A 197-page report released Thursday by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias said that pro-LGBTQ+ policies pursued by former President Joe Biden are anti-Christian. Biden is Roman Catholic, and numerous Christian groups support LGBTQ+-inclusive social policies.
“The Biden administration’s policies regularly clashed with a Christian worldview and burdened traditional religious practices. These conflicts frequently arose over abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation,” the report says, focusing almost entirely on so-called anti-Christian federal polices, some allegedly antisemitic ones, and none affecting other faith communities.
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While the report mentions numerous actions the Biden administration took to reduce discriminatory behavior based on Christian beliefs, it specifically mentions memos, executive orders, and other policies based on the 2020 Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court decided that anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination forbidden by federal law.
The Biden administration used the ruling as a pretext for enforcing transgender-inclusive school, medical, workplace, and institutional policies that gave trans people the rights to access facilities, medical care, and basic respect befitting their gender identities. The administration also used the ruling to rescind policies from the first Trump presidency that sought to protect anti-LGBTQ+ behavior as constitutionally protected forms of religious free speech.
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Report targets Biden policies protecting trans people & queer youth
Among its findings, the report targets a 2024 rule which required foster care providers who wanted to receive designated placement status for caring for LGBTQ+ children to receive training on the needs of LGBTQ+ youth, help queer kids access to age-appropriate healthcare resources, and “commit to establishing an environment that supports the child’s LGBTQI+ status or identity.”
The administration didn’t require all foster carers to follow this rule, nor did it penalize any groups that didn’t seek such designation, making sure to include language about carers’ “religious freedom.”
Nevertheless, the recently released DOJ report says, “Because it viewed traditional Christian values as harmful to children with gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, the Biden [Department of Health and Human Services] took multiple steps to prevent Christian families from living out their religious beliefs.”
“As a result, Christian foster families who had provided safe and loving placements for children in need sometimes lost their licenses, in some cases, dissolving foster families that had been in place for years,” the report adds.
The report also claims that Biden’s 2022 executive order against conversion therapy “took steps to limit Christian families from seeking therapy from likeminded therapists on matters of sexual orientation and gender ideology… painting with a broad brush… that denigrated and attempted to outlaw religious counseling based on traditional views, deeming such approaches to be dangerous.”
The report accuses the Biden administration of “sidelining Christians in favor of their preferred constituencies,” by flying Pride flags on U.S. embassies; acknowledging the 2024 Transgender Day of Visibility, which, that year entirely by coincidence, fell on Easter Sunday; assigning Matt Nosanchuk as a coordinator to stop anti-LGBTQ+ book-banning in schools; and prioritizing other faith traditions in various departmental initiatives.
The report envisions a Christian Nationalist federal government
The report says its development is in accordance with the president’s February 6, 2025 executive order entitled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” which pledged to “protect the religious freedoms of Americans and end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.” The order also accused Biden of “targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.”
The report says its next steps are to “solicit information and ideas from a broad range of people and groups,” but it only mentions Christian groups, as the report doesn’t focus on the numerous other faith traditions practiced nationwide.
The report also pledges to recommend actions to undo the Biden administration’s alleged harms to Christians, including the following “next steps”:
- fostering the delivery of Christian sermons, singing hymns, and scripture in the Pentagon’s Department of Defense,
- rolling back adult trans people’s rights to gender-affirming medical care,
- maintaining a tipline for the “chemical and surgical mutilation of children” (something that isn’t actually happening),
- allowing faith-based housing providers to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people,
- allowing workers and educators to make anti-LGBTQ+ statements as constitutionally protected religious expression,
- forcing schools to out trans students to their potentially unsupportive parents,
- having the Department of Homeland Security publish Bible verses on its social media channels, and
- allowing churches to endorse religious candidates without losing their tax-exempt status.
Secular groups criticize anti-LGBTQ+ report as “bogus”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State said in a statement, “The Executive Summary alone confirms what we have been saying all along: The administration’s claims that it has uncovered extensive evidence of anti-Christian bias within the federal government are unfounded. Instead, the report just repeats the misleading examples the Trump administration has been using since Day 1. The task force is doing exactly what we expected: imposing its narrow view of Christianity on the country and attacking freedom and equality, especially for women and LGBTQ+ Americans.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) called the report a “political document masquerading as a civil rights analysis,” with FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor saying, “The bogus findings of the ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ were always a foregone conclusion since the purpose of the task force was to presume and look for bias against only one class, conservative Christians, and seek to expand protections only for them.”
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