President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission convened a third hearing on Religious Liberty in Public Education at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., last week.
The hearing opened with a series of video clips featuring Charlie Kirk, the late CEO of Turning Point USA and TPUSA Faith, who was an outspoken advocate of his Christian faith.
A five-minute video showed Kirk declaring, “The more I study the framers and founders, the more thankful I am to God that we live in this country.”
He stated in another clip, “Freedom cannot exist without virtue. Freedom will come after, and it’s happening right now, people go to church and give their life to God. You cannot have a free society if you do not have a society that values God.”
One of the panelists, Hutz Herzberg from Turning Point Education, shared how Kirk became a “generous donor” to a Christian school he once led.
“Charlie was a man that was strongly motivated by his relationship [with] the Lord in all that he did, and it obviously gave him the courage to … continue to do what he was doing with boldness, with courage, with commitment,” he added. “In the last couple of years, I cannot remember a talk that Charlie gave where he did not speak about his personal faith in the Lord.”
Pastor Jentezen Franklin of the Georgia-based multi-campus megachurch, Free Chapel, who also served as a panelist, discussed the recent mass shootings at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis and a Mormon church in Michigan.
As he reflected on the threats faced by houses of worship, Franklin stated, “We don’t have the luxury of disunity anymore.”
“We are all needing to stand together as never before,” Franklin added, noting how his church spent $1.2 million on security measures.
He highlighted that, despite nationwide threats to churches and faith communities, attendance at his services has continued to grow.
“On the Sunday after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, just in the one campus, we had over 2,000 [more] people than we had the same time that Sunday a year ago,” Franklin recalled. “We had people in the overflow out in our chapel. We had people out in the amphitheater.”
Franklin concluded his opening remarks by saying, “If ever we needed to stand together and stand up for what we believe and the faith, it’s time for pastors and preachers to do that.”
One panel featured individuals connected to public schools who found themselves unable to openly express their faith and deeply held religious beliefs.
Among the speakers were Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach in Washington State whose efforts to pray on the field before games went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Monica Gill, a teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia, who spoke out against her school district’s policy requiring teachers to refer to trans-identified students by their chosen names and pronouns.
Another speaker, teacher Marisol Arroyo-Castro, shared her legal battles with her school district over a crucifix displayed in her classroom.
Nicole Stelle Garrett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, presented statistics indicating that numerous laws at the state and federal levels violate the First Amendment by discriminating against religion.
“At the state level, we identified 364 statutes and 104 regulations that discriminate against religion,” she explained. “All states impose religious restrictions on charter schools, which are privately operated. Many do the same for pre-K, privately operated pre-K programs, and special education providers.”
Garrett stated, “Many states allow high school students to enroll in classes in college, including private college, at public expense but limit their freedom to take classes at religious colleges for dual credit.”
She further identified laws such as “college scholarship programs that exclude religious students attending religious colleges or studying theology,” as well as rules requiring work-study students to “refrain from engaging in religious conduct.”
Garrett highlighted federal laws, noting, “At the federal level, we identified 135 unconstitutional statutes and regulations, 41 of which restrict the religious liberty of private educational institutions.”
The Rev. Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest from Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose parish includes Sacred Heart of Jesus Academy, described how recent legal changes have negatively impacted Catholic schools.
“Recently, the Michigan Supreme Court reinterpreted the state’s nondiscrimination law, redefining sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity,” he lamented.
Sirico warned, “This new framework would compel us to hire staff whose lives and words openly contradict Catholic teaching to adopt speech contrary to the Church’s doctrine, such as pronoun usage divorced from biological reality or to suppress Catholic teaching altogether when educating our students or even advertising for enrollment.”
Todd Williams, president of Cairn University in Pennsylvania, gave examples of how “regulatory” and “accrediting bodies” have hindered his school’s academic programs.
“We chose to close the social work program, eliminating both a BSW degree and a newly launched MSW degree in light of the Council for Social Work Education’s overreach,” he explained.
Williams explained that the reason his institution decided to sever ties with the Council for Social Work Education and eliminate its social work degrees was due to efforts to “compel us to write curriculum that was rooted in Marxism and intersectionality, especially as it applied to matters of human sexuality and gender.”
