I was used to being on the other side of government commissions, panels and review boards. During my 12+ years in government, I supported many such gatherings. But now I was a guest, warming a seat in the World State Theater of the museum of the Bible. (The M in “museum” is left lowercase on purpose.) Why was I here, sitting with Americans United’s CEO and President Rachel Laser and coalition partners from both faith and secular organizations? We were attending the inaugural meeting of President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
Before I get into it, yes, it’s concerning that this meeting of a government commission happened at a private museum dedicated to the Bible. We discuss that and much more in American United’s written public comments to the Commission.
Here, I just want to share my experience of being there. Candidly, I felt out of place and perhaps a bit unnerved joining the line of people entering the building for this occasion June 16. Would the Christian Nationalists queuing up alongside me spot me as a defender of church-state separation? Or would my blue suit and my whiteness reassure them that we were all on the same team?
I didn’t spend a ton of time on those questions because the line moved quickly and, before I knew it, I had made my way to the auditorium, where I ended up sitting between a colleague from Interfaith Alliance and one from American Atheists. (I liked how my positioning captured AU’s place in the fight, bridging the gap between believers and nonbelievers.) Comforted by the presence of like-minded people, I focused on the stage.
The Commission’s seats formed two sides of a V, with the bottom of the letter occupied by two seats for witnesses. Once filled in, one side of the stage would hold the Commission’s chair and vice-chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, respectively, as well as Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office, Paula White. The other side had media personality Phillip McGraw (better known as “Dr. Phil”) and Carrie Prejean Boller, a former Miss California who wrote a book about how persecuted she was for her “conservative values.”
But it wasn’t the chair setup that chilled me. Serving as the backdrop for this meeting were alternating flags: the American flag and the flag of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now, I used to work for the DOJ. Indeed, I left my job as a civil rights lawyer there nearly a year ago to come to AU and lead its Policy Department. It made me feel strange when I first RSVP’d for this event and had to email a DOJ email address to do so. Housing this Commission at the Justice Department is a deliberate choice that should disquiet all of us. But seeing that the business of this Commission would literally occur before a backdrop of DOJ symbols made me a bit queasy.
The meeting itself was everything you would expect. It started with a prayer, given by a Catholic bishop and specifically made “in Jesus’ name.” There was as much praise for Trump tossed about as there was for Jesus Christ. I listened to Boller insist that our founders wanted exclusively Christian “rulers,” while sitting next to the sole Jewish member of the Commission. I listened while a witness – a law professor – made the point that religion should be thought about like education, his point being that the government should promote religion the way it promotes and supports public education. I listened as a member of the Commission asked a question vilifying the courts as the primary aggressor on religious freedom in America. (Notably, even the witness – a constitutional lawyer – seemed alarmed by the question and walked back the characterization of the courts as the enemy of religious freedom.)
I’m not naïve, so I cannot say with a straight face that I expected something different. I expected a focus on Christianity so specific that you’d barely know other faiths existed in the U.S. I expected the rhetoric of victimization that certain American Christians have spouted for years, but which reached a new milestone with Trump’s Executive Order on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” I expected egregious mischaracterizations of facts. (“Nuns being forced to provide birth control!” “A Christian grandmother arrested for praying quietly!” I wanted to ask if the grandmother was in the room with us right now.)
What perhaps I didn’t expect was how distasteful I would find the connection of all of this to my former employer, the Justice Department. The surprise guest for the Commission meeting was none other than U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. The witness tables on stage were cleared to make way for a podium, from which Bondi would eventually say that “[the Commission] will be the tip of the spear” in the fight for their version of religious liberty and expressed her pride at it being housed at the DOJ.
That’s when my row decided it was time to leave. It felt right – necessary even – not to sit there and listen to the explicit weaponization of the U.S. Department of Justice, where I once worked to protect the American people from discrimination, for the good of Christian Nationalism. So, quietly and politely, we walked out.
But I was struck by something else that Bondi said. With a big smile on her face, she crowed, “Elections have consequences.”
Yes, they do. But under our system, guardrails still exist. We are a constitutional republic and a democracy, not a theocracy. This Commission seems to be confused about that.
You can rely on Americans United to set them straight.
