The commission was created by an executive order Trump signed on May 1, 2025, and is chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, with Dr. Ben Carson serving as vice chair. Its roughly dozen members include a Catholic cardinal, a Catholic bishop, a rabbi, and legal scholars, drawn together to study how the federal government treats faith in public schools, the military, and grant-making.
The draft report's central recommendation is repeal of the "Johnson Amendment," the 1954 tax-code provision barring churches and other tax-exempt organizations from endorsing political candidates. Alongside it, the commission calls for Justice Department guidance narrowing how the Establishment Clause is applied, "Know Your Rights" posters and complaint hotlines for religious liberty violations, back pay for service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, and two new federal honors — a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero Awards.
Speaking to a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington the same week the draft went public, Trump told the crowd, "We saved religion, it was going down," and said the prior administration had carried out what he called a "reign of persecution" against believers. Critics on the political left have pushed back on the commission's approach to church-state separation, while backers call it overdue recognition that faith belongs in the public square, not shut out of it.
A liberty no commission can grant
Now here is a thing worth turning over slowly, my friend. A government commission can write recommendations. A Congress can strike a bad law off the books. A president can sign an order and call it protection. All of that matters — it matters whether a pastor can preach without the tax man listening for a stray word about an election, it matters whether a soldier's conscience is honored instead of punished. Do not let anybody tell you these things don't count. They count.
But hear this too: no report, however well meant, can hand a man the liberty the Bible is talking about. The liberty that matters most was never up for a vote in Washington. It was purchased on a hill outside Jerusalem, with blood, by a Man who owed no debt of His own.
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (2 Corinthians 3:17)
You can live in the freest nation ever built by man and still be a slave — bound to a bottle, bound to bitterness, bound to a sin you have confessed a hundred times and never yet laid down. And you can sit in a prison cell in a country that hates the name of Jesus and be freer than the judge who sentenced you, if the Spirit of the Lord has hold of your heart. That is not sentiment. That is the plain teaching of the Word.
Paul wrote to the Galatians, who were being talked back into bondage by men who should have known better: "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Galatians 5:1). Every generation has its yoke-makers. Some wear robes of government. Some wear no uniform at all — they just whisper that you are what you have always done, that the old chains fit you fine, that freedom is for somebody else. Christ says otherwise. He says the Son makes free, and whom the Son makes free is free indeed.
So welcome every earthly protection a good law can offer a church, a soldier, a believer under pressure. Write your comment. Thank the men who labored over that report. But do not mistake a legal shelter for a saved soul. The one true, unshakeable liberty was never Washington's to give, and it is not Washington's to take away. It is offered still, tonight, to whoever will come and receive it from the hand of the Lord Jesus Christ.