President Donald Trump’s impulsive foreign policy has many critics but at least one bright spot — he’s winning plaudits from the evangelical right and even some Democrats for his push on religious freedom.

Trump's religious freedom squad — including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Ambassador at Large Sam Brownback, and national security adviser John Bolton, a former member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, or USCIRF — has promised to deploy a stockpile of little-used legal tools to shame and sanction countries they view as interfering with the practice of religion.


On Thursday, as the U.S. welcomed a capacity crowd to its inaugural Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, Trump indicated that the crackdown was starting — he threatened to sanction Turkey, a NATO ally, for detaining American pastor Andrew Brunson. The news drew an enthusiastic response from those gathered at the State Department and seemed to deliver on the long-held hopes of religious activists that Trump would clamp down on intolerance.

“There’s a great sense of optimism because of the support of the president,” said Gayle Manchin, a USCIRF vice chair and the wife of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). “We have a great opportunity.”

It remains to be seen how Trump will follow up on his tweeted threat to Turkey, and White House and State Department officials did not respond to questions about what form sanctions would take or when they might go into effect.

Twenty years after the International Religious Freedom Act was signed into law, its sanctions have been used only twice, against Vietnam and Eritrea, a record viewed by civil society groups as dismal. The law’s power to punish groups or individuals also is rarely used.

“Even though USCIRF has recommended multiple times that targeted sanctions be deployed by the White House, nothing has ever happened,” USCIRF Vice Chair Kristina Arriaga said. “The same people who are torturing Uyghurs in China or Christians in Iraq are able to send their wives and children here to go Christmas shopping in New York. This is a travesty. For the first time in 20 years, I feel that this is an administration that’s willing to take action.”

Whether Trump takes action or not, his ministerial already has served a political purpose, raising the profile of religious freedom as an issue the administration cares about and sending a message of kinship to the evangelical voters who will be crucial to Republican chances in congressional midterm elections.

But the event, with hours of testimony on dismal rights abuses, also showed the stark contrast between the administration’s statements on religion and its record on human rights. Trump has attempted to ban travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S., separated thousands of families along the southern border to discourage asylum seekers, and failed to roundly condemn last year’s neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the ministerial, some attendees quietly dismissed the event as just for show.

“It makes it hard to take them seriously when they both undermine religious freedom here at home and when they are ignoring so many other disastrous human-rights abuses,” said Michael Fuchs, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress and former deputy assistant secretary of state. “Some of the smoke and mirrors around an event like this can obscure the lack of a focus on human rights and the much, much bigger problems in religious freedom.”

Trump’s team, too, is heavy with Christian evangelicals, which has raised concerns that the administration, if it does follow through with hints to step up sanctions, will be focused on Christian causes at the expense of other populations, such as the Rohingya, Muslims who have been subjected to what the U.S. labels an ethnic cleansing campaign by Myanmar’s Buddhist-dominated army.

“This administration’s reputation is: We care about religious freedom if you’re Christian. They care a lot less about Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a Foreign Affairs Committee member who didn’t attend the event. “Tragically, the incredible layer of bias, perceived and real, in this administration just kind of taints everything they’re doing. It’s not the bright spot it could be.”

So far, Brownback has been conducting outreach for the administration by meeting with a multitude of groups. On a typical Tuesday, he’s on Capitol Hill for listening sessions organized by the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, an informal group of nongovernmental organizations.

“This administration is very serious about this,” Brownback told reporters Thursday. “This is an important human right, but we haven’t had the push behind it. We haven’t put enough energy and effort behind it. That’s the focus, that’s the intent, and I think we’re going to stay on it.”

