Vile-Drawing Bias, or Much Ado about Nothing?

On September 5, the Trump administration released its “Initial Report by the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” completed three months ago. The actual title of the 48-page document is “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government,” and was mandated by President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14202 tasking the Attorney General with ensuring that “any unlawful and improper conduct, policies or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified.”

The author of the report, presumably a Justice Department official, notes that it is “not the end of the inquiry,” but that a “detailed report with findings and recommendations” will be done by February 2026. Let’s hope that comes to pass, for “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” is more of an overview, based on mostly anecdotal information, than an empirical report.

However, even its cursory intelligence should be alarming not just to Christians (especially conservative ones, across all denominations) but to any Americans who take seriously our founding documents on the topic of religious freedom — and who fear that a future (Democrat) administration might return to weaponizing the federal government against disfavored groups.

Overall Findings

The Task Force first met in April with most of the major Cabinet Secretaries — notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, or their senior representatives — present. This is promising, as it shows that Trump administration officials took the president seriously on the matter. They then reported “initial findings” from their departments or agencies to the Attorney General. The outline of the biases encountered included the facts that:

• The State Department “provided limited humanitarian relief to Christians relative to other populations and offered muted responses to attacks on Christians compared to other groups.” It also “imposed radical LGBTQ gender ideology on foreign governments and State employees, including the forced usage of preferred pronouns and rainbow flags.” Also, internally, State favored non-Christian employees over Christian ones and “harassed families that chose to homeschool their children” via Inspector General scrutiny, IRS referrals, etc.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development made or tolerated social media posts about Pride Month, Ramadan, and Diwali, but removed ones about Palm Sunday, Good Friday, or Easter.
• The Justice Department “arrested and convicted approximately two dozen individuals under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for praying and demonstrating outside abortion facilities” yet “refused to apply the FACE Act to protect places of worship and crisis pregnancy centers.”
• And the departments of Defense and Labor “deprioritized, mishandled, or denied requests for religious exemptions to the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”

More Specific Examples

More specific examples of Biden administration discrimination against Christians are provided throughout the report. I’ll only list the most egregious here:

• During Holy Week 2023, the DoD axed pastoral care by Franciscan priests at Walter Reed Hospital, awarding the contract instead to “a secular for-profit entity.”
• The Education Department violated the religious rights of students and parents in K-12 public schools by ignoring their objections to radical “transgender” ideology.
• Likewise, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission went after federal employees and private contractors for “harassment” if they refused to allow “transgender” males to use female bathrooms.
• In bias by neglect, the Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission entertained almost no Christian religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, allowing only four lawsuits out of over 15,000 filed to move forward.
• Health and Human Services directed state child welfare agencies to support and promote “sex-reassignment” surgeries, disregarding any Christian individuals’ or groups’ objections.
• Customs and Border Protection allowed religious accommodations for Sikhs, Muslims, Jews and even Rastafarians — but not Christians.
• The FBI targeted traditionalist Catholics as possible “extremist” threats and, although that program was terminated during the Biden term, the current DoJ promises to monitor the FBI for any hint of such activity in the future.
• The Small Business Administration “banned religious organizations from receiving Economic Injury Disaster Loans,” affecting nearly 170 religious organizations, including many Christian ones.

Good, But Not Empirical Enough

As I said earlier, this report, while damning, is almost entirely anecdotal. The only quantitative data is that about the COVID-19 vaccine rejection lawsuits (noted above) and a “voluntary survey” asking Department of State employees if they’d encountered anti-religious bias, which showed 64% answering in the affirmative.

However, some other allegations are rather vague: “anti-religious hostile work environment” or “bias affecting foreign policy” are not exactly solid data. Furthermore, some of the bigotry against members of this country’s (and the world’s) largest faith is based on assumptions. For example, the well-known story of Biden administration Federal Emergency Management Agency employees being told to bypass hurricane-devastated homes in Florida is equated to anti-Christian bias on the logic that the vast majority of people in the southeastern US are Christians. But it’s just as likely Deep State workers simply dislike conservatives, especially Trump-aligned ones.

Also, at times, the report goes outside the bounds of its stated goal, which is federal government bias against Christians — as when it decries a Washington state law that would force Catholic priests to break the sacred seal of confession if the confessor admits to “child abuse or neglect.” It’s good that Trump’s DOJ filed suit challenging this (and keep in mind that Orthodox priests and some liturgical Protestant pastors, such as confessional Lutherans, also use private confession), but this matter doesn’t really fall under the stated aegis of this report. Ditto for a narrative in this document about private companies and individuals who have sued the government, alleging discrimination against them as Christians. This comes across as padding, rather than relevant information.

Finally, the sourcing in much of this report is shoddy or nonexistent. If you’re going to allege that “the Department of State … limited humanitarian relief to Christians,” or that “many pro-Christian groups have been debanked by financial institutions in recent years,” provide specific examples — and sources. But there is neither in this report. Perhaps the full report in February 2026 will rectify these flaws.

However, I have no doubt, as this report says on page 43, that under the Biden administration, “on a broad level, there is indicia of a culture unfriendly to religion generally and to Christianity in particular.”

Why? The major reason is that the Democrat Party is dominated by non-Christians, whom the party elites have to placate. Per Pew, in general, most Christians identify as Republicans, but most atheists/agnostics, Jews, and Muslims are Democrats. The Biden administration, whose titular head was asleep (at best) at the wheel, was actually driven by staffers dedicated to the religion of “Progressivism,” which views conservative Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox as the enemy. In fact, the Democrat Party has been trending in this direction since former President Barack Obama’s disparaging of conservative Christians as xenophobic, “bitter” churls who “cling to guns or religion.”

Since then we’ve witnessed Senator Bernie Sanders attack a Trump administration official for daring to state that Jesus, not Muhammad, is the way to salvation. Senator Dianne Feinstein savaged then-Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett for her Catholic faith. And, earlier this year, Senator Elizabeth Warren ridiculed Hegseth for his Jerusalem cross tattoo. And those are only the most obvious, public examples.

What this report revealed that was new, and most disturbing, about the Biden administration was just how openly they discriminated against Christians and used the mechanisms of the federal government to do so. That much is clear to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see.

Timothy Furnish has a PhD from Ohio State in Islamic, World & African history. He’s been an Arabic interrogator in the 101st Airborne, a US Special Operations Command analyst, an author and professor. Furnish is the military/security affairs writer for The Stream.