Tomorrow, President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission will hold its fourth public hearing to discuss religious liberty issues in the military. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, which houses the commission, the objective of the hearing is to recognize present threats to religious liberty in the military and to identify ways to strengthen religious liberty for all service members. The commission’s three previous hearings were devoted to exploring the nation’s broad foundations of religious freedom with religious and legal scholars and understanding the current religious liberty landscape in public and private education from teachers, students, and parents.
The military hearing, which will include perspectives from service members, chaplains, and veterans, will be streamed live December 10, 2025, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and can be viewed here.
Liberty Counsel represents several military clients who have submitted written testimonies to the commission regarding religious discrimination. For instance, a U.S. Marine Corps First Lieutenant, who has religious objections to the TDAP and Flu shots, faces an administrative discharge after being denied a religious accommodation to be exempt from military vaccine policies. Liberty Counsel has already won a legal victory on this officer’s behalf and many others when it litigated against the Pentagon’s COVID-19 shot mandate in Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin and Colonel Financial Management Officer, et al. v. Austin obtaining multiple restraining orders and injunctions, including a class-wide injunction that led to the rescinding of the unconstitutional mandate.
But in 2025, despite the officer’s sincere faith-based request to abstain from TDAP and Flu vaccinations, which a chaplain affirmed, the Marine Corps gave the officer a “boilerplate” denial virtually identical to those used during the COVID-19 mandates.
“My separation recommendation is grounded not in lack of unit performance, bad conduct by me, or mission failure, but solely on my lawful exercise of religious convictions,” reads the testimony. “Sincere religious believers opposed to additional vaccinations are still being treated as insubordinate, violators of lawful orders, and ‘refusers,’ notwithstanding the rejection of the COVID mandates.”
In the testimony, the First Lieutenant makes several recommendations, including:
- Adopt a genuinely individualized, case-by-case process for evaluating religious accommodation requests — one that does not rely on form denials, boilerplate, or blanket rejections, but instead carefully considers the sincerity of beliefs, the actual risk to force readiness, and less burdensome alternatives.
- Prohibit punitive or career-damaging actions (e.g., separation, loss of pay, denial of promotion or training) triggered as soon as a service member submits a request for exemption from vaccines on religious grounds.
- Revise the vaccine requirement for all vaccines for conditions that are non-life-threatening in healthy individuals, or which are non-transmissible to others to be optional based solely on individual service member’s discretion. The U.S. Government does not live in the service member’s body after service. Only that person does.
Under its COVID shot mandate, the Pentagon uniformly denied most of the 36,500 religious accommodation requests it received from troops to abstain from the experimental shot and involuntarily discharged more than 8,300 service members for refusing to take it. Thousands of service members were involved with Liberty Counsel’s litigation on behalf of the military, and many had been forced to resign, prematurely retire, or had lost promotions and career opportunities.
In January 2025, President Trump ordered the Pentagon to reinstate any willing service members who were forced out of the military for taking a stand and refusing the experimental shot.
In May 2025, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Religious Liberty Commission to “safeguard” the nation’s founding principle of religious freedom. As the order notes, federal policies in recent years have threatened religious liberty in America. According to a White House fact sheet, these policies have undermined longstanding conscience protections, targeted peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses, prevented parents from sending their children to religious schools, threatened the loss of funding or denial of non-profit tax status for faith-based organizations, and singled out religious groups and institutions for exclusion from governmental programs.
Specifically, the Commission is tasked to produce a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, the current threats to domestic religious liberty, and strategies to preserve and enhance religious liberty protections for future generations. The commission is set to terminate after delivering the report on or before July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Although the COVID-19 mandate has been rescinded, some service members are still facing anti-religious hostility when it comes to vaccine requirements. With testimony from military members and veterans, the Religious Liberty Commission will be in position to recommend to President Donald Trump the changes that need to be made to protect the religious liberty of service member citizens to practice their faith without government interference. Our brave military heroes should never have to put aside their faith to serve our nation.”
