The Trump administration’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias spent a year building a 565-page case for the Biden Administration’s federal persecution of Christians. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the report on April 30, 2026.
What this report tracks:
- Fines on two evangelical universities equated with Larry Nassar’s sexual assaults on hundreds of girls and Jerry Sandusky’s rape of children. The report’s Finding 4 argues that the Education Department’s fines against Liberty University, for hiding campus sexual assault, and Grand Canyon University, for misleading working-class students about tuition, “dwarfed the penalties” for the sexual assaults committed by Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky.
- Enforcement of the law, recast as bias. FACE Act prosecutions of demonstrators who blocked clinic entrances (Finding 1), IRS enforcement of the Johnson Amendment against electioneering churches (Finding 3), and Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students (Finding 7) each appear among the report’s 14 findings of anti-Christian discrimination.
- An Easter that landed on a calendar date. Transgender Day of Visibility has been held on March 31 since 2009; in 2024, Easter Sunday fell on the same date. Finding 10 attacks the Biden administration for issuing the 2024 proclamation on Good Friday and titles the section “Replacing Easter with the ‘Transgender Day of Visibility.’”
Executive Order 14202, which Trump signed on February 6, 2025, established the Task Force inside the Justice Department and gave it one job: identify any Biden-era policy that “evinced discriminatory treatment of Christians.” The conclusion was the assignment.
Of the 14 findings the Task Force eventually returned, 13 describe federal agencies enforcing laws already on the books. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act prosecuted demonstrators who physically blocked abortion clinic entrances. The Johnson Amendment, on the books since 1954, policed tax-exempt churches that endorsed candidates from the pulpit. Title IX protected LGBTQ+ students from school discipline aimed at them; the Clery Act, which requires colleges to disclose campus crime data, fined a university that hid years of sexual assaults from federal regulators. The 14th finding, drawn from a single Army Reserve JAG officer’s account of his unit’s handling of religious-accommodation requests during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, contains a real Title VII grievance. The other 13 are complaints that the law was applied as it was intended.
On April 22, 2025, the Task Force took its first testimony at the Justice Department. Three Christians described what the federal government had done to them. All three cases had been resolved before the hearing.
Pam Bondi, then the Attorney General and Task Force chair, opened the meeting and told reporters that the Biden administration had “engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses,” and that vandalism against churches in 2023 had run eight times higher than in 2018, before dismissing the press. The Task Force chair delivered her verdict that morning, before a single witness had spoken. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche stayed for the closed session.
Michael Farris, founding president of Patrick Henry College and former head of Alliance Defending Freedom, testified about an IRS investigation into Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia, where he serves as elder. The church’s senior pastor, Gary Hamrick, had preached a sermon to his congregation before the 2020 election declaring that no Christian could “in good conscience” vote for “an agenda that is evil,” and the IRS opened a Johnson Amendment enforcement against the church, which ultimately paid a tax penalty. Farris served as the church’s counsel. Scott Hicks, provost of Liberty University, appeared at the hearing with his institution under a record $14 million federal fine assessed by the Department of Education. The department’s 108-page report documented “serious, persistent, and systemic” Clery Act violations from 2016 to 2023, among them a campus culture that discouraged sexual-assault victims from coming forward and an honor code, the “Liberty Way,” that punished women who reported by citing them for premarital sex while their assailants went unpunished. Liberty erased evidence during the investigation.
Former Navy SEAL Phil Mendes described being relieved of duty for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. Mendes was one of 35 named plaintiffs in U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 v. Biden, brought by First Liberty Institute. A federal judge in January 2022 called the Navy’s religious-accommodation process “theater,” finding the service had not granted a religious exemption to any vaccine in recent memory. The case grew into a class action of more than 4,000 sailors, and the Navy settled in July 2024, expunging service records and paying $1.5 million in attorneys’ fees. Trump signed Executive Order 14184 on January 27, 2025, ordering the Pentagon to reinstate every service member discharged for vaccine refusal with full back pay. Mendes testified to the Task Force on April 22.
The Task Force kept working after the hearing. Justice Department staff contacted roughly 120 advocacy groups, law firms, and faith organizations and conducted around 60 stakeholder meetings.
The argument sits in Chapter 2 of the report. The Task Force writes that for Christians, “the ability to live according to God’s designs for humanity and teachings in all areas of life implicates salvation and ongoing obedience to God.” A footnote attached to that line approvingly quotes the evangelical authors Jen Wilkin and J.T. English, who say that recognizing transgender people means Americans “participate in attempting to overturn God’s created order.” The Justice Department has made that footnote federal policy.
The men on the Task Force have spent careers staking out that same ground. OMB Director Russell Vought was caught on undercover video in 2024 saying he wanted to “rehabilitate” Christian nationalism. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wears Deus Vult and kafir tattoos and worships at a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination Christian nationalist Doug Wilson co-founded in 1998. Wilson defended Southern slavery in a 1996 book as the source of “a genuine affection between the races.” Hegseth invited him to preach at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service on February 17, 2026. At the closing prayer, with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder, Hegseth thanked him for “the truth you’ve told.” Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War in September 2025, and the Task Force uses the new name throughout the report.
FBI Director Kash Patel used his appendix interview to declare the bureau has cut its ties with the Anti-Defamation League. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas told the Task Force that the previous EEOC’s handling of religious-accommodation requests during the COVID-19 vaccine surge was “not just a sin of omission, it was a sin of commission.” That category comes from conservative Protestant theology, and the woman who runs the EEOC is now applying it to federal civil rights enforcement decisions.
The three outside witnesses named in the appendices are not bystanders to the policies the report attacks. David Kubal of Intercessors for America leads a Christian nationalist spiritual-warfare ministry whose work overlaps with Seven Mountain dominionism, the framework that calls for Christian control of government, education, and media. Jeremy Dys, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, and Kristen Waggoner, CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom, run two of the impact-litigation shops that spent the last decade pressing religious-liberty cases that the Task Force now cites as evidence of persecution.
Finding 1 accuses the Justice Department of aggressive FACE Act prosecutions of “non-violent, pro-life, Christian demonstrators.” What the report does not say is that the protesters cited had physically blocked clinic entrances, which the FACE Act prohibits. The same move repeats. Finding 3 alleges that the IRS targeted churches “because of what their pastors preached,” conduct that the Johnson Amendment has barred tax-exempt churches from engaging in since 1954. Finding 7 attacks the Biden Education Department for protecting LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, which is what the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County required. Finding 8 attacks the HHS rule that stopped federally funded Christian foster agencies from turning away same-sex couples. Each grievance, on inspection, is a complaint that an existing law was enforced.
Finding 4 is where the document escalates. The Task Force argues that Education Department fines against Grand Canyon University ($37.7 million for misrepresenting the cost of education to working-class students) and Liberty University ($14 million for failing to disclose campus crimes, including sexual assault, as the Clery Act requires) “dwarfed the penalties for Larry Nassar’s and Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assaults.” Nassar molested hundreds of female gymnasts over two decades; Sandusky raped children. The federal government has placed the regulatory fines paid by two evangelical universities, for fraud and for hiding sexual assault, on the same moral plane as the criminal sentences imposed on those two men, and signed the comparison.
Finding 10 attacks the Biden administration for issuing its 2024 Transgender Day of Visibility proclamation on Good Friday, and for letting the observance fall on Easter Sunday. Transgender Day of Visibility has been fixed on March 31 every year since 2009. Easter Day changes, and in 2024, it landed on March 31. The Task Force titles the section “Replacing Easter with the ‘Transgender Day of Visibility.’” Finding 2 cites the FBI’s 2023 Richmond memo on traditionalist Catholics. A whistleblower leaked the memo in February 2023, 17 days after the Richmond field office produced it, and the bureau withdrew it a day after that. The Justice Department Inspector General later found no evidence that the memo was driven by religious bias. The Task Force has built its case for a federal assault against the Catholic faithful out of those 17 days.
Finding 11 attacks the State Department for taking Nigeria off the religious-freedom watch list, recasting Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province violence, which kills Christians and Muslims alike, as a campaign against the faithful. The same logic carries Findings 5, 6, 9, and 12. In August 2019, HHS issued a notice of violation against the University of Vermont Medical Center under the Church Amendments, the 1970s federal conscience laws covering abortion and sterilization, after a Christian nurse said she was forced to assist in an abortion. The notice rested on a reading of the Church Amendments that two federal courts had already rejected. HHS dropped the notice in 2021. The Task Force calls the withdrawal anti-Christian bias.
One finding holds. Finding 13 contains a real Title VII grievance. Former Army Reserve JAG Officer Scott Centorino told the Task Force that his unit received what he stopped short of calling an order to deny every COVID-vaccine religious-accommodation request without individualized review. “It was made very clear to us that we were to deny all of the requests,” Centorino said. The Task Force has built the rest of its 565-page document on the back of his testimony.
Finding 14 is the climax the Task Force has been building toward. The previous administration, the report charges, “regulated and suppressed religious speech” and “curtailed Christians’ ability to jointly worship and study the Bible.” The supporting record sits in the appendices. Catholic high schoolers from a South Carolina parish school visited the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in January 2023 wearing pro-life caps. Guards hassled them. The Smithsonian apologized three weeks later and settled the lawsuit the families filed. Guards at the National Archives did the same to a March for Life group, and the Archives paid those plaintiffs $10,000. A Catholic hospital in Oklahoma got told its sanctuary candle was a fire hazard in a Medicare facility full of oxygen tanks. Each grievance was resolved by the same Biden administration that the Task Force is now indicting for it.
Underneath the catalog is Chapter 2’s constitutional argument. To establish the United States as a Christian nation in the specific sense the report requires, the Task Force pits Christian nationalist popularizers against academic historians in a single footnote and sides with the popularizers. The headline name is Christian nationalist David Barton, the Texas activist whose books are source material for much of the Christian-nation curriculum sold to homeschoolers and Sunday schools. Barton has no graduate training in history. His best-known book, The Jefferson Lies, was pulled from print in 2012 by Thomas Nelson, his own evangelical publisher, after a panel of conservative Christian scholars documented its fabrications. House Speaker Mike Johnson has named Barton as a personal advisor of 25 years’ standing.
The Americans the Task Force did not consult, responded the same day the report dropped. Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation called the document “a political document masquerading as a phony civil rights analysis.” Nick Fish of American Atheists noted that the report mentions atheists only twice, both in footnotes, despite the 29 percent of Americans Pew counts as religiously unaffiliated. “It’s very clear this administration is only concerned about Americans of a certain faith,” Fish said. The Reverend Paul Brandeis Raushenbush of Interfaith Alliance, who had organized two dozen Christian leaders in May 2025 to publicly reject the persecution premise, said the Trump administration “should look in the mirror at its own targeting of Christian communities.”
Only Christians spoke at the convening hearing on April 22, 2025. The Task Force published its findings on religious liberty in America without hearing from anyone else. Across 565 pages, Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Within the Federal Government uses the term “Christian nationalism” exactly once, inside a verbatim quotation of the same Richmond FBI memo the report holds up as proof of bias against Christians. The report says the previous administration “generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held but zealously pursued actions to limit Christians’ ability to act in accordance with their faith.” The men who signed the document have spent careers constructing the framework of federal religious-liberty policy, and they have 18 months and a budget to finish the job.
