In early September, Fox News published a report from the Justice Department’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias focused on allegations of such bias “within the federal government.” Within two hours, the State Department promoted Fox’s story on official social media, adding, “Our nation was founded on the recognition that moral virtue and steadfast faith in God are necessary preconditions of freedom,” and vowing to “eradicate practices that devalue and demean the Christian faith.” Alleged State Department transgressions featured prominently in the report, in keeping with Marco Rubio’s role presenting discrimination against Christian employees during the task force’s initial meeting in April. The following Monday, President Donald Trump gathered his Religious Liberty Commission at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The event announced an “America Prays” initiative, with Trump pledging to “bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”
Some religious freedom advocates have praised these developments at the departments of State, Justice, and other executive branch agencies as aggressive protections of constitutional liberties under threat. Other voices have expressed alarm over what they view as attempts to instrumentalize religion, define Christianity, or grow the power of Christian nationalists through “creeping theocracy.”
Here we take a different tack, setting out to make sense of several important developments to religion in American institutions, particularly Rubio’s State Department, when comparing the first and second Trump administrations. Trump I’s posture of relative bureaucratic neglect has developed into a more aggressive stance that draws religion into confrontation with the bureaucratic “deep state” while also promoting the ambiguous performance of “bringing religion back” in the face of secular excesses. There are early signs that this is implicating the current administration more deeply in the inner workings of religion in the bureaucracy, including turning the levers of state power against even religious voices deemed insufficiently devoted to the administration’s tenets.
Trump’s 2016 victory certainly brought instability to the State Department. Yet, ultimately, his first term mostly featured neglect of the bureaucracy in favor of foreign policy via personal ties. This is in marked contrast to the wholesale institutional degradation of 2025.
We observed this period firsthand, as academic fellows in the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs (RGA). John Kerry, then secretary of state, launched RGA in 2013 under the leadership of Shaun Casey, on essentially pragmatic grounds. As Kerry remarked at RGA’s launch, “We ignore the global impact of religion, in my judgment, at our peril.” Internally, RGA built the capacity of American diplomats to, in the words of former RGA staffer Peter Mandaville and Sara Silvestri, “integrate religious engagement into diplomacy.” RGA was intentionally distinct from the Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF), which worked to monitor and advance a core U.S. human rights commitment, as well as work on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which focused narrowly on ideological origins of security threats.
Externally, RGA was a hub for connection between religious leaders and diplomats. RGA’s work ranged widely, depending on local diplomatic priorities and religious opportunities. For instance, when Nigeria’s 2015 election brought President Muhammadu Buhari to power on an anti-corruption platform, RGA developed a multistage process with department colleagues to integrate religion into anti-corruption diplomacy by assessing potential religious dynamics in anticorruption work, building relationships with potential partners, and, eventually, encouraging partnerships between religious leaders and like-minded partners in civil society.
The first Trump administration’s relationship to our office, and to much of the bureaucracy, was distant and disinterested. No mass termination notices came by email. No one announced RGA’s closure. Instead, by late summer 2017, RGA had fewer than a half dozen full-time staff, down from a peak of roughly thirty, as staff departing through standard bureaucratic job rotation simply were not replaced. The congressionally-mandated office of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism sat unfilled for well over a year.
This neglect was paired with a premium on personal access to the White House. As Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then White House press secretary, said at a press briefing, “I don’t think an office is what determines the faith of the administration …. I think we probably have, actually, more people, front and center, speaking openly about their faith.” Trump loyalists boasted of opening State Department meetings in prayer. Splashy “ministerial” meetings on religious freedom became personal priorities of Mike Pompeo, Trump’s second secretary of state, but took place at a distance from the department’s bureau tasked with advancing human rights.
When our fellowship terms in RGA ended in mid-2017, capacity had certainly been lost through seemingly intentional neglect. At the same time, a zombie-like form of RGA outlived our term in government. And a significant amount of workaday diplomacy carried on at a distance from the personal whims of the White House.
Upon returning to office last January, the Trump Administration quickly operated with a distinct approach to the foreign policy bureaucracy, including elements related to religion. As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gutted USAID, religion’s updated role emerged. First, this administration would use religion as a key rationale in internal confrontations with its own bureaucracy. To this end, on February 6, Trump issued Executive Order 14202, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” which created Pam Bondi’s Task Force of the same name. Second, appointees would bring religion back, leveraging state power as part of ambiguous religious performance against alleged secular liberal excesses. Executive Order 14205, “Establishment of a White House Faith Office,” issued the next day, pursued this end.
Trump’s February 6 executive order on anti–Christian bias was an early indicator that his second term would draw religion into confrontation with the so-called “deep state,” rather than return to the first term’s disinterested neglect. While DOGE railed against alleged wasteful government spending, the anti-Christian bias executive order leveled an additional charge at the bureaucracy: discriminating against faithful Americans. The text centers not on promoting religious freedom abroad, but rather on the Biden Administration’s alleged “anti-Christian weaponization of the government.” It directs officials, including those involved in the foreign policy process, to police their own agencies, monitoring “any unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct,” and recommending “action necessary to rectify past improper anti-Christian conduct.”
By the time Bondi’s task force first met, USAID had effectively ceased to exist, but State Department leadership dutifully complied with its directives. In a cable to all department posts, Rubio reportedly directed employees to use “anonymous employee report forms” to document “examples of anti-religious bias . . . where the Department targeted anyone for their religion.” While perhaps noteworthy that Rubio’s cable mentioned all anti-religious bias, regardless of religious affiliation, the hypothetical examples it provided left little doubt about its focus on conservative Christians. It reportedly mentioned potential retaliation against those seeking religious accommodation “from taking mandatory vaccines,” resistance to “policies or practices related to preferred personal pronouns,” and “mistreatment for opposing displays of flags … due to religious objections.”
When Bondi’s task force first met in April, Rubio’s contribution stood out. Jenny Korn, White House faith office deputy director, marveled that “in just seven days” Rubio had found “150+ instances” of anti-Christian bias at the department. Rubio briefed the task force on alleged hostility “against Christian Foreign Service Officers who preferred to homeschool their children” and complained that “Christian holidays … were frequently stripped of any religious overtones,” while “non-Christian holidays” were not. While some of these charges involve reasonable protections of religious liberty, they quickly morphed into a rationale for the administration’s wholesale assault on the bureaucracy. As Bondi remarked in mid-June, “The federal government became complicit in sheltering these threats, becoming the greatest threat itself.”
Trump’s February 6 executive order on anti-Christian bias was an early indicator that his second term would draw religion into confrontation with the so-called “deep state,” rather than return to the first term’s disinterested neglect.
The fusion of Christianity with anti-institutionalism was at the center of dismantling U.S. foreign assistance. Congressional foreign assistance critics like Brian Mast (R-FL) justified their support for wholesale cuts by pointing to LGBTQ-oriented programming offensive to conservative Christian sensibilities, like an alleged “transgender opera in Colombia.” Vice President JD Vance advanced similar framing at the February 2025 International Religious Freedom Summit when he slammed foreign assistance for becoming “corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity,” particularly in “sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe.” Pete Marocco, who slashed aid as the Trump-appointed director of the Office of Foreign Assistance, welcomed Hungary’s State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians to “contribute to the United States’ review of its development policy.”
Such faith-based anti-institutionalism was destructive to not only the government’s bureaucratic capacity, but also its established foreign policy engagements with religious actors and organizations. Catholic Relief Services and World Vision, both Christian development organizations, are among USAID’s largest non-governmental partners, with U.S. funding accounting for roughly half of CRS’s $1.2 billion 2023 annual budget. The administration’s decision to halt refugee resettlement, notwithstanding exceptions for white Afrikaners, has prompted layoffs at a spectrum of faith-based refugee resettlement agencies, and has moved the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to end its governmental partnership in refugee support entirely.
The faith office deputy director marveled that “in just seven days” Rubio had found “150+ instances” of anti-Christian bias at the department.
In addition to this essentially negative process of bureaucratic destruction, an inchoate, positive project has emerged, captured under Trump’s frequent promise to use the state to “bring religion back.” While at times explicitly tied to Christian referents, in other moments it presents itself more broadly. The non-negotiable core, however, seems defined less by theology than by loyalty, not to any gospel, but rather to the person of President Trump and his “America First” project. This emergent “orthodoxy” is clearer on its opponents: not only secular liberals, but also religious Americans who dissent from the tenets of Trumpism.
President Trump’s rebranding of the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as a “Faith Office” and his establishment of a Religious Liberty Commission is consistent with this change, pivoting from pragmatic social service cooperation to the direct promotion of religion as such. As Bondi remarked on June 16, at the first meeting of the White’s House’s Religious Liberty Commission, “Together we will return America to the vision of our founders, a nation where faith merely isn’t tolerated but it’s embraced and celebrated.”
This framing has trickled into the foreign policy bureaucracy, both among senior officials and lower-level appointees. The approach often appears ad hoc and symbolic, manifested as religious performance rather than systematized policy or comprehensive ideology. Rubio’s official Twitter/X account as secretary of state has taken on a confessional accent, with Gospel quotes on Good Friday and a video voiceover marveling at the enduring power of the papacy. Moving down the org chart, Lew Olowski, Trump’s appointee to the State Department’s Bureau of Global Talent Management, performed this role in remarks at a swearing-in ceremony on April 24. He noted that, in the oath government officers make to the Constitution upon taking their positions, “the phrase ‘so help me God’ is optional,” because of the Constitution’s prohibition of a religious test (Article VI, Section 3). “Freedom of religion and nonreligion permeates even our first step into this career.”
Yet Olowski went on to present a deeply religious conception of the oath government officials take, replete with a quotation from the Gospel According to John: “To an Officer of the United States, the Constitution is our Commandment, its Words are like the Word of God, and the words of the oath are our creation and our beginning: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’”
In a similar vein, an essay on the State Department’s Substack newsletter, by a young appointee in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), advocates a renewed Atlantic alliance “forged in common culture, faith . . . and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.” This tradition “echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights,” a formulation that elides the importance of John Locke and liberalism in favor of medieval scholasticism and virtue ethics. Still, aside from vague invocations of “spiritual and cultural roots,” the positive content of this “civilizational heritage” remains slippery.
Such remarks are clearer about what makes one a heretic from the new orthodoxy. Olowski highlights one non-negotiable: “[President Trump] is the living avatar of the executive power of the United States . . . the executive power is vested in nobody else.” The Substack essay reiterates arguments made by JD Vance in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February: “global liberalism,” rather than an integral part of the Western tradition, represents its betrayal. “The global liberal project,” we are told, “is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it.” That such musings received the imprimatur of the State Department is noteworthy.
In identifying purported regime “heretics,” the mask slips from claims to generically value religion as such in American society. In his earliest hours in office, Trump referred to Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde as a “so-called Bishop” on TruthSocial after her remarks in an inauguration day prayer service. JD Vance questioned the theological motives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, telling CBS News that they were “actually worried about their bottom line” when they criticized Trump immigration policy. Not only are religious voices who dissent from this orthodoxy subject to rhetorical attack, but Trump’s administration has also shown a willingness to deploy the power of the state against them. His Department of Homeland Security has removed existing protections for houses of worship from immigration enforcement actions. Allies in the House of Representatives have boasted of investigations into religious NGOs engaged in immigrant support. Groups of Jewish scholars have filed briefs in federal court arguing that administration actions in the name of combating antisemitism in fact violate federal law in “assum[ing] all Jewish people share identical views about Israel and Zionism.”
Elements of this flexible theism percolated during Trump’s first term, for instance in Mike Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. What stands out in the second Trump administration is both its more consistent public performance, and indications of drawing mainstream bureaucratic channels into its implementation. As Pam Bondi promised before the Religious Liberty Commission, executive agencies “will use every legal and constitutional tool available to ensure Americans can live out their faith freely without fear.”
At the State Department, this has shown through in the department’s in-progress “reorganization,” a vast process of shuttering offices, reassigning staffers, and organizing new structures. Reorg plans will reshape the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to become “focused on advancing the Administration’s affirmative vision of American and Western values.” The bureau will in large part be organized under a new Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy & Western Values, and feature an Office of Natural Rights that “will ground the Department’s values-based diplomacy in traditional western conceptions.” Interestingly, the revised bureau org chart embeds the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom (IRF) within the human rights bureau, which prominent IRF advocates have noted represents a curious “demotion” from its earlier status and a potential return to “bureaucratic isolation.”
At the beginning of the Biden Administration, after four years of relative neglect, the foreign policy bureaucracy still possessed institutional raw material, in the form of offices on organization charts and personnel with expertise, that could be revitalized in future administrations. This was something that E.J. Dionne and Melissa Rogers mapped out in their important 2020 report “A Time to Heal, A Time to Build.” Work on religion and development assistance advanced at USAID during the Biden Administration, although RGA’s relaunch did not take place.
It seems clear that legacies of this Trump term on the bureaucracy will be more powerful. In the short term, preserving institutional knowledge outside of the official bureaucracy takes on real urgency. In the longer term, there will be opportunities to rebuild bureaucratic capacity damaged by the self-defeating decisions of the past six months. Early proposals have focused especially on the umbrella concept of “strategic religious engagement”(SRE), which maintained some momentum during the first Trump administration and was central to the work of Biden Administration officials at USAID. The new Strategic Religious Engagement Hub at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs makes an early contribution to this work.
“SRE,” however, is itself a term that requires careful bureaucratization. At USAID, it largely referred to technocratic improvements in government partnerships with faith-based organizations in providing foreign assistance. At the State Department, in contrast, it was used to refer to the remnants of the RGA office, focused on assessment and diplomatic engagement, not assistance partnerships. Launching a revitalized SRE office within the reorganized State Department could be a logical next step in repairing recent damage. However, this office must have two distinct sets of staff expertise: diplomatic assessment and engagement, in keeping with RGA’s model, and development assistance, carrying forward the faith-based work lost at USAID.
The now-shuttered RGA office’s approach to assessing religion’s impact on foreign policy gives one sense of how this refounding may take place. That office regularly argued that engaging religion in diplomacy required highlighting diversity even within religious blocs that appear unified. While some Christian elites sat on stage for Trump’s September 8 event at the Museum of the Bible, diverse religious leaders and institutions have expressed strong concern about reducing the United States’ diplomatic capacity, development assistance, and refugee resettlement. Engaging these religious defenders of diplomatic capacity may represent an opportunity for religion to stabilize, and even revitalize, damaged American state institutions after a period of turmoil.