The initial report from Trump’s "Anti-Christian Bias" task force reveals... nothing

From deleted Easter posts to phantom candle bans, their evidence of Christian persecution is nothing but a pile of petty grievances

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Earlier this year, Donald Trump announced the formation of a Justice Department task force that would eliminate "anti-Christian bias" in the federal government. Given that 87% of Congress and 98% of elected Republicans are Christian, you had to wonder what the hell they were talking about. Which non-Christian faith groups had it better than Christians? (Then again, these were the same people trying to eradicate “DEI” because they pretend white people are victims of racism…)

When the “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” held its first meeting in April, it was obvious where this was going. Attendees included several notable right-wing Christians, including Pastor Paula White-Cain, homeschooling advocate Michael Farris, and the provost of Liberty University. You just knew they were going to compile a list of conservative Christian grievances—How dare anyone say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”?—not an actual list of federal biases that exist against Christians, much less ways to fix anything, because no such thing exists.

Attorney General Pam Bondi leads the first (and only) meeting of the “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force” (screenshot via YouTube)

That committee has now issued its preliminary report, which is nothing more than a collection of complaints from various Cabinet departments along with a preamble that laughably claims there was “a consistent and systematic pattern of discrimination against Christians during the Biden Administration.” (The report is dated June 6, but it wasn’t public until now.)

Their examples are pathetic and many of them have been dissected and picked apart for years now. I won’t get into every single one of them, but I wanted to highlight a few of the examples that jumped out at me because I could already tell they were lying to the American public.

For example, with offering any specifics, the Department of Housing and Urban Development noted the “Targeted Removal of Holiday Posts”:

During the 2023 Easter season, a Public Affairs Officer was instructed to take down posts on an official HUD office X account relating to Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter because they potentially violated the Establishment Clause and other federal regulations. However, similar posts in celebration of Pride Month, Ramadan, and Diwali, among others, received no scrutiny.

Without screenshots, it’s hard to understand why certain posts were removed, and there’s no further explanation as to what happened.

It’s entirely possible that the posts honoring Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter included Bible verses or statements that promoted Christianity while the Pride, Ramadan, and Diwali posts were pretty generic. After all, this is what the Pride Month post looked like:

That’s about as basic and boring as you can get!

Meanwhile, here’s a Biden-era post from HUD celebrating Christmas. This one was not taken down—nor should it have been:

For whatever reason, that Christmas post was not mentioned in the report.

That is not anti-Christian bias. That’s someone possibly getting a little over-zealous with some posts on Christian holidays, crossing the line, and getting asked to take them down.

The Department of Education offered up its own examples of the Biden administration going after Christians. One involved the appointment of a “book ban coordinator” that investigated school boards revoking access to certain books from students.

Again, there are no further details, nor any indication why appointing someone to look into book bans is “anti-Christian bias.” What we know about school district book bans is that conservatives love banning books that reference LGBTQ people or sex in any form, even if they are age appropriate. That’s why some activists countered those book bans by invoking hypocrisy and calling for school districts to remove the Bible from their shelves.

The DoE also said the Biden administration targeted “Christian Higher Education”:

The Biden Administration weaponized the Department of Education (ED) and attempted to impose record-breaking fines on some of the nation’s largest Christian universities, including Liberty University ($14 million) and Grand Canyon University ($37.7 million).

Neither penalty was an example of “anti-Christian bias.”

In 2023, Biden’s DoE levied a $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University because there was ample evidence that the school lowballed its tuition fees to reel students in… before hitting them with larger fees once they were already taking classes (and it was therefore harder to leave).

The government laid out, with plenty of detail, how the school lied about tuition on its website, its enrollment agreement, the “Net Price Calculator” that students could use online to figure out how much they would owe, and other marketing materials. This wasn’t, in other words, some accident on one page of GCU’s website; it was clearly a purposeful move to attract students before gouging them later.

But the Trump administration rescinded that penalty because it doesn’t give a shit about students who were defrauded by the school.

What about Liberty University? They were fined $14 million for violating the Clery Act, meaning the school created a culture where students were afraid to report sexual violence and didn’t do nearly enough to let students know about threats on campus. A consultant who spoke to the Washington Post said it was “the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.” (For the sake of comparison, the largest-ever Clery fine issued before that was $4.5 million to Michigan State for failing to address Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse.)

Punishing schools for not taking sexual assault seriously and for jacking up tuition costs after students have enrolled was never ideological. Biden wasn’t weaponizing the government to go after Christian schools. His administration did the kind of oversight it’s required to do of any school that receives taxpayer money—and both Liberty and GCU benefit from government-funded student loans.

In other words, the Biden administration didn’t target Christian schools. They went after schools that were screwing over their own students, and two of those schools happened to be Christian.

That is not anti-Christian bias. That’s two Christian schools that got punished for harming their own students.

The Department of Defense had its own gripe: The “Cancellation of Pastoral Care for Service Members and Veterans”:

During Holy Week in 2023, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center issued a “cease and desist” letter to a community of Franciscan Catholic priests that had been providing pastoral care to service members and veterans for nearly two decades. After canceling its contract with these priests, the Center awarded the contract to a secular for-profit entity, leaving inadequate pastoral care for Catholics during Holy Week.

They make it sound like the Walter Reed administrators booted Catholic chaplains from the premises right before Holy Week just to fuck over Catholic patients.

That’s not true. Here’s what actually happened: The Franciscan chaplains in question belonged to the “Holy Name College Friary of Silver Spring, Maryland” but their contract with Walter Reed expired on March 31 of 2023, shortly before Easter. They continued providing services anyway, but that violated the by-the-book rules of Walter Reed, so they were asked to stop, and the hospital sent them a cease-and-desist letter because they had no legal right to be on the campus.

Meanwhile, the hospital awarded a contract to provide chaplain services to Mack Global LLC, a company that serves the military in a variety of ways. Despite providing ordained chaplains to patients, the Archbishop for Military Services said it wasn’t good enough because those chaplains didn’t come from the Catholic Chaplain region of France and were instead sparkling imitators. That let to a right-wing-fueled shitstorm.

In any case, when bidding for a new contract was reopened in May of that year, the Franciscans won the contract. So the temporary complaint was resolved in a matter of months—months during which Catholic chaplains were still available to Walter Reed patients who wanted them.

That is not anti-Christian bias. That’s a contract dispute over a non-issue that was quickly resolved.

Perhaps the wildest allegation comes from the Department of Health and Human Services, which said the Biden administration “persecuted” a Catholic hospital.

They cited the story of the St. Francis Health System in Oklahoma. That hospital had a chapel which contained a lit candle, but in 2023, after an inspection, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the flame violated government regulations. They said you’re not allowed to have “a lit candle with open flame burning unattended 24/7” as was the case here. They also said you can’t have an open flame within 15 feet of oxygen delivery equipment for obvious reasons, but that was a possibility here.

Right-wing groups turned that sensible concern into an attack on their faith, with one hospital executive saying, “We’re being asked to choose between serving those in need and worshiping God in the chapel, but they go hand in hand… Our work depends upon our faith in the living God, and the sanctuary candle represents this to us.”

That legal battle was eventually settled out of court, and the hospital was allowed to keep its candle.

That is not anti-Christian bias. That’s the government saying maybe it’s not wise to keep a potential fire hazard lit and unsupervised near patients who may visit the chapel with oxygen tanks.

The Department of Justice claimed the Biden-era DoJ demonstrated a “lack of concerted effort to address and prosecute violations of the law where anti-Christian bias was demonstrated by the perpetrators” but that’s now being fixed. One of their examples involves a lawsuit they filed against the city of Troy, Idaho. It alleges that Troy officials “violated [the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act] when it denied a conditional use permit (CUP) application sought by Christ Church, a small evangelical church, while granting similar use permits to nonreligious institutions.”

First of all, Christ Church is not “small.” It’s a massive church that was expanding into Troy.

But as I’ve written about before, that new church wanted to set up shop in the commercial district of the city—the part of Troy where officials hope people will visit and shop and spend money. The conditional use permit was denied because the church wasn’t a store or restaurant. Officials were also concerned about parking and traffic: If people came to the area multiple times during the week for church services, they were taking up limited parking spots that could be used by people who wanted to go to local shops and spend money. As the town’s attorney said, “The permit was not denied because they were any particular church but because the demand they put on our scarce city resources.”

I don’t know how the legal battle will end, but the city wasn’t targeting the church because it’s Christian, but because of how it would get in the way of their commercial prospects.

That is not anti-Christian bias. Yet the DoJ is pretending it is.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also chimed in about a Biden-era memo that “asserted that ‘radical-traditionalist’ Catholics were domestic-terrorism threats and suggested infiltrating Catholic churches as ‘threat mitigation.’”

I wrote earlier about how that story was bullshit, too. Basically, an internal FBI memo pointed out that a guy they were looking at as a potential terror threat hung out at a church that described itself as Catholic but wasn’t formally affiliated with the Catholic Church. He also appeared to be recruiting members for a possible attack. When a couple of FBI analysts wrote up their report on this guy, they noted the link between his extremism and his faith, though they pointed out this guy was on their radar before he ever joined that church.

Those analysts later found that there were other men on the FBI’s radar that had similar extremist ideologies and belonged to a similar church. So they noted there might be a link there worth investigating. But higher-ups in the FBI rescinded that report saying it “failed to adhere to FBI standards” because of a number of other errors in it and that the agency did not conduct investigations “based on religious affiliation.” (It should be noted that the draft report was never even made public, but it was leaked to a right-wing outlet before it could even be scrutinized.)

That is not anti-Christian bias. It was a valid documentation of a potentially dangerous phenomenon. (It wasn’t even against the Catholic Church, but rather a potentially extremist sect calling itself Catholic!) Yet the DoJ cited it as an example of the Biden administration targeting people of faith while leaving out the details that would have justified those actions.

Even the Treasury Department claims, with no elaboration, that the “IRS under the Biden Administration scrutinized several Christian-based organizations and their applications for nonprofit, tax-exempt status.” (All organizations should be scrutinized for this. Why should Christian groups be exempt from this?)

You get the idea here.

Some of the biggest examples of “anti-Christian bias” in this report aren’t systemic attacks on religion at all, but just examples of Christians behaving badly and getting punished for it. Apparently, Christians should be allowed to get away with anything they want under the Trump administration.

Yet the report concludes that “during the Biden Administration, people of faith, particularly Christians, were repeatedly subjected to anti-religious bias at the hands of their own government.”

The report, however, never backs that up, as you can see from the examples above. Other examples included in the report involve Christians who were reprimanded or fired for refusing to get vaccinated, thereby putting their colleagues in harm’s way. That’s not anti-Christian bias! That’s pro-public health!

There’s a reason this report was first given to Fox. The “task force” wanted a certain headline and they got it:

But there aren’t “numerous instances” of bias. There are just a bunch of anecdotes that fall apart the moment you look deeper into them.

What this entire idiotic charade shows is that the Biden administration wasn’t waging war on Christianity. But we now live under a regime full of powerful conservative Christians who want to weaponize victimhood to shield themselves from accountability.

All these so-called examples of “anti-Christian bias” dissolve under scrutiny, revealing instead a pattern of Christian institutions breaking the rules, endangering people, or defrauding students—and being held to the same standards as everyone else.

To call that persecution is an insult to the very concept of oppression.

This report is not evidence of discrimination; it is evidence of entitlement. These Republicans don’t give a damn about freedom of religion. All they want is freedom from consequence. They want right-wing Christians to be allowed to operate above the law, unchallenged and unaccountable.

To state the obvious, Anti-Christian bias shouldn’t be ignored, nor should bias against any other group. If it happens in a government agency, it should be punished. The problem here is the underlying theory that Christians suffer more discrimination than other religious groups, and that’s why it must be eradicated.

If these are the best examples of anti-Christian discrimination they have, they have nothing. They’re just proving what many of us have been arguing for years: Cries of anti-Christian persecution in America are not about protecting faith, but about protecting power.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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