American Catholics were jubilant recently over a new religious freedom guidance issued by the Trump administration.
Some of it is fine, as far as I can see. I can think of instances where people were bullied or harassed for openly expressing their faith in the workplace, and where they were made to feel inferior for being religious.
Some people have taken the Establishment Clause of the Constitution to mean that to mean that religious expression is sort of vaguely illegal, and should be quashed. So this new guidance says federal employees are allowed to have Bibles and crosses and so on in the workplace. (It’s notable that all the examples it gives are either Christian or Jewish, explicitly mentioning tefillin and rosary beads, for example, but it avoids any mention of Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu practices of faith. Which is a clear violation of the Establishment clause. Note this. Note. This.)
Some of the guidance makes me extremely nervous. You can click through and read it for yourself if you don’t trust me to summarise—it’s just five pages—but it essentially says that federal employers and employees can display signs of their religious faith, pray and organise prayer groups in the workplace, and talk about and argue for their faith with others in the workplace, as long as they’re not aggressive about it and respect requests to stop.
Here is what I promise will happen: Decent people will adhere to the guidelines, and indecent people will not. People who are good Christians will quietly wear a cross and pray sincerely at lunch and be welcoming and inviting to others; and people who are bad Christians will bully and harass and intimidate people they don’t approve of, and they will point to these guidelines and say they’re entitled to do it.
This is not just a Christian thing; it’s a human nature thing. If people think they can get away with bullying other people, they’ll do it.
I just wanted to establish that the guidelines are absolutely guaranteed to be abused. They were deliberately written to give cover to people who will abuse them. That is how this administration functions, on every level, and it is what we have come to expect from them.
But let’s assume for a minute that it’s all been done in good faith. Let’s pretend that all they want is for Christians and a few docile Jews to be able to keep worshipping God all day long, and not have the government forcibly stripping away their religious convictions and expression.
It sure sounds like that’s what they’re calling for. The first paragraph says:
“The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.” President Trump is committed to reaffirming “America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty,” including by directing “the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law.”
And the fourth paragraph says:
“The First Amendment to the US Constitution robustly protects expressions of religious faith by all Americans—including Federal employees. The US Supreme Court has clarified that the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly,” but also “protect[s] the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life.” Indeed, “[r]espect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic[.]”
That’s what they say.
What are they actually doing?
They’re not letting prisoners see priests. It took nearly a month of extreme public duress before any member of clergy was granted permission to go inside to minister to the inmates of the sweltering, punitive detention center in Florida grotesquely named “Alligator Alcatraz” And it hasn’t happened yet, and may never happen.
They have been confiscating rosaries and bibles at the border and throwing them away, and feeding only pork to Muslim detainees. This has been going on for years and years, including under Biden and other presidents. But now we have a president who pretends he’s terribly offended by that kind of thing. And yet it continues.
There have been so many violent and indiscriminate sweeps by ICE in Hispanic communities, people are afraid to go to Mass. They are so afraid, the bishop of San Bernardino, CA has given them a specific dispensations from the Sunday obligation.
Will you argue that they brought this on themselves by being illegal? You need to know that, despite the president’s incessant “worst of the worst” fear mongering about rapists and drug lords, the majority of those arrested have zero criminal convictions, and the overwhelming majority have no record of violence at all.
Oh! But they are illegal, Simcha! That makes them criminals!
Wrong again. A shocking percentage of them are legal residents. Here is a running list of all the legal residents who have been detained by ICE.
And all the while, they say they’re promoting religious liberty. You may not be able to own a rosary or Bible or go to Mass or see a priest. But you can go to Hobby Lobby and buy a sign that says “Be Still And Know That I Am God” and hang it in the break room to enjoy after a long, hard day of slapping around Guatemalan grandmothers.
Let’s be really clear. The administration does not care about religious liberty. This administration has been actively quashing religious liberty. If you can’t see that, all you have to do is imagine anything I described above happening to white people.
Imagine if white people were afraid to go to Mass. Imagine if white people were being detained and sometimes deported based entirely, 100 per cent on their appearance, and had their rosaries or crucifixes thrown away. Imagine if white inmates were not allowed to see a priest for over a month. And then imagine if the government put out a memo saying that, thanks to them, we could all finally worship God in peace, all day long.
I remember clearly how American Catholics howled and screamed when the government closed the churches because of COVID. This is when we didn’t understand what COVID was and didn’t know how to treat it, and people were dying in droves. My own parents both died, so I remember what those days were like. But the main thing some American Catholics remember is that the government wasn’t letting them practice their religion.
That’s exactly what’s happening now. It’s just happening mostly to people who aren’t white.
7/8/25 – The paragraph about clergy visits to detainees was updated to reflect recent changes in policy. The previous version read: We are now closing in on a month since the sweltering, punitive detention center in Florida, grotesquely named “Alligator Alcatraz,” was opened, and in that time, not a single member of clergy has been allowed inside to minister to the inmates.
