Last month, at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Donald Trump stated that the US must “bring God back” in order to overcome division and foster stronger communities. The next day, Trump signed an executive order establishing the White House Faith Office.
Previous presidents created a similar office.
When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he vowed to usher in a new era of compassionate conservatism. One of Bush’s first acts as president was to sign an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
The OFBCI’s mission was to help faith-based and community organizations increase their capacity to provide federally funded social services to local residents.
The American Civil Liberties Union argued that President Bush violated the constitution by using tax dollars to fund religion. They also suggested that faith-based initiatives were a GOP scheme to increase the Republican Party’s appeal to working-class voters.
At the 2009 National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama stated, “The particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a greater good for all of us.” Obama rebranded the OFBCI as the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Obama assembled an advisory council comprised of religious and secular leaders, as well as specialists from several fields and diverse backgrounds. Obama’s OFBNP emphasizes social service outreach and aid to the disadvantaged.
This time, the ACLU argued that the Obama administration inherited fundamentally defective faith-based policies from the Bush administration, but the Obama administration denied that it had inherited detrimental policies.
Obama’s approval of Bush’s faith-based initiative revealed that it was a nonpartisan effort to assist religious organizations that were already serving the community, rather than a GOP ploy for votes. As long as faith-based organizations followed federal guidelines, they were considered just another non-profit organization that provided social services; therefore, the government was not funding “religion” like the ACLU implied.
The ACLU took an extreme position on the separation of church and state, which many mainstream Christian organizations interpreted as anti-Christian.
When Donald Trump became president in 2016, he did not nominate a director for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Instead, Trump formed the Center for Religion and Opportunity Initiatives, which acted as the Health and Human Services Department’s contact with religious communities and grassroots organizations while simultaneously pushing for religious liberty across all HHS programs.
President Joe Biden entered the White House during a global pandemic and after the worst rioting in the United States since the 1960s, when police killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in May 2020. Biden promptly announced he would relaunch the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Biden expanded the OFBNP’s scope.
According to a press release, the White House announced, “The Partnerships Office’s initial work will include collaborating with civil society to address the COVID-19 pandemic and boost economic recovery, combat systemic racism, increase opportunity and mobility for historically disadvantaged communities, and strengthen pluralism.”
Faith-based initiatives evolved from a compassionate conservative approach to reduce poverty and substance abuse to a progressive effort to reduce systemic racism and injustices. MAGA Republicans believed Biden’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships overemphasized social justice issues, making it overly “woke.”
Trump was reelected president in 2024, and he established the White House Faith Office to replace Biden’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. According to Trump’s directive, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities … to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, and other federal funding opportunities.”
That sounds like Bush.
“The efforts of faith-based entities,” Trump’s directive stated. “Are essential to strengthening families and revitalizing communities, and the federal government welcomes opportunities to partner with such organizations through innovative, measurable, and outcome-driven initiatives.”
That sounds like Obama.
Biden’s emphasis on tackling systemic racism was missing, but Trump’s executive order required the new Faith Office to prioritize combating anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, and other forms of religious intolerance. Trump’s executive order also stated that the Faith Office will work with the attorney general, who was authorized to form a Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.
Because Christianity is America’s largest religion, Trump detractors dismissed the idea of anti-Christian bias and denounced Trump’s new Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias as an unneeded pander to his MAGA base. However, Christian organizations argue that the task force is overdue because the Biden administration discriminated against them.
That sounds like a “woke-right” reaction.
For the past decade, the term “woke” has been used to define the radical left. The word simply means being aware of societal inequalities, inequities, and injustices. Far-left “woke” politics aimed to provide government solutions for victims of social injustices. However, “woke” activists frequently overstated the problems, played the victim card, and promoted inequities that did not exist in order to demand a federal or state response. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order titled Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.
The Christian right saw that “woke” was more than just a state of mind; it was also a set of tactics, and conservatives who adopted far-left methods to achieve a political end are the “woke right.”
MAGA Christians, according to critics of Trump’s Task Force to End Anti-Christian Bias, exaggerate their experiences with discrimination to play the role of victims.
These critics have a valid point, and their concern is warranted, as those who portray themselves as victims often seek out an enemy to blame and subsequently punish.
However, skeptics who say there is no anti-Christian bias because Christianity is the most popular faith in America are mistaken. The task force will uncover a hidden truth, which is that the majority of anti-Christian bias exists between rival Christian denominations.