Having purged and ostracized its dissenting members, President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission held its final hearing on Monday amid a storm of faith-based controversies.
After a weekend in which the president launched a puerile political attack on Pope Leo XIV and later posted an image in which he appeared as Jesus, the commission’s final session amounted to little more than idolization of Trump and rambling complaints about the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state.
To give you a sense of the tone, the commission’s chairman, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, went on a rant calling the separation of church and state “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.” Each speaker after him parroted a similar line, framing liberals as some kind of threat to free religious expression. Among the speakers was far-right evangelical influencer Eric Metaxas, who said faiths are “not all equal.” Metaxas has played a role in planning religious-based celebrations that the Trump administration is coordinating around the United States’ 250th anniversary.
The final meeting made no reference to the brazen Nazi sympathizing, antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Hindu bigotry that is metastasizing throughout the MAGA movement. There were no rebukes of the president in response to Christian church leaders who have said that fear of Trump’s immigration raids have deterred some parishioners from attending services. There was no reference to the arrests and assaults on faith leaders who were protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions over the past year.
And no one — neither the Catholic nor the evangelical members of the commission — said a mumbling word about Trump’s social media post on Sunday depicting himself as Jesus (Trump dared the public to believe that he “thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross”). Prior to its deletion Monday, the image garnered accusations of “blasphemy” from some of the president’s supporters in conservative religious communities and drew public calls from some others for the commission’s Catholic members to address it. But those members let it pass.








