Professors Nicholas Miller and Jonathan Scriven at Washington Adventist University Honors College Center for Law and Public Policy have issued their response to the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission Report, and it points out some areas that may have been overlooked by others writing on the topic.
A Response to the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission Report “Americans’ First Freedom
Summary: We believe that the draft report of the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission offers a forceful and often compelling account of the importance of religious liberty in American life. It rightly seeks to reassert religion as a vital component of the nation’s constitutional order and civic culture. At its best, the report reflects a genuine concern for preserving the freedom of conscience and ensuring that religious individuals and institutions are not unjustly excluded from participation in public life. Yet, for all its strengths, the report ultimately suffers from significant historical omissions, analytical imbalances, and a troubling lack of attention to religious minorities outside the Judeo-Christian framework. These shortcomings weaken its credibility and, ironically, risk reproducing the very violations of equal religious liberty that it ostensibly seeks to challenge and prevent.
I. Positive Contributions of the Report
A. Recognition of a Pervasive Secular Ideology. One of the report’s most persuasive contributions is its recognition that a form of secular ideology has gained dominance across many sectors of American society—one that in various ways, marginalized religious belief and religious adherents. The Commission’s observation that religion is increasingly treated “as a problem or annoyance to be managed, restricted, or sidelined” captures a real and widely experienced phenomenon. In educational institutions, corporate environments, and certain areas of public policy, religious perspectives are often tolerated only insofar as they align with prevailing secular norms. When they diverge—particularly on contested moral issues such as sexuality, gender identity, or bioethics—religious individuals may face professional or social consequences. The report is right to highlight that this dynamic does not necessarily arise from formal legal prohibitions, but from cultural and institutional pressures that function as de facto constraints on religious expression. The Commission’s critique of the so-called “myth of neutrality” is especially valuable. The assumption that secular frameworks represent a neutral baseline, while religious perspectives are inherently biased or sectarian, is philosophically untenable. Secular ideologies themselves embody substantive moral commitments. When these commitments are treated as normative and unquestionable, religious viewpoints are effectively relegated to second-class status. The report is correct to identify this as a distortion of genuine pluralism.
B. Affirmation of Religious Pluralism
Closely related is the report’s commendable emphasis on the importance of protecting a healthy religious pluralism. The Commission repeatedly affirms that religious liberty is “for everyone” and that it benefits believers and nonbelievers alike. This is not merely a rhetorical point; it reflects a foundational principle of the American constitutional system.
The strength of the First Amendment lies in its refusal to privilege one faith over another while simultaneously protecting the free exercise of all. In this respect, the Commission is right to call for renewed vigilance in preserving conditions under which diverse religious communities can flourish. Its recognition that pluralism requires not just formal tolerance, but meaningful inclusion in public life, is both accurate and important.
C. Religion as a Conscience for the State
The report also deserves credit for emphasizing the historic role of religion as a moral and prophetic voice in American public life. Its discussion of religion as a “conscience of the state”—drawing on examples from abolitionism to the civil rights movement—highlights a truth that is often forgotten in contemporary debates. Religious conviction has frequently served as a catalyst for reform, challenging unjust laws and calling the nation to live up to its professed ideals.
This insight is particularly significant in a democratic society. If public discourse is limited to purely secular reasoning, it risks excluding deeply held moral perspectives that have historically contributed to the nation’s moral development. The Commission’s insistence that religious voices should not be silenced, but engaged, is therefore well taken.
II. Critical Concerns
Despite these strengths, the report’s analysis has some significant flaws that need to be remedied.
A. A Historically Incomplete Account of Separation
The Commission’s treatment of the “wall of separation between church and state” is one of its most problematic aspects. The report portrays this concept as largely a product of Enlightenment thinking, associated with figures like Thomas Jefferson, and suggests that it has been improperly expanded by modern secularists. While there is some truth in this critique, it is historically incomplete and ultimately misleading.
Long before Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, the idea of a separation between church and state had been articulated by religious dissenters themselves—most notably Roger Williams, the 17th-century Baptist pastor and founder of Rhode Island. Williams famously wrote of the need to maintain “a wall or hedge of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”1 This was not a secularist argument for excluding religion from public life, but a deeply theological claim that the purity of the church required protection from state interference.
This dissenting Protestant tradition played a crucial role in shaping American religious liberty. As has been shown by recent scholarship, the Establishment Clause cannot be understood solely as a product of Enlightenment skepticism toward religion. It was also—and perhaps more fundamentally—the result of theological convictions held by Baptists, Quakers, and other dissenting groups who had experienced persecution under established churches.2
By overlooking this religious heritage, the Commission creates a false dichotomy between “secular” separation and “religious” participation. In reality, the principle of disestablishment emerged from within religious thought itself. It was precisely because religion was considered so important that it needed to be protected from the corrupting influence of state power.
This omission matters. Without acknowledging the religious roots of separation, the report risks endorsing a model of church-state relations that insufficiently guards against governmental entanglement with religion—a danger the founders were acutely aware of.
B.Failure to Grapple with Religious Nationalism
If the report’s critique of secular ideology is one-sided, its failure to meaningfully engage the dangers of religious or Christian nationalism is even more striking. While the Commission briefly acknowledges the risk of theocracy, this acknowledgment is cursory and lacks substantive analysis.
This omission is not merely academic—it reflects a significant blind spot. The historical record is clear: the entanglement of religious authority with state power has, for much of Western history, resulted in coercion, exclusion, and persecution. From the establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire in the fourth century through the confessional states of early modern Europe, religious establishment invariably led to the marginalization or suppression of dissenting beliefs.
It was precisely this history that informed the framers’ decision to adopt the First Amendment. They sought to avoid not primarily secular oppression of religion, which was not really even seen before the French Revolution, but religious domination of the state. The religion clauses were designed to prevent the kind of legal privileging of a particular faith, and the resulting marginalization and abuse of minority faiths, that had characterized European societies for centuries. ( Professor Nicholas Miller demonstrates this in The Religious Roots of the First Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2012). 1 Roger Williams, Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London: Gregory Dexter, 1644), 3.)
Yet the Commission’s report gives little attention to contemporary forms of this danger. Indeed, in its own framing and examples, the report often centers almost exclusively on Christian and Jewish concerns. While these communities undoubtedly face real challenges, as well enumerated in the report, the relative absence of other religious traditions—particularly Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and others—is a gap that can hardly be viewed as accidental.
There are occasional token references to non-Christian groups, but they are largely peripheral. The overwhelming focus remains on issues affecting Judeo-Christian communities. This imbalance raises an uncomfortable question: does the report genuinely reflect a commitment to pluralism, or does it subtly, or not so subtly, privilege certain religious, Judeo-Christian identities?
A serious analysis of religious liberty in America today must confront both sides of the equation: the marginalization of religion by secular forces and the potential for religious majorities to dominate minorities. By neglecting the latter, the report presents an incomplete and distorted picture of current challenges and realities.
C. The Most Significant Omission: The Experience of Sikhs and Muslims
The report’s most consequential shortcoming, however, lies in what it almost entirely omits. According to data from federal agencies such as the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics and reports from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Justice, Sikhs and Muslims in the United States are among the most frequently targeted religious groups for harassment, discrimination, and violence. (Some reports indicate the Sikh population has the highest numbers of hate crimes against them per capita of any religious group in the U.S.) Anti-Sikh and Muslim bias has been consistently documented in employment, education, law enforcement practices, and public life.
Yet this reality receives virtually no meaningful attention in the Commission’s report.
This omission is not a minor oversight; it is a fundamental failure when measured by the Report’s own standards. If the purpose of the report is to identify threats to religious liberty, it cannot credibly ignore the experiences of some of the most vulnerable religious minorities in the country. The absence of sustained discussion of anti-Sikh and Muslim discrimination—along with the minimal attention given to other non-Judeo-Christian groups—undermines the report’s claim to represent religious liberty “for everyone.”
This omission replicates the very dynamic the report criticizes: the marginalization of certain religious communities. By focusing almost entirely on the concerns of majority or historically dominant groups, the report reinforces a hierarchy of religious concern in which some voices are amplified while others are neglected.
In this sense, the report becomes an example of the problem it seeks to address. It critiques a cultural environment that sidelines religious perspectives, yet it sidelines the perspectives of some religious groups within its own analysis.
III.Conclusion: A Call for Revision and Inclusion
The Religious Liberty Commission’s report raises important and legitimate concerns about the place of religion in American public life. Its critique of secular ideological dominance, its affirmation of pluralism, and its recognition of religion’s role as a moral conscience are all valuable contributions to an ongoing national conversation.
But the report’s weaknesses are too significant to overlook. Its incomplete historical account of church-state separation, its failure to seriously engage the dangers of religious nationalism, and—most critically—its omission of the experiences of non-Judeo-Christian religious minorities limit its effectiveness and credibility.
If the Commission is to fulfill its stated mission, it must take seriously the full scope of religious liberty challenges in the United States. This requires a more balanced and historically grounded analysis, as well as a genuine commitment to inclusivity that extends beyond the dominant religious traditions.
Accordingly, the report should be returned to the Commission for further development. A revised version should include a thorough investigation of the challenges faced by religious minorities—especially Muslims, Sikhs, and other frequently targeted groups—and should more fully engage the historical and theological foundations of religious liberty, including the dissenting Protestant traditions that helped shape the First Amendment.
In the United States, religious liberty has never meant protecting only the faith of the majority. From the nation’s founding, its promise has rested on the equal dignity of every person’s conscience and the equal protection of every religious community. A commission charged with defending religious liberty should reflect that principle. Only then can the report truly serve as a credible and comprehensive defense of religious liberty for all Americans.
Nicholas P. Miller, JD, PhD
WAU Honors College Professor of Law and Religion
Co-Director of the Center for Law and Public Policy
C. Jonathan Scriven, D. IR, MA
Associate Director, WAU Honors College
Co-Director of the Center for Law and Public Policy
Washington Adventist University