A large portion of Jim Garlow’s “Future Conference” in San Diego this week was devoted to the plight of Christians in parts of the Middle East, including those imprisoned and even executed by ISIS and oppressive governments.

The speakers largely refrained from making strained false equivalencies between Christians persecuted by ISIS and American Christians “persecuted” by having to provide public services to gay people. (The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who has made a cottage industry out of this kind of rhetoric, was scheduled to speak but had to drop out because of illness.) To Garlow’s credit, he also invited Suzan Johnson Cook, the former Obama-appointed U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, to discuss the work that she did in that office.

But Cook was forced to confront some of the entrenched right-wing talking points about the Obama administration and religious freedom when, in a Q&A after her speech, conservative pundit Gina Loudon asked her why “we hear so little” from the administration about efforts to help victims of religious persecution. Loudon’s question echoed the claims of many Religious Right activist who claim that the president has done little to free imprisoned Christians, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

Cook told Loudon that how much the administration says publicly about these cases does not always reflect the amount of work that they are doing “delicately and discreetly” behind the scenes. While such cases are “a priority,” she said, “many times you can’t tell the story of who’s being persecuted outwardly, because many times their very lives were at stake”: