The Religious Liberty Commission: A Deepdive
What Is the Religious Liberty Commission?
The Presidential Religious Liberty Commission was established by President Donald Trump through Executive Order 14291 on May 1, 2025.
It is housed within the U.S. Department of Justice.
Its stated mission is to advise the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council on religious-liberty policy, recommend ways to protect religious liberty in the United States, identify threats to religious freedom, and develop strategies for protecting those rights in the future.
The commission was also charged with exploring the historical foundations of religious liberty and promoting what it calls America's "peaceful religious pluralism."
The Commission specifically identified a broad range of subjects for examination, including:
First Amendment rights of pastors and religious leaders
Religious organizations and faith-based institutions
Religious expression in schools
Parents' rights concerning their children's education
Military chaplains and service members
Religious accommodations in healthcare
Vaccine mandates and conscience objections
Religious displays on government property
Debanking of religious organizations
Religious discrimination in employment
Violence against houses of worship
Anti-Semitism
The ability of religious people to participate in public life without government retaliation or censorship.
The Commission ultimately held seven hearings between June 2025 and April 2026, hearing from more than 100 witnesses. According to DOJ's own summary, the hearings covered the military, education, healthcare, public and private sectors, parental rights, faith-based institutions, anti-Semitism and violence against houses of worship.
Who Is On the Commission?
The Commission is chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, with Dr. Ben Carson serving as vice chair.
The listed commissioners are:
Dan Patrick, Chair
Ben Carson, Vice Chair
Ryan T. Anderson
Allyson Ho
Dr. Phil McGraw
Eric Metaxas
Kelly Shackelford
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik
Pastor Paula White
Attorney General Pamela Bondi, ex officio
HUD Secretary Scott Turner, ex officio
Vince Haley, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, ex officio
Mary Margaret Bush serves as Commission Director and Designated Federal Official.
The Commission also has advisory boards made up of religious leaders, legal experts and lay leaders:
Bishop Salvatore Cordileone.
Pastor Jentezen Franklin
Archbishop Elpidophoros of America
Father Thomas Ferguson
Rabbi Mark Gottlieb
Pastor Jack Graham
Rabbi Yaakov Menken
Bishop Thomas Paprocki
Bishop Kevin Rhoades
Rabbi Eitan Webb
Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel
Advisory Board of Legal Experts
Francis Beckwith
Jason Bedrick
Josh Blackman
Gerald Bradley
Alyza Lewin
Kristen Waggoner
Advisory Board of Lay Leaders
Abigail Robertson Allen
Gene Bailey
Mark David Hall
Alveda King
Christopher Levenick
Sameerah Munshi
Ismail Royer
Ryan Tucker
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf
To read more about these individuals please see: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/white-house-press-release-president-donald-trump-names-advisory-board-members-the
The composition matters.
The Commission is not simply a neutral panel of constitutional scholars representing an equal cross-section of American religious and nonreligious life. Its membership contains prominent Christian conservative figures, religious-liberty attorneys, conservative public intellectuals and political figures, alongside Rabbi Soloveichik as a Jewish representative.
That does not, by itself, determine whether its recommendations are legally correct. But it is important context when evaluating which religious-liberty concerns received sustained attention and which perspectives were less visible.
The Hearings: A Chronological Timeline
June 16, 2025 — First Hearing
Foundations of Religious Liberty
The inaugural hearing at the Museum of the Bible established the Commission's philosophical framework.
Witnesses included religious-liberty attorneys, constitutional scholars, historians and representatives of faith-based organizations.
Among them were Mark Rienzi of Becket, Gerard Bradley, Mark David Hall, Barbara Elliott, Anthony Schmidt, Stephanie Barclay, Joshua Blackman and Alliance Defending Freedom CEO Kristen Waggoner.
The hearing emphasized several ideas that would recur throughout the Commission's work:
1. Religious liberty is a foundational American freedom.
2. Religious organizations should not be treated as inherently suspect because they are religious.
3. Religious freedom extends beyond private worship.
4. Religious people should be able to bring their beliefs into public life.
Commissioner Ryan Anderson argued that religious liberty should encompass participation in the public square rather than just the right to worship privately.
The Commission's first-hearing recommendations included restoring what it described as an "originalist understanding" of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses and treating faith-based organizations as public goods.
Why this hearing matters
The first hearing established the Commission's starting point:
Religious liberty is not freedom from government interference. It is also freedom for religious people and organizations to participate openly in American society.
That distinction becomes extremely important in later dicussions about schools, government funding, public displays and church-state separation.
September 8, 2025 — Second Hearing
Religious Liberty in Public Education
The second hearing shifted from constitutional theory to schools.
Students and parents described alleged conflicts involving:
religious clothing
prayer
school curriculum
gender identity instruction
parental authority
religious expression
opt-outs from educational materials
One student, Lydia Booth, had previously been prohibited from wearing a "Jesus loves me" mask.
Other witnesses discussed parents' objections to school materials involving gender identity and sexuality.
President Trump personally appeared at the hearing.
His remarks framed the issue in explicitly religious terms, describing America as "one nation under God." Chairman Patrick described the hearing as part of an effort to restore the nation's religious identity.
The underlying question
The hearing wasn't simply:
"Can students practice religion at school?"
It was also:
"How much authority should parents have to prevent public schools from exposing their children to ideas that conflict with their religious beliefs?"
That question would become one of the Commission's recurring themes.
September 29, 2025 — Third Hearing
Religious Liberty in Education — Teachers, Coaches and Faith-Based Schools
The third hearing continued the education discussion but expanded it to teachers, coaches and religious schools.
Witnesses included:
Coach Joseph Kennedy
teachers Monica Gill and Marisol Arroyo-Castro
attorneys
faith-based school representatives
Rabbi David Zwiebel
Father Robert Sirico
representatives of Christian schools
education-policy experts.
The hearing also opened with a discussion of violence against faith communities, prompted by the killing of Charlie Kirk.
The Commission characterized physical violence as deprivation of religious liberty and connected attacks against religious people and institutions to the larger religious-liberty debate.
A major theme emerged:
The Commission treated religious liberty as extending beyond worship into:
Employment
Education
Speech
Public expression
Institutional autonomy
December 10, 2025 — Fourth Hearing
Religious Liberty in the Military
Held in Dallas, this hearing focused on military personnel, chaplains, veterans and state/local religious-liberty disputes.
Witnesses included:
military personnel
former service members
military chaplains
religious-liberty attorneys
David Barton
Pastor Robert Jeffress
former Austin Fire Department Chaplain Andrew Fox
Phyllis Morris of Sweetwater, Texas.
The hearing discussed religious expression in the military, including:
religious accommodations
chaplaincy
religious symbols
faith-based materials
vaccine mandates
service members who said they suffered career or retirement consequences after refusing COVID-19 vaccination on religious grounds.
The hearing became significant because the Commission later incorporated those stories into its draft report and recommendations for restoring benefits to service members who lost them because of religious objections.
February 9, 2026 — Fifth Hearing
Anti-Semitism, Religious Liberty and the Private Sector
The fifth hearing broadened the discussion beyond Christianity.
It focused heavily on anti-Semitism, particularly in:
higher education
employment
public demonstrations
houses of worship
private organizations
Witnesses included Jewish students and leaders, Coach Bruce Pearl, Rabbi Ari Berman, Yitzchok Frankel, Shabbos Kestenbaum and others.
The hearing also examined religious-liberty conflicts involving employers.
Among the witnesses was Lacey Smith, a former Alaska Airlines employee who said she was fired after expressing concerns about the Equality Act.
Another witness, Hermione Susana, discussed losing work opportunities after religious objections involving COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
This hearing is important for another reason.
It demonstrated that the Commission was willing to describe religious discrimination against Jews as a religious-liberty issue, rather than treating anti-Semitism solely as a hate-crime or civil-rights problem.
March 16, 2026 — Sixth Hearing
Religious Liberty in Healthcare
The sixth hearing moved into medicine.
Witnesses included:
Dr. Eithan Haim
Christian counselor Kaley Chiles
nurse practitioner Abby Sinnett
former University of Michigan employee Valerie Kloosterman
healthcare and human-services providers
parents and students affected by vaccine mandates
physicians and medical ethicists.
The hearing examined religious objections involving:
gender-transition procedures
abortion
medical ethics
healthcare employment
professional licensing
vaccine mandates
conscience protections.
The Commission's stated goal was to identify threats to religious liberty in healthcare and determine how religious freedom could be protected in medical settings.
April 13, 2026 — Seventh and Final Hearing
Religious Liberty in America: Past, Present and Future
The final hearing was fundamentally different.
Instead of concentrating on one sector, it stepped back and asked:
What should religious liberty look like in America going forward?
The first major panel was titled:
"Church and State: Melodies in the Song of Freedom"
Witnesses included:
Professor Helen Alvaré
Clarence Henderson
Helen Aguirre Ferré
Erika Bachiochi
Dr. Akshar Patel
Dr. Paul Brintley
A second panel examined:
"Church and State: Partners in Solving Today's Problems"
Witnesses included representatives from Prison Fellowship, the Sisters of Life, the Woolf Group and the Aleph Institute.
Then Came the Draft Report
On June 26, 2026, the Commission delivered its draft report to President Trump.
DOJ says the report was based on the seven hearings and testimony from more than 100 witnesses.
The report then went through a public-comment period.
The Public Comments
A lot of things were said in this public comment period.
Some supported, others did not, but what PUP found most interesting was the suppport for the Pagans.
The public comments reveal something that the hearing transcripts alone don't:
There was a significant disagreement over what "religious liberty" actually means.
Some commenters essentially told the Commission:
Religious liberty means protecting religious people from government interference.
Others told it:
Religious liberty also requires government to protect and sometimes actively accommodate religious expression.
And another group argued:
The government should protect religion precisely by staying out of religion.
One of the clearest arguments came from Alturas, California.
Her argument begins with Jesus' words in Matthew 22:21:
"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."
Her interpretation is essentially:
Civil government has authority over civil matters, but not over conscience.
She argues that government should not determine:
which beliefs are legitimate
which religious practices are acceptable
which religion deserves official support
which religious texts should be promoted.
Her larger warning is that once government accepts the principle that it can favor religion, the question becomes:
Whose religion?
Her argument is particularly relevant because the Commission's own materials reject the idea that church-state separation requires religion to be excluded from public life.
She instead argues that government neutrality is itself a religious-liberty protection.
Another commenter, approached the issue from a very different position.
She identified herself as a Seventh-day Adventist married to an active-duty atheist.
That creates a particularly interesting example because the people in the same household have fundamentally different religious positions.
Her argument was essentially:
If religious liberty protects her conscience, it must also protect her husband's lack of religious belief.
She explicitly argued against government-enforced religious observance.
She also opposed:
expanding government funding for religious activities
repealing the Johnson Amendment
government involvement in religious organizations.
Her reasoning was that government funding inevitably creates government decisions about:
which religious activities qualify, which organizations qualify and what conditions accompany the money.
She therefore argued that religious organizations can actually be more independent when they remain financially independent of government.
Another submission came from someone who identified themselves as a pantheist Roman Reconstructionist Polytheist Pagan.
The argument was much more confrontational.
It challenged the idea that the United States was constitutionally established as a Christian nation and pointed to:
the First Amendment
Article VI's prohibition on religious tests
Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance
Jefferson's writings on religious freedom
Washington's references to Jews, Muslims and Christians
the Treaty of Tripoli.
The commenter made an especially important point for minority religions:
If government acquires the power to promote Christianity, there is nothing inherent in that power preventing a future government from promoting another religion.
That is the same structural argument made by Madison in the eighteenth century.
It is also one of the central concerns behind the Establishment Clause.
The Public Pushback
Even outside of the public comment period, plenty of others weighed in on social media, via articles, interviews, and more.
Democracy foward (in partnership with the Interfaith Alliance) wrote a public article criticizing the comission.
Despite the guidelines set by law through FACA, the commission’s membership consists exclusively of Christians, except for one Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, all of whom collectively represent the narrow perspective that America was founded as a “Judeo-Christian” nation and must be guided by Biblical principles. No members of the commission represent other minority religions, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Sikhism, or non-religious Americans, and the commission’s meetings have expressly adopted and promoted purportedly Judeo-Christian ideals and viewpoints, with members routinely expressing their views during meetings that the United States is a Judeo-Christian or Christian nation.
The Interfaith Alliance also submitted a public comment during the open period.
Interfaith Alliance: Public Comment
Interfaith Alliance argues that the RLC misunderstands religious liberty and risks privileging conservative Christianity over other beliefs.
Its recommendations could:
Favor religious institutions at the expense of nondiscrimination and public health.
Increase religion in public schools, threatening church-state separation.
Marginalize religious minorities in the military.
Allow religious objections to restrict healthcare access.
Address antisemitism while inadequately confronting Islamophobia.
Expand workplace religious exemptions in ways that could enable discrimination.
Weaken the Establishment Clause by increasing government involvement with religion.
Bottom line: Interfaith Alliance says religious freedom means freedom for everyone, government neutrality, and equal protection, not government-sponsored religion or religious exemptions that harm others.
The Interfaith Alliance et al v. Trump et al
Interfaith Alliance v. Trump — What Happened?
Interfaith Alliance, Muslims for Progressive Values, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Hindus for Human Rights, and Reverend Paul Raushenbush sued the Religious Liberty Commission and federal officials, arguing that the RLC violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
Their central complaints were that:
The Commission was not fairly balanced, because its membership overwhelmingly represented Christian viewpoints and included no representatives of non-Judeo-Christian religions.
The Commission's members were allegedly skewed toward views favoring religious exercise over certain civil-rights protections and toward greater government involvement with religion.
The RLC allegedly failed to make meeting materials, witness statements, agendas, transcripts and other records available to the public in a timely manner.
The plaintiffs asked the court to require the government to rebalance the Commission, release its records and prevent the RLC from issuing its final report until the alleged FACA violations were addressed.
What Did the Court Decide?
The plaintiffs lost the case.
Judge John P. Cronan dismissed the entire lawsuit on July 27, 2026.
The organizational plaintiffs' claims were dismissed with prejudice, while Reverend Raushenbush's claims were dismissed without prejudice because he lacked Article III standing. The court also denied the request to block the RLC's report because the underlying case was dismissed.
Importantly, the court did not rule that the RLC was fairly balanced or that its report was constitutionally sound. Instead, the court concluded that the plaintiffs had not established a legally viable basis for obtaining the relief they requested under FACA and the procedural mechanisms they used.
Why This Matters:
The court did not endorse the RLC's composition or conclusions. It dismissed the challenge on procedural and standing grounds.
The case also establishes some useful factual context. The court records that the RLC held hearings on:
June 16, 2025
September 8, 2025
September 29, 2025
December 10, 2025
February 9, 2026
March 16, 2026
April 13, 2026.
The RLC published its draft report on June 26, 2026, followed by only a 15-day public-comment period, which closed July 12 or 13.
That lines up directly with the concerns raised in the Interfaith Alliance public comment the organization argues that the Commission's composition, transparency practices and limited public-comment period prevented meaningful participation by many religious communities.
Source: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2026cv01075/657592/67/
Americans United: RLC Criticism
Americans United's full analysis argues that the RLC has repeatedly promoted a false narrative that church-state separation threatens religion.
Their main criticisms are:
Church-state separation protects religious freedom by preventing government from favoring one faith.
The Constitution protects both free exercise and against government establishment of religion; it does not establish Christianity.
The RLC allegedly excluded voices defending church-state separation and communities affected by government-sponsored religion.
Americans United argues the Commission's concept of religious liberty privileges conservative Christian beliefs, particularly in schools, healthcare, workplaces and government programs.
The organization also criticized the Commission for claiming to represent all faiths while allegedly marginalizing Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, LGBTQ+ people, women seeking reproductive healthcare, and nonreligious Americans.
It rejects the argument that opponents of the RLC want to "remove God from America," arguing that separation actually protects churches from government interference as well as individuals from government-imposed religion.
Bottom line: Americans United's position is that religious liberty means freedom from government-imposed religion as much as freedom to practice religion, and that weakening church-state separation ultimately threatens religious minorities and nonbelievers.
Taken together, the public comments, legal challenges, and responses from organizations such as Interfaith Alliance and Americans United reveal a central dispute over what religious liberty is supposed to protect. Supporters of the Religious Liberty Commission argue that government has failed to adequately protect religious expression, particularly for faith-based institutions and conservative Christians.
Critics, however, warn that expanding religious exemptions, increasing religious influence in public institutions, and weakening church-state separation could transform protections for religious freedom into government preference for certain religious beliefs. The controversy ultimately comes down to a question larger than any single recommendation: Does religious liberty mean giving religion a greater place in government, or protecting every person's ability to believe, worship, change faiths, or reject religion without government coercion?
For Pagans, Muslims, Jews, atheists, humanists, minority Christian traditions, and anyone whose beliefs fall outside the political or religious mainstream, that distinction matters. A system that protects only the beliefs currently favored by those in power is not religious liberty. The strongest protection for everyone may therefore be the simplest one: government should protect the right to practice religion without becoming the authority that decides which religion deserves protection.
Well researched and well written! Thank you for keeping up with all this ridiculous tomfoolery. This fight is not over!