This week, Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is joined by a panel of faith leaders, legal experts, and policymakers to discuss the urgent threats facing democracy and religious freedom under the Trump administration.
Together, they explore how faith communities can take action against executive overreach, attacks on religious institutions, and efforts to dismantle critical government programs.
Here’s the complete list of speakers:
- Jamie Raskin – United States Congressman, MD-08
- Skye Perryman – President and CEO, Democracy Forward
- Adam Nicholas Phillips – Chief Strategy Officer & Chief of Staff, Interfaith America; former head of localization and faith-based efforts at USAID
- Melissa Rogers – Former Special Assistant to the President and Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Biden and Obama administrations
- Jennifer Butler – Founder, Faith in Democracy; former founder and executive director, Faith in Public Life
- Maggie Siddiqi – Senior Fellow, Interfaith Alliance, former Director of the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships at U.S. Department of Education
At a time when religious communities are being targeted, and democratic institutions are under attack, this discussion serves as a powerful call to action, emphasizing that courage, community, and persistence are essential in this moment. Rep. Jamie Raskin warns, “It is the religious, the real religious community, that is under attack by these people, and we’ve got to stand up and defend all of these positive projects that religious organizations have been engaged in.” Rev. Jennifer Butler underscores the need for resistance, stating, “The first rule for resisting autocracy? Do not obey in advance.” Maggie Siddiqi highlights the misuse of government power, reminding us, “Formal investigations are the role of government whenever that’s warranted. Unsubstantiated slander is not.”
Skye Perryman reinforces the legal limits of executive authority, asserting, “In this country, the president doesn’t get to denounce the Constitution or take away constitutional rights with the stroke of a pen or with the signing of an executive order.” Rev. Adam Nicholas Phillips paints a dire picture of the consequences of policy decisions, warning, “Stories are unfolding every day, every hour, around the world because of the pause in funding, and because of the systematic dismantling of USAID in a matter of days.” Melissa Rogers reinforces the fundamental principles of democracy, stating, “Presidents are not kings, and thus the federal executive branch must have legal authority for its actions.”
Video of this panel discussion is available online at https://youtu.be/dXw0VjJOmJ8?si=huGDOgoJ-vDdY2bj
Please share this episode with one person who would enjoy hearing this conversation, and thank you for listening!
—PANEL TRANSCRIPT—
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Hello everybody! It is great to be with you on this evening. I am grateful for each one of you, for each one of your presence tonight, for each one of your spirits, your hearts, your hands, everything you are bringing in this moment. I am so grateful for the over 1,100 people who have signed up for this gathering, and how important each one of you are. This is one of the central messages that we want to impart here, is that each one of us is valuable. Each one of us is important in this moment. We are so grateful that you’re here.
I want to start with just a couple other acknowledgements of gratitude for the Interfaith Alliance team, Sophia Gottlick and Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, for helping put this great event together. My name is Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. I am the president of Interfaith Alliance. We are part of a broad pro-democracy faith movement that is activated in this time. We are so grateful for all of you that are part of that movement, and we really need one another right now. And so this is an opportunity for us to be with one another, to hear from one another, and to be inspired to take action. So to be aware and inspired.
I want to start tonight with a quote from Governor Pritzker. I hope many of you saw his moving speech in Illinois as governor, and he said something that I want to start with. He says, after setting it up, he said, “All I’m saying is, when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post. Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your complacency. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the tragic spirit of despair overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
I really appreciate the governor for saying that, for encouraging the people of Illinois. I think he also encouraged the people of the nation with that. There’s a word that stuck with me especially in that, which is “courage.” And I am honored that Interfaith Alliance has been a close partner with Democracy Forward and many of the other amazing legal efforts to secure our democracy, to really fight back, especially under the leadership of Skye Perryman, who we’re going to be hearing from today.
And I want to say, she said something in a meeting I was in. She said the religious groups – because Democracy Forward has supported the effort to fight back against ICE – and she said the religious groups, when many people are shirking and shrieking, the religious groups are coming forward with courage. And the root of courage is core, it is heart, and I think tonight I just want us to bring our heart, the strength of our heart, the strength of love, the love, the powerful love, the kind of Martin Luther King Jr. kind of love, that can overcome and that can really meet this moment. So I just invite all of us to bring that together.
I want to start, next, with introducing a wonderful colleague who is Maggie Siddiqi, who is going to talk a little bit about the reality that we are facing. Maggie Siddiqi is a part of the Interfaith Alliance community. She is a senior fellow at Interfaith Alliance, she’s the former director of the US Department of Education Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
And, Maggie, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what we’re really facing right now.
MAGGIE SIDDIQI:
Well, thank you so much, Paul, and it’s a pleasure to be here with everyone today. I wanted to offer just a brief rundown, before we get to our main speakers of the evening, of the, sadly, extremely long list of attacks on faith communities in just 30 days of the Trump administration. We’ll be dropping in the chat a link to our webpage where we are tracking this growing list and so folks can read about all of the attacks there. But I wanted to highlight five themes in how this administration is attacking faith communities, and offer a few examples of each.
So first, the Trump administration is having a chilling effect on religious gatherings. For example, as you’ve likely heard, Trump revoked a 30-year-old policy in order to allow immigration enforcement officials to conduct raids in houses of worship and other sensitive locations. At best, this throws our houses of worship into chaos as they try to develop protocols for what to do if worship services are interrupted by federal agents; and, at worst, families and communities might stay home if they’re afraid and they won’t be able to engage in the free exercise of religion.
Second, this administration is using the full weight of the federal government to condemn specific clergy or specific faith-based institutions, and accuse them of wrongdoing with no evidence. I’m just coming off of an appointment with the US Department of Education, and during my time there it was an absolute guiding principle that, as a representative of the federal government, one did not use the full weight of that office to single out specific individuals – in our case, students or student groups – for nationwide public condemnation.
Formal investigations are the role of government whenever that’s warranted. Unsubstantiated slander is not. And Elon Musk, in his government capacity, accused the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America of money laundering. Vice President Vance accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of being interested solely in their bottom line. After they condemned the administration’s recent immigration policies, the administration refused to pay the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for refugee resettlement efforts they had already done, leading the Conference to have no choice but to sue the administration. Now, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is decidedly not a progressive-leaning institution, leading one bishop to say, “If these are our friends, I’d hate to meet our enemies.”
Third, in terms of themes, of how these attacks are coming against faith communities, this administration has disbanded efforts aimed at religious inclusion through its war on DEI, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. For example, after the executive order directing federal agencies to eliminate DEI efforts, a Christian affinity group at the Department of State was forced to disband. In my role at the Department of Education, I was centrally focused on ensuring students of all religious and non-religious backgrounds could bring their full selves into the classroom, and not have to hide that part of their identities at school.
Our work had a good amount of bipartisan support. Undercutting any effort like DEI to be inclusive of kids’ religious identities will undermine their religious freedom. Our Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships website linked to resources to help schools and communities support students’ religious freedom, and all of the pages on our website have since been erased.
Fourth, the Trump administration is engaging in divide-and-conquer strategies that pit faith communities against one another. For example, Trump issued an executive order allegedly aimed at addressing antisemitism, with an accompanying fact sheet that was filled with Islamophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. It called some students “jihadists”, said they “infested” college campuses, and are “terrorists.” And whether or not you feel this executive order will address the very real problem of antisemitism, it certainly fuels Islamophobia and appears aimed, at least in part, in exacerbating existing rifts between Jewish and Muslim communities.
And then the last theme that I wanted to highlight is, the Trump administration uses distorted theology as a cover for all of these misdeeds. Trump continues to blasphemously allege he was chosen by God for this role, and Trump also established a White House faith office aimed at addressing anti-Christian bias, despite the fact that the bias appears to be coming from within his own administration, as I’ve outlined above.
So I’m sure our speakers will shed more light on those concerns and others, and help us determine how to take action together here for the sake of all our communities. So I wanted to offer that brief overview as we get started.
Back to you, Paul.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Thank you so much, Maggie.
I’m going to do the briefest of introductions of our speakers and then I will be inviting Rep. Raskin to lead us off. There’s Rep. Jamie Raskin, United States Congressman from Maryland. We will then have Rev. Adam Nichols Phillips, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff Interfaith America and former executive director of the local faith and transformative partnership hub at the United States Agency for International Development, also known as USAID. Skye Perryman is joining us, who is the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, and truly one of the heroes, heroines of this moment. Melissa Rogers, former special assistant to the president and executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
It’s important to recognize that each of these individuals will be speaking on their own behalf and from their own areas of expertise. And so now I invite Rep. Jamie Raskin to take the floor. Sir.
U.S. REP. JAMIE RASKIN:
Rev. Raushenbush, thank you for inviting me to come, and thank you for pulling this together on this very important public mission of defending the constitutional values of separation of Church and State, no establishment of religion, free exercise of religion; but also, more importantly, to stand up for moderate and progressive and liberal religionists all over America whose values are being so assaulted and trashed by Trump and Vance and Elon Musk. So I suppose I just want to talk about both sides of this.
One is defending the separation of Church and State against Christian White Nationalism and the effort to trample two centuries of development of constitutional values around the separation of Church and State. You know, some states, like Louisiana, have adopted the idea of endorsing the Ten Commandments and posting the Ten Commandments in school rooms. I’ve got colleagues who are talking about reestablishing prayer in public schools, compulsory prayer in public schools.
One of them got up not long ago, made a big speech on the House floor about how the moral downfall of America was in 1962 with Engel v. Vitale, where the Supreme Court banned prayer in the public schools. And I had to correct him and say, the Supreme Court never banned prayer in the public schools. As long as there are pop math quizzes, there will be prayer in the public schools – because anybody can pray whenever he or she wants to pray. What the Supreme Court found, under the Establishment Clause, was the government cannot compose a script and then compel your children to participate in it in a way that may be against your own religious or spiritual or moral or constitutional values. So we don’t need to restore compulsory, organized, State-sponsored prayer in the public schools. The kids can follow the path that their families have chosen.
My colleagues also want to climb aboard this movement for endorsing the Ten Commandments and posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings. And I told them when they raised this, gee, you know, the Ten Commandments have been doing fine for millennia without an endorsement from the Freedom Caucus and the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. But no, they insist, this is the movement, this is where everything is headed.
So I said, all right, fine, if we’re going to vote on endorsing the Ten Commandments, let’s vote on endorsing each commandment separately, and you’re not allowed to vote for any commandment you yourself have ever violated before. So we’re not taking the name of the Lord in vain in violation of the Third Commandment.
So, in any event, we’ve got to remind people about the fundamental values that are embodied in our Enlightenment Constitution. Everybody has absolutely free exercise of worship and belief and faith, but no religious group can capture the mechanism of government and then start imposing theology and prayers and liturgy on everybody else.
The real issue of this time is the way that religious groups that are actually living their creed through deeds for everybody, not along sectarian lines, are being shut down and cut off by the reactionary authoritarianism that has overtaken government. And I’m thinking specifically – let me give one case with AID, the Agency for International Development.
So there are lots of organizations and groups that have a religious character that are out actually delivering food and goods and housing and humanitarian relief to people all over the world, not along sectarian lines. There’s no religious tests for who gets served, and they’re not evangelizing or proselytizing or propagandizing anybody – they’re just serving humanity.
And yet they’ve been completely cut off in the Agency for International Development, along with almost all of the funds to the agency, which is a violent usurpation of Congress’s lawmaking power as they decide, basically, to abolish the agency. They can’t abolish the agency. Congress created the agency and only Congress can destroy it. But in their path of destruction of AID and food for peace and food for progress and housing construction and work against HIV and AIDS and malaria and avian flu all over the world, religious groups that were involved in this project have been cut off, and have rightfully been loudly complaining about this assault against the poorest people of the world by the richest man in the world, as well as an assault on US farmers, because they’re the ones who were getting contracts for $2 billion in order to get that American-grown food into the hands and the mouths of people starving around the world.
And so, as they’ve spoken out, they’ve been denounced on a religious basis by members of the Trump administration. JD Vance purported to lecture Catholic Relief Services, saying they just cared about their bottom line – that is, they were viewing foreign aid as just a money-making proposition for them, which is just a scandalous and defamatory statement and completely false. We know the people who are looking at government as a money-making opportunity in an attempt to rip everybody off and to engage in corruption.
And we know that, because the very first thing that Trump and Vance did when they got in was, they sacked, they fired 17 inspectors general at all of the federal departments and agencies, and they went on to sack the inspector general at AID because they want to pave the way for corruption throughout the entire federal government. But you’ll see all of the nasty things that they’ve been saying about Catholic Relief Services, about the Lutheran groups that have been cut off, other religious groups.
So I’ll just close with this thought: we need to have everybody else stand up for these groups, but we need an Interfaith Alliance standing up for all of the religiously-inspired groups that are engaged in such crucial humanitarian relief and social reconstruction all over the world as they rebuild housing destroyed in wars, as they stand up for democracy and literacy and the rights of girls and women. It is the religious, the real religious community, that is under attack by these people, and we’ve got to stand up and defend all of these positive projects that religious organizations have been engaged in.
And I’m happy to yield back and thank you for making me part of this conversation.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Representative Raskin, thank you so much. I would like to ask you for a one minute intervention. There there is frustration among many religious activists and others about what Congress might do, how we could be supportive of those who want to stand up. Is there a way, specifically, that we can work with elected officials in an efficient way that isn’t just unloading, but also really being helpful in ways of standing up to this administration and voicing our complete rejection of the direction of our country? What is the most helpful way that religious leaders, but also all of us – not everybody here is a religious leader, or religious, by the way – but is invested? What is the best way we can be helpful?
REP. JAMIE RASKIN:
Well, you know, I gave this example of creating an Interfaith Coalition, which I know exists already, but a manifestation of how these attacks are coming out against religiously-based groups. That’s going to be a very important message to take out to the broader society.
We are involved in tons of litigation through amicus briefs and support for groups. We are winning in court. There are more than a dozen court decisions at the preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order level against the violations of Article 1 lawmaking powers that Congress has that have been violated, against attacks on the civil service laws. I mean, the heart of the civil service is you can’t fire people for political reasons. You only fire them for poor job performance or professional misconduct. And they don’t have any of that on any of the people who are being fired. Rather, these people have the highest possible superior performance ratings in their jobs – and we’re talking about people who are air traffic controllers, people who are forest service firefighters, people who are food and drug and safety inspectors, cancer research scientists at NIH. So we’re standing up for all those people.
We are obviously involved in the essential political project of getting ready to take back the Congress in 2026. I don’t want to violate anybody’s (c)3 status, but there’s lots of ways people can get involved in that. And then, long term, we are fighting to defend democracy against dictatorship and autocracy all over the world. So I hope people will consider their elected officials very much an organic part of this movement. And we have just a two-vote majority of the Republicans in the House, so we’re very close. We’re within striking distance of taking back the House and cutting this reign of terror in half.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Thank you so much, Rep. Raskin, for all of your work – in this time and in all times. You are an incredibly valuable ally in every single way, so thank you very much.
I’m going to turn it over to Adam Nichols Phillips, who is coming off of a stint with AID and is now at Interfaith America, to give us your thoughts. Adam, thank you.
REV. ADAM NICHOLS PHILLIPS:
Thanks so much, Paul, and thanks, Congressman Raskin, for such an eloquent articulation of what’s happening at USAID, which I’m going to be sharing more of tonight.
I just want to step back for a minute and help us just imagine the situation on the ground in far-off places. Children waiting in the hot summer sun in parts of Africa with their moms and dads for a life-saving medicine. At a regularly monthly scheduled appointment, one by one, one sibling receives the med and the other is turned away.
Or think about an orphan in Latin America being told halfway through the school day to shut her books, go home, there’s no more plans for school.
Or think about a young entrepreneurial woman in Southeast Asia who, after surviving years of human trafficking, received a course in business skills and just a little bit of financial investment now told her only source of income is under threat because the market in which she sold her goods would be closed. Stories like that are unfolding every day, every hour, around the world because of the pause in funding, and because of the systematic dismantling of USAID in a matter of days.
USAID was started during the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy saw this as an opportunity to take the tremendous moral leadership, after World War II, around the Marshall Plan, where we airlifted food to starving East Berliners who were suffering under the authoritarian, totalitarian state of the Soviet Union and Soviet East Germany, and wanted to apply that to a world that was growing increasingly more complex, with even more conflict during the Cold War. And for 60 plus years, Republicans and Democrats have invested in USAID.
One of the greatest champions of USAID until January 26th was Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So it’s very confusing and very concerning to see what’s happening. I was the leader at USAID working on faith-based engagement right at the start of the Biden-Harris administration in early 2021, and left the agency at the end of 2023. My good friend, Peter Mandeville, picked up the baton in the final year of the administration.
So USAID has always had these faith-based engagement strategies, these faith-based partnerships and programs, and it really started, actually, as a rich bipartisan legacy kicked off by President George W Bush. So I think it’s really important for folks on the call tonight to remember that these are not partisan issues.
You know, of course, elections have consequences and we’re suffering that tonight and we’ve been suffering that in so many myriad of ways that we’ll hear tonight. But democracy, leadership, these humanitarian assistance, the things I’m talking about tonight on USAID, these do not have to be zero-sum games – and they haven’t, actually. USAID has been one of the most cherished ways in which people with great differences have bridged those differences to come together and do the right thing when it comes to humanitarian assistance and foreign aid.
This was a deep commitment of my former boss, Administrator Samantha Power. She asked me to do a comprehensive overview of all of the programs that the first Trump administration convened around faith-based partnerships – and, of course, every administration does these reviews. Of course, every administration makes some changes, but we were proud to see that there was, for the most part, excellent work on the faith-based portfolio: partnerships like World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services. These are just tried-and-true faith-based partners, and we wanted to go even further in 2021. And so that’s why we increased funding to these partners, actually. Faith-based partners have received more funding than ever before.
Funding for, of course, the COVID-19 response. I have vivid memories of being in very rural Kenya, off the grid, at an Assemblies of God church, of all places, that was a vaccine clinic. We were working with the local Maasai leaders, the government of Kenya. World Relief was our program partner there in the new partnership initiative, and we were getting people life-saving COVID shots.
So there were great things that actually happened in Trump I that I think we need to remember. And there were great things obviously that were happening in the Biden-Harris administration that we need to remember. But in these times of kind of scorched earth approaches to cutting foreign assistance, it’s good to show especially Republicans right now that they’ve been leaders on this in the past and then they can be leaders on this again. There’s too much at stake to make this kind of a scorched earth partisan response, as well.
So when I was at USAID, we kicked off the first ever strategic religious engagement policy. It was called Building Bridges for Development, and it centered faith-based leaders, NGOs, churches, gudwaras, mosques, faith communities all around the world in about 130 countries, to be trusted messengers – but also trusted deliverers of good news on the ground for folks in far-off places.
But what’s at stake tonight is that, as a result of the foreign aid freeze, USAID cannot coordinate with the CDC or others to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases like Ebola. 90% of lifesaving HIV AIDS programs are now stopped. Imagine a child that’s living with HIV relying on those ARV medicines now not being able to access them. It’s an unfolding human tragedy that can be stopped.
There has been the notion that Secretary Rubio is looking to unpause some of these phrases. He’s talked about waivers – but the waivers are not enough, and the unpause has not happened. And so I really encourage folks to go to Catholic Relief Services. Join their call to action – it’s a similar call to action that all of these major faith-based partners and others have been calling for. People are suffering as a result of these policy decisions, and there’s a way in which we can unpause them and get things back online. It’s not too late, but we need to let our elected leaders know what they can do.
I’ll just hand it back to Paul at this point, but feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Blue Sky or X. You can find me, Adam Nichols Phillips. Really great to be with you all. Thank you.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Adam, let me say how moved I am by what you just said, and it really brings it home, the vivid stories that you’ve shared. You were there. You know what’s happening on the ground. These are not victimless crimes that we are witnessing. We are witnessing major crimes, major death happening as a result of these efforts, and so your testimony, and the importance of faith… That’s the irony, the terrible, terrible irony is how important faith has played. And so I just appreciate all of your effort and also this call to join Catholic Relief, their call for USAID, and to, again, raise your voice around USAID. It’s a major faith issue that all of us can be involved with. So thank you so much, Adam, really appreciate you.
I’m next going to invite Skye Perryman, who is the president and CEO of Democracy Forward. She has been doing incredible work, and is one of the great minds and hearts of this moment and this movement that we’re all a part of. And welcome Skye to join us now.
SKYE PERRYMAN:
It’s great to be here and with such moving remarks and reflections. And thank you, Paul, for the opportunity to not just be here on the town hall tonight, but to be a board member of the Interfaith Alliance. And then, of course, I get to be here tonight in my capacity as the president and CEO of Democracy Forward. I think, hopefully, those that are tuning in know a little bit about us, but we are a legal organization that gets to go to court every single day for our favorite clients, the American people, and for our democracy, and so you can learn more about us at democracyforward.org.
But, Paul, you had asked me to speak tonight about, as we look at this month that we’ve had since inauguration, how we’re processing it, how we’re responding and what things look like in the courts. So I just first want to stop and make a little space for what I think so many Americans, so many of us, so many of you that are on here tonight, so many of us personally, are experiencing in this time. We have a president that, on the campaign trail, disavowed these very extreme policies that are in Project 2025, said he didn’t know anything about it – and then immediately has installed leaders within the federal government that are accelerating the implementation of some of the most extreme policies.
By the way, for those of you who were following the Project 2025 developments – and we of course know the Interfaith Alliance did so much to educate people about that – that extremism was unpopular among conservatives, among liberals and among independents, which is why, of course, on the campaign trail, the president had to say he didn’t know anything about it. But we, of course, know the truth, and he’s now accelerating a really extreme agenda that strikes at the heart of what everyday Americans like me and you and people in our communities need, that strikes at the heart of our best values, and that really seeks to undermine not only our present but our chance at a better future.
In addition, there were things that weren’t even on the bingo card in Project 2025, like the installation of Elon Musk and a series of cronies throughout the federal government doing things like accessing data about individual Americans, going around and seeking to run roughshod over the very public servants that serve all of us, that keep our water safe, that keep our food labeled correctly, that protect our communities and our borders, in, really, a destructive way.
And so we’re all taking that in, and we have an administration that, unfortunately, has decided that the way they want to govern is through what they themselves call “shock and awe.” Like, who does that? Who says that about the very people in the very country that you are supposed to be a part of and leading? And so it has been a lot of shock and awe, but there have been some bright spots, and I want to talk about what we are doing to respond.
First of all, the Interfaith Alliance is a member of a coalition of groups that we started, which we call Democracy 2025. And you can go to democracy2025.org and learn more. And we knew that the playbook was going to be about chaos, going to be about confusion, going to be about quote-unquote “flooding the zone,” trying to just make it so overwhelming that extremism becomes normalized, that people lose hope or give up. And so we created some structure around that, because we don’t have to play on an extremist turf. We get to play on the American people’s turf and on our democracy’s turf.
So if you go to democracy2025.org, this website, you will see an executive order legal response center – and that legal response center is updated in real time. It is tracking what is happening out of the White House, all of this shock and awe. Guess what. We can categorize it, we can understand it, we can learn about it. We don’t have to be overwhelmed by it, and it is tracking the responses to it, including the legal responses to it, which I will talk about in a minute.
So that’s one tool we want to make sure that everyone here has. We will continue to keep it updated. There will be more information on that. And we are really grateful for the Interfaith Alliance and to so many organizations – over 400 now – that are part of this work to ensure that people and communities in this time are as protected as possible, and that we fight for the ability to have a better chance at a better future.
Now, how do you respond to shock and awe? Well, one way to respond is through the courts. And right now in Congress, the president’s party has the majorities. They are slim majorities, but they have the majorities. Right now, there are not that many people putting country over their party. We hope that changes and we’re going to push for that to change, but that’s where it is right now. And you have an executive branch, again, that is trying to run roughshod and say that they’re going to engage in shock and awe tactics. And so the courts are really the front lines of a lot of the defenses that we’re seeing.
In this country, the president doesn’t get to denounce the Constitution or take away constitutional rights with the stroke of a pen or with the signing of an executive order. The president doesn’t get to dismantle large agencies. You’ve heard about USAID and we’ll talk about that in a minute, because we’re in court right now on behalf of USAID, but he doesn’t get to ignore the will of Congress and doesn’t get to ignore what people need without legal consequences, because we have laws that protect us.
And so since inauguration, there have been more than 60 lawsuits filed against the administration. Judges, federal judges who were appointed by Republican presidents, federal judges who were appointed by Democratic presidents, federal judges who were appointed by Donald Trump himself, have all taken action in response to litigation to stop or to slow what the administration is doing. Many, including Republican-appointed judges, have said that what they are doing is blatantly unconstitutional, and we are seeing that the courts are a really important frontline. Democracy Forward, the organization that I lead, is not only doing a lot of work to coordinate multiple groups and to ensure that we all are able to make the best defenses in the court, but we are bringing a lot of litigation and we brought over a dozen cases.
We have won court orders that have stopped the decimation of USAID. By the way, that is in front of a judge that was appointed by President Trump. There have been two orders right now to pause what they’re trying to do to decimate USAID. We had to go into court within a day to stop the freeze of essential services across the country, everything from Meals on Wheels to Head Start, to small business and community credits. They were going to seek to freeze across the country, and so we have seen wins on that.
We are protecting our civil servants, which I will talk about, and we are so grateful that the Interfaith Alliance has been speaking out about the importance of our civil service. We are protecting our First Amendment freedoms against these anti-DEI orders that are trying to prescribe – to have the president, in a king-like fashion, prescribe what the American people can say and think and do. That is not how we do things in the country, and we’re confident that the courts are going to see it that way. And so the courts and these legal challenges are going to continue to be very important, and we are really grateful for all the communities across the country that are standing up in this way. The courts are not a silver bullet, and it is going to take all of us doing what we can in our own lives to push back.
And so what does that look like? Well, first of all, it looks like taking in accurate information, going to town halls like this where you can hear perspectives of people. It means following what’s happening in the courts and, better yet, if you or your community members are affected, you have rights to vindicate, you can be part of some of this work in the courts that we’re doing. We’re in court every day on behalf of parents and teachers, on behalf of nonprofit organizations, on behalf of religious organizations, really fighting for our constitutional rights in this time. And the courts, like I said, are really holding the line on a lot of these areas.
But it also means making your voice heard in your community, to your congressional members, to your neighbors, to your friends. And then it also means finding courage and community with each other, because one of the tools that this administration is seeking to use – and that extremists seek to use all the time, it’s like the oldest trick in the playbook – is to try to flood the zone and to put people in a situation where they feel as if they can’t do anything, that it’s all hopeless. And what we know and what we see in our work every day is that there are still wins that can be had, there are rights that can be protected, and that nothing can overcome the power of the American people.
And so we’re going to work every single day in the courts. We have a team and so many organizations are working literally day and night and early into the wee hours of the morning to make sure that we’re able to respond. That is going well. We are very grateful for state attorneys generals who are bringing cases, for so many organizations bringing cases; but we also need to find time to be with each other, to create community with each other, to not feel isolated and to muster that courage that Paul talked about at the beginning of this webinar. And so we want to be partners with you in doing that, as well.
I want to say a little bit around the legal challenges here and around the civil service. And so many of you are following this, for those that are not, the United States is powered by federal workers who swear an oath to our Constitution and to the American people. They work under Republican administrations. They work under Democratic administrations. They are promoted based on their merit, not based on loyalty to a particular political ideology or particular political agenda, and this administration is seeking to take a wrecking ball to that system of civil service in this country. They are attacking and targeting the very people, the very Americans, that serve the American people, and they are doing it in highly destructive ways. And it’s not just at USAID. They’re seeking to do it across the federal government.
At Democracy Forward, we are doing several things to respond, and we have been so grateful for the voice of faith leaders and the voice of the Interfaith Alliance in this work. We have brought multiple federal lawsuits, we have brought multiple challenges in an administrative process that civil servants have, and we’ve also launched an initiative, along with others, called Civil Service Strong.
So you can go to civilservicestrong.org – we want to make sure you have all the resources – that is run by the former acting head of the Office of Personal Management. So the person that led the civil service and helped develop inclusive policies for our civil service, at 12:01 on Inauguration Day, came to Democracy Forward in order to be able to support our civil servants and to support the American people in this time. So if you are distressed about the reports that you are seeing – which I hope you are distressed because they’re very distressing – know that we’re fighting in the courts, we’re mobilizing communities, and we are so appreciative of the Interfaith Alliance for doing that. And also that there are a range of resources that you can access at Civil Service Strong, whether you care about public servants, which we hope you do, or whether you are a public servant.
The final thing I’m going to say is we’re just going to talk a little bit about DOGE for a minute, because I know that it is just on everybody’s mind. This was something that was not on the bingo card. They didn’t spell it out in Project 2025. And so we’re all working to respond, but I will tell you that we are seeing the federal courts really respond.
We’ve had a number of cases against an attempt to really take the American people’s data and privacy, to run roughshod over our institutions and over a government that works for all people, and we are confident that these strategies will be able to work. But they can only work if people also muster the courage to say: not on our watch. We did not elect people to come into the government, we did not elect Elon Musk. We don’t operate under a system of cronyism, we operate under a system of public service.
And we may not all agree on things, but we can all agree on the beauty of this country and our ability to move forward together, and that is what we are seeking to do through the courts, and we’re so grateful to have the Interfaith Alliance with us. Please check out our resources at democracy2025.org, civilservicestrong.org and democracyforward.org, and know that you are not alone and you’ve got lots of lawyers and good advocates that are going to be in court fighting for you every single day.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, Skye, as we say, that’ll preach! I especially appreciate what you’re saying about the importance of community and the importance of not feeling alone and not feeling powerless, and what you are doing certainly makes me feel more powerful in collaboration with you. But everyone on this call has power. We all have power. We all have power to show up. We all have power to speak up, and we need to use that power right now. And so I really appreciate, Skye, all you’re doing personally, but also your incredible team and the teams around the country that are using the law for the good. The people’s attorneys, as we might say, so thank you so much.
It gives me great pleasure to turn to Melissa Rogers, who is going to be a great addition to this incredible lineup already. You know Melissa Rogers. She has been a central figure in helping us navigate and discern the question of faith and government, how they can work positively together, and has served in such important capacities in helping facilitate that.
So welcome, Melissa. Thank you for being with us.
MELISSA ROGERS:
Thank you so much, Paul and Guthrie and Sophia and everybody at the Interfaith Alliance for organizing this webinar tonight, and to my fellow panelists. And good evening to everyone. We really appreciate you taking time out of your very busy schedules to join this call. We are so grateful and glad to be with you.
You know, as we’ve been discussing, we’re asking what we can do right now to uphold treasured principles, including liberty and equality, for every American. And, in particular, I was asked to address what Americans can do in response to certain executive actions by the Trump administration. And there’s actually a great deal Americans can do, and you’ve begun to hear about that from other speakers. Let’s start here.
As Skye said, presidents are not kings, and thus the federal executive branch must have legal authority for its actions. And that’s why numerous executive actions are currently being challenged in court, as Skye explained, including some lawsuits brought by or supported by religious organizations. And also, as Congressman Raskin explained, many Americans are engaging members of Congress about overriding or altering certain executive actions, either because Congress, not the executive branch, actually holds the relevant power, or because it shares that power with the executive branch.
For example, I believe that Congressman Raskin mentioned that DHS, under the Trump administration, recently summarily rescinded a long-standing bipartisan policy that severely curtails immigration enforcement actions in houses of worship and other sensitive locations. And they’ve done so for years in the cases of houses of worship because they recognize the importance of free exercise of religion and the sanctity of places of worship. Maggie spoke about this too.
So some in Congress have responded by proposing a bill that would reinstate this bipartisan, long-standing sensitive locations policy – the one that the Trump DHS undid – and make it part of the federal statute, make this longstanding bipartisan policy part of a federal statute. Now, if that bill becomes law, it would take precedence over a contrary agency decision. So members of Congress took that action, in part because they heard from you that this was important to do, and so it’s so important for constituents to be engaged on these matters.
In addition to joining or supporting lawsuits or urging your elected representative to act, we’re also seeing people push back on concerning executive actions in other ways, and let me just mention three of them.
First, people are documenting the impact of various executive actions on their communities and sharing that information. As you know, the Trump administration is freezing certain forms of federal funding, dismantling some federal agencies and programs and terminating large swaths of employees across a number of federal agencies.
In response, some are documenting the impacts of these actions on their communities, for example when there’s interference with a program: Meals on Wheels or Job Training or Head Start program, just to give a few examples, people are documenting that disruption or interference with facts. They’re taking down the who, what, where, why, when of what happened and the impact that that is having on communities, including with video with people who are directly impacted like beneficiaries of these programs, and then they are sharing that information with members of Congress and elected leaders at state and local levels, as well as with non-governmental organizations, so that they can compile it.
So this is just one way in which everyday Americans can report on the impacts of various executive actions in their own communities, and by sharing that information with others we can compile it, and that can be an important way to make a record about the impact of these actions.
Second, people are preparing to file comments on forthcoming proposed federal rules. In coming months, federal agencies will begin issuing a flurry of proposed rules on topics such as health care, education, non-discrimination, religious freedom, conscience rights and many more. And those proposed rules will then be open for public comment by any individual or entity for a period of time before the rules are finalized, and there are websites one can consult to learn about such proposed rules, including regulations.gov. But by being a part of this network that Interfaith Alliance is organizing, it will also help you ensure that you hear about key proposed rulemakings and getting information about them, including how and when to file comments.
Now you might ask, why should I comment on a proposed rule when agencies will basically control the content of a final rule and they may not listen to me? Well, it’s a good question. Let me try to answer that. One reason people do so is because federal law requires agencies to respond to all significant comments made on a proposed rule; and if agencies don’t, they can be sued. Also, highlighting one’s opposition to a rule can lead to responsive policies in other venues, like by Congress or by state legislatures or by a governor or a mayor. Toward this end, many who file comments consider whether there is broad-based opposition to various proposed rules, or at least aspects of them, so that that can be made clear in comments, because that can really get people’s attention.
Third, as others have mentioned, people are raising their voices in op-eds and letters to newspaper editors, and on podcasts and social media. Many of you are doing this already. Maggie described some of this earlier, and other speakers, talking about various attacks that the administration has made on particular religious communities. And I’ll just mention one that hasn’t been recounted thus far, when President Trump stated at the National Prayer Breakfast that large swaths of Americans “oppose God” simply because they disagree with him.
In response to these attacks, many faith leaders spoke out. They said hey, that’s false. That is, we are seeing our highest ranking officials, they said, telling falsehoods – and that’s wrong. They should not be targeting sacred beliefs and practices. Well, saying that is really powerful, especially when folks do so in unison across religious, ideological and political beliefs. So remember to always look out and see wherever you can make common cause with others in your community.
So these are just a few ways in which Americans are speaking out right now on certain executive actions, and I want to thank you again for your time tonight, for your love of our country, for your attention to these issues, and for the conversations that we will have moving forward. It means so much to be able to have these conversations and work with you, and I just really welcome your comments and questions.
So back over to you, Paul.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Melissa, thank you so much. That was just so concrete and helpful and real and bracing. There’s things we can do, and a real opportunity, and so I appreciate you and all that you are doing. I’m going to quickly turn this over to Rev. Jennifer Butler in a moment; but we’ve had so many good speakers, I do want to make sure that everyone knows that this will be on our YouTube channel and you will be able to get a copy there and send that to anybody who you think would benefit from it.
We have a couple petitions right now that I want you to make sure you know about. One of them is to petition the Congress to support the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act. That is a bill in Congress right now to reinstate protection of our sanctuaries against ICE invading them. There’s also a petition to demand Trump stop attacking religious communities as he has for the past month. All of the questions or concerns, or if you’re interested in knowing more about any of the groups that were involved here today, please reach out to us in our contact form.
The other thing I just want to quickly mention is that we are fueled by our work in DC, but also with Interfaith Alliances across the country. We are rooted in local communities. You all are rooted in local communities. We believe in that. If you’re interested in our affiliate program, we definitely want to make sure that you know about it and that you are aware that there may be an affiliate that does local work with local issues, and if you don’t have one in your community, we would welcome your interest in maybe starting one.
And the last thing, I’m going to turn it over to Jen next, but I want to answer one question that really struck me, because it just is one of the questions I think many of us who are from the Christian tradition. It asks: are we in a Bonhoeffer moment? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian and a pastor in Nazi Germany who created a resistance church.
I think we are, but I think we are still in a moment where we are actually in the majority. That the religious community that we represent – the mainstream, pluralistic, multi-religious, multi-racial movement for democracy in America – we are still in the majority. We are not an underground church, we are not a resistance church. We are the majority and we should act that way. So there may be moments for important resistance coming going forward. I invite our courage, but let’s be aware that we represent the majority of people in America who reject Project 2025, who reject the radicality of this administration, and make sure that our elected officials and anyone else knows that we’re going to show up and be present in this moment, and that they will realize that we are actually the American people who they can listen to.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Rev. Jennifer Butler, who is an extraordinary figure and has been in this work for so long. She is the founder of Faith in Democracy and she is the former director of Faith Engagement for the Kamala Harris for President Campaign, among many other things.
Why don’t you close us out, Jennifer, with some next steps that you are doing and that all of us can join together and recognizing that this isn’t one organization or one group or one tradition. It’s all of us together. Thank you for being with us, Rev. Butler.
REV. JENNIFER BUTLER:
Thank you so much, Paul. This has been an amazing night. What an amazing lineup of speakers, and thank you so much to Interfaith Alliance for having organized this session for us.
I wanted to let all of the participants know that this event that you’re attending tonight is part of a weekly series of mobilization calls that faith allies have come together to commit to hosting, and our next mobilization call will be on Wednesday, february 26th, at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time. There’s just so much happening these days, we decided to commit to getting together weekly so we could respond real-time to the opportunities and to the threats.
We began these calls on January 6th of this year, and we thought we would just have one call on that day. 860 of us gathered – not just to bear witness to January 6th and the violence done to our democracy and to human beings on that day, but also to take action. We committed to stopping the extreme cabinet nominees like FBI pick Kash Patel, who had repeatedly celebrated the J6 convicts as heroes and who had frequently appeared on antisemitic and Christian Nationalist podcasts.
So, out of concern around that, thousands of us have, over the past number of weeks, been driving calls and delivering petitions to state Senate offices and meeting with our senators and their staff. Now, sadly, as you know from the news today, all but a handful of Republican senators still voted for Patel, and these other nominees that we had opposed were also confirmed. But I hope that none of us despair over this outcome, because we are in this for the long haul.
Against all odds, we nearly defeated some of these nominations, and at a time when others were flat-footed or lacked courage, we, as the faith community, made sure that American citizens knew what this administration is doing. We kept truth alive. We even spoke of that as a spiritual practice: keeping truth alive. And going forward, we will hold senators accountable for their lack of moral courage and for having voted for candidates they knew to be seriously flawed and anti-democracy.
Most importantly, we also built our power in key states. All of us, working together, built power in places we are going to need to have power. We developed relationships with our senators and with their staff, and we lived out the principle that we discussed in those first two calls, the principle coined by Timothy Snyder: do not obey in advance. The first rule for resisting autocracy: Do not obey in advance.
And I just want to say in closing tonight that this rule of not obeying in advance is deep in our faith traditions. It’s part of our DNA. For example, many of us share the story of Exodus, chapter one, in which the Hebrew midwives Shipprah and Puah refused to implement the order of a king to kill Hebrew children. They started a movement, these midwives. They were small and powerless, but their courage saved the people and led to freedom.
Tonight, we’ve talked about attacks on religious leaders, religious institutions and government agencies that partnered closely with faith communities to save lives. We’ve talked about the lives that are on the line because of this drastic and horrific action taken by the Trump administration; and we’ve seen also, though, that religious leaders are leading the way and we are pushing back.
We’ve talked about what we can do to stand up to those who would silence us, so I hope you will continue to join us and invite others to come. We will meet next week to take action to oppose the SAFE Act, which is a bill before Congress that seeks to make it harder for Americans to vote. Republicans are fast-tracking this legislation, and we have to do everything in our power to stop them. The Senate and House remain closely divided, and we can block this if we work together. Thank you again so much for your dedication and support and all of your efforts, and until we meet again, may peace and strength be with you.
I turn it back to you, Paul.
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:
Rev. Butler, thank you so much for your action. I want to again thank all of our speakers Melissa Rogers, Maggie Siddiqi, Adam Phillips, Skye Perryman, Rep. Raskin.
I’ve been ordained for about 30 years now. I’m 60. I’ve never seen quite this moment in American democracy before. I truly believe this is a moment for American religious communities really to show up for one another. It is a time for us to truly show up with our full beliefs, our full selves, and be part of the pro-democracy faith movement. So thank you all for being with us here tonight. Thank you to our speakers, thank you especially to those of you who attended, and we look forward to being in touch with you in the future. Have a great night, and be well.
