Yesterday marked the third convening of President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, once again held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The venue alone speaks volumes as to the Commission’s ideological leanings, but the content of the meeting made it unmistakably clear: Members of the Commission are no longer pretending to care about true religious liberty. They are openly pushing a narrow view of religion that undermines the separation of church and state as they try to remake America in the image of a singular Christian nation – one that excludes millions of Americans who practice other faiths or no faith at all.
As you may remember, at the Commission’s second meeting, Donald Trump announced his “America Prays” initiative – a government-sponsored campaign to get more Americans to pray. The third meeting doubled down, opening with prayer and quickly turning into a platform for how to promote religion, complete with calls for bribing schools to teach Bible stories to elementary school students, forcing prayer on football players, and, of course, funding religious education through private school vouchers. One of the panelists at the meeting went so far as to admit that vouchers are “not about increasing test scores,” as voucher proponents have often falsely claimed, but about turning students into people that “God has called them to be.”
But we know, and you know, that a majority of Americans don’t want this. We recognize the dangers of the government promoting religion in schools, seeing that it leads to coercion, exclusion, and the erosion of true religious freedom. We also know that vouchers are widely unpopular, and voters reject them time and time again when they’re on the ballot. Despite all of this evidence, Trump and his allies continue to push for religion in schools because – say it with me – they’re not pretending anymore. They’re not pretending to care about religious liberty, and they’re not pretending to care about the true harms our children face.
At the meeting, we heard testimony from teachers and coaches who claimed their religious freedom was violated because they weren’t allowed to proselytize students. Among them was ex-football coach Joe Kennedy, the plaintiff in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the case where the Supreme Court misconstrued the facts to justify ruling in favor of Kennedy and minimized the coercion that students faced from him.
Like he did while the case was pending, Kennedy spun a false narrative about his repeated behavior of leading students in prayer on the 50-yard line for years. Kennedy claimed he was “prosecuted and persecuted for a 15-second prayer,” implying that he didn’t have a history of leading players in prayer and that none of the students he coached had a problem with the praying or felt coerced. But in fact, students from Kennedy’s team did feel pressured to join these prayers, fearing ostracization if they didn’t participate. And Kennedy knows that happened, because he himself admitted during the meeting, “I could tell these kids to do anything and everything. We have that much impact on them.” It’s astounding that Kennedy doesn’t see the irony in complaining about the pressure he felt as an adult. That statement alone underscores why prayer led by authority figures in public schools is inherently coercive.
Kennedy lamented that “they took all the fun out of coaching.” But if coercing students into religious activity is what someone considers fun, they have no business in public education.
Carrie Prejean Boller, a member of the Commission who is not a religious liberty lawyer, misstated the limited impact of the Kennedy case, declaring, “Now is the time to build, to put those crosses and nativity scenes back up. We have more rights as Christians than we’ve ever had.” She’s wrong on the law and the reality. Christians – and people of any and all faiths – do not have the right to impose their religion on others or use it to discriminate.
Keisha Russell, counsel at First Liberty Institute, also weighed in during the meeting. She said, “90% of children in America attend public schools. We can’t just give those kids away… We need to take back those schools deliberately and intentionally.” That’s not just a dog whistle, it’s a threat. It’s nothing short of a promise to transform our public schools into Sunday schools, erasing the diversity that makes them a cornerstone of American democracy.
We at Americans United have a message: Public schools are not Sunday schools. They are for everyone – regardless of religion, race, sex, or disability. They are one of the few places where children from all backgrounds can come together, thrive, learn from one another, and grow into informed citizens. They are not battlegrounds over religion and religious belief.
All of these statements made it impossible to ignore that Trump and his allies are no longer hiding their Christian Nationalist agenda of eroding the separation of church and state. They’re saying the quiet part out loud: that when it’s up to them, if you’re not a Christian, they will not look upon you very favorably.
Members of the Religious Liberty Commission during a June meeting. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images.
