The commission was created by an executive order the president signed on May 1, 2025. Over the following year it held seven public hearings and took testimony from more than one hundred witnesses on religious liberty in the military, public schools, healthcare, the private sector, and faith-based charities, along with parental rights and the rise of attacks on houses of worship.
Among the report's chief recommendations: repeal of the Johnson Amendment, the 1954 tax provision threatening churches and pastors with loss of tax-exempt status for speaking on candidates and elections from the pulpit. The commission also asked the Department of Justice to stand up a religious liberty task force to track and prioritize litigation, and called on the Department of War to streamline its process for granting religious accommodations. It further recommended restoring retirement and re-enlistment eligibility to service members who lost pay, pensions, and health coverage after seeking religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
The report argues that the familiar phrase "a wall of separation between church and state" -- borrowed from a private letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802, not from the Constitution itself -- has been stretched by courts and agencies into something never intended, used to push faith out of schools, the armed forces, and government contracting. The commission frames religious liberty instead as a bridge connecting a citizen's faith to public life, not a wall shutting it out. The Department of Justice has opened a public comment period on the draft, running through July 12, 2026, before a final version is completed.
A Freedom Older Than the Republic
A government commission can recommend a repeal. It cannot grant what it was formed to protect. The freedom to preach, to pray without asking permission, to raise a child in the fear of the Lord -- that liberty did not begin with a statute Lyndon Johnson wrote in 1954, and it will not be restored by a memo undoing it seventy-two years later. It began somewhere higher up than Washington.
Scripture never treats liberty as a government grant. It treats liberty as a gift, purchased at a price, and guarded by God Himself.
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (2 Corinthians 3:17)
Paul wrote those words to a church with no First Amendment, no commission, no Oval Office to plead its case before. Rome granted the early Christians nothing but a cross, yet the liberty Paul described could not be repealed by Caesar, because Caesar never issued it in the first place. When a council once ordered the apostles to stop preaching Christ, Peter answered plainly, "We ought to obey God rather than men" -- and that answer has outlasted every empire that has tried to silence it since.
That is what makes the Johnson Amendment worth naming here. For seven decades it has hung over pulpits like a threat, warning pastors that speaking too plainly about right and wrong could cost their church its exemption. Most have obeyed it out of caution rather than conviction. But a preacher answers first to the One who called him, not to a line in the federal tax code, and no free nation should force a man to choose between his ordination and his conscience.
None of this means Christians should look to Washington the way Israel once looked to Egypt for its safety. Commissions rise and get revised; comment periods open and close. What Dan Patrick and Ben Carson handed the president on June 26 is a good and welcome thing -- a government owning up that faith belongs in the public square, not locked outside it. Give thanks for that, and watch to see whether it holds. But do not hang your hope on a fifteen-day comment period.
The liberty that matters most was never on any ballot. It was purchased at Calvary and sealed by an empty tomb, and it is offered free of charge to whoever will have it -- the believer worshiping under threat of violence, the pastor free to preach without fear, and you, wherever you are reading this. No government has the power to grant that liberty. None has the power to take it away. Only Christ.