The Trump Administration’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias released a report April 30th claiming that Christians faced discrimination in federal agencies and public institutions during the Biden administration. (Find the link here.)
The report focuses on complaints about religious colleges, abortion protests, vaccine mandates, military policies, and debates over gender identity in schools and workplaces. It tries to argue that government actions sometimes infringed on religious liberty and portrays conservative Christians as targets of ideological hostility.
In reality, the report mostly relies on anecdotal evidence and coincidences to conclude that members of the religion that includes almost two-thirds of the American population, 87 percent of members of Congress, and 100 percent of the Supreme Court are victims of bias and persecution.
The report begins with 14 “Key Findings” which mostly should have been called “Key Isolated Incidents.”
Key Finding 1: The Biden administration “weaponized” the 30-year-old FACE Act, which prohibits people from blocking access to abortion clinics. In one example, some people who happened to be Christian and happened to be praying but definitely were blocking access to an abortion clinic were arrested for doing that. The Task Force’s complaint was overzealous prosecution compared to other types of protesters at other types of locations. Currently the Justice Department has stopped FACE Act prosecutions against anti-abortion protesters but not pro-abortion protesters.
Key Finding 4: “The Biden Department of Education focused its enforcement actions against Christian universities…”. The Biden administration fined Grand Canyon University, a mostly online Christian university, for providing inaccurate information on total costs for prospective students. Which they did. The report compares the size of the fine to fines for totally different offences at other universities and says it was too big. Not to worry, the Trump Education Department dropped the whole fine last year and said there was never any problem at Grand Canyon. There was also a fine for Liberty University for not doing what it was supposed to in reporting crime and sexual assault statistics. So, two examples.
Key Finding 10: “The Biden Administration sidelined Christians in favor of their preferred constituencies.” Since 2009, International Transgender Day of Visibility (ITDV) has been observed on March 31. Since the year 325 AD the date for Easter has been set according to when the moon is full in April or something like that (see proceedings of the Council of Nicaea from that year.) so the date for Easter moves around. In 2024, both ITDV and Easter COINCIDENTALLY happened on the same day. Biden wished the Christians a happy Easter, went to church as he did more regularly than most recent presidents, and issued a proclamation supporting International Transgender Day of Visibility.
