The Freedom From Religion Foundation strongly condemns the continued bias, misplaced priorities and troubling direction of the President’s Religious Liberty Commission, which met for the fifth time today.

Throughout the meeting, commissioners and invited witnesses focused on ideological grievances, culture-war narratives and foreign policy disputes while paying no attention to the growing influence of white Christian nationalism, the erosion of state/church separation, or the ways “religious liberty” rhetoric is being used to justify discrimination and government entanglement with religion. The overall tone underscored longstanding concerns that the commission has been tasked with approaching religious liberty through a narrow, sectarian lens rather than a genuinely pluralistic and constitutional one.

“As an organization dedicated to protecting the First Amendment, FFRF is deeply troubled by this commission’s apparent unwillingness to confront the most pressing dangers to religious freedom,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “True religious freedom means safeguarding the right of every person to live free from religion in our government. This is a phony commission with a fore-ordained conclusions.”

The meeting took place the same day the commission was sued in federal court over what plaintiffs allege is its unlawful lack of religious and ideological diversity. Interfaith Alliance, Muslims for Progressive Values, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Hindus for Human Rights filed the suit, arguing that the commission violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires advisory bodies to be fairly balanced in terms of the viewpoints represented. The lawsuit underscores concerns that the commission is structurally tilted toward a narrow, Christian nationalist perspective rather than a genuinely pluralistic understanding of religious liberty.

Antisemitism is rising in America and must be condemned unequivocally, as FFRF has consistently done. That condemnation must also extend to Nick Fuentes, his supporters and the broader movements of white supremacy and Christian nationalism that give antisemitism fertile ground. Antisemitism is not incidental to white Christian nationalism. It is embedded in an ideology that insists political power in the United States should belong only to certain white, male Christians.

The commission’s failure to confront these realities is especially alarming given President Trump’s decision to appoint Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian nationalist and End Times ideologue, has repeatedly denied the existence of the Palestinian people and framed U.S.-Israel policy through an explicitly religious lens. As a Christian Zionist, Huckabee supports Israel not to promote peace or security, but to advance biblical prophecy, welcoming conflict as a prelude to the Second Coming and envisioning a future in which Jews ultimately convert or perish.

Instead of discussing antisemitism coming from the religious right, the commission devoted time to fringe claims such as “debanking” and to private-sector disputes framed as religious persecution while downplaying the real-world consequences of allowing religious beliefs to override civil rights protections and public health policy. Debanking is largely a manufactured grievance, a fringe conspiracy theory that the religious right has promoted and that FFRF has previously debunked.

During a discussion of religious liberty in the private sector, Lacey Smith, a plaintiff in Brown v. Alaska Airlines, spoke about being fired after questioning her employer’s support for the Equality Act. Smith and another employee objected on the basis of their Christian beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman and that sex is defined by biology. Their comments framed the Equality Act as a threat to religious freedom and women’s rights, a familiar narrative used to justify discrimination under the guise of faith.

Another witness, Hermoine Susana, described being fired for her opposition to a Covid-19 vaccine mandate based on her Catholic beliefs. As FFRF has repeatedly noted, vaccine opposition is most often politically motivated and not rooted in sincerely held religious belief. No major religious denomination in the United States opposes vaccination outright. While the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, it does not grant anyone the right to endanger others or impose religious beliefs on public health policy.

FFRF remains committed to opposing all forms of religious bigotry, discrimination and extremism — whether directed at Christians, Jewish people, Muslims, atheists or any other group. But given the commission’s overwhelmingly Christian composition, with only a single Jewish rabbi and no meaningful representation of nonreligious or minority viewpoints, it is ill-suited to confront the real threats to religious liberty, many of which have been ignored in favor of familiar conservative grievances.

A commission genuinely committed to religious liberty must confront the greatest threats to that liberty honestly and without favoritism. That requires rejecting Christian nationalist ideology, defending the separation of state and church, and refusing to weaponize religious freedom as a tool for extremism or exclusion.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation will continue to hold government bodies accountable to the Constitution’s promise of a secular state, where freedom of belief includes the right to dissent, to criticize government policy and to live free from religious coercion.

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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