Protection or Promotion?
Christopher C. Lund May/June 2026Religion and executive power in the Trump administration
Presidents routinely issue executive orders. These are not laws exactly; they are not statutes enacted by Congress. Executive orders are essentially directives to the executive branch—commands to federal agencies and personnel about how they should exercise the legal authority and discretion they already possess. Executive orders shape enforcement priorities, internal procedures, and institutional focus. Sometimes executive orders are small, such as President Obama’s Executive Order 13589, which encouraged double-sided printing to save paper. Some executive orders are momentous, such as President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which became the legal foundation for the forcible removal and incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, many of them citizens, during World War II.
Since returning to the White House, President Trump has issued a series of executive orders and related directives concerning religion and religious liberty. They cover a wide range of topics: religious expression in the federal workplace, accommodation of religious practices, enforcement policies affecting churches and religious nonprofits, and the creation of commissions and task forces focused on religious liberty, anti-Semitism, and anti-Christian bias. All these actions reflect the administration’s priorities when it comes to religion and religious freedom.
Looking at all this material cumulatively, the bottom line is that the Trump administration’s actions on religion have been incremental and symbolic rather than transformative. They tell a story about threats to religious Americans that is real in some respects, overstated in others, and sometimes selective. For the most part, these executive actions play defense—seeking to protect Christians from perceived discrimination and abuse. The big question, however, is whether the administration will move more to offense—seeking to use the machinery of the federal government to promote and encourage Christianity.
Writing about the Trump administration’s executive orders and directives can be challenging, because the topic is so vast. Since returning to the Oval Office, the administration has issued hundreds of executive orders, many of which have little to do with religion. Some of the administration’s actions that relate to religion are good and more-or-less uncontroversial—such as the personnel management memo clarifying that telework may be a valid accommodation for employees who religiously need it. That does not represent a major shift in law or policy; it is instead simply a sensible accommodation that makes sense as an interpretation of existing law.
Other actions sound like major changes but turn out not to be. The administration’s revised guidance on religious expression in the federal workplace is a good example. It has been portrayed as a huge departure from the policy of previous administrations. But in truth it differs only somewhat from the rules put into place in 1997 by the Clinton administration. Like the Clinton guidance, the Trump guidance allows federal employees to talk to each other about religion. The Clinton guidance had a special section about the dangers of supervisors pushing religion on their subordinates—“A supervisor should not say to an employee: ‘I didn’t see you in church this week. I expect to see you there this Sunday.’ ” On this topic the Trump guidance is less explicit. But even so, the Trump guidance still maintains that “unwillingness to engage in [religious] conversations may not be the basis of workplace discipline.”
And some of the Trump administration’s actions are best understood as the culmination of long-standing trends. Take the Johnson Amendment, which restricts tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. The amendment was added to the Internal Revenue Code in 1954, at the urging of then-Senator Lyndon Johnson. It has long been controversial, particularly among religious conservatives, who argue that it infringes the rights of churches to speak about politics.
But in truth, enforcement of the Johnson Amendment has been infrequent. The Internal Revenue Service has brought very few cases against churches—one of the most prominent examples being when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Branch Ministries after it ran newspaper advertisements urging Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton. In recent years pastors have repeatedly tested the limits—most notably through organized “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” protests in which clergy would openly endorse candidates and send recordings to the IRS—without triggering meaningful penalties. Against that background, the Trump administration’s decision not to enforce the rule against churches has been framed as a dramatic break. But really it just formalizes what had already become the prevailing practice.
Other initiatives may prove more consequential, but it is still early. The administration has established a Religious Liberty Commission, a Task Force on Anti-Semitism, a Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias, and the White House Faith Office. These bodies are not lawmaking institutions. They do not issue binding rules or adjudicate rights. Their formal role is advisory: to study problems, hold hearings, gather testimony, and recommend policy changes to the executive branch.
They follow the basic structure of prior presidential commissions. They are relatively small—typically composed of a few dozen members at most—drawn from a mix of government officials, religious leaders, academics, and advocates. They meet periodically rather than continuously, through a combination of public hearings and closed working sessions, with much of their work occurring through staff reports and internal deliberation.
Their mandates are broad. The Religious Liberty Commission is charged with identifying threats to religious freedom and proposing governmental responses. The Task Force on Anti-Semitism is tasked with studying incidents of bias and prejudice and recommending strategies to combat them across federal agencies. The Task Force on anti-Christian Bias focuses on identifying ways Christians may have been disadvantaged by government action. The White House Faith Office, which also existed under previous Democratic and Republican administrations starting with George W. Bush, serves as a liaison between religious communities and the executive branch, coordinating outreach and advising on faith-related initiatives.
Bodies like these can matter in two ways. Substantively, they can shape agency priorities, enforcement strategies, and future executive action through their recommendations. Symbolically, they can signal which problems the administration considers urgent and which constituencies it views as deserving attention. Because most of these bodies are newly formed, have held relatively few meetings, and do much of their work outside public view, it is hard to assess their long-term significance. To be sure, some have attracted public attention. The Religious Liberty Commission, for example, made headlines after its chair, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, removed commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller, following a contentious public hearing on anti-Semitism. Boller had pressed Jewish witnesses about Israel and suggested some Christians were being unfairly characterized as anti-Semitic. The episode shows how such commissions can quickly and easily become venues for broader cultural and political disputes, whatever their substantive recommendations.
Religion Under Threat
If a general theme runs through the Trump administration’s executive orders and actions, it is this: that traditional religion, especially Christianity, is under threat. Undoubtedly, there is truth to this. Along a variety of measures—such as religious affiliation, worship attendance, and self-reported belief—American society is more secular than it used to be. Traditional religious beliefs stand in tension with contemporary culture in many ways, most visibly in disputes over sexual morality. We see that tension everywhere—from conflicts over contraceptive-coverage mandates, to religious exemptions from gay-rights laws, to fights over the curriculum of the public schools and what they will teach about sexuality, gender, and family life.
But the executive orders take this sociological reality and fashion it into a narrower claim: that conservative Christianity has been persecuted by the federal government.
Take the executive order entitled “Eradicating anti-Christian Bias,” which talks about the “anti-Christian weaponization of government.” There are kernels of truth in it, but there is a lot of hyperbole, too. It is not fair to say, for example, that the Biden administration has “engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” It is not fair to say, for example, that the Biden administration “largely ignored . . . violence, theft, and arson” against “Catholic churches, charities, and pro-life centers.” To be sure, maybe the Biden Administration was louder and quicker to respond to threats against abortion providers. But even so, the Trump administration’s claims of systematic targeting and official indifference go too far.
Whose Religious Liberty?
The executive orders consistently foreground the concerns of conservative Christians. Those concerns are real and often justified—particularly in urban and coastal environments—where elites sometimes think of conservative Christians as bigots. But they do not exhaust the landscape of religious discrimination in the United States.
America is a religiously heterogeneous country. Atheists and other nonbelievers face hostility in the South. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and Native American practitioners can face problems everywhere they go. Yet these groups receive little attention in the executive orders. Indeed, the secretary of war recently adopted a more restrictive, department-wide policy on beards that will cause real problems for a number of minority faiths, reversing an earlier policy that more freely allowed religious exemptions for those with religious needs.
Now, to be sure, the Trump administration has been concerned with anti-Semitism. Jews have been well represented on these commissions and task forces, and one of them is specifically about anti-Semitism. But most of the administration’s focus has been on anti-Semitism in left-leaning universities—such places as Columbia and Brown. This makes some sense—the federal government funds these institutions, and such laws as Title VI apply to them. But it treats anti-Semitism primarily as a campus issue rather than as a broader social phenomenon that appears across ideological and institutional settings.
Defense or Offense?
By and large, the Trump administration’s executive orders have been playing defense—defense against the threat of anti-Christian bias. But they also raise the question—are we just playing defense, or do we want to play offense, too?
The distinction surfaced in the hearings of the Religious Liberty Commission. In the first hearing the group openly debated what the commission should be trying to do. Should the commission take its mandate as simply preventing Christians from being unfairly discriminated against? Or should the commission also seek to promote or advance religion in general or Christianity in particular?
Those are different things, and in some places we could see a move from defense to offense. For example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth decided in May of 2025 to start holding voluntary midday Christian prayer and worship services inside the Pentagon. Such services are now being held monthly, broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal television network. As it stands now, this kind of thing is an outlier. Other federal departments have not gone this direction; this may just be an issue particularly important to the secretary. But more of it may be coming, and we may see a switch from defense to offense, as it were.
An Unfinished Story
As a whole, the Trump administration’s executive orders relating to religion do not dramatically transform the landscape. Most of them are minor changes—reinforcing existing practices, making modest changes, or formalizing trends that were already underway. The effects are modest, at least for now. But they tell a story about how the Trump administration sees religion in American public life, and they offer thoughts about the direction the country might take in the future.
That story begins with something real. Traditional religious belief, especially conservative Christianity, does face deep cultural resistance in many places in many parts throughout the country. During the past 20 years we’ve seen deep conflicts over sexuality, family life, and moral formation. It makes sense that the Trump administration would be concerned about those.
But there are other important issues too, other religious groups with needs—such as Native American groups fighting with the federal government over sacred property that used to be theirs, and Sikhs, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews wanting to follow their religious commitments to wearing beards while not being kicked out of the military. Those issues, and those groups, matter too.
In the end, executive orders often do not mean much, at least in themselves. They are not laws; they are instructions—directions to the executive branch about how to exercise authority it already has. The real question is not what these orders say, but how that authority will be used. And as the Trump administration moves toward its halfway point, one big question is this: Will that authority be used defensively, to protect religious believers from discrimination and exclusion within a pluralistic society? Or will it be used offensively, to take sides in religious disputes and to place the weight of the federal government behind particular religious views? That line—between protection and promotion—is an old one in American law, and it remains an important one. As these policies are implemented, that line deserves to be closely watched.
Article Author: Christopher C. Lund
Christopher C. Lund is a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School, Detroit, Michigan. He is widely published, and his academic work has been cited extensively by commentators and courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Along with Michael McConnell and Thomas Berg, he is the author of a leading church-state casebook, Religion and the Constitution, the fifth edition of which was published by Aspen in 2022. In 2017 he was awarded the Berman Prize for Excellence in Scholarship by the Law and Religion Section of the American Association of Law Schools for his piece “Religion Is Special Enough.”