When President Joe Biden took office four years ago, some more conservative religious freedom advocates were hopeful that he would turn down the temperature of faith-related culture wars.
As a lifelong Catholic, Biden is closely connected to many people who oppose birth control, abortion and same-sex marriage because of their religion.
The hope was that he’d keep them in mind when overseeing policy battles, and temper the Democratic Party’s growing disdain for legal exemptions allowing people of faith to live according to their beliefs about health care, sexuality and marriage.
But instead of striking a balance between conservative and progressive takes on religious freedom, Biden mostly toed the Democratic party line.
He rolled back protections for religious organizations participating in federal programs, pushed for new, exemption-free protections for the LGBTQ community and fought against limitations on abortion access.
These moves and others left many conservative people of faith frustrated with his leadership.
In a column published this week, a Catholic legal analyst claimed no president has harmed religious freedom more than Biden.
Nathan Finn, senior fellow on religious liberty with the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, didn’t go that far in an interview with the Deseret News, but he did speak of missed opportunities, sharing his sense that Biden failed to consistently champion religious freedom over the past four years.
“I wish that President Biden’s views of religious freedom sounded more like the church that he has been a part of for his entire life rather than the party that he has led for the last four years,” Finn said.
Biden’s record on LGBTQ rights
Finn, who identifies as a conservative evangelical, was particularly frustrated by Biden’s approach to gender and sexuality.
When proposing new laws or administrative rules related to gender identity or LGBTQ discrimination, Biden often failed to acknowledge how the policies would affect conservative religious communities, Finn said.
Instead, the president acted as if opposition to the policies amounted to bigotry.
“There was an unwillingness to champion religious freedom when it came to those who hold more conservative understandings of human gender and sexuality,” Finn said.
A key source of this frustration is the Equality Act, which Biden promoted at multiple points of his presidency.
The bill, which passed the House in 2021 but then stalled in the Senate, would amend federal civil rights law to boost protections for gay and transgender Americans while also limiting the application of federal religious freedom protections.
“For our LGBTQ+ Americans, let’s finally get the bipartisan Equality Act to my desk. The onslaught of state laws targeting transgender Americans and their families — it’s simply wrong," Biden said during his 2022 State of the Union address.
Ironically, the comment came just before he highlighted the importance of bipartisanship, a factor that some religious freedom advocates say was missing from Biden’s faith-related work over the past four years.
In general, Biden ignored calls to find a middle ground when LGBTQ rights came up against religious freedom, wrote Stanley Carlson-Thies, founder and senior director of the nonpartisan Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, in an email.
“Instead of working out a ‘fairness for all’ policy to simultaneously protect LGBTQ rights and institutional religious freedom, the Biden administration weighed in heavily on the the former side, causing difficulties for many morally conservative faith-based organizations,” he said.
Biden did sign the Respect for Marriage Act in December 2022, turning a proposal to strengthen protections for same-sex and interracial couples and uphold existing religious freedom rights into law.
But at the signing ceremony, he emphasized the need to pass the Equality Act next and said nothing about respecting religious objectors to same-sex marriage.
Protecting faith groups
Although Finn and Carlson-Thies are critical of Biden’s approach to religious freedom in the LGBTQ rights context, they said his overall religious freedom record includes some bright spots.
For one thing, the Biden administration worked to build bridges between faith-based charities and government officials as part of a broader push to care for the poorest Americans.
Biden also increased the pool of money available to houses of worship that were struggling to guard against potential violence, like church shootings, Carlson-Thies said.
“There were greatly expanded grants and training to help houses of worship bolster their defenses against attack,” he said.
Similarly, Finn praised Biden’s work on antisemitism, saying that his administration proactively worked to protect the Jewish community at home and abroad.
“There was a resurgence of antisemitism in American culture and abroad over especially the second half of the Biden administration, and I think Biden ... recognized it as a problem” and fought against it, he said.
Finn also praised Biden for keeping the U.S. engaged in international efforts to protect people of all faiths and no faith around the world.
“Biden continued to position America as a champion of international religious freedom and made that something we care about in our diplomacy with other nations,” he said.
From Biden to Trump
Finn said he hopes President-elect Donald Trump will continue that international religious freedom work even as his administration reverses course on many of Biden’s other faith-related moves.
After he takes office Monday, Trump is expected to issue a flurry of executive orders, some of which will likely reinstate heightened religious freedom protections for faith groups receiving federal money.
It’s safe to predict that move, since the protections that Biden adjusted were put in place by Trump during his first administration.
But even if next week was Trump’s first time in the White House, it wouldn’t be a surprise for him to adjust the country’s approach to religious freedom, Finn noted.
“This is one of those issues that does tend to yo-yo a little bit depending on which party is in office,” he said. “This is an area with fundamental disagreements between at least the public officials who are Republicans and Democrats.”
Carlson-Thies is among those hoping that the Trump administration doesn’t yo-yo so far in the rightward direction that it becomes a mirror image of the Biden administration.
In other words, he’d like to see Trump spend some of his political capital on resolving religious freedom battles, rather than amping them up.
“The next administration has to really take seriously that we’re a nation of communities of different convictions and ask, ‘How can the government help them live together?’” he told the Deseret News this fall.