Christian Persecution in America: Attacks, Courts, and Task Force

Christian persecution in America is a contested claim, not a settled fact: Christians are the country’s largest religious group, hold most levers of political power, and have won nearly every major religious liberty case at the Supreme Court in the last decade, yet churches are vandalized and attacked in the hundreds each year, and a majority of American Christians tell pollsters they experience discrimination. Whether that adds up to persecution depends almost entirely on how the word is defined.

Persecution or Loss of Cultural Privilege

Scholars who work on the question draw a hard line between persecution — coordinated, sustained efforts to inflict harm on people because of their faith — and the erosion of cultural privileges that were never constitutionally guaranteed.

Writing in the New York Times, evangelical commentator David French argued that by any “meaningful historical definition,” American Christians are not persecuted, noting that they retain “an immense amount of liberty and power.”¹ Nathan McCabe, writing in the Church Life Journal, proposed a working test: “If what someone else finds intolerable in you is your Christianity, then you are persecuted for Christ’s sake.” By that measure, he argued, hostility directed at specific political stances is not the same as persecution for faith, and conflating the two “cheapens the experiences of those facing genuine persecution” elsewhere in the world.²

The perception on the ground runs the other way. A 2016 PRRI/Brookings study found that a majority of American Christians believed they faced discrimination, and a 2017 PRRI survey found white evangelical Protestants were the only religious group in the country more likely to say Christians face discrimination than Muslims do.³

Attacks on Churches

The most concrete evidence of hostility toward Christians is physical. The Family Research Council counted 415 attacks on U.S. churches in 2024: 284 acts of vandalism, 55 arsons, 28 gun-related incidents, and 14 bomb threats.⁴ The 2024 total was below the record 485 tracked in 2023, but gun-related incidents more than doubled year over year. FRC acknowledged that many of the incidents were tied to financial motives, juvenile behavior, or mental health issues rather than anti-Christian intent, though others appeared politically motivated.

CatholicVote, which maintains a separate tracker focused on Catholic churches, has documented 565 attacks across 43 states and Washington, D.C., since May 2020. Roughly 30 percent of cases have resulted in an arrest. A sharp spike followed the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: CatholicVote recorded 398 incidents from that point forward, and the Department of Homeland Security warned the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of “credible threats” against Catholic churches and clergy in June 2022.⁵

FBI hate crime data adds only limited context. In the most recent reporting year, 3,096 religiously motivated hate crime offenses were logged nationwide, but anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 69 percent of them. The bureau’s data does not isolate anti-Christian hate crimes with the same granularity, and many church attacks are never reported to law enforcement.⁶

How Christians Have Fared in Court

If persecution is measured by whether the legal system protects religious exercise, the record over the past decade is overwhelmingly favorable to Christian plaintiffs. The Supreme Court has reshaped the relationship between free exercise, anti-discrimination law, public health regulation, and public education, almost always in favor of religious objectors.

Business Owners

In Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Court ruled 7–2 that Colorado had violated the Free Exercise Clause by demonstrating “clear and impermissible hostility” toward a baker who refused to design a wedding cake for a same-sex couple; commissioners had compared his beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust.⁷ Five years later, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), the Court held 6–3 that the First Amendment prevents states from compelling expressive businesses to produce content that conflicts with the owner’s beliefs. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent called it the first time the Court had granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”⁸

COVID-19 Restrictions

Early pandemic rulings went against churches, but the tide turned in November 2020 with Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, in which a 5–4 majority blocked New York’s COVID-19 attendance caps on religious gatherings, stating they “struck at the heart of religious liberty.”⁹ The Court then invoked that ruling to strike down or force reconsideration of restrictions in Colorado, New Jersey, California, and Washington, D.C.¹⁰ In Tandon v. Newsom (2021), it struck down California rules restricting at-home Bible studies and prayer meetings.¹¹

Workplace Accommodations

In Groff v. DeJoy (2023), a unanimous Court raised the bar for employers seeking to deny religious accommodations. For decades, lower courts had allowed employers to refuse accommodations based on any “more than a de minimis cost.” The Court replaced that with a “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of [the employer’s] particular business” test, making it significantly harder to refuse accommodations for religious observance. The case was brought by an evangelical Christian postal worker who sought exemption from Sunday shifts.¹²

Prayer and Parental Rights in Schools

Students already have a constitutional right to pray voluntarily and to organize religious clubs on the same terms as other student groups.¹³ In 2022, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District ruled that a public school football coach’s post-game prayer on the 50-yard line was protected personal religious expression rather than government-sponsored religion.⁹

In June 2025, the Court decided Mahmoud v. Taylor 6–3, ruling that a Maryland school board must allow parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ-inclusive storybook instruction that conflicts with their religious beliefs. Justice Alito’s majority opinion held that the curriculum posed “a very real threat of undermining” parents’ religious beliefs and practices.¹⁴ The parents in the case were Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox.¹⁵

Where the Friction Is Real

The persecution claim does not rest on nothing. There are specific settings where Christians have been treated worse than comparable groups, and courts have often said so.

Universities. Public universities have repeatedly deregistered Christian student groups that require leaders to affirm a statement of faith. The line courts have drawn is about evenhandedness. In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), the Supreme Court upheld an “all-comers” policy that required every recognized group to accept any student as a member or leader.¹⁶ But when the University of Iowa deregistered InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Business Leaders in Christ for requiring leaders to share their beliefs while allowing other groups, including one that required leaders to sign a “gay-affirming statement of Christian faith,” to restrict membership, the Eighth Circuit found unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and held university officials personally liable.¹⁷ A federal judge in Michigan reached the same conclusion when Wayne State University revoked InterVarsity’s status.¹⁸

The FBI Richmond memo. In January 2023, the FBI’s Richmond field office produced an intelligence memo linking “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic” ideology with racially motivated violent extremism, drawing in part on Southern Poverty Law Center material. The FBI withdrew the memo and conducted an internal review of 26 interviews, which found that the seven employees involved “lacked professional judgment and failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards” but showed “no evidence of malicious intent or an improper purpose.” The memo had originated from a legitimate investigation of a specific violent domestic terrorism subject who self-identified as a “radical traditional Catholic Clerical Fascist.”¹⁹ The House Judiciary Committee later produced evidence of coordination with the Portland and Los Angeles offices.²⁰

Healthcare. Federal law has protected healthcare workers’ right to refuse participation in abortion and sterilization on religious or moral grounds since the Church Amendments of the 1970s, with additional statutes (Coats-Snowe, Weldon, and ACA provisions) covering referrals, training, and insurance.²¹ Recent Supreme Court signals in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Moyle v. United States suggest those protections could allow individual doctors and religious institutions to decline to perform emergency abortions.²²

The Federal Task Force and Its Findings

On February 6, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14202, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” declaring it federal policy to eliminate the “anti-Christian weaponization of government.” The order established a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias within the Department of Justice, chaired by the Attorney General and including the heads of more than a dozen federal agencies.²³²⁴

On April 30, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche published the task force’s initial report, a 200-page document with more than 1,100 footnotes.²⁵ Its central findings included:

The Biden-era DOJ pursued roughly two dozen cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and requested an average sentence of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants compared to 12.3 months for pro-abortion defendants.²⁶
The FBI Richmond memo was evidence of systemic anti-Christian targeting.
The Department of Education fined Grand Canyon University $37.7 million and Liberty University $14 million, amounts the report compared to the $2.4 million fine against Penn State and $4.5 million against Michigan State over sexual abuse scandals.²⁷
Biden DOJ officials allegedly advised the White House that federal employees’ religious objections to COVID-19 vaccine mandates were “insincere” or “not religious.”

The report drew sharp criticism. Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman called it a “fictionalized, false narrative” built on “cherry-picked emails.”²⁸²⁹³⁰ Law and religion professor Robert Tuttle argued that the executive order itself focused on a specific conservative version of Christianity and promoted a “persecution narrative” tied to the perceived loss of Christian cultural dominance.³¹

The Demographic Backdrop

The persecution debate is unfolding against measurable religious change. The share of Americans identifying as Christian has fallen from 78 percent in 2007 to roughly 62 percent in recent Pew surveys, though the decline has slowed and may have plateaued since about 2019.³² The religiously unaffiliated have grown from 16 percent in 2007 to roughly 28 to 29 percent.³³ Gallup found that only 49 percent of U.S. adults in 2025 said religion is an important part of their daily life, down 17 points from 2015.³⁴

The shift is generational: only 46 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 identify as Christian, compared with 80 percent of those 74 and older. It is also politically asymmetric: 84 percent of Republicans identify as Christian, compared with 57 percent of Democrats.³³

Those numbers help explain the mismatch between the sense of siege and the record of legal and political victory. Christians continue to hold the presidency, a majority of Congress, and a supermajority on the Supreme Court. But the everyday cultural weight of Christianity is receding, especially among the young, and cultural retreat can feel like persecution even when the law is moving in the opposite direction. Whether to call that persecution is, in the end, the argument.

1
New York Times. The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow
2
Church Life Journal (University of Notre Dame). Are American Christians Persecuted?
3
Sojourners. Why I Ditched the Evangelical Persecution Complex
4
Daily Citizen (Focus on the Family). New Report: Over 400 Attacks on Churches in 2024
5
CatholicVote. Tracker: Church Attacks
6
U.S. House of Representatives — Rep. Beyer. 2024 Hate Crime Statistics
7
National Constitution Center. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission
8
Howard Brown Health. 303 Creative Case Overview
9
First Amendment Encyclopedia (MTSU). Free Exercise of Religion Cases
10
SCOTUSblog. Justices Revive Religious Groups Attempts to Block Covid-Related Restrictions
11
Becket Fund. COVID-19 Religious Worship Cases
12
U.S. Supreme Court. Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. ____
13
U.S. Department of Education. Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer and Religious Expression in Public Schools
14
U.S. Supreme Court. Mahmoud et al. v. Taylor et al., 606 U.S. ____
15
Oyez. Mahmoud v. Taylor
16
FIRE. Religious Liberty on Campus
17
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA v. University of Iowa
18
Baptist Press. Christian Campus Groups Win in Court
19
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee — Senator Grassley. FBI to Grassley — Richmond Catholic Memo Follow Up
20
House Judiciary Committee. Judiciary Committee Uncovers Multiple FBI Field Offices Coordinated to Prepare Assessment
21
HHS. Your Protections Against Discrimination Based on Conscience and Religion
22
Petrie-Flom Center (Harvard Law School). The Ever-Expanding Right to Refuse to Provide Healthcare
23
White House. Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias
24
GovInfo. Executive Order 14202 — Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias
25
U.S. Department of Justice. Task Force Publishes Report on Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias and Restoring Religious Liberty
26
CNN. Justice Department Weaponization FACE Act Report
27
U.S. Department of Justice. Task Force Report — Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Within the Federal Government
28
NPR. DOJ Biden Weaponization Report
29
Higher Ed Dive. Education Department Grand Canyon University Fine
30
Inside Higher Ed. Ed Rescinds $37.7M Fine Against Grand Canyon University
31
NPR. Heres How Trumps Faith Office and Task Force Against Anti-Christian Bias May Work
32
Pew Research Center. Decline of Christianity in the US Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off
33
PRRI. 2025 PRRI Census of American Religion
34
Gallup. Drop in Religiosity Among Largest in World