WASHINGTON — The federal Religious Liberty Commission, established by President Donald Trump through executive order and housed within the Department of Justice, was created to study, promote, and strengthen protections for religious liberty in the United States. Its work has examined the role of religion across government, education, healthcare, workplaces, the military, and other areas of public life. The Wild Hunt has been reporting on the Commission’s activity since its inception in 2025.
The Commission has generated controversy over how it defines religious liberty and whose experiences are represented in its work. A multifaith coalition including Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh organizations filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the Commission disproportionately represents a “Judeo-Christian” perspective while excluding minority-faith voices. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has similarly argued that church-state separation is essential to protecting religious freedom for everyone.
Commission members have generally characterized religious liberty as facing increasing cultural and governmental pressures, particularly in disputes involving religious conscience, healthcare, education, and the ability of religious institutions to participate in public life.
The inaugural meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission took place at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C on June 16, 2025. | Image via YouTube/ The Justice Department
The Commission held its final scheduled public hearing on April 13, 2026, concluding a series of sessions featuring commissioners, legal scholars, religious leaders, and advocates. Over the summer, the Commission received public comments on its process and proposals. Some of those comments mentioned contemporary Paganism and Indigenous spirituality, while other references to ancient pagan religions appeared in the context of Christian belief. The Commission is scheduled to begin reviewing the public comments today.
The Pagan Solidarity Alliance submitted a policy brief during the public-comment period. In the following Letter to The Wild Hunt, M. Rev. Dr. Davron Michaels examines the public-comment record, PSA’s participation in the process, and what the relative absence of Pagan institutional voices may mean for Pagan representation in federal discussions of religious liberty.
Rev. Dr. Davron Michaels is a member of the Spiral Council of the Pagan Solidarity Alliance (PSA) and Paramount Priest of New Aeon Church International. His work with PSA includes research and advocacy concerning religious liberty, the government administration of minority religions, and the Department of Defense Faith and Belief Code restructuring.
When Washington Talks About Religious Liberty, Does It Remember Pagans?
When the federal government talks about “religious liberty,” who does it picture?
That question has become increasingly important for Pagan Americans as the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission moves toward completing its final report. The Commission’s June 2026 draft offered twelve broad recommendations touching education, healthcare, religious institutions, the military, government enforcement, and the relationship between church and state.
After the draft was released, the Department of Justice opened a public-comment period. DOJ has since released thousands of pages of those submissions. The Pagan Solidarity Alliance has been reviewing that record with two questions in mind: What did Americans—particularly members of minority religious communities—tell the Commission? And where were the Pagans?
The answers are revealing.
A Pagan voice enters the federal record
PSA submitted Policy Brief No. 2026-01, “Administrative Principles Supporting the Practical Implementation of Religious Liberty,” as part of the public-comment process. We now know that it made it into the official federal record.
The DOJ production contains PSA’s transmittal email as DOJ-RLC Comment-009205, followed by our cover letter and the full policy brief. That may sound like a mundane administrative detail. It isn’t. For a relatively young Pagan organization, it means that when the federal government assembled a public record on the future of religious liberty in the United States, a substantive Pagan policy analysis became part of it.
Our argument was deliberately broader than Paganism. We did not ask the Commission for special treatment for Pagans. Instead, we focused on an often-overlooked question: how does a constitutional promise like religious liberty become something people actually experience in their interactions with government?
The answer involves decidedly unglamorous things—classification systems, chaplaincy programs, accommodation procedures, demographic information, administrative guidance, and recordkeeping. But those things matter.
As PSA told the Commission, “Religious liberty is often tested not when government serves the religious majority, but when it encounters communities that are unfamiliar, numerically small, or imperfectly understood.”
The minority-faith problem was bigger than PSA
One of the most important things we found in reviewing the public comments is that PSA was hardly alone in questioning whether the Commission adequately understood America’s religious diversity.
The Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, for example, described the draft as relying on predominantly Judeo-Christian terminology and argued that it lacked meaningful engagement with many minority-faith experiences. SALDEF stressed that religious-liberty protections must work for Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and other religious minorities—not only for traditions already well represented in public institutions.
Other commenters raised similar concerns about the Commission’s composition, hearings, and policy framing. Again and again, sophisticated submissions argued that a durable religious-liberty framework must work for communities outside the religious majority.
This is not simply a dispute between Christians and non-Christians. One of the more interesting features of the public record is the number of Christians who themselves defend church-state separation and government neutrality, sometimes on explicitly Christian theological grounds. Their argument is that religious preference can ultimately corrupt religion as well as government.
The real divide in the comments often appears less like “Christian versus non-Christian” and more like two competing understandings of religious liberty: preferential religious liberty and pluralistic religious liberty.
The pluralistic approach asks a deceptively simple question: whatever rule government creates, will it still seem fair when applied to a religion we do not understand, share, or particularly like? For minority religions, that is the test that matters.
And yet, where are the Pagans?
Here the review becomes especially interesting.
Again and again, commenters trying conscientiously to describe America’s overlooked religious communities name Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Baha’is, Indigenous traditions, Humanists, and atheists. Those communities unquestionably deserve inclusion.
But frequently absent from those lists are Pagans, Wiccans, Druids, Heathens, and modern polytheists.
That does not necessarily reflect hostility. In some ways, the absence is more instructive because it appears unintentional. Even people actively thinking about religious pluralism can simply forget that we exist.
Our review of the released public-comment materials is still being completed, so PSA is not claiming that no other Pagan organization submitted comments. That conclusion would be premature. What we can say is this: among the Religious Liberty Commission public comments PSA has reviewed to date, we have not identified another Pagan organization that submitted a comparable substantive institutional policy analysis.
If another exists in this enormous record, we hope to find it. But the difficulty of finding Pagan institutional voices is itself noteworthy.
The military issue wasn’t just a Pagan concern
Many Pagan readers will already know about the Department of Defense’s 2026 restructuring of its religious-affiliation codes. The previous system contained more than 200 faith and belief categories. The revised system reduced that number dramatically, removing numerous specific minority-faith and nonreligious identifiers.
That development helped prompt PSA’s research. But something important happened when we examined the Commission comments: other organizations independently saw the same problem.
Interfaith Alliance devoted part of its submission to the marginalization of religious-minority service members. It specifically cited the reduction from more than 200 recognized religious traditions to 31 and noted the removal of Humanism, Unitarian Universalism, and other traditions. It argued that a serious religious-liberty policy must address the experiences of minority-faith service members rather than assume that religious accommodation is only about the majority.
Other commenters likewise questioned the apparent tension between the Commission’s call to streamline military religious accommodations and DoD’s simultaneous reduction of the administrative categories used to identify religious communities.
This matters. PSA’s concern was not an isolated Pagan reaction to losing names from a government list. Independent religious-liberty advocates looking at the same administrative decision also saw a pluralism problem.
Our policy brief approached the question from public administration. The 2017 DoD expansion of Faith and Belief Codes explicitly tied greater specificity to better demographic reporting, planning for religious support, and assessment of chaplain capabilities and requirements. PSA therefore asked a practical question about the 2026 reversal: if specificity served operational purposes in 2017, how will those functions now be performed with dramatically less specific information?
We do not yet know the full answer.
That is why PSA has filed a coordinated series of Freedom of Information Act requests seeking the administrative record behind the changes. Those requests remain a separate research project, and our Commission submission deliberately avoided drawing conclusions from records we have not yet received.
Visibility is part of religious liberty
There is a larger lesson here for the Pagan community.
Government discrimination does not always arrive as someone declaring that Wicca is not a religion or that Druids have no constitutional rights. Sometimes it is quieter.
A classification disappears. A form contains no appropriate choice. An advisory board is assembled without anyone noticing that entire families of religions are absent. A policy designed around familiar religious structures works poorly for unfamiliar ones. Or an otherwise thoughtful discussion of “minority religions” simply never remembers Pagans at all.
None of those things automatically proves discriminatory intent. But accumulated administrative invisibility can have practical consequences.
That is why PSA chose to participate in this process as a policy organization rather than merely issue a statement of protest. Our submission argues that government religious classifications should be understood as administrative tools, not theological judgments. Specificity, transparency, documentation, and consultation can help government serve a religiously diverse population without deciding which religions are more legitimate than others.
That principle protects Christians as surely as it protects Pagans. Religious neutrality is not hostility toward religion. For small religions especially, it is often our best protection.
What happens next?
The Commission is scheduled to hold a virtual public meeting on August 17 to review the comments, discuss the draft, and finalize the report. When the final report appears, PSA intends to read it carefully.
Did the Commission respond to concerns raised by minority-faith organizations? Did its conception of religious pluralism broaden? Did it address the tension between improving military religious accommodation and reducing the administrative visibility of minority religions? And did anything Pagans said make a difference?
We do not know yet.
But we know something we did not know before DOJ released the public comments.
We were there.
When the federal government opened a national conversation about religious liberty, the Pagan Solidarity Alliance put a Pagan institutional perspective into the permanent public record—not asking for special privileges, but arguing that the machinery of religious liberty must work equally well for traditions that are large or small, familiar or unfamiliar.
Perhaps that is also a lesson for the broader Pagan community.
For decades, Pagans have fought to be recognized as legitimate religious participants in American society. Some of those battles have been dramatic. Others take place in hearing rooms, administrative databases, policy briefs, and federal comment periods that few people will ever read.
They matter nonetheless.
Because when government asks America’s religions what religious liberty should mean, someone has to make sure Pagans answer.
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