EXCLUSIVE: Trump To Address Threats To Faith At Public Schools

As parents across the country push back against schools undermining their children’s faith, President Donald Trump will speak at the Museum of the Bible on Monday during a hearing on religious liberty in education, The Daily Wire has learned.

Trump will give remarks during the second meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission he established earlier this year to protect the rights of Americans to practice their faith. At the hearing, parents and students will discuss their experience of expressing their faith in the public schools. 

The Trump administration has placed a large emphasis on protecting religious liberties, from issuing new guidance that allows federal workers to be more open about their beliefs, to pardoning pro-life Christians targeted by the Biden administration over peaceful demonstrations at abortion facilities. 

“The previous administration abused the federal government’s power to interfere with Americans’ First Amendment right to religious freedom,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told The Daily Wire. “They even used the Department of Justice to target peaceful people of faith, specifically Christians. This is exactly why President Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission to stop the emerging threats against Americans’ inalienable right to practice their religion freely.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Religious Liberty Commission Chair Dan Patrick will also speak at the hearing. 

The first panel to be heard at the event will be a group of elementary school students “who will share stories of challenges to their religious liberty,” according to the White House. Other panels will feature parents whose rights to raise their kids religiously were “challenged or abridged in the school system,” and students who faced challenges to their faith in higher education.

The goal of the hearing will be to “understand the historic landscape of religious liberty in the public education setting, identify present threats to religious liberty in America’s public school systems, and identify opportunities to secure religious liberty in this context for the future,” the White House told The Daily Wire. 

In May, Trump signed an executive order creating the commission with the task of producing a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty and the top threats to it in the United States today. 

“President Trump is the greatest defender for people of faith in modern history and will continue to protect and promote America’s founding principle of religious freedom,” Rogers told The Daily Wire. 

Other notable commission members to be in attendance include Ben Carson, Senior Adviser to the White House Faith Office, Paula White, Pastor Franklin Graham, Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and Eric Metaxas. 

The first meeting of the commission took place in June, during which attendees contrasted the Trump administration’s approach to religious liberty with that of former President Joe Biden.

On Tuesday, Trump said that he would be making a “big announcement” in about two weeks related to the administration’s goals to protect religious liberty. The administration is also looking to protect churches following an attack on a Catholic school last week in Minneapolis by a transgender-identifying shooter who had a documented hatred of Christians. 

In recent years, the Supreme Court has handed advocates of religious liberty a number of major victories in education, including siding with a high school football coach who was disciplined for leading voluntary prayers after games. More recently, the court sided with a group of Maryland parents who argued that schools violated their religious beliefs by forcing them to participate in sexually-themed education.