What "Anti-Christian Bias" does for Trump

The president's executive order is a vehicle for white evangelical Protestant Christian favoritism, but it is also a weapon against other Christians.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Among the deluge of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump was a curious one that went largely under the radar: an order “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” The order purports to “end the anti-Christian weaponization of government,” charging that “the previous Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” The evidence the order gives of Christian persecution is thin, misleading, and telling. The order celebrates, for example, Trump’s pardon of a small group of “pro-life Christians” who were convicted in a court of law for illegal protest activities at an abortion clinic, and it decries, as an attack on Christians, Biden’s 2024 proclamation of Transgender Day of Visibility, which by coincidence fell on Easter Sunday.

Screenshot of Donald Trump’s “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” Executive Order, via whitehouse.gov.

The executive order contains the usual Trump bluster: “My Administration will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians.” But it goes much further. Most troublingly, the order goes on to establish a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” which will be located within the Department of Justice, chaired by the U.S. attorney general and populated by Cabinet heads and other senior-level administration officials. In addition to granting the task force sweeping powers to collect information across all government agencies, the order calls for the heads of agencies to “identify deficiencies in existing laws and enforcement and regulatory practices that have contributed to unlawful anti-Christian governmental or private conduct and recommend … appropriate actions that agencies may take to remedy failures to fully enforce the law against acts of anti-Christian hostility, vandalism, and violence” [emphasis mine].

Notably, while Trump’s executive order is peppered with references to religious liberty, it makes no mention of any other religious groups. Only Christians—who, even with rising levels of secularity, still comprise approximately two thirds of the U.S. population—are singled out as particular victims deserving special protections. Never mind that according to the 2023 Hate Crimes Report compiled by the FBI, out of 2,833 hate crimes motivated by religious bias, only 10% (290 cases) were motivated by anti-Christian bias. By contrast, 71% (2,006 cases) were motivated by antisemitism, and 19% (537 cases) involved bias against members of other non-Christian/non-Jewish religions and atheists/agnostics. In other words, adjusting for their smaller percentage of the population, Jews were more than 200 times more likely than Christians to be the target of a hate crime in the US in 2023.

Trump’s executive order is clearly not about protecting the religious liberty of a persecuted minority or the religious groups actually experiencing the most violence, as some religious liberty advocacy groups have noted. “If Trump really cared about religious freedom and ending religious persecution, he’d be addressing antisemitism in his inner circle, anti-Muslim bigotry, hate crimes against people of color and other religious minorities,” Rachel Laser, the president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement responding to the order. “This taskforce is not a response to Christian persecution; it’s an attempt to make America into an ultra-conservative Christian Nationalist nation.”

So what’s going on?

To understand what Trump really means by “anti-Christian bias,” we have to interrogate how he deploys the word “Christian.” In his bombastic proclamations, Trump repeatedly asserts, incorrectly, that Christian identity and opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights are synonymous. But today, such an equation is true for only a small fraction of America’s major religious groups—principally white evangelical Protestants and Latino Protestants (who also predominantly identify racially as white and theologically as evangelical).

For example, according to PRRI’s 2024 American Values Survey, only 29% of white evangelical Protestants and 41% of Latino Protestants believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases; but majorities of all other major religious groups—including white non-evangelical Protestants (66%), Black Protestants (74%), and Catholics (59%)—favor the legality of abortion. The same pattern prevails on attitudes about marriage equality. The religious actors Trump is really pledging to protect—white evangelical and Latino Protestants—comprise, even combined, only about one quarter of all Christians and less than one in five Americans.

This attempt to establish favoritism for a small subset of conservative, predominantly white Protestant Christians should be no mystery. And like most of Trump’s anti-democratic actions, he telegraphed his intent, in big and small ways, long in advance. During last year’s Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, Trump began hawking a $60 God Bless the USA Bible. His sales pitch included posting this message on Twitter/X: "Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.” Even here the details are a tell: The Bible is explicitly Protestant, excluding some books Catholics acknowledge, and it contains “the trusted King James (KJV) translation,” long favored by white evangelicals.

Almost exactly a year ago, Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), a group of the largest television and radio networks in the white evangelical world, where he identified with and talked openly about his intention to favor their kind of Christianity:

And I make you a simple promise. In my first term, I fought for Christians harder than any President has ever done before…. I get in there, you're gonna be using that power at a level that you've never used it before. It's gonna bring back the church goer…. We're gonna bring it back. And I really believe it's the biggest thing missing from this country. It's the biggest thing missing. We have to bring back our religion. We have to bring back Christianity in this country.

Notably, these are not the kind of remarks Trump makes when speaking before audiences of Black Americans, who also overwhelmingly identify as Christian.

Trump’s ludicrous posturing as the defender of the Christian faith has already been undermined by his own administration’s actions in the opening weeks of his presidency, which have explicitly targeted Christian leaders and groups. Trump called Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde “nasty” (his favorite epithet for women he finds threatening) for preaching at the Washington National Cathedral a sermon about mercy, and he allowed Elon Musk to disparage and gut funding from Lutheran and Catholic groups who have provided social services to immigrants and refugees for decades. His encouragement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue arrests of undocumented immigrants even in sensitive locations like churches and synagogues has made his Department of Homeland Security the target of a lawsuit filed by 27 Christian and Jewish organizations, and his inhumane mass deportation program has earned him a rare pointed rebuke from Pope Francis, who called it “a disgrace.”

In the royal MAGA court, “Christian” isn’t a term that describes someone who is a follower of Jesus or a member of a church. It is a privileged, protected status awarded by the Great Leader to politically useful religious people, preferably white rather than Black, and evangelical rather than mainline or Catholic or Orthodox. With this sleight of hand, Trump’s “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” order licenses persecution of Christian (or other) groups he declares disloyal, while permitting favoritism of white evangelical Protestants to masquerade as religious liberty.

Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute and the author of .”The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future,” “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity” and “The End of White Christian America.” You can find him on Substack at White Too Long.

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