Members of the White House-created U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom want to demolish the long-standing constitutional wall between church and state, direct federal muscle toward conservative Christian litigation, and reward a baker whose refusal to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple became a national flashpoint. The proposals, disclosed in detail to the Associated Press during the panel’s most recent meeting in April, show how aggressively the advisory body intends to push a vision of religious liberty that critics say replaces the First Amendment’s prohibition on government establishment of religion with an expansive platform of state-endorsed religious expression.
The commission, which President Donald Trump convened last year, is dominated by conservative Christian figures; its gatherings have been held largely at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor who chairs the body, used the April session to denounce the very concept of a church-state divide. “We have to say that there is no separation between church and state,” Patrick declared. “That’s a lie.” He suggested printing “a million bumper stickers” with that assertion and setting up a federal hotline delivering the same automated message. No one on the panel objected.
A medal for a baker, a fee-shifting rule and vaccine exemptions
Kelly Shackelford, who leads the First Liberty Institute, advanced two proposals that would tilt the legal landscape toward religious claimants. He urged that governments be required to cover the legal costs of any citizen who wins a religious-liberty lawsuit — a shift he described as “an enormous change of power in favor of citizens.” Shackelford also pressed for a Presidential Medal of Freedom to be awarded to the baker at the center of the 2018 Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, who refused on religious grounds to create a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.
Other members focused on exemptions from vaccination mandates and gender-identity accommodation requirements. They called on the Justice Department to intervene in battles over New York’s vaccination rules for Amish parents and over state demands that Catholic nursing homes treat patients according to their self-identified gender. Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic prelate from Minnesota, argued that Catholic Charities should be eligible for federal grants without altering church teaching on the family. He also told the commission that detained Catholic immigrants must receive humane treatment and that immigration agents should be barred from disrupting worship services — an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s 2025 rollback of a policy that had discouraged enforcement actions at religious sanctuaries.
Additional recommendations included requiring public schools and workplaces to post notices of religious-expression rights and exempting religious adherents from a range of regulations governing employment, instruction and health care. The commission also wants the federal government to restore full pay and pension benefits to service members who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
One-sided panel faces a lawsuit
Critics of the commission, including a progressive interfaith coalition that has sued in federal court, argue the body is composed almost entirely of conservative Christian clergy and commentators — with a single Orthodox rabbi as the sole non-Christian voice — and that its meetings have been skewed toward a narrow set of grievances. “The omissions of this commission are just as significant as what it focuses on,” said the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president of the Interfaith Alliance, which is among the plaintiffs. Raushenbush said the panel has not adequately addressed anti-Muslim measures in Texas or rising antisemitism on the political right.
The lawsuit asserts the commission violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires advisory panels to be fairly balanced and to include diverse viewpoints. The Trump administration has asked a federal court to dismiss the case, arguing that the law does not define precisely how a commission should be balanced or which viewpoints must be represented.
The commission itself has not been free of internal friction. One member, Carrie Prejean Boller, was removed in February after a contentious hearing on antisemitism. Patrick said Prejean Boller tried to “hijack” the hearing by clashing with witnesses over the definition of antisemitism and by defending commentator Candace Owens against accusations of antisemitic statements. Prejean Boller, who is Catholic, has maintained she was unjustly expelled for expressing her beliefs.
Reshaping the boundary between religion and government
Patrick’s insistence that church-state separation is a fiction echoes Trump’s own rhetoric. At a White House prayer event in 2025, Trump said of the phrase “separation of church and state”: “I said, okay, forget that for once.” Although the exact words do not appear in the Constitution, the Supreme Court adopted Thomas Jefferson’s description of the First Amendment as building “a wall of separation between church and state” in a series of twentieth-century rulings that applied the Establishment Clause to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
The commission’s wishlist would accelerate a trend already visible on the high court, where a conservative super-majority has, in recent years, consistently ruled in favor of religious claimants — upholding a football coach’s on-field prayer in a public school, expanding taxpayer funding for religious schools, and recognizing for-profit businesses’ religious objections to covering contraception.
The panel’s final report has not yet been issued. Several commissioners plan to take part in a prayer event on May 17 marking the upcoming 250th anniversary of American independence, and some previously joined a Bible-reading marathon at the Museum of the Bible. For now, the April meeting has provided a clear preview of where a body stacked with Trump loyalists intends to take the national conversation on religious liberty — toward a world in which the barrier between church and state, in Patrick’s words, simply does not exist.