One must wonder if the absurd recent Democrat pretense to being “Team Pope” was an attempt to distract the public from the recently issued April 14 Department of Justice (DOJ) report on “The Biden Administration’s Weaponization of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” which showed how the DOJ under Biden aggressively and often unjustly prosecuted pro-life activists even while virtually ignoring many violent attacks on pro-life clinics and people. Those violent pro-abortion activists who were prosecuted were given much lighter sentences than those pro-life activists with similar charges.
If this sleight of hand was successful, it’s not clear that Democrats will be able to pull off this distraction act twice. With the April 30 release of a second mammoth Department of Justice (DOJ) report, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government,” there is no more room to hide the ugly reality that if Democrats and the Biden administration were on anybody’s team, it wasn’t the pope’s. Indeed, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians (as well as Jews and other believers in God) who opposed the new and jealous gods of DEI and LGBTQ were treated as enemies.
The 565-page report, written to fulfill the demands of the February 6, 2025, Trump Executive Order 14202 on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” demonstrates with shameful detail how “the Biden Administration’s policies regularly clashed with a Christian worldview and burdened traditional religious practices,” particularly with regard to “abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation.” The Biden administration decided to resolve this clash not by any serious thought about religious freedom or freedom of conscience. Instead, they “penalized Christians who lived in accordance with their beliefs.”
This penalization happened in multiple federal agencies. The report discusses:
- The FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics because of “a single law enforcement target who happened to identify himself as a ‘radical traditional Catholic’” and the “baseless allegations” of the now fully discredited SPLC.
- The IRS’s investigation of and denial of tax-exempt status to churches and non-profits it deemed conservative while approving those it deemed liberal.
- The Department of Education’s levying of massive fines on Christian institutions such as Grand Canyon University for financial predation even though “Federal courts and Arizona regulators found no such issues.”
- The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) worked with the DOJ to pull back on enforcement of conscience rights for medical professionals, “withdrawing a notice of violation against the University of Vermont Medical Center after it coerced a Christian nurse into participating in an abortion despite her religious objections.”
It wasn’t just that the Biden administration’s execution of the laws was tilted against Christians and religious believers. Policy changes these agencies took—as well as many proposed policy changes and even congressional legislation—were designed to punish Christians who didn’t get on the progressive train.
Take, for example, the approach to foster children. “In 2022,” the report explains, “the Biden HHS issued guidance memoranda and a final rule, preventing foster children from being placed with Christian foster families or Christian foster agencies that, because of conflicts with their faith, insufficiently affirmed the Biden Administration’s views on sexual orientation and gender ideology.” What the report clarifies is that such rulemaking on the official level had serious effects on state-level policies, pushing some of those most ready to take care of children without parents out of the process.
The policymaking was not just aimed at individual Christians. It was aimed at faith-based organizations more broadly. The report details a “multi-agency rulemaking” that cut off many Christian organizations from “federal funds and public programs.” Essentially, “the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and Small Business Administration (SBA) limited Christians’ access to federal economic relief, disaster assistance, security grants, and food programs.”
As noted concerning healthcare, the Biden administration took multiple actions to render Christians unable to find remedies for unfair treatment. The Biden DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, for instance, “issued a brochure that excluded Christians from the list of possible victims of actionable discrimination.”
The Biden administration’s anti-Christian policy wasn’t just in domestic matters either. As AMAC Newsline has reported, President Trump’s work to protect Christians in Nigeria involved reversing Biden’s removal of that country from the Countries of Particular Concern list despite the admission of violent Christian persecution.
The zeal with which the Biden administration attempted to erase Christian beliefs and witness from public view is astonishing. Pro-life Christians at the national March for Life in 2023 were shocked when “two federally managed museums on the National Mall asked them to remove their religious and pro-life attire or leave the premises.” And Biden’s declaration of a “Transgender Day of Visibility” to be celebrated on Easter Sunday was a particularly egregious attempt to displace Christian faith in the country.
What the report makes clear is that all these federal anti-Christian actions had effects not only on state and local government action, but on private action, too. The law is a teacher. When the federal government’s policies and practice show that anti-Christian discrimination and low-level persecution is acceptable, private actors who have the same animus will go and do likewise. Attacks on Christian parents, Christians in public education, and more generally in public life proliferated under the Biden administration.
Much of the task of the Trump administration since the Biden administration’s end has been to simply reverse the bad policies enacted and keep a sharp eye out for government employees still keen to discriminate against Christians. However, as the report outlines, the enacting of and implementation of new policies to protect parents, children, churches, and charities from biased treatment and the denial of basic freedoms is an urgent task to which the Trump administration has applied itself already and will continue to do so vigorously.
The protection of conscience rights and religious freedom for both individuals and the mediating institutions that provide so much of the dynamism in American life is a key task for our government.
While the Trump administration may not style itself as “Team Pope,” its approach to Christians who acknowledge the pope’s authority and to those who don’t has been one that is far different from and far better than the leadership under the supposedly “devout” administration of Joe Biden. Biden’s frequent photo ops in churches with a Rosary draped around his fingers were charming enough. They were a poor substitute for respect for and fair treatment of Christians attempting to live out their faith with integrity.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.
