In the commentary on the harmful impact of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, one term keeps appearing: self-inflicted. A CNN article speaks of a “self-inflicted tariff crisis.” A New York Times piece laments “a self-inflicted debacle.” A Bloomberg op-ed warns, “The Coming Recession Will Be Self-inflicted.”
The Trump administration’s drastic cuts to the federal bureaucracy have likewise inflicted many wounds. Among those wounds is the evisceration of the U.S. government’s institutional capacity to analyze the complex role of religion in the world and to engage with religious groups and faith-based organizations in pursuit of America diplomatic, development, and defense objectives.
For instance, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships is gone, along with the rest of its agency. The United States Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent congressionally-funded entity, has been gutted by the new administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—with its religion and peacebuilding team lost in the process. The U.S. State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, once a thriving unit home to over 30 officials, was diminished during the first Trump administration and has now been dissolved.
Given that religious ideas, images, individuals, and institutions play important roles across a wide range of global issues, this dismantling of America’s strategic religious engagement (SRE) capacity is a non-strategic, self-inflicted injury. And there is cascading damage to faith-based groups that receive U.S. government funding and collaborate in a host of other ways with these mechanisms.
But I trust that this downturn will be temporary, and there are reasons to be bullish on America’s SRE capacity. Here, I will offer three reasons for that hope, followed by three corresponding actions that the current Trump administration—or a future administration—will need to take to reverse the current SREcession.
The first reason for hope is that what is now called SRE is a long-standing, bipartisan effort. USIP and its religion unit were established during the Ronald Reagan administration. Congress unanimously passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, and it was then signed by Bill Clinton. George W. Bush established the faith-based initiative in 2001, and it has been re-upped by every subsequent president. The U.S. State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs was established by John Kerry during Barack Obama’s second term. The first Trump administration convened a massive evidence summit on SRE in 2020 and laid the groundwork for USAID’s SRE policy that the Biden administration released in 2023. With so much of American religious life now fractured and polarized, it’s refreshing that there remains a broad bipartisan consensus on SRE.
Second, the creation of these government entities has stimulated and complemented the rise of many non-governmental organizations, centers, networks, programs, and projects focused on aspects of SRE at home and abroad. Moreover, the academic literature on the subject has exploded in recent decades. In concert with scholars and practitioners, the U.S. government has produced many excellent reports, toolkits, and trainings related to SRE.
The SRE field will now be tested by a dearth of U.S. government funding and partners. But there is sufficient momentum to sustain the field during a (hopefully) temporary downturn in U.S. government involvement. And the experience and expertise captured in SRE documents will live on.
Third, the Lemon Test is dead. For years, government officials and religious groups had to dutifully evaluate their SRE activities and grants in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s guidance stemming from the 1971 case Lemon v. Kurtzman. According to the Lemon Test, to avoid violating the Establishment Clause, a law must have 1) a secular purpose, 2) not advance or inhibit religion, and 3) not foster excessive entanglement with religion.
When I served in the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, I remember wondering: What exactly is “entanglement”? And how much is “excessive”? And what did this 1971 test actually have to do with the 1791 Establishment Clause that prohibited Congress from establishing a national church but left state-level religious establishments untouched?
Lemon soured many government officials on the very idea of outreach to faith communities. In a 2022 opinion piece, constitutional lawyer Jordan Lorence observed, “Its ahistorical focus and one-size-fits-all application convinced many government officials that they had a constitutional duty to go on search-and-destroy missions to obliterate all things religious from public life.”
Thankfully, life is no longer giving Lemon to government officials. The Supreme Court has been moving away from the Lemon Test for years, and in the 2022 case Kennedy v. Bremerton the court “abandoned Lemon’s ‘ahistorical, atextual’ approach to discerning Establishment Clause violations” in favor of “references to historical practices and understandings.” The sad irony is that the Trump administration has dismantled the government’s SRE institutions right when these institutions could enjoy newfound, Lemon-less freedom.
So, what should the second Trump administration or a future administration do to build on these reasons for hope? Well, first, and most obviously and consequentially, rebuild these mechanisms—and the agencies and institutions in which they were embedded. These mechanisms were created for a reason. And the compelling reason for engaging with religious groups to advance American interests on peacebuilding, humanitarianism, and many other issues still very much exists.
Second, preserve and then review and update the U.S. government’s SRE policies and reports produced in concert with scholars and practitioners. Many of those resources are now hard or impossible to find online, so they need to be collected and curated.
Third, because Lemon-y language can still be found in many recent government documents, the current or a future administration should produce explicitly post-Lemon Test guidance on SRE that is objective and permissive rather than subjective and restrictive.
While the current self-inflicted downturn in America’s SRE capacity is deeply concerning, I hold out hope that it is temporary and reversible. That hope is grounded in SRE’s bipartisan history, the strength of its surrounding non-governmental ecosystem, and a more favorable legal climate. Rebuilding these institutions, preserving hard-earned knowledge, and offering clear post-Lemon guidance will be essential steps toward restoring the United States’ ability to advance its interests through engagement with religious actors. SRE practitioners need to keep the faith.
