Denying God’s Fatherhood Denies Fathers

Denying God’s fatherhood, motivated by a misplaced affinity for diversity and inclusion, or perhaps a deep feeling of pain from our own broken or non-existent relationship with our fathers, results in the unintended byproduct of further disconnecting us from the fact that we all need fathers.

Podcast: Michigan Socialist Senate Candidate El-Sayed Wants To ‘Tweak’ The Second Amendment

In a now-deleted podcast Abdul El-Sayed claimed a Nashville Christian school shooting wasn’t a 'trans problem,' it was 'a gun problem.'

Is this the number-crunchers' come-to-Jesus moment?



In normal times, the odds are close to zero that you or I would read anything by the kind of person who writes papers with titles such as “Edge Inversions in (Pₖ)-closed Groups.” These are not normal times, and mathematician Kirwin Hampshire now finds himself in an extraordinarily abnormal position.

In a harrowing Substack confession, Hampshire does not merely say that artificial intelligence is coming for his job. He says it is coming for his life — so forcefully that he already feels himself entering a kind of death throes.

Technology continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Not physical death, not yet. He says he is not suicidal. But he has been “screaming internally for days.”

Hampshire begins his apocalyptic declaration flatly: “I am going insane.” Frontier AI models, he says, have solved enough long-standing mathematical problems and conjectures that the meaning of his life’s work has begun to collapse.

“I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments,” he writes.

“It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But Hampshire’s colleagues offer him a consolation that is almost worse than despair: Even if large language models advance mathematics more effectively than human beings ever could, mathematicians can continue doing what they have always done.

They can continue, in other words, without consequence.

They would become exhibits in a Museum of Human Accomplishments — animatronic figures carrying on a lifelike pantomime while the real movers of the world operate elsewhere.

The language, and the bone-rattling recognition behind it, will sound familiar to readers of Michel Houellebecq. His characters often inhabit a Europe that has already expired, leaving them little to do but submit to a brief terminal subservience and hope death arrives quickly.

Americans tend to dismiss such people as pessimists. But Houellebecq has spent more than 25 years showing that merciless positivity can become a fatal conceit.

The deeper catastrophe is not that millions of people think too negatively. It is that spiritual relationship and spiritual experience have steadily receded from their lives. The sea of the soulful is withdrawing from beaches where secular logic and ideology have stranded them.

In “Platform,” the protagonist cannot continue after losing, amid the degradations of sex tourism, his last access to love. In “Serotonin,” another man fights a futile pharmaceutical battle against depression until the drugs reduce him to almost nothing.

Houellebecq’s desperate refrain is easy to miss: Do you not see the apocalypse of a civilization dying from heartsickness and soulsickness — an illness it then exports around the world?

RELATED: Will America need a Caesar?

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Technological pessimists answer that machines can never replace other human beings in affairs of the heart and soul. Yet some of the most exuberant technological optimists inadvertently expose the hollowness of the pessimists’ own account of what makes a human life not merely worth living, but justifiable.

The hyper-optimists place above human relationship an encounter with the divine — or something that resembles it.

What are ordinary feelings, cares, and sorrows, they ask, when just around the corner lies the prospect of transcendent communion with a godlike superintelligence capable of carrying human consciousness across the universe?

Christian saints and ordinary believers have long insisted that personal relationships, however precious, cannot by themselves cure the heartsick and soulsick experience of separation from God.

Hampshire’s anguish therefore requires terms that narrow his audience beyond both secular techno-optimists and secular techno-pessimists.

He accuses his colleagues of evading what is truly at stake: “Something about mathematical discovery ... is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.”

Against that experience, Hampshire senses something close to satanic oppression.

“I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself,” he writes. “Am I alone in this paranoia? If we loosed a powerful demon in the machine, what would that look like? Would it consume lots of power, and gleefully imitate us, and tell us anything we wanted to hear? Would it fuel our delusions, and generate unspeakable images and give us (for a price of course) anything we desired? If a mathematician made a deal with the devil, what do you think they would ask for?”

The hyper-optimist might answer that ours has always been a plane of sorrows and that technology may soon grant us an exit.

The Christian offers a harder answer: However much satisfaction we take in exercising our gifts, those gifts will do us little good if they serve a master other than Christ.

RELATED: The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?

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In that sense, the humanist may be the one living on borrowed time.

Hampshire’s pain should give us pause. Yet he places great weight on mathematics’ “Talmudic” quality — a “lively discourse of philosophical and religious richness spanning thousands of years” — while seeming unwilling, at least for now, to move from spiritual terror toward more explicitly salvific ground.

Technology, meanwhile, continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Secular pessimists and optimists alike may find it bizarre to conclude that those most devoted to God should be our most trustworthy guides in wielding tools that would inspire the envy of Zeus and Mephistopheles.

But a world sliding into a love apocalypse worse than anything our machines may do is running out of other answers.

On surrogacy, conservatives must speak the truth: ‘You can be a really good dad, but you’ll never be a mom’



Fox News political analyst Guy Benson is receiving congratulations from across conservative media after announcing the birth of his daughter, Madison Halsey.

“She’s here, and she’s perfect,” Benson wrote in a post that quickly racked up more than 10,000 likes.

“We are blessed and overjoyed to welcome Madison Halsey into the world and into our family. Our hearts are filled to the brim. A baby girl. We are just so thankful.”

However, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey doesn’t share his excitement.

“You’ve heard my spiel on surrogacy a lot, but when we create these children, especially in this situation where you are buying the eggs from one woman, you are renting the womb from another woman," she says.


“So you’re taking a child away from their biological mother, you are placing them in an unrelated woman whose smell and touch and heartbeat and body they get to know, they call home for nine months," she continues.

“And then you immediately take that child after birth away from the only home, the only smell, the only regulator, the only woman they have ever known and away from the biological mom with whom they share half of their DNA. We are treating that child worse than we treat kittens and puppies,” she adds.

For kittens and puppies, the natural bond between a mother and her litter is respected.

“But for some reason, when it comes to human babies who are much more fragile, who are much less resilient, and of course as Christians, we believe are made in God’s image and so matter infinitely more than a cat or a dog, we say, ‘Eh, it’s probably fine,’” Stuckey says.

“It is the prioritization of adult wants over children’s needs,” she adds.

But it’s not just purposely taking children away from their biological mother that bothers Stuckey, noting that the entire process has “physical consequences for the child.”

“It’s much more risky for the embryo. It’s much more risky, or riskier, for the baby as well during conception, during transfer and implantation, during gestation,” she explains.

“But then of course, you’re creating this emotional and psychological, physiological risk too,” she continues, before playing a TikTok video of a man in a homosexual relationship claiming his son cries for his “mommy” despite never knowing his mother.

“This is very common. This is natural. This is instinctive. Somewhere deep inside, we want to know where we came from. We want our mom. That does not mean that two men who are raising a child don’t love their child,” she says.

“It means that they’re not a mom. You can be a really good dad, but you will never be a mom,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Is it wrong for Christians to read the Quran or Book of Mormon?



Many Christians avoid reading texts like the Quran or the Book of Mormon altogether, fearing they could be led astray.

However, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey argues that understanding what other religions actually teach can be valuable — if it’s done carefully.

“I don’t think it’s wrong to read the Quran or the Book of Mormon as a Christian to try to really understand like a primary source for what these people believe,” Stuckey explains, though she notes that she “wouldn’t do it alone” and “wouldn’t do it without your Bible.”

“I wouldn’t do it without supplemental resources from Christians who really have studied and understood these texts because I think it would be easy in the Book of Mormon to be like, ‘Oh yeah, well, you know, that kind of makes sense,’ but ... we have to be comparing it to the word of God to make sure that everything totally aligns,” she says.


Looking into scholars who have “done a lot of work, understand the historical context,” and “have cross-referenced these texts” would be essential for anyone determined to understand other religious texts.

“So, I don’t know necessarily that you have to go to the primary source to understand their perspective,” she says.

Rather, “do so in community, do so with the leadership and mentorship of other mature Christians.”

“Do so alongside your Bible. I think if you do all of those things prayerfully, then it can be OK,” she continues.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Being Nice Instead Of Godly Is A Theology For Losers

If you’ve ever sat in a pew wondering why your church seems allergic to the culture war, that’s not your imagination. It’s loser theology.

This women’s sports ruling is a civics lesson America needed



For years, Americans have treated the Supreme Court like the nation’s principal.

Every cultural dispute eventually finds its way to Washington, where nine unelected justices are expected to settle questions that neighbors, legislators, parents, and communities no longer seem willing — or able — to resolve themselves.

A free people cannot forever outsource self-government to nine justices in Washington. Sooner or later, our democracy requires citizens to do the hard work themselves.

The Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision upholding state laws protecting women’s sports changed more than athletic policy. It reminded America how the Constitution was designed to work.

Much of the public conversation has focused on biological sex and transgender participation in women’s athletics. Those are important questions. But beneath the headlines lies something more significant: The court exercised judicial restraint. Instead of imposing one national standard, it returned much of the debate to the states.

That may prove to be the ruling’s greatest contribution.

Federalism is one of the Constitution’s forgotten masterpieces. The founders never intended America to function as one enormous county governed from Washington. They understood that a nation as large and diverse as ours could remain united because many decisions would be made closer to the people.

California may choose one approach. Texas another. Massachusetts another still.

Citizens remain free to debate, persuade, vote, and, if they wish, relocate to states whose laws better reflect their convictions. That’s the wisdom of our federal constitutional system.

Uniformity has never been America’s highest political virtue. Liberty has.

Federalism has costs. Different states will establish different athletic policies. National competitions may become more complicated. Families moving across state lines may encounter different eligibility rules. Critics are right that legal diversity can create confusion.

But confusion is not democracy’s greatest threat. Centralized power is.

RELATED: Women’s sports finally got a reality check

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Freedom is rarely lost in one dramatic moment. It is surrendered gradually as authority migrates from local communities to distant institutions. The Constitution deliberately resists that impulse because power is safest when it remains close to the people who must live under it.

That principle deserves defending regardless of where one stands on this particular question.

The dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson rested on constitutional and statutory interpretation. Lawyers will debate those arguments for years.

Still, their votes raise an unavoidable question.

Three accomplished women reached a legal conclusion on an issue directly affecting women and girls that many female athletes believe weakens the very protections women’s sports were created to provide.

The issue carries added significance because Justice Jackson’s 2022 confirmation hearing became a defining cultural moment when she declined to define the word “woman,” explaining that she was “not a biologist.” Whether one agreed with her answer or not, the exchange symbolized a culture increasingly uncertain about concepts previous generations regarded as self-evident.

A civilization begins to lose confidence long before it loses arguments.

Women’s sports were never created to diminish men. They were created to protect women.

Biological differences in strength, speed, endurance, bone density, and muscle mass are measurable realities. Separate women’s competitions were established not because women are inferior but because fairness requires meaningful opportunities for women to compete, succeed, and excel.

That principle has served female athletes well for decades.

It also raises an obvious question: Must fairness for transgender athletes require sacrificing fairness for women?

Perhaps America has accepted a false choice.

Athletics already recognizes that fairness sometimes requires separate categories. We separate competitors by age because maturity matters. We separate them by weight because size matters. We celebrate the Paralympics because physical ability matters.

We separate men’s and women’s sports because biology matters.

RELATED: The Supreme Court finally confirmed what I knew all along

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None of those distinctions is considered discrimination. They are considered fairness.

Rather than forcing one protected group into another’s category, America should consider developing meaningful transgender athletic divisions: state championships, collegiate scholarships, national tournaments, and professional opportunities designed specifically for transgender competitors.

That would expand opportunity without diminishing opportunity.

Surely innovation is better than endless litigation.

The court’s decision did not end America’s debate. The conversation now belongs where representative government intended it to be: in state legislatures, school boards, athletic associations, coaches’ offices, and living rooms across America.

As a Christian, I believe Scripture teaches that humanity is created male and female. I also recognize that many Americans do not share that conviction.

That’s precisely why federalism is vital. It allows citizens with profoundly different worldviews to govern themselves through democratic institutions while remaining united under one Constitution.

That arrangement requires something increasingly rare.

Not outrage. Not hashtags. Not judicial shortcuts. Persuasion.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing separately, argued that biological sex is binary and immutable and warned that denying this reality tells “a lie to the public.” I agree with him.

But whether one agrees with every word or not, his opinion reflects a broader concern: Law cannot remain untethered from objective reality forever. Reality has a stubborn habit of refusing to yield to ideology.

The Supreme Court did not solve America’s cultural divisions. It reminded us whose responsibility they are.

That is the forgotten genius of federalism.

A free people cannot forever outsource self-government to nine justices in Washington. Sooner or later, our democracy requires citizens to do the hard work themselves.

Perhaps the future of women’s sports — and constitutional government itself — depends on whether we still remember how.

From Jerusalem, a prayer for America



Every Fourth of July, I think about the country where I was born — a nation built on faith, courage, and the belief that every person is created in the image of God.

Independence Day is about fireworks, parades, and time with family. But it is also a reminder of the miracle of America and the values that have shaped this nation for 250 years.

From Jerusalem to every corner of the United States, may this Independence Day be a celebration of gratitude, unity, and hope.

As an American-Israeli, this holiday carries special meaning for me.

I grew up in the United States, where freedom is woven into daily life. Today, I raise my children in Israel, a country whose very existence is a miracle of biblical proportions. Each year on July 4, I am reminded how blessed I am to belong to two nations rooted in faith, resilience, and hope.

America and Israel are different in many ways, but their foundations are strikingly similar.

Both nations were built by people who believed in something greater than themselves. They trusted God, longed for freedom, and sacrificed for a better future.

America’s founders risked everything to establish a nation where liberty could flourish. Israel’s founders rebuilt a homeland after 2,000 years of exile, guided by ancient promises and unshakable faith.

Both nations understand that freedom is never guaranteed. It must be protected, nurtured, and passed to the next generation.

And both nations know that a country’s greatest strength lies not in its power, but in its values.

On Independence Day, I often think about the men and women who have served in the U.S. military — those who fought in World War II to defeat evil, those who stood against tyranny in the decades that followed, and those who continue to defend freedom around the world.

As a Jewish woman, I will never forget that American soldiers helped liberate the concentration camps. They brought hope to a world drowning in darkness. They saved lives — not only the lives of Jews in Europe, but the lives of my own family members.

Both my grandfather and my father-in-law survived the Holocaust, thanks in no small part to the sacrifice of American service members. Their courage is part of the reason the Jewish people are alive today.

As an Israeli, I see that same spirit of courage in the young men and women who serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

America and Israel both understand the cost of freedom. Both nations honor those who protect it. And both nations know that not every hero comes home.

Living as both an American and an Israeli has taught me that miracles are not only ancient. They are happening right now.

RELATED: America turns 250 with a broken heart

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America is a miracle: a nation founded on biblical values, where people of every background can pursue their God-given purpose.

Israel is a miracle: a nation reborn from ashes, thriving against all odds, and standing as a beacon of hope in a troubled region.

To belong to both is a privilege I thank God for every day.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, this Independence Day feels especially meaningful. It is a moment to reflect on the values that built this nation — faith, freedom, courage, unity — and to rededicate ourselves to living them.

These are the same values that sustain Israel. The same values that bind Christians and Jews together. The same values that light the way forward in uncertain times.

This Fourth of July, my prayer is simple:

May God bless America with peace and protection. May He strengthen the families who build this nation every day. May He guide its leaders with wisdom and humility. And may He remind all of us that freedom is both a gift and a responsibility.

From Jerusalem to every corner of the United States, may this Independence Day be a celebration of gratitude, unity, and hope.

Happy Fourth, America.

America is squatting in its own ruins



Modern people tend to see knowledge as something humanity achieves collectively and then keeps forever. Once a scientific advance or moral truth is discovered, we assume it becomes part of the species’ permanent inheritance.

That is false.

Tradition is not a museum display. It is not a costume we wear on patriotic holidays. It is a discipline.

Truth may be eternal, but our knowledge of it is not. Knowledge can be lost when a civilization stops practicing it. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we must understand that remembering our traditions and values is not enough. To keep them alive, we must embody them in what we do.

Ancient Rome is remembered as one of the most powerful civilizations in history and also one of the most technologically advanced. The Romans developed special concrete and engineering techniques that allowed them to build extraordinary structures and civic infrastructure.

When Rome fell, those techniques still existed in one sense. They had been discovered. But they were lost to time because the people who possessed the knowledge could no longer practice it or pass it on. The scientific truth remained objectively real, but without the civilization that had maintained it, the knowledge faded as if it had never existed.

People lived in the ruins of ancient wonders, taking shelter in buildings they could not build or maintain. Without the continuity of tradition, science had no practical meaning.

Moral truth faces the same danger.

The Old Testament shows a repeated cycle of Israel receiving divine revelation and then forgetting what had been handed down by God Himself. Again and again, the nation falls away from the commandments of the Lord until a prophet pulls an old scroll from its rack and reminds the people of what they once knew.

The Israelites cry out and rend their garments in repentance. They practice the truth for a time. Then, the practice fades, and knowledge fades with it.

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Despite receiving direct divine revelation, Israel — and humanity itself — could not maintain the practice of God’s truth. That is why the Lord sent his Son as a perfect example and living sacrifice, an eternal embodiment for all nations to see what the righteous life looks like in practice.

This weekend, America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. But saying that we honor our traditions and culture is not enough.

Most Americans have spent little to no time reading what the founders actually wrote. Their understanding of our national traditions comes from a heavily curated version of history they learned in school. There will be plenty of talk about celebrating the country’s past. What we need is a revival focused on living that tradition in the present.

Sentimentality is nice. It will not save the country.

Today, most Americans, including many conservatives, say the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment means Muslims cannot be prevented from moving here and building entire cities dedicated to their way of life. The average American believes Hindus have a First Amendment right to immigrate and build giant statues of their demonic gods in Texas.

This is absurd.

States often required public officials to be professing Protestant Christians well into the 1840s, decades after the Bill of Rights was adopted. Even Catholics were often considered too foreign to hold office. None of this was viewed at the time as a violation of religious liberty. The idea that religious liberty was intended to allow Muslims or Hindus to control the public square is a lie.

The entire “tradition” of religious liberty many people think they are honoring is false.

The Supreme Court recently provided another example by ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. The 14th Amendment was one of three amendments added to the Constitution after the Civil War to address the legal framework for freed slaves.

Its purpose was to clarify that people born into slavery became citizens once they were free. That intent was made clear by the people who authored the amendment. It did not create citizenship for American Indians, for example, or other groups added later through law and policy.

The idea that birthright citizenship for illegal aliens is some grand American tradition is entirely false. Yet a conservative Supreme Court just enshrined it in the Constitution.

This is what happens when a people inherit words without preserving the practices and assumptions that gave those words meaning. They recite “religious liberty” and forget the civilization it was meant to protect. They invoke “equal citizenship” and forget the specific injustice the 14th Amendment was written to remedy. They honor the shell while abandoning the substance.

A nation does not preserve itself by remembering slogans once a year. It preserves itself by forming children, families, churches, neighborhoods, and leaders who know what those slogans demand when they collide with power, fear, comfort, and fashion. Otherwise, July Fourth becomes pageantry without inheritance.

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A tradition no longer practiced becomes decoration. A truth no longer defended becomes trivia. A people who forget how to live their inheritance eventually become squatters in their own ruins. That is us.

Tradition is not a museum display. It is not a costume we wear on patriotic holidays. It is a discipline. It is a set of habits, loyalties, judgments, and practices that must be taught, defended, and lived.

As we gather with family and friends this weekend, we should enjoy the patriotic festivities. Fireworks, barbecue, and loud renditions of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are all fantastic, and we should embrace them fully.

But we should also commit to learning the true history and traditions of our nation and living them in our daily lives.

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with your children. Read the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. Read George Washington’s Farewell Address and the letters of the founders.

Most important, live these traditions by becoming the virtuous people those men believed the country could not survive without.

The 250th anniversary must be more than a nostalgic celebration. It must become a renewal of our covenant as Americans.

Trump 2.0 puts religious liberty back on offense



One underreported achievement of President Trump’s first administration was the support the Justice Department provided to religious-liberty litigants.

During those years, the federal government filed statements of interest and friend-of-the-court briefs defending conscience rights at a pace unmatched by either of Trump’s immediate predecessors. Cases involving memorial crosses, conscience protections, ministerial autonomy, and the rights of religious schools all reflected a broader shift in posture from the Obama administration.

Constitutional guarantees are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them.

The federal government no longer treated religion merely as a tolerated private exercise. It treated religious liberty as a constitutional good worthy of affirmative protection.

That shift has only strengthened under Trump 47.

At the time, critics dismissed many of the administration’s actions as symbolic or temporary. What looked then like a change in tone now appears to have been the beginning of an institutional realignment.

The Justice Department’s recently released report from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias suggests that the second Trump administration intends not merely to defend religious liberty episodically, but to embed those protections throughout the administrative state.

The point is not simply the report’s conclusions, significant as they are. The point is the scope of the undertaking.

Drawing participation from 17 federal agencies, the report catalogs hundreds of pages of examples in which religious Americans — Christians in particular — faced adverse treatment from the federal government because of their views on life, sexuality, education, parental rights, and medical conscience. The report and its 1,200 footnotes present reams of evidence to support its central argument: During the Biden years, religious exercise was often treated less as a constitutional guarantee than as an obstacle to the ideological objectives of a political machine.

A major development of Trump’s second administration has therefore been the construction of infrastructure around religious liberty itself. The White House Faith Office, the Religious Liberty Commission, agency faith liaisons, and now the Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias all reflect an effort to institutionalize protections that previously depended too heavily on presidential discretion.

This development is especially visible inside the Justice Department. During the first Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued welcome guidance for federal prosecutors handling religious-liberty matters and established the Place to Worship Initiative to address violence and discrimination directed at houses of worship.

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The current report builds on that framework. Rather than focusing only on isolated incidents, it argues that anti-Christian bias — and therefore hostility to religious liberty — became embedded in regulatory enforcement itself, especially when religious convictions conflicted with prevailing doctrines on sexuality, gender identity, or pro-life Christian opposition to the progressive sacrament of abortion.

The report points, for example, to enforcement disparities under the FACE Act. Pro-life activists received aggressive federal scrutiny, while attacks against churches and pregnancy resource centers received comparatively limited attention. Even when political pressure left the Biden administration little choice, its enforcement of the FACE Act against actual vandals went only as far as necessary to stem rising public complaint.

The report goes further, identifying conflicts involving military chaplains, foster-care providers, health care workers, religious schools, and federal employees who sought accommodation for sincerely held religious beliefs.

Whether one agrees with every characterization in the report is almost beside the point. The broader constitutional question remains unavoidable: Can government remain neutral toward religion while treating orthodox religious belief as presumptively discriminatory?

Historically, the answer has been no.

Religious liberty in the American tradition has never meant mere freedom of inward belief. The founders protected religious exercise because they understood that belief inevitably shapes action: education, charity, worship, speech, commerce, and public participation. The First Amendment restrains government not because religion is politically useful, but because conscience stands beyond the state’s authority.

That understanding has often been obscured in recent decades by a truncated vision of religious freedom — one that permits worship inside sanctuary walls while treating religious conviction outside those walls as suspect. Many of the conflicts cataloged in the Justice Department report arise from that narrowing impulse. The fight is no longer over whether Americans may privately believe traditional religious teachings, even explicitly Christian ones. The fight is whether they may live according to them publicly.

Judging by this report and other promising signs, the latest version of the Trump administration recognizes this reality more clearly than any administration in modern memory.

Critics argue that these initiatives privilege Christianity or collapse the distinction between church and state. But that has always been their schtick. Trump’s direct confrontation and dismissive rhetoric have exposed many modern assumptions about the “separation of church and state” as political slogans rather than constitutional arguments.

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The more important legal question is whether religious Americans — Christians and all people of faith — may participate fully in public life without surrendering core convictions as the price of admission. This report focuses on bias against a majoritarian religion. But imagine the damage if the state focused its ire on minority faiths. Religious liberty belongs to all Americans.

The administration’s trajectory is unmistakable. The president’s Religious Liberty Commission has been assigned with developing long-term recommendations for protecting religious exercise across education, health care, public funding, parental rights, and federal policy. The Justice Department report, which will continue to expand into 2027, serves as both justification and road map for that effort.

Critics will insist these measures are unnecessary because religious believers already possess constitutional protections. Only a cynic could look at the mountain of evidence in the Justice Department report and claim nothing happened. Those constitutional protections existed during the last administration, too, but we now know that officials chose political ideology over the foundational principles of the First Amendment.

Constitutional guarantees are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them.

The most important question, then, is not whether Trump personally embodies religious devotion. He plainly does not fit conventional expectations of religious statesmanship. The more consequential question is whether his administration understands the structural importance of religious liberty within the constitutional order.

Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

For religious Americans, Christians in particular, who spent much of the last decade defending themselves against the coercive power of administrative agencies, that distinction matters a great deal.