In recent campaign stops and on social media, Donald Trump has reprised lies aimed at inciting his Christian-right base against Joe Biden. These tirades, centered on the false charge that the Biden administration is persecuting Christians, aren’t just Trump’s typically dubious claims. Much like Trump’s lies about a stolen election, they are designed to immerse his loyalists in a grievance-laden alternative reality in which Trump alone can rescue them from an evil government threatening their freedom.
In a Dec. 19 speech in Iowa, for example, Trump pledged, “As soon as I get back in the Oval Office, I’ll also immediately end the war on Christians. I don’t know if you feel it. You have a war. There’s a war.” Speaking just after the Colorado Supreme Court disqualified him from appearing on the state’s GOP primary ballot, Trump tied this “war” to his own legal woes. “Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before. And also presidents like never before,” he added. “I always say Al Capone was treated better than I was treated.”
Trump has promoted the theme of Christian persecution in the past, but is elevating it again as these legal issues mount. His clear purpose is to deflect attention from his own criminal liabilities by insinuating that the same Biden administration he falsely claims is unfairly targeting him for prosecution is similarly persecuting religious Americans.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s ardent supporters see his and their “wars” as tied together. When he was indicted in a Manhattan court on charges that he illegally covered up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, his backers compared this supposed persecution to that of Jesus Christ. In a Truth Social video two days after his Iowa speech, Trump made this persecution pact complete. He contended that under Biden, “Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before.” Trump has also echoed wild and debunked claims from congressional Republicans about anti-Catholic bias by the Biden administration and the FBI in particular.
Ramping up his authoritarian rhetoric, Trump pledged in the Iowa speech to institutionalize an authoritarian crackdown of the same sort he falsely accuses the Biden administration of implementing. “Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice that’s fair and equitable,” he promised. “Its mission will be to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America.”
In another speech, in Reno, Nevada, he pledged to go after colleges and universities for running afoul of his “religious freedom” edicts. “If colleges and universities discriminate against conservatives, Christians, Jews, anybody,” he said, “we are going to take away their tax advantages, grants and endowment.”
Lies about the persecution of Christians are very familiar to Trump’s base. During Barack Obama’s presidency, the Christian right and its GOP allies in Congress accused his administration of targeting Catholics with policies promoting access to birth control. After the Obama administration issued a regulation under the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-sponsored health care plans to cover contraception, Christian-right lawyers successfully took the administration to court, arguing that these requirements violated the religious rights of evangelical and Catholic companies and organizations run by religious opponents of abortion and birth control. When the Supreme Court enshrined marriage equality as the law of the land in 2015, Christian-right activists ginned up fears of widespread persecution of Christians, including raising the specter of an Internal Revenue Service that would strip the tax exemptions of nonprofits, including universities, that oppose LGBTQ rights. Needless to say, that never happened.
When Trump took office in 2017, he immediately moved to feed the Christian right’s persecution complex. A draft executive order circulated in the early days of his presidency proposed sweeping expansions of religious exemptions for right-wing Christians that would have legalized discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, pregnancy status and abortion history in a staggering variety of contexts. Although Trump scrapped the executive order after an outcry, he signed a different order requiring then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to craft a policy protecting the religious and conscience rights of Christians, binding the Justice Department and all other federal agencies. The ACLU denounced Sessions’ subsequent memo as “a dangerously broad interpretation of religious freedom laws that will open the door to discrimination against LGBT people, women, and religious minorities.”
Although the Christian right has fearmongered that a Democratic administration would strip educational institutions of tax exemptions for anti-LGBTQ stances, they are welcoming Trump’s task force idea. “It would be good for a federal task force to investigate these concerns in a systematic way and ensure that religious freedom is being protected for all Americans,” said Arielle Del Turco of the Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty.
One needs to look no further than Trump’s efforts during his first term, combined with his 2024 pledges to govern like a dictator, to see the authoritarian steps he is taking when it comes to “protecting” his base’s religious freedom. He is leaving little doubt that he will do whatever it takes to retain the loyalty of the base that has stood by him through an insurrection, two impeachments and now multiple criminal indictments. He is saying loudly and clearly that as part of his broader disparagement of the rule of law, he would shred everyone else’s rights in the name of his loyalists’ “freedom.”