicles that “cause or contribute to” air pollution that endangers public health or welfare. The repealed finding faithfully applied that mandate. The administration’s new position, which attempts to exclude pollutants that endanger people “only indirectly,” contradicts the statute’s plain language and decades of settled law, including the Supreme Court’s recognition in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases fall within the act’s scope.

Greenhouse gases do not cease trapping heat because a presidential administration wishes them away. As the EPA’s own website has long explained, these gases thicken the Earth’s atmospheric blanket, intensifying warming regardless of how “well-mixed” they are in the atmosphere. The physics of climate change is not subject to executive revision.

The repeal also leans on fringe and cherry-picked claims that elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a serious threat and that isolated environmental anecdotes undermine decades of peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, the scientific evidence of harm has only grown stronger. Researchers can now attribute specific extreme weather events, ecosystem collapses and public health crises directly to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

This action aligns directly with the Christian nationalist, anti-science agenda outlined in Project 2025, which seeks to gut environmental protections, dismantle climate initiatives and subordinate evidence-based policymaking to ideological goals. Trump’s former EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunasekara helped write the climate section of the guiding document for Project 2025 and was a driving force behind this change, along with Christian nationalist Russell Vought.

Nonreligious Americans, who now make up roughly one-third of the U.S. adult population, overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Pew Research has found that 90 percent of atheists acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change, the highest percentage of any religious or nonreligious group. The “Nones” understand that this is our only world while evangelicals are apt to deny reality.

“The only afterlife that should concern us is leaving our descendants and planet a secure and pleasant future,” says Gaylor. “By repealing the Endangerment Finding, this administration is willfully sabotaging that future. It is choosing short-term corporate gain over long-term human survival — and condemning our children and grandchildren to escalating climate chaos, preventable suffering and irreversible environmental loss.”

All Americans rely on the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean air, a stable climate and a livable planet are not partisan luxuries. They are prerequisites for public health, economic stability and intergenerational justice. By repealing the Endangerment Finding, the Trump administration has abandoned the EPA’s core mission and placed ideology above evidence. The government cannot repeal atmospheric chemistry by decree. It cannot vote away thermodynamics. And it cannot wish rising seas, burning forests and intensifying storms out of existence.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation calls on Congress, the courts and the American public to reject this reckless repudiation of science and to restore the EPA’s obligation to protect the health and welfare of present and future generations before it’s too late.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.

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Coalition Letter Opposing H.R. 7296, The So-Called “SAVE America Act”

Arab American Institute
By Staff

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In Oklahoma and Tennessee, religious charter schools face barriers

Baptist News Global
By Jeff Brumley

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Rapper’s Prayer Rally At Haywood High Sparks First Amendment Firestorm

Hoodline
By Caleb Powell

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AU & allies applaud Oklahoma charter school board for rejecting Ben Gamla religious public school

Americans United
By Staff

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OK Statewide Charter School Board rejects Jewish virtual charter school application

KFOR 4 (Oklahoma City, OK)
By Sydnee Batzlaff

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