The State vs. The Pew

Paul Vaughn was arrested at gunpoint, in front of his wife and children, for the federal crime of having prayed and sung hymns outside an abortion facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. The Biden Justice Department prosecuted him, secured a conviction, and asked for a year in prison. President Trump pardoned him in January 2025, along with 22 other pro-life advocates Biden’s Department of Justice had prosecuted under the same statute.

Or take the case in Virginia. On January 23, 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Richmond Field Office produced an internal intelligence assessment titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” This mouthful of document, embossed with an anodyne title referred to as “the Richmond memo,” ruined people’s lives.

Senator Chuck Grassley’s oversight has since established that the memorandum was distributed to over 1,000 FBI employees nationwide. The memo defined “radical traditionalist Catholics” using a hate-group taxonomy supplied by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization a federal grand jury has now indicted on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Bureau interviewed a parish priest. It interviewed a choir director. It proposed cultivating sources inside Catholic churches as a form of “threat mitigation.” Congressional investigators found at least 13 additional FBI documents that used the same SPLC-derived framework to spy on church-going Americans.

These stories are just a few examples from the 200-page report, recently released by the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias under the chairmanship of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. This powerful analysis documents what the federal government did to American Christians during the previous administration. (President Trump’s memo establishing the task force is also worth reading.) The Justice Department supports its findings, drawn from 17 federal agencies, with more than 1,100 footnotes and 300 pages of exhibits.

What was discovered is as unsurprising at it it depressing. The Biden Administration generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held, but pursued aggressive action to limit Christians’ ability to act in public accordance with their faith. That distinction, formalized into federal policy across nearly every cabinet department, is what the Trump report calls anti-Christian bias.

Inquisitions

To understand how we got here, begin with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 (FACE). The Biden Justice Department interpreted this statute to charge more than 45 pro-life defendants in over 20 cases, roughly a quarter of all FACE Act prosecutions in the law’s three-decade history. The average sentence requested by Biden prosecutors was 26.8 months for pro-life defendants and 12.3 months for pro-choice defendants. In every one of the six pardoned cases the Department’s Weaponization Working Group examined, the DOJ learned of the underlying conduct from abortion-industry NGOs rather than from local law enforcement or alleged victims. Internal records show prosecutors privately mocking pro-life Christians as “culty” and searching for indirect ways to elicit jurors’ religious affiliations. While more than 100 churches and crisis pregnancy centers were attacked in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), almost none of those cases produced a federal prosecution.

The Biden Administration was clever in their approach. They applied a federal civil-rights statute against the religious side of the abortion debate while declining to apply the same statute to protect that side.

One wonders why it took Republicans this long to fight back.

It is important to understand how Christian persecution for formalized and weaponized. It was not incidental, it was carefully planned. A (now) discredited advocacy organization (think SPLC) supplied the taxonomy. A federal law enforcement agency adopted the taxonomy and operationalized it. Field offices coordinate the surveillance. Headquarters expanded the product for external dissemination. If it were not for a FBI whistleblower, Kyle Seraphin, Americans would know little of this.

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice also deserves special consideration. Under the Biden Administration, the division published guidance suggesting that Christians could not be victims of religious discrimination, only members of other faith traditions. It also adopted an aggressive reading of Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that mandated gender ideology across federal agencies far beyond what the Supreme Court had actually held, and that treated requests for religious exemption as harmful conduct to be regulated. Federal courts repeatedly rejected the interpretation. The administration kept pressing it in amicus briefs anyway. On the morning after the 2021 inauguration, career employees at the Department of Justice circulated demands that a Trump-era memorandum directing the Department to “respect its employees’ right to express traditional views” on marriage and gender be rescinded as “an affront to the dignity of our transgender employees.” The administration rescinded it.

Of course, the practical effects land on people outside of DC. The Department of Agriculture tied the same Bostock interpretation to the National School Lunch Program, leaving Christian schools and ministries with what the report describes as a coercive choice: abandon the Bible’s teachings on sex and marriage, or stop feeding hungry children using a public program their tax dollars finance.

The Department of Education also levied disproportionate fines on Christian universities, including Grand Canyon University and Liberty University. The Department of Health and Human Services withdrew an earlier notice of violation against the University of Vermont Medical Center, where, in the report’s account, the hospital had coerced a Christian nurse into assisting an elective abortion despite her religious objections, and the Justice Department dismissed the federal lawsuit that followed. The Justice Department itself advised White House leadership in a recorded phone call that federal employees’ religious objections to the Covid vaccines were “insincere” or “not religious.” The Garland School Board Memo, since rescinded, treated parents who objected at school board meetings to gender ideology and graphic library content as a federal law-enforcement matter.

The Biden Administration’s program rested on a long-standing liberal worldview: orthodox Christian commitments concerning life, sex, marriage, and human nature are not merely wrong but socially harmful, and the federal government therefore has both the authority and the obligation to suppress them.

Founding Father James Madison understood religious liberty in the opposite way. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, not its quiet possession. The French philosopher Tocqueville, in his great book Democracy in America, identified American Christianity as our indispensable civic glue precisely because Americans carried its useful tenets into their schools, their associations, their charities, and their politics. The Biden Administration’s working theory ran the opposite direction. Faith was tolerable until it acted.

He Returns

The current Trump Justice Department has begun the work of unwinding the apparatus. It rescinded the Garland Memo. It reversed the Biden interpretation of Bostock. The Office of Legal Counsel has issued a fresh opinion affirming religious-liberty protections for federal employees. The Civil Rights Division has filed statements of interest in support of religious congregations under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000. It has restored the FACE Act to its original purpose, protecting houses of worship as well as clinics. Praise be.

But 200 pages and 1,100 footnotes raise a question that runs deeper than the corrective work now underway: how the program became possible in the first place, and how it ran unopposed for so long. The answer involves the personnel of the federal civil service, the ideological assumptions of the law schools that supply it, the advocacy infrastructure that feeds it taxonomies and target lists, and the absence, until very recently, of any institutional counterweight inside the executive branch willing to call the program by its name. This is worth a much deeper investigation.

The Founders structured the Constitution to make religious persecution by the state difficult. But it was not impossible. The report released today proves that the machinery of the federal government can, under the right conditions, be turned against the religious convictions of tens of millions of citizens, and that the men and women who turn it have ways of believing, sincerely, that they are doing the work of justice. That is the warning the report contains, beneath the litany of cases and the careful prosecutorial restraint of its prose.

The next administration that wishes to do what the Biden Administration did will know exactly which levers to pull. Stopping it will take more than a change of party. It will take a country that remembers what the First Amendment was for.