Vice President J.D. Vance is pledging that he and President Donald Trump will make religious liberty a top priority for their administration. Speaking at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Vance promised to promote “moral clarity” at home and abroad where religious liberty is concerned. “Religious freedom, of course, is the freedom to practice one’s own faith and act according to one’s own conscience and it’s, of course, the bedrock of civil society in the United States and across the world,” the vice president explained.

“Religious freedom flows from concepts central to the Christian faith,” Vance declared, including “the free will of human beings and the essential dignity of all peoples.” He continued, “We find its foundational tenets in the gospels themselves with Christ’s famous instruction to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” He added, “Early Christians, of course, suffered greatly and unfortunately many Christians still suffer today at the hands of oppressive state power.”

Vance touted the first Trump administration’s religious liberty achievements while promising to “expand” the administration’s focus on religious liberty going forward. “We are only in the third week of his second term, but I think it’s safe to say we’ve accomplished maybe more in the last two weeks than a lot of administrations have in a few years,” the vice president observed. He continued, “But this administration is intent on not just restoring but on expanding the achievements of the first four years and certainly of the last two weeks.”

He noted that Trump has already “issued orders to end the weaponization of the federal government against religious Americans, pardon pro-life protesters who were unjustly imprisoned under the last administration, and, importantly, stop the federal censorship used to prevent Americans from speaking their conscience and speaking their mind, whether it’s in their communities or online.”

“Now, our administration believes we must stand for religious freedom, not just as a legal principle, as important as that is, but as a lived reality, both within our own borders and especially outside of it,” the vice president continued. Referring to the failures of the previous Biden administration, he added, “In recent years, too often has our nation’s international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity.” He asked, “Think about this — how did America get to the point where we’re sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe?” He declared, “That is not what leadership on protecting the rights of the faithful looks like, and it ends with this administration.”

The vice president’s comments follow Trump’s decision to effectively shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), after audits revealed that the agency has been funding left-wing projects around the globe. Some of the more egregious initiatives reported by The Washington Stand include $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, nearly $50,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, over $30,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru, funding to print “personalized” contraceptives birth control devices in developing countries, $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,” $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland, “[h]undreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria,” and $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam, among other projects. It has also been reported that organizations such as Redeeming Babel and Christianity Today were funded by the Biden administration, largely through USAID grants.

Vance continued, “In China, across Europe, and throughout Africa, and the Middle East, the first Trump administration took critical steps to protect the rights of the faithful,” adding, “whether that was by rescuing pastors who were persecuted by foreign regimes or bringing relief to Yazidis, Christians, and other faith communities facing genocidal terror from ISIS.” He stipulated that the U.S. must clearly designate which governments “respect religious freedom and those that do not.” He explained, “The United States must be able to make that distinction. We must be able to look at catastrophes, like the plight of Iraq’s Christians over the past three decades and possess the moral clarity to act when something has gone wrong.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, lauded the vice president’s remarks.

“It was encouraging and exciting to see Vice President J.D. Vance speak at the IRF Summit just a week into the second Trump administration,” she observed. “He is the highest-level politician to do so, and that says something about how seriously this administration is taking international religious freedom. He made it clear that the Trump administration plans to prioritize religious freedom in foreign policy. Religious freedom advocates are looking forward to seeing the administration once again elevate this issue, appoint a prominent Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, and speak out for the persecuted.”