The Freedom From Religion Foundation says the Trump administration’s announcement that it will direct almost $2 billion in global funding toward faith-based organizations is outrageous.
The State Department is touting the initiative as the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based groups in more than 20 years, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars for some of the world’s largest evangelical Christian ministries. The administration announced $1.4 billion for health services delivered through faith-based and community hospitals and clinics plus $538 million in humanitarian assistance involving Samaritan’s Purse, and a consortium led by World Vision and Compassion International.
“The administration is openly restructuring American foreign assistance around religion,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Humanitarian aid should be based on humanitarian need and the ability to provide effective, secular services, not on whether an organization puts ‘faith in action.’ Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll an administration’s campaign to elevate and subsidize religion.”
The administration’s own language makes its religious favoritism impossible to miss. It celebrates the funding as a “historic” investment in faith-based groups and repeatedly identifies the religious character of recipients as a virtue. The government may contract with religiously affiliated organizations to provide secular services under appropriate safeguards. Still, it may not use public money to advance religion, subsidize evangelism or deliberately privilege religious organizations because they are religious.
The inclusion of Samaritan’s Purse, a pervasively sectarian religious outfit headed by zealous evangelist Franklin Graham, is particularly alarming.
Samaritan’s Purse is not just any old charity. It explicitly identifies itself as an evangelical Christian organization whose mission combines aid with spreading Christianity. Its own mission statement says it assists “with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ” and “serves the Church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The group says its mission is to help people in need while “proclaiming the hope of the Gospel.”
Those are constitutionally significant facts when the federal government proposes directing enormous amounts of taxpayer money through the organization.
Samaritan’s Purse also requires employees to affirm and adhere to its Statement of Faith, such as that the bible is “inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.” Its employment website describes working for the group as a “calling” and “ministry,” and states that its religious beliefs determine employment eligibility.
The organization has attracted particular controversy for its anti-LGBTQ+ religious requirements. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Samaritan’s Purse faced widespread criticism when workers at its emergency field hospital in New York were required to subscribe to a statement of faith containing its religious teachings about marriage. Samaritan’s Purse defended its practice of requiring paid staff to subscribe to that statement. Graham himself has publicly attacked marriage equality and insisted that marriage is defined by “God’s laws.”
It is untenable that theTrump administration now proposes making Samaritan’s Purse one of its favored conduits for American humanitarian assistance.
“Feeding hungry people and providing medical treatment are worthy public purposes,” says Gaylor. “Preaching the gospel is not a government purpose. When an organization expressly combines humanitarian assistance with an evangelical mission, the government has a heightened obligation to ensure that not one taxpayer dollar subsidizes religious activity, proselytizing or religious discrimination.”
FFRF emphasizes that the constitutional problem is not simply that religious organizations may participate in otherwise neutral government programs. The problem is that the administration is proposing to funnel extraordinary sums of public money through ministries because those missions advance Christianity.
The danger is especially acute overseas, where recipients of American assistance may be experiencing war, famine, disease, displacement or natural disaster. People in desperate circumstances should never have to encounter government-subsidized evangelism alongside food, medicine or shelter. U.S. foreign assistance must serve people regardless of their religion or nonreligion, without using their vulnerability as an opportunity for religious outreach. Making the allocations all the more concerning is the inhumane destruction of USAID under DOGE cuts, which have already cost as many as 750,000 lives worldwide. Lancet estimates the aid defunding will take as many as 9.4 million lives by 2030.
FFRF is urging the administration to disclose the terms of every award, the safeguards separating publicly funded services from religious activities, the rules governing employment and subcontracting with federal funds, and the mechanisms that will ensure beneficiaries are never subjected to proselytizing or religious discrimination. The state/church watchdog will be filing a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department seeking records related to these awards, including grant agreements and funding terms, communications concerning the selection of faith-based recipients and documents detailing safeguards intended to prevent taxpayer funds from being used for religious activities, proselytizing or religious discrimination.
FFRF is also calling on Congress to investigate these awards and demand strict accounting for every taxpayer dollar. The American public deserves to know why these organizations were selected, how federal funds will be used and what protections are in place to ensure that humanitarian assistance does not become taxpayer-funded evangelism.
The United States can and should provide lifesaving assistance around the world. It does not need to finance the spread of Christianity to do so.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
