Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 20, 2025 /
14:11 pm
As the work of the presidential Religious Liberty Commission gets underway, the commission’s chairman, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, said he sees two major sets of domestic threats to religious liberty in the United States.
The first set of threats, he said, has its origins in several mid-20th-century court decisions, while the second set of threats is due to apathy by people of faith, “because if you don’t fight for it, you can lose it.”
Patrick made these observations during a June 19 interview on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” following the commission’s opening June 16 hearing in Washington, D.C.
Patrick said the commission’s inaugural convocation addressed a range of topics including the intent of the country’s founders, “what the establishment clause was about … and how we lost it in this country through court decisions.”
He explained that the courts, “particularly the Warren court and Hugo Black,” took religious liberty away, “and now we’re fighting to bring it back. Because if you lose religious liberty … all the other liberties fall by the wayside quickly.”
Patrick said he and his 13 fellow commissioners, which include Bishop Robert Barron and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, received expert legal input on a number of religious liberty cases and the feedback included that “the Supreme Court needs to take up more cases, and they need to quit kicking them back down to the lower courts.”
“We have to get the courts at every level to take more cases on these big decisions,” Patrick said. During the commission’s initial hearing, the U.S. Department of Justice, under which the commission operates, was also called upon to take a more proactive role in religious liberty cases.
Patrick indicated that the commission plans to hold another seven or eight hearings over the next year and then will deliver to President Donald Trump “a report on what he can do in executive orders or maybe legislation he’ll recommend to Congress to take up,” Patrick said.
Discussing the origins of the commission, Patrick said that “when I talked to the president about this last November, and he had already talked about religious liberty in his first four years, I said, ‘I think the timing is right now.’ And he just loved the idea.”
Patrick said that “we have to be very smart about how we walk down this path with the president” and expressed his confidence that “we have a president who believes in God, who believes in Jesus Christ, and who has said, ‘I want my government to reflect the values of where I know most of the country is.’”
The full “World Over with Raymond Arroyo” interview with Patrick can be viewed below.
Tessa Gervasini is a staff reporter for Catholic News Agency.
Ken Oliver-Méndez is editor-in-chief of the Catholic News Agency, which provides news of general interest to Catholics worldwide through its network of regional correspondents, bureaus, and sister services, including ACI Prensa, ACI Stampa, CNA Deutsch, ACI Africa, ACI Afrique, ACI Mena, and ACI Digital. A native Washingtonian and journalist by profession, Ken is a former White House director of specialty media, news editor at NBC Radio, and evening news producer at Radio Martí, among other positions in journalism and public policy.
