What Washington Gets Wrong About Religion, According to 14 Religious Leaders and Experts

Washington gets a lot right about religion. For example, thanks to so many members of Congress coming from a variety of religious backgrounds, legislators understand that we are a multi-religious and multi-faith (and sometimes no-faith) populace. What Washington usually gets wrong is the idea that God is only on our “side,” whether that’s on the side of Democrats or Republicans or even the United States. God certainly blesses America, but God blesses other countries and every person in the world. The trouble with believing that God is only on my side is that it implies God is somehow against the other side, political, national or otherwise. God, for example, obviously doesn’t want others to suffer when we are at war. In the end, if God is on any side, it is the side of the “brokenhearted,” as the Psalms say. So Washington needs to be careful not to claim exclusive ownership of God’s love, care and protection.

James Martin, SJ, is a priest and author of “Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest.”

There is a common assumption that American religion is synonymous with Christianity. This is not true, either historically or presently. A number of other religious traditions were present when the United States was founded, and religious diversity has grown ever since. By privileging Christianity as the dominant form of religion, Washington disadvantages other religious communities. If leaders in Washington can see this cultural bias, they can do a better job of ensuring equal treatment and religious freedom for all Americans, regardless of what they believe or don’t believe.

Simran Jeet Singh is a professor at Union Theological Seminary and the author of “The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life.”

Many American believers yearn for more pluralist spaces. Both religious and secular spaces have become more partisan in recent years. What used to be places for mingling diverging personalities and politics have morphed into echo chambers. Often, this is a top-down dynamic, as ecclesiastical leaders have become more devoted to prejudiced positions. This approach has drawn some new followers and radicalized others, but a growing number have fled their churches, unsatisfied. The nation is now filled with seekers who refuse to be defined by institutional authorities. Washington would do well to stop reducing America’s diverse, evolving and complicated religious landscape to the loudest yet unrepresentative voices.

Benjamin E. Park is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University and the author of “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism.”

Washington is too busy trying to convince the public that America is, and always has been, a Christian nation to recognize the beauty of our interfaith America.

Recognizing that we are an interfaith nation means not just embracing the fact that the United States is history’s most religiously diverse country. It means embracing the reality that we are at our best when faith serves as a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division.

Just look to the friendship between UConn women’s basketball star Paige Bueckers and her teammate Jana El Alfy. During the 2025 NCAA tournament, Bueckers, a devout Christian, woke before dawn each day to prepare breakfast so El Alfy, a Muslim from Egypt, would not have to observe Ramadan alone. In doing so, she took the time to understand a religious tradition different from her own and publicly affirmed why supporting her teammate’s Muslim faith mattered. Their friendship is a model of cooperation across difference, the kind that wins national championships and the kind Washington should be celebrating.

Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America.

Washington gets religion wrong when it treats faith as either a private sentiment or a partisan weapon.

Religion is not just a voting bloc, a demographic category or a culture-war code word. It is one of the most powerful forces shaping people’s moral imagination — how they understand belonging, dignity, obligation, fear, sacrifice and hope. When political actors ignore that, they leave the field open to those who are eager to weaponize religion for exclusion and authoritarian power.

For too long, progressives have ceded religion to the right, while many conservatives have confused political dominance with religious faithfulness. Both distortions harm democracy and religion itself.

The truth is that faith has always been at the center of America’s democratic struggles — from abolition to civil rights to movements for peace, labor, immigrant justice and human rights. At its best, religion calls us beyond tribal fear toward the common good. It reminds us that every person bears sacred worth and that power must be accountable to moral truth.

Washington would do better to partner with people of all faiths who are working to repair our common life — rather than treating religion as a tool to manipulate or a threat to manage.

Rev. Jennifer Butler is the founding CEO of Faith in Democracy.

Washington fundamentally misunderstands Islam in America by perpetuating the fear that Muslims seek to impose sharia law. This narrative ignores both the reality of American Muslim integration and our own theological history. Contrary to misconceptions, Prophet Muhammad himself established a pluralistic secular framework in Medina, where each community governed by its own religious laws while sharing civic responsibilities. The Medina Constitution demonstrates that diverse religions can coexist under a just governance system — precisely what American Muslims seek today.

The real issue isn’t sharia law but the erosion of constitutional protections. When Washington conflates religious practice with extremism, it undermines the very pluralism that makes American democracy vibrant. Progressive Muslims like me promote a human-rights-affirming vision of Islam, challenging patriarchal interpretations and advocating for gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion — goals that align with American values, not undermine them. The fear of sharia law is a false flag and distracts from the real threats to religious freedom: policies that target Muslim communities and restrict the very pluralistic governance our faith tradition has historically embraced.

Ani Zonneveld is the founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values and the author of “An Unlikely Social Justice Warrior: Making My Life Count as a Muslim Feminist.”

Washington gets religious freedom wrong. Too many in power reject a foundational American principle: Religion and freedom of belief thrive only when church and state are separate.

Washington is acting as if the opposite were true. Federal agencies are holding monthly prayer services heavily featuring speakers from ultra-conservative Christian circles. The government just sponsored a nine-hour evangelical-style worship service on the National Mall. The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent an Easter email this year to all USDA employees proclaiming, “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith. ... Jesus has been raised from the dead.”

That is not religious freedom. It’s government-backed religious favoritism that veers into government-forced religion.

Our Constitution separates church and state. It bars religious tests for public office and prevents the government from favoring one set of beliefs over others. “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together,” James Madison explained. America’s founders understood what many government officials today forget: Separation is not a threat to religious freedom but its best protection. This promise is why people of every religion and no religion have been able to live, worship, dissent and coexist here.

Church-state separation belongs to all of us. It protects freedom. When we separate church and state, everyone is freer.

Rachel Laser is the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Few areas of genuine ideological bipartisanship are left in Washington. Here’s one: The right-wing politician pining for a “Christian America” in order to get votes from evangelicals and the left-wing activist pointing to secularization as an inevitable step toward a more progressive world-order are doing the same thing. They are both seeing religion as a useful means to an end — and there are always religious people who want their faith to be used in such a way.

And if “religion” is just one more type of tribal belonging, then that’s exactly the cynicism that’s needed. Yet what if it’s true what the ancient Hebrew prophets used to say — that God cannot be captive to any king’s agenda, no matter how many court prophets claim otherwise? And what if it’s true what Jesus of Nazareth said about himself, when he refused to fit into the partisan camps of his day: “My kingdom is not of this world”?

Then that would mean religion is not just one more way of saying “Republican” or “Democrat.” That would mean religion, when it’s in step with something real, is not a means to an end, but a Way that, ultimately, upends every other ambition, every other allegiance. Washington has grown accustomed to a tame, useful religion. But there’s another kind. And, sooner or later, it will be born, again.

Russell Moore, a Christian theologian, is an editor-at-large and columnist for Christianity Today, the host of “The Russell Moore Show” podcast, and the author of “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.”

Washington often approaches religion through assumptions that privilege belief: What do people believe? What doctrines define them? What rights do they seek to protect? These are important questions, to be sure, but they are not the only ones.

In fact, Washington’s biggest mistake may be that it notices religion primarily when there is a fight and only through the lenses of culture wars, litigation, religious liberty cases and competing claims of rights. Faith is reduced to an ideological faction or political constituency.

Hindu traditions speak of dharma — the closest Sanskrit equivalent to “religion” — not primarily as asserting one’s rights, but as fulfilling one’s responsibilities to the Divine, to our highest selves, to others, to future generations and to the natural world. Imagine if policymakers sought religious leaders not only for reactions to controversy, but for wisdom about loneliness, caregiving, civic trust, environmental stewardship or cultivating compassion. Religion’s greatest and deepest public value may not be the interests it defends, but the obligations it teaches. In a society fixated on rights, religion can remind us of responsibility.

Vineet Chander is an assistant dean for religious life at Princeton University, where he directs the Hindu Life Program. This piece was written in a personal capacity.

Religion offers a foundational set of values and principles: a call to pursue justice, to protect the most vulnerable, to recognize that all people are created in the image of God and should be treated with dignity — to name just three. Our traditions generally do this with nuance, grappling with questions like: If resources are limited, who should we prioritize? What are our concentric circles of responsibility? But amid the complexity, the fundamental vision for a just society is clear.

Yet too often our political leaders claim a religious framework while simultaneously ignoring these most foundational values. They hang a mezuzah on their doorpost in a public ceremony while dismantling the legal frameworks that protect our Earth; they purport religious values while desecrating creation. They stage a photo op attending church with their family while stripping their constituents of food security and health care.

Such behavior makes a mockery of religion at a time when we so desperately need the vision of a just society, the faith in the possibility of transformation and the commitment to future generations that true religion offers.

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn is the founder and CEO of Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action.

All religion is political. Those who claim their religious commitments to be apolitical are the most muscularly political of all. In the American context, those whose religion has compelled them to seek liberation and revolution have been labeled as political. By contrast, those who have used religion to maintain current power arrangements have often managed to hide their politics in cloaks of quiet orthodoxy and mendacious religious detachment from the bloody workings of our world.

Every movement in this nation has been powered by religion — from the conquest of native peoples and their lands to the “abolition” of slavery to the Jan. 6 insurrection to the current Trumpian revival of manifest destiny and white domination. Washington must ask all who come in the name of religion a simple question: “Do you seek to bind us together in love?” Those who do not declare by their actions that hegemonic power is their god and dominance is their worship.

If religion speaks to our ultimate concerns, politics is about how those commitments unfold in the everydayness of human existence. Washington, religious people are as political as you are. Don’t trust them unless they name their politics. Don’t trust them unless they place their cards on the table.

Rev. William H. Lamar IV is pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington.

Too often, Washington misunderstands religious freedom as the power to promote certain beliefs rather than protect everyone’s rights. Many Americans don’t want government officials choosing which faith is preferred. The First Amendment’s establishment clause exists to prevent that. Most simply want the freedom to worship — or not worship — without political interference. Events like Rededicate 250 risk using public resources in ways that divide rather than unite. When government aligns itself with particular religious viewpoints, it undermines the religious liberty it is meant to safeguard. Let us be free to pray as we wish!

Cary Brief is the Buddhist chaplain at Duke University.

Washington is driven by political power, which recently has been clearly aligned — rhetorically, performatively, symbolically and otherwise — with religious power. But Washington and its many powerful constituencies are wrong that such religious power excuses executive reach over that of the other coequal branches of government; or undergirds military might, bravado, braggadociousness and aggression; or justifies how we might variously otherize those different from us and whom we disagree with, including our political opponents. Instead, religious power arises from the voice of each and every person, whether older or younger, regardless of gender, ethnicity, culture or language, not only the more affluent and socially respectable but also the less privileged, and even especially the immigrant, the refugee, the incarcerated, the homeless, the disabled or impaired, and the many others considered marginal or of less economic value. It may be idealistic and utopian to imagine attempting to live into this kind of religious empowerment, and yet it is this kind of potency that is needed to — and, when it arrives, will assuredly indeed — turn the world right side up.

Amos Yong is a professor at Fuller Seminary and a visiting senior fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry.

Washington assumes that it must co-opt or control religion instead of letting religious voices call Washington (and others) to their highest ideals and principles — which they can do by advancing the notion of accountability to a higher power. At their best, religious voices have the independence to speak truth to power and to check the excesses of politicians and those elected to office who are supposed to serve the American public or, more broadly, humanity at large. I dream of a world where religious voices embrace their highest calling by urging governments, politicians and all people to live up to their highest ideals.

Ebad Rahman is the associate dean of religious life and the adviser for Muslim life at Columbia University.