Vance Addresses Concerns About Religious Liberty in the US and Abroad

At a time when nongovernmental organizations are under intense scrutiny for what they are doing with federal funding, religious leaders, nonprofit executives, and religious liberty advocates gathered Wednesday to hear Vice President JD Vance articulate the Trump administration’s position on religious freedom.

“Now, our administration believes we must stand for religious freedom, not just as a legal principle—as important as that is—but as a lived reality, both within our own borders and especially outside them. In recent years, too often has our nation’s international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of uncertainty,” Vance said at the International Religious Freedom Summit, an annual gathering of the biggest players in preserving religious conscience around the world.

Vance called out the government sending federal taxpayer dollars abroad to nongovernmental organizations dedicated to spreading atheism across the globe. His remarks came as the Trump administration is making significant changes to United States foreign aid to cut not only waste, fraud, and abuse but also to curb the Left’s use of foreign aid to spread its ideology around the world. Most U.S. Agency for International Development employees will be put on administrative leave Friday, according to the agency’s website.

The Trump administration has close ties to the religious freedom summit. Sam Brownback, who served as the ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during Trump’s first term, is a current co-chair, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously served as co-chair of the summit. 

In his remarks at the summit, Vance began by joking that his seven-year-old had to come to work with him and probably felt his liberty was being violated. Vance then highlighted the importance of faith to American renewal. 

“We know in America, faith nurtures our communities,” the vice president told the audience.

Vance argued against the modern conceit that religious freedom arose as a liberal principle rather than proceeding from the centuries of church teaching in the West. He cited early church leaders, including Tertullian, and noted that Founding Fathers like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had drawn inspiration from the early church fathers. 

The vice president talked about fostering a culture where faith can thrive. He discussed how he had grown up Christian but not as a regular churchgoer. He joked that his grandmother had told him that even the Episcopalians in her childhood home of eastern Kentucky were snake handlers.

Vance noted the importance of how the church was a gathering place for all citizens: “The thing about it, the church was a place—it still is—where people of different races, different backgrounds, different walks of life came together and committed to their shared communities and enforcing commitment to their God.” 

Vance also said the United States must help Christians in Iraq.

“We must be able to look at the catastrophes like the plight of Iraq’s Christians over the past three decades and possess the moral clarity to act when something’s gone wrong.”

He praised the assembled advocates in the room, highlighting that their support for religious liberty was a recognition of the fundamental dignity of mankind.

“Thank you for safeguarding the rights of faith communities across the globe, and thank you most of all for believing, because we know that the source of religious liberty is the recognition that all of us are equal under the rights and laws of God, and that principle will guide us in the years to come,” Vance concluded. 

Reacting to the speech, Drew Bowling, who serves as the congressional co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit, told The Daily Signal, “Vice President Vance hit it out of the park, quoting with precision key principles of his deep Catholic faith, to firmly and eloquently declare that the second Trump administration will act with even greater intent and effect to protect international religious freedom, including here at home in the United States.”

He added, “I sat with the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch, His Holiness Aphrem II from Damascus, and Bishop Zaidan, who runs international affairs for the USCCB [United States Conference of Catholic Bishops]. We, as with the entire audience of so many faith traditions from across the country and the globe representing large diaspora populations in the United States, were universally thrilled.”

This year, the International Religious Freedom Summit was sponsored in part by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), the Religious Freedom Institute, Pepperdine University, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

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