A Southern Baptist megachurch pastor and a controversial Baylor University professor are among 26 people named by President Donald Trump to serve on three advisory boards of his Religious Liberty Commission.
Two weeks ago, Trump named members of the main commission, which is to be chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a vocal Christian nationalist who is a longtime member of Second Baptist Church in Houston, a Southern Baptist Convention church. Church-state separationists criticized Trump’s creation of the commission as an attempt to elevate the grievances of evangelical Christians while ignoring real persecution suffered by other religious groups.
Dallas-area pastor Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church was named to the Advisory Board of Religious Leaders. Graham is a former president of the SBC who has been to the White House multiple times to meet with and be photographed with Trump. He is a solid and reliable Trump supporter.
Francis Beckwith
Baylor University professor Francis Beckwith was named to the Advisory Board of Legal Experts. His relationship to Baylor and the Baptists is complicated and illustrates much of the rough terrain between evangelicals, Catholics and higher education.
Francis Beckwith
In addition to other degrees, Beckwith earned a master of jurisprudence degree from Washington University. This is different than a juris doctorate, which is the terminal degree for practicing lawyers. His dissertation on that degree was about including intelligent design teaching in public school science curricula.
That’s part of what got him to Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated school in Waco, Texas. In 2003, when he was hired as associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor. He was put in that role by then-Baylor President Robert Sloan, who was on a mission to make Baylor the Notre Dame of the South. Part of his evangelical-fueled vision was to introduce the teaching of intelligent design as a middle ground between traditional creationism and Darwin-inspired evolution.
This didn’t go well, and Sloan stepped down from the presidency to a temporary role as chancellor in 2005. Today, he is president of Houston Christian University.
After Sloan hired Beckwith for the Dawson Institute, 29 members of the Dawson family called on Baylor to remove him, saying Beckwith held church-state positions contrary to Dawson’s beliefs. Dawson was a well-known strict separationist, which was the standard Baptist position until the late 20th century.
Two years later, Beckwith left the Dawson Institute post but remained at Baylor, where today he serves as professor of philosophy in the Baylor University College of Arts and Sciences.
At the time of his hiring at Baylor, Beckwith was an evangelical, and in November 2006 he was named president of the Evangelical Theological Society. However, he resigned that post six months later when he returned to the Catholic Church. Later, he became president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
Last year Beckwith received one of 14 Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prizes from the Heritage Foundation.
In February 2016, Beckwith wrote a column for The Catholic Thing that was critical of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. He said Trump was a flawed candidate who had “tapped into an anger that is very real in America.” He further said Baptist pastors Jerry Falwell and Robert Jeffress “seemed to set aside their critical faculties in their assessment of Trump. For these are men who – reared on the cadence emanating from those old sawdust revivals – are suckers for good preaching that can move the pilgrim from his mercy seat. And Trump is a damn good preacher. So much so that many evangelicals don’t seem to notice the un-Christian personal insults, slurs, arrogance, mendacity and incoherence. Which just goes to show you that not only is a sucker born every minute; sometimes he’s born again.”
He changed along the way, however, because last year Beckwith received one of 14 Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prizes from the Heritage Foundation, progenitors of Project 2025 and an organization fully committed to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The academic prizes Beckwith won is intended to “support higher education professionals who advance research aligned with Heritage’s priority issue areas.”
Advisory Board of Religious Leaders
Besides Jack Graham, others named to the Advisory Board of Religious Leaders include:
Salvatore Cordileone, archbishop of San Francisco and a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth and also of its Committee for Canonical Affairs and Church Governance. Cordileone previously tangled with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and banned her from receiving Communion.
Jentezen Franklin
Jentezen Franklin, senior pastor of Free Chapel, a multi-campus church based in Gainesville, Ga. He has been among Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters.
Archbishop Elpidophoros, the Greek Orthodox archbishop of America, who has compared Trump to Constantine.
Thomas Ferguson, pastor of Good Shepherd Catholic Parish in Alexandria, Va.
Mark Gottlieb, a rabbi who is chief education officer of Tikvah and founding dean of the Tikvah Scholars Program. He supports the Phoenix Declaration, a wide-ranging prescription for America’s public school systems produced by the Heritage Foundation. The document establishes seven pillars for education, including parental choice and responsibility, character formation and academic excellence.
Yaakov Menken, a rabbi who serves as executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, a group of Orthodox Jews who support “traditional Jewish values” as exhibited by the nation’s Founders. He is a frequent contributor to right-wing publications.
Thomas Paprocki, Catholic bishop of Springfield, Ill., who has a long list of accusations against Democrats while overlooking Republican policies and positions that contradict Catholic doctrine. In 2018, he upheld a ban on U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, a Catholic in his diocese, from receiving Communion.
Kevin Rhoades, Catholic bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind. He currently chairs the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Religious Liberty. He previously chaired the bishop’s Committee on Doctrine, which in 2021 targeted President Joe Biden for his stance on abortion rights.
Eitan Webb, a rabbi who co-founded the Chabad House of Princeton in 2002 and has served as a Jewish chaplain at Princeton University since 2007.
Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, a rabbi who serves as executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, an American organization that represents Orthodox Jews.
Advisory Board of Legal Experts
In addition to Francis Beckwith, others named to the Advisory Board of Legal Experts include:
Jason Bedrick, research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, creators of Project 2025. He was the first Orthodox Jew elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives and advocates far-right positions on most social issues, including “school choice.”
Josh Blackman, professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and is president of the Harlan Institute. He was a contributor to Project 2025 and publicly supported Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program
Gerald Bradley, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches legal ethics and Constitutional law. He publicly criticized the New York court that indicted Trump for fraud by covering up hush money payments to a prostitute. “The Trump indictment is a grave abuse of a prosecutor’s discretion,” he said.
Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and co-founder and partner in the law firm Lewin & Lewin. She served as president of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists from 2012 to 2017. She is a Zionist who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court to permit Israel to be named as a place of birth on a U.S. passport.
Kristen Waggoner
Kristen Waggoner, president and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative evangelical-focused legal advocacy firm with a track record of getting its cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was the lead defense counsel in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in 2018 and represented Lorie Smith and 303 Creative in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis in 2023.
Advisory Board of Lay Leaders
Trump named nine people to the Advisory Board of Lay Leaders:
Abigail Robertson Allen, an on-air reporter and podcaster for the Christian Broadcasting Network, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson.
Gene Bailey, host on The Victory Channel, a faith-based Christian television network. He’s also an executive director at Kenneth Copeland Ministries and executive pastor at Eagle Mountain International Church, an assistant vice president at Kenneth Copeland Bible College and as a professor of revival history. He used his platform to portray Trump as God’s divine answer for the nation.
Mark David Hall, professor at Regent University in the Robertson School of Government. He has written and testified that Christian nationalism is not a threat and that many of the nation’s Founders were influenced by orthodox Christianity and none of them favored a wall of separation between church and state.
Alveda King, a niece to Martin Luther King Jr., who leads the Center for the American Dream at the America First Policy Institute and serves as a board member at Priests for Life. In a departure from the rest of her extended family, she has been called one of the most prominent Black figures of the American Religious Right. She repeatedly endorsed Trump in his presidential races.
Christopher Levenick, director of the Program for Civic Renewal with the Connelly Foundation, and editor-in-chief of Philanthropy magazine.
Sameerah Munshi, a Muslim woman best known for her advocacy against “radical gender ideology” in public schools, meaning any mention of the transgender community.
Ismail Royer, director of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team for the Religious Freedom Institute. He also advocates against public schools recognizing transgender identity and actively opposes abortion.
Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom, described above. He advocates for evangelical Christians not to be hampered in their free expression of faith.
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the United States. He is an adviser to the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. While considered one of the top Islamic scholars in the world, he has generated controversy for his views on race and particularly opposing the Black Lives Matter movement,.
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