Vance says Trump administration is ‘not just restoring, but expanding’ religious freedom for America

The Trump administration will embrace and uphold the core American value of religious freedom and expand protections for people of all faiths while rolling back federal censorship efforts “used to prevent Americans from speaking their conscience and speaking their mind,” Vice President J.D. Vance said Wednesday.

Speaking to the International Religious Freedom 2025 Summit in Washington, Mr. Vance made clear that religious Americans have an ally in the White House. He said the new administration will stop using taxpayer dollars to promote atheism abroad or prop up causes that undermine religion.

“You shouldn’t have to leave your faith at the door of your people’s government. And under President Trump’s leadership, you won’t have to,” Mr. Vance said.

“The administration is intent on not just restoring but expanding the achievements of the first four years [of Mr. Trump’s leadership] and certainly of the last two weeks,” he said.

“In recent years, too often has our nation’s international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity,” Mr. Vance said. “How did America get to the point where we’re sending hundreds of thousands of dollars abroad to [nongovernmental organizations] that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe? That is not what leadership on protecting the rights of the faithful looks like, and it ends with this administration.”

He was referring to the United States Agency for International Development and other U.S. government-funded programs overseas that promote what critics say are atheist messages and other problematic causes. The Trump administration has taken dramatic steps to scale back USAID’s work.

Organizers said Mr. Vance’s appearance at the summit is a powerful testament to the Trump administration’s commitment to the core values of religious liberty and freedom. He delivered his speech inside a packed ballroom at the Washington Hilton to a remarkably diverse audience from around the world representing numerous faiths.

On Tuesday evening, representatives from Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and other faiths came together. Each poured a glass of water into the same large vessel, symbolically “combining forces” for the principles of religious liberty. The Washington Times Foundation and the Universal Peace Federation sponsored the event, centered on what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and others described as a “religious freedom crisis” in Japan stemming from attempts to dissolve the Unification Church and seize its assets.

‘Connecting us to the sacred’

The International Religious Freedom Summit featured remarks from international and U.S. religious and political leaders. It was co-chaired by Sam Brownback, a former Kansas governor who also served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom in the first Trump administration, and Katrina Lantos Swett, a co-chair of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and a former Democratic congressional candidate.

Speakers drew attention to threats to religious freedom around the world. They cited pressure on religious minorities from hard-line regimes in China and Iran, the plight of Christians in Ukraine and the rapid expansion of Islamic extremism across Africa.

In his address, Mr. Vance said faith is a key component of one’s connection to the broader world.

“One of the wonderful apparent paradoxes of religion is that in connecting us to the sacred and to the universal, it deepens our commitment … to our neighbors, to our obligations to one another, to the individual communities that all of us call home,” Mr. Vance said.

“The church was a place, and still is, where people of different races, different backgrounds, different walks of life came together in commitment to their shared communities and, of course, in commitment to their God,” Mr. Vance said. “It was a place where the CEO of a company and the worker of a company stood equal before their worship of God. … Are these not the kinds of bonds and virtues that lawmakers today should strive to cultivate? Well, I’m pleased to say that they certainly were in the first Trump administration, and they will be even more so in the second.”

Other speakers delved into that idea and focused on how faith and shared communities centered around that faith drive human happiness and better quality of life.

Before Mr. Vance took the stage, a panel discussion focused on religious freedom in Africa and, more broadly, the role of faith in “human flourishing” for people worldwide. Byron Johnson, founding director of Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, said he is in the midst of a groundbreaking study on the role of religious freedom and personal faith in individual happiness and human flourishing.

“It would seem like a no-brainer that we would want to advance religious freedom. And yet a lot of people are living in countries where they’re being persecuted for their faith,” he said.

People of all faiths had unique stories to tell at the summit. Some were chilling and drew attention to what they said was the government-sponsored repression and even outright persecution of religions in some corners of the world.

Several members of the Baha’i faith spoke to The Washington Times about crackdowns on their faith, including in Iran, which is home to about 300,000 Baha’is. Evaz Fanaian, whose nephew Ardeshir has been imprisoned multiple times in Iran because of his faith, said the Baha’i faith is at odds with the strict versions of Islam at the heart of the theocratic government in Tehran.

“They saw equality for men and women. For them, that’s extraordinary. They cannot take it,” Mr. Fanaian said in an interview, drawing distinctions between what he says are the core tenets of his Baha’i faith and the practices of the clerical rulers in Iran.

“If somebody hates us, we are going to oppose them with the more powerful force of love,” he said. “We don’t hate them. We don’t kill them. That is different.”

In his speech, Mr. Vance stressed that America embraces protection for all faiths.

“This is the light that has guided America’s political principles from the founding to this very day,” he said. “We remain the world’s largest majority Christian country, and the right to religious freedom is protected by the people for everybody, whether you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim or no faith at all.”