Christian leaders issued a stark warning this week, telling a federal commission that believers are being systematically pushed out of the nation’s healthcare and social services sectors due to mounting legal and ideological pressures.
“I think they want us out of health care,” said Bishop Robert Barron during a hearing on Monday. “They want us out of education.”
The testimony was delivered during the sixth hearing of the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission, a body established in 2025 by President Donald Trump to advise the White House on threats to religious freedom.
While the testimony focused on broad religious protections, the speakers—Barron and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone—specifically highlighted the legal battles facing Catholic institutions and medical professionals.
Archbishop Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, drew particular attention to the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order that has been embroiled in over a decade of litigation regarding federal contraception mandates.
“The courage of this poor religious community to take on the federal government with its endless resources cannot be overstated,” Cordileone said. He questioned why such “humble, holy, and self-giving women” should find themselves in “a multiyear, burdensome litigation with the federal government over a contraception insurance mandate that was part of the Affordable Care Act.”
The Archbishop also pointed to recent legal actions in California, including a lawsuit against Providence St. Joseph Hospital for refusing to perform abortions and another against a Catholic facility that declined to perform a hysterectomy for a gender transition. He warned that if courts rule against these hospitals, “all Catholic hospitals in California will be threatened.”
A central point of contention raised during the hearing was how the government defines religious activity. Cordileone criticized state bills that offer narrow exemptions only to organizations that employ and serve people of their own faith with the primary goal of proselytizing.
“So here we have the secular government defining for religious communities what it means to be religious,” Cordileone said. “If we lose this fight, we will have lost the soul of our country.”
Bishop Barron, who leads the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, argued that religious leaders have become “more reticent” to speak publicly as they succumb to “pressures from the secular ideology.” He emphasized a need to return to traditional definitions of service and morality.
“We’ve got to keep articulating what the good is, because otherwise we won’t know what love really is,” Barron said.
The commission itself remains a point of intense political friction. A coalition of multifaith advocacy groups, including the Interfaith Alliance and Muslims for Progressive Values, has sued to challenge the commission’s existence. They argue the body is not “fairly balanced” as required by law, claiming its membership is overwhelmingly Christian.