You may have missed it amid the crowded news cycle. But on April 30, the Justice Department released a 565-page document deserving far more attention than it has received: a report by the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, cataloging a systematic pattern of discrimination against Christians embedded throughout the federal government during the Biden administration.
For Alabamians, the findings should land not as a partisan abstraction but as a personal affront. Alabama is among the most devoutly Christian states in the nation, with Pew Research recently finding that 73% of the state’s adults identify as Christian, a decline from 86% a decade prior. According to Gallup, Alabama has ranked as the second most religious state in the country, trailing only Mississippi, a distinction it held for years. Some 90% of Alabamians say religion is “very important” or “somewhat important” to their lives, the highest percentage of any state.
These statistics are not sociological curiosities. They describe a people for whom faith is not merely a weekend habit but the animating architecture of daily existence: how they raise their children, organize their communities, understand suffering, and conceive of justice.
What the DOJ report reveals, then, is that for four years, the federal government – which Alabamians fund with their taxes and empower with their votes – was engaged in something between studied indifference and active hostility toward the very convictions that define their lives.
The report, led by the DOJ and comprising 17 federal departments and agencies, was established pursuant to Executive Order 14202, signed by President Trump in February 2025. Its findings are organized around prosecutions, enforcement actions, policy decisions, adverse employment actions, and restrictions on religious expression. The cumulative picture is not flattering to our Republic.
Consider the DOJ’s own conduct under the prior administration. The report finds that Biden’s Justice Department “operated as an enforcement arm for abortion non-governmental organizations,” including Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, pursuing aggressive prosecutions of nonviolent pro-life, Christian demonstrators under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act – while responding with notably less urgency to violent attacks against pregnancy resource centers.
Prosecutors privately complained when a FACE case was assigned to a judge described in internal communications as a “very Catholic magistrate” who was “very particular” about not “infringing on the [defendants’] first amendment rights.” They also “mocked Christian pro-life views as ‘culty.’”
The report notes that Biden DOJ prosecutors “tried to screen out jurors based on their Christian beliefs” and “requested an average sentence of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants, compared to 12.3 months for pro-choice defendants” committing comparable offenses. So much for equal justice under law.
The FBI’s conduct was, if anything, more troubling. The Bureau’s Richmond Field Office, relying on characterizations furnished by the Southern Poverty Law Center, began treating traditional Catholics – those attached to the Latin Mass and holding conventional views on abortion and sexuality – as potential domestic terrorists.
The report documents that the office “considered traditional Catholics as potential violent extremists” based on “their preferred popes, devotion to the Traditional Latin Mass, and views on abortion, immigration, and human sexuality.” One need not be Catholic to find this chilling. The use of a citizen’s liturgical preferences as a basis for federal surveillance is the kind of thing Madison feared when he warned, in Federalist No. 10, against factions using governmental power to trample on “the rights of other citizens.”
The IRS, meanwhile, was documented denying tax-exempt status to a Christian organization on the grounds that its “[B]ible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican] party and candidates,” a statement of breathtaking administrative audacity, in which a revenue agency presumed to adjudicate the political valence of Scripture.
Federal courts found no such problems. State regulators found no such problems. The Biden Education Department was apparently not similarly constrained: it levied a $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University (a Christian institution), a sum dwarfing the $2.4 million penalty assessed against Penn State following Jerry Sandusky’s serial child molestation and the $4.5 million assessed against Michigan State in the Larry Nassar case.
One searches in vain for the principle of proportionality that produced these results.
The report’s broader policy findings are no less disturbing. The administration, it concludes, “generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held but zealously pursued actions to limit Christians’ ability to act in accordance with their faith.” This is a fine distinction with a devastating practical consequence: a faith sequestered entirely within one’s interior life is not free exercise in any meaningful constitutional sense.
There is a clarifying electoral choice embedded in all of this. The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential campaign will not be, on one level, about budgets or trade policy alone. They will be about the relationship between the citizen’s conscience and the coercive apparatus of the state.
The trajectory that the Biden administration established, in which federal prosecutors coordinate with advocacy organizations to build dossiers on churchgoers, revenue agents parse the political implications of biblical doctrine, and Christian foster families lose their licenses for declining to affirm ideological positions their faith forbids, is a trajectory that, if resumed, will not stop where it has thus far arrived.
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned that morality cannot be “maintained without religion” and that no man could claim the title of patriot “who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” He was describing, with the precision of lived experience, what a republic requires to function. What the DOJ report describes is the opposite: a federal bureaucracy that treated those pillars as obstacles.
Alabama’s Christians – Baptists and Catholics, traditionalists and charismatics, those who attend Latin Masses and those who clap in storefront churches – are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the freedom to raise their children, serve their communities, run their organizations, and live out their convictions without the IRS, FBI and DOJ mobilizing against them.
That is a modest request. It is also, apparently, a contested one.
Alabama’s voters understand something that the prior administration’s policymakers did not: that the freedom to believe is meaningless without the freedom to act on belief. The coming elections are, at bottom, a referendum on whether that understanding will be honored in Washington, or whether the machinery of government will once again be turned against the faithful.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Free Enterprise Initiative and a Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
