A State-Church Lawyer and Activist's Response to Trump's Holy Week Statement
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This probably isn’t surprising, but I don’t think originalism is the end all be all of legal interpretation, nor the best way to approach legal theory in modern American society.
The men of the founding generation were not gods. They were no more remarkable than the legal thinkers of any other time. Yes, much of what they did was revolutionary. The American form of democracy was a major historical development. But that does not make the founders anything more than humans that got some things right, and a great many other things wrong. They were biased representatives of a small, but systematically empowered social class of the time, and much of our legal system is designed to favor that same social class today.
But perhaps of all the things that they did manage to get right, the separation of church and state is one of, if not the most important. To quote my colleague Andrew Seidel, “the wall of separation between church and state is an American original.” And it’s one of the few legal principles that I am anywhere close to a strict absolutist on. The government has no business dictating religious principles to the people, and religious institutions have no business dictating legal principles to the government. I don’t mind if politicians are people of faith, or if they wear symbols of their faith in their day to day lives like hijabs or cross necklaces (extremist symbols though, like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “Deus Vult” tattoo are a different story), so long as they do not let it interfere with fair and neutral governance for people of all forms of belief, or lack thereof. I don’t even necessarily mind blasé, generic acknowledgements of major religious holidays so long as everyone is represented, though I think it would be a much better policy to do away with government messaging about religious holidays altogether for simplicity’s sake.
That being said, the Trump administration absolutely crossed the line this week with the “Presidential Message on Holy Week, 2025.” It’s short, so I’ll copy it here in its entirety for your convenience.
This Holy Week, Melania and I join in prayer with Christians celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—the living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all of humanity.
Beginning with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and culminating in the Paschal Triduum, which begins on Holy Thursday with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, followed by Good Friday, and reaching its pinnacle in the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night. This week is a time of reflection for Christians to memorialize Jesus’ crucifixion—and to prepare their hearts, minds, and souls for His miraculous Resurrection from the dead.
During this sacred week, we acknowledge that the glory of Easter Sunday cannot come without the sacrifice Jesus Christ made on the cross. In His final hours on Earth, Christ willingly endured excruciating pain, torture, and execution on the cross out of a deep and abiding love for all His creation. Through His suffering, we have redemption. Through His death, we are forgiven of our sins. Through His Resurrection, we have hope of eternal life. On Easter morning, the stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and light prevails over darkness—signaling that death does not have the final word.
This Holy Week, my Administration renews its promise to defend the Christian faith in our schools, military, workplaces, hospitals, and halls of government. We will never waver in safeguarding the right to religious liberty, upholding the dignity of life, and protecting God in our public square.
As we focus on Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, we look to His love, humility, and obedience—even in life’s most difficult and uncertain moments. This week, we pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our beloved Nation. We pray that America will remain a beacon of faith, hope, and freedom for the entire world, and we pray to achieve a future that reflects the truth, beauty, and goodness of Christ’s eternal kingdom in Heaven.
May God bless you and your family during this special time of year and may He continue to bless the United States of America.
Presidential statements for Easter are nothing new, and yes, have also gone beyond what I and many others feel should be acceptable for the leader of a secular democracy to be issuing through formal channels. This has been a long standing problem in government, and Democrats are not above it, as evidenced by, for just one example, President Obama’s 2016 Easter statement:
Michelle and I join our fellow Christians in observing Good Friday and celebrating Easter this weekend. This is a time to remember the sacrifices made for us and hold all who suffer close to our hearts. Yet it is also a time to rejoice, give thanks for the Resurrection, and unite with Christians around the world in proclaiming, "Christ has risen; He has risen indeed." We wish all who celebrate a blessed and joyful Easter.
That being said, I think that anyone with a basic amount of common sense can see that one of these is worse than the others. Two things can be bad but on different orders of magnitude. While Obama’s statement goes beyond simply acknowledging a widely celebrated holiday, it at least manages to be free of the implication that Christianity is somehow under attack, or of calling for an “outpouring of the Holy Spirit on our beloved Nation.” There is no assumption that everyone is celebrating Easter, or that everyone should be celebrating Easter.
The tonal difference, in conjunction with the difference in political climate are staggering, and should alarm anyone with a concern for true religious liberty.
This was not a simple statement wishing people a happy and meaningful holiday as they choose to understand it. This is a statement with a clear theopolitical message: The government acknowledges this specific theology as superior, and will use whatever means necessary to hold it above all other rights and liberties. This is the government telling us that if you do not believe that this is a so-called “Christian nation” that adheres to a specific fundamentalist theology, you are an enemy of the state, pushing their god out of the “public square” that must be punished by the government to protect its preferred religious class.
Anyone with a well developed democratic conscience should be outraged and offended by this statement. People with beliefs that are dissenting, or even simply different from the Christo-fascist set are not “attacking” religious liberty simply by asking for our right to co-exist not be trampled on. People who wish to receive reproductive and gender affirming healthcare based on science and medical consensus over theological belief are not attacking religious liberty in hospitals. Wanting our public tax dollars to go to secular education instead of religious dogma is not infringing on religious liberty in schools. Asking people to provide a basic level of courtesy and respect to their coworkers from different backgrounds is not destroying Christinaity in public life. Religious, gender, and political diversity does not harm religious liberty in our military. And just because people want a government that makes decisions based on reason and scientific evidence instead of forcing Christian fundamentalist and evangelical theologies down our throats does not mean that there is no religious liberty in the halls of government. Conservative Christians have never had their right to worship attacked, except to limit the arc of their fist to just before it meets the bridge of everyone else’s noses.
But I have a feeling I am not saying anything that my readers don’t already know.
Stick with me here for this next bit friends, I promise that this isn’t a conversion pitch (my formal theological stance on proselytization is “fuck that noise” and that’s a Transing Boundaries Guarantee™.) I’ll explain why I'm bringing any of this up at the end.
I’ve acknowledged before on this blog that I’m, at least depending on your definition, religious. More specifically I use the word Catholic, though as of late I’ve been qualifying it as being an “unorganized Catholic.” My affiliation with the formal Church institution is about as minimal as it can get while getting away with using the word. Catholic may technically mean “universal”, but there are a ton of different ways to be “Catholic,” even within the Roman rite alone. Go and compare the vibes of mass in a predominantly white, upper middle class parish vs a low income, predominantly immigrant parish and you’ll see a difference as just one example.
I’m also a transgender/nonbinary lesbian and politically queer anarcho-communist, so trust me when I say that my version of Catholicism looks radically different from the vision of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the reactionary anti-Vatican II “rad-trad” Catholics, and much of the Vatican itself. In addition to my belief that the separation of church and state is a brilliant secular legal principle for creating a just, modern, equitable, and pluralistic society, I also believe in it as a theological imperative – though religious institutions have historically failed in this regard, I believe at the very core of my being that Christianity was never meant to be a tool of formal government. To my own understanding there is a reason that in the Gospels Jesus actively rejects an earthly kingdom when it’s offered to him. I’ve never understood how so many Christians (I refuse to claim that they “aren’t real Christians” in an attempt to absolve my own faith tradition of wrongdoing) continuously miss that key factor, other than that most humans are inherently drawn to hoarding power, and are very good at ignoring the continual lessons of both religious and secular history that have taught us over and over again why that is a terrible idea.
Most people would barely consider me “Christian” despite my own self labelling, and I promise you that when this administration and the wider Christian nationalist movement talk about protecting the religious liberty of Christians, they absolutely don’t mean me or my comrades in that statement. I try to put on a brave face, but if I’m being honest, I am scared these days in a way that I never used to be, and this Holy Week statement only serves to heighten that fear. I’ve always been cognizant of the social backlash, and the risk of police/state and interpersonal violence that comes with my identity and politics, but the precise nature of that threat has changed enormously. As I watch my immigrant comrades in the fight against genocide get actively snatched off the street by government agents, and people being shipped off to foreign prisons, even in defiance of court orders, I’ve never felt more helpless. Right now I know that perhaps my only protections are that I am a white, naturally born American citizen, but I also know that the clock is running out on those protections, perhaps in under a year if we do not work together to divert the country from the path we’re currently on. My fear is not of the so-called “cancel culture” that conservatives of all stripes have been railing against as somehow being the highest form of censorship. My fear is of true, violent, government repression. Almost every part of who I am puts me directly on the list of people this administration would like to see silenced, if not eliminated completely.
That fear is also why I write. That fear is why I am doing everything I can to leverage my education and skills and abilities to fight against this attempt to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in this country. I may be one person, with very few resources, but I do have fear, a keyboard, a law degree, prescription anti-depressants, and a whole heck of a lot of gumption. And you’d be shocked by how much you can do with just that.
The fear I just outlined is also why I think the story of Holy Week resonates so deeply with me personally. Now I don’t think the Bible is an accurate historical document. It’s a grouping of oral stories and scraps of letters and writings that over the centuries has been subject to political manipulations through translations and debates about what is and is not “canon” to the point that we will likely never know what bits and pieces represent any kind of historical truth. I don’t think the various authors of the books of the Bible intended it to be a historical document either, at least not in the way that we now consider “historical documents” because the ancient world had a different understanding of what it meant to record history. But the value I find in the story isn’t in its historicity, it never has been. Hopefully we can all at least agree that one can draw meaning from stories even if they aren’t 100% accurate retellings of history.
When I read the story of the events of Holy Week, I see something far beyond the Trump administration’s characterization as it being about a religious sacrifice as some kind of vending machine transaction for intangible salvation. In the story I see a deeply familiar lesson on what it means to resist oppression and how humanity might grow beyond it, as well as the many ways humans fail in that pursuit. I actually often say that the recurring theme of the Bible is the ways that humans fail to understand that the answer to “am I my brother’s keeper?” is “yes.”
For several years now, I’ve been struck by how much the Palm Sunday story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem brings to mind a drag performance in its political satirization of the violent hypermasculinity of Roman Triumph parades. The dinner of Holy Thursday, not a Passover Seder in the modern sense (what we think of as Seders now didn’t exist then), but still a remembrance of the story of an escape from oppression, brings to mind the many gatherings of friends and comrades that have brought comfort and solidarity in times of action. Jesus’ anxiety and fear in the garden before his arrest, and human failures of the apostles, from them falling asleep to Judas’ betrayal to Peter’s denials and the fears and doubts of the apostles after the crucifixion show a vulnerability and realness that we are all meant to be able to relate to and learn from in the moments where we need to show courage. Pontius Pilate finding Jesus not guilty of a capital crime against the Roman government, but going through with the execution anyway because he valued political expediency and maintaining “order” over true justice, to me at least, is a lesson in how large government systems will always sacrifice the innocent to preserve itself, and that an action is not just simply because the government deems it so. Jesus’ death is important in the narrative, not because it was necessary, but precisely because it was not. And the redemptive lesson I draw from the idea of the Resurrection is that it is never too late for humanity to turn away from the mistakes of our past. We do not need to keep repeating this cycle of oppression and violence, and we have every resource and opportunity to do and be better, but only if we choose to as a collective.
These are the themes that resonate with me from the stories. They may not do the same for you, and that’s ok, they don’t have to. But I do find that there is a great irony that in its statement that claims to acknowledge the message of Holy Week, the Trump administration consistently fails to see the role it is playing in perpetuating the same cycles that led to the unjust execution of the man they say they believe to be God incarnate.
By now I know you’re absolutely asking why I’m bringing any of this up at all as a response to this administration’s Holy Week statement?
After all, while I have plenty to fear, there are so many other people that have even less protection than I do. I could have easily written out all of the reasons why the statement was legally problematic without bringing my religious identity into it, and to be fair, in the overwhelming majority of my advocacy work I never explicitly bring that part of myself into it unless I can use it to find common ground with well meaning people, because it’s not relevant. You will never see me bring it up over on Freethought Now, or when I am doing any other work for FFRF, for example, because it’s really not relevant to that aspect of my work. I fully believe that my political and legal stances on all of this, and a large many other topics would be completely identical regardless of what religious beliefs I hold, because values are more than identity labels.
I bring this all up because I think there is distinct political value in disrupting the Christo-fascist narrative that the Trump administration and its supporters are doing anything whatsoever to protect Christian religious liberty, much less religious freedom for anyone else. We need to use a wide variety of tactics to delegitimize their campaign of persecution propaganda, and this is just a single one of them, but one that I am extremely well situated to use. This is a matter of practical political strategy in the fight for a truly secular government. We need to refuse to let them dictate not only what the “American” view on any legal issue is but also the “Christian” view on these issues, in order to dismantle their claims that discrimination and bigotry are a matter of religious liberty. Because there is no such thing as a singular Christian view on almost any topic, and by acknowledging the diversity of thought in the Christian world, we can defang the narrative that civil rights and social justice are an “attack” on the “Christian” way of life. To be clear, this is not because anyone’s theological beliefs should matter in the development of neutral, secular legal structures, but because unfortunately right now it does matter, and we won’t get to a society where it won’t matter because all laws apply to everyone equally regardless of religious belief until we destroy the idea that any single group or person can adequately represent the views of every single believer of a given religious system.
The position I occupy in the state-church world, and in the religious world is a bizarre one. I don’t really fit into any one camp in particular other than those who share the broad idea that everyone should be free to express their religious beliefs so long as it does not interfere with anyone else’s fundamental human rights. I’m ok with my eclectic mix of identities that come together to form my whole and authentic self, and the ways I have to sometimes rearrange that self to achieve the work I have found to be so important and meaningful. I’m always going to be too “something” for whatever space I’m in, and that’s ok, because I’ve been “too much” my entire life. But by being "too much" that means I have plenty to give, plenty to contribute, and I’m going to keep doing so until I am physically forced to stop.
But I’m just one player in this fight, and I hope that if you take any overarching message from this essay, it’s that if we all play the many parts that we are uniquely situated to play, and provide the unique perspectives that can dismantle hegemonic monoliths, we can win the fight for secular democracy and religious liberty.
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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.