President Donald Trump on Thursday said he’s ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to stand up a “task force” to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” within the United States and prosecute instances of “anti-Christian violence and vandalism.”
Speaking at a bipartisan National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington, DC Hilton hotel, Trump said the task force will be ordered to “immediately halt all forms of anti Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government,” including at the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“In addition, the task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society, and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide,” said Trump, who highlighted the example of Paulette Harlow, an anti-abortion activist who was convicted of conspiracy to violate a federal law prohibiting the blockading of reproductive health facilities.
Harlow, who he described as having been sentenced to a two-year prison sentence for merely praying in front of the clinic, was one of the many anti-abortion activists who he pardoned upon returning to the presidency last month.
The president justified the pardon by claiming that Harlow and her co-conspirators had seen federal law enforcement “selectively weaponized” against them for their Christian faith.
He told prayer breakfast attendees that his administration would also work to “protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares” and “bring our country back together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
Under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, Americans are guaranteed freedom of worship and the government is prohibited from creating any manner of established religion along the lines of the Church of England in the United Kingdom.
But Trump and his supporters have long pushed for Christianity — specifically evangelical and fundamentalist strains of Christianity — to occupy a privileged place in American society.
His administration is expected to throw support behind efforts to permit public funding of religious schools and has already given social conservatives a victory by signing an order to ban the legal recognition of transgender people by the US government.
