Trump's latest move to make America a Christian nationalist state

Critics have accused Donald Trump of pushing a “Christian nationalist agenda” in the US that is “detrimental to democracy”, after a report by a religious advisory body he created called for stronger ties between church and state.

The Religious Liberty Commission – made up mostly of conservative Christians – released the draft report on the history and state of religious liberty late last week. It advocates for a stronger role for religion and religious expression across government, schools and the public sphere.

“Far too often in our national life, religion is treated not as a protected and valued contribution to public life, but as a problem or annoyance to be managed, restricted, or sidelined,” the report said.

Three families reflect on the early signs of the illness, which affected their parents.

They include the things they missed or dismissed, what they’d do differently and what they’d want other people in the same position to know.

One of the first incidents that rang alarm bells for Robert was his mum falling victim to a suspected scam from someone selling mattresses door-to-door. 

She also started to struggle with cooking and making her special dishes she’d been making for decades without a problem.

We [had] just sort of played along with everything. But on one particularly bad day, I blurted it out over the phone, ‘Because you’ve got dementia, mum!’ She threatened to kill herself, which was very scary. Maybe it’s something I should have explained properly to her from the get go…

I think we missed some of the really early subtle signs.

Rosie’s mother was diagnosed with Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 58 but some symptoms, like brain fog, were put down to the menopause.

She had become more forgetful, and was repeating herself, but as she had always “been scatty” it was dismissed.

It was on strange things like going to the same buffet.

Chloe was just 14 when her mum, Sarah, was diagnosed with young onset frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease.

Another time Sarah, who was diagnosed in her forties, forgot how to boil an egg.

On Saturdays, when she’d usually go shopping, she’d go out and come straight back home, almost like she forgetting
what she was going out for.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Writer Sadhbh O’Sullivan looked into her own forgotten subscriptions when she became a first-time buyer, and realised how much she was wasting on things she wasn’t using.

I’d long considered myself to be quite a reasonable spender. 

But the hidden costs across her bank accounts, like free trials that hadn’t been cancelled and memberships for abandoned services, proved otherwise.

It was full of small amounts, £2.99 here, £4.50 there. These small amounts added up.

According to a Nationwide survey almost one in five Brits don’t use every platform they pay for.

The bank suggests they could save as much as £400 a year by ditching them. 

National Trading Standards’ 2025 research found 4.7 million people were paying for subscriptions they didn’t know they’d signed up for.

In 2024, a government report found unused and unwanted subscriptions cost consumers up to £1.6bn a year.

Hunt them down

Banking apps usually list your ‘subscriptions’ separately from direct debits and standing orders so you can easily spot what you’re shelling out on.

Check everything

You can be debited through credit cards, E-payment services, your mobile phone bill, Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Don’t vow to use a subscription you’re not going to, even if you
have good intentions.

Many businesses have changed from monthly to annual payments so look further back.

Make sure to track any subscriptions you have kept so you can cancel them, if need be, in future.

But staff say many people treat their shops like a tip.

Here they share the most useful donations they get, and the
ones that drive them mad.

The quality of donations over the last year has diminished.

Claire Stockman, head of retail for St
Luke’s Hospice [pictured], says many donations include used items from fast fashion like Boohoo and Primark, which they cannot sell for more than £2, if at all.

of what comes into St Luke’s Hospice is unsellable, Stockman says.

She adds its soiled, damaged beyond
repair or smelly.

Harriet, a volunteer at Crisis in Dalston,
says people bring in clothes that are dirty and stained – things that they cannot sell
on Vinted.

She also sees dirty kitchenware and technology that no longer works.

There was a box donated after someone’s family had passed and in it were all these medals. I researched them and the whole collection ended up going for £2,340…

A good donation is anything new with tags on, anything that hasn’t been opened, or higher quality items.

Items that have been well looked after are more likely to sell and generate a better price for charity too.

Harriet adds that knick-knacks and wine glasses are surprise hits in her branch.

Here, psychologists, career consultants and sleep experts give their best advice on how
to beat the gloom that the
work week is looming…

Pave the way on Friday

Psychologist Maria-Teresa Daher-Cusack says to wrap up tasks and not to leave big or difficult things for Monday. And write a to-do list for the next week so you know what to expect when you return after the weekend.

Get outside early

Doctor Naheed Ali says getting out on a Sunday morning – not sleeping late – helps regulate the circadian rhythm that can become skewed over the weekend.

On Sunday spend time away from technology to allow yourself a personal reset away from doom scrolling.

Put yourself in the best position to rest by avoiding large meals, screens and caffeine.

If possible don’t stack your Mondays with high-pressure tasks.

Don’t just save joyful things for the weekend. On lunch breaks, try to do something you enjoy.

If the Sunday scaries are constant, listen to them. If every Sunday fills you with dread and nothing seems to quell it it’s worth asking if it’s the job, the culture or the career itself. No one should spend half their weekend bracing for impact… ” says Victoria McLean

But no country’s energy system is 100 per cent secure and large-scale blackouts, although rare, are possible.

Here’s how to prepare, and what could happen, if we do have a blackout.

If the UK’s power went down tomorrow, these are the ways it is likely to impact you first.

For EV owners that are already on the road, Professor Keith Bell, who works in electricity planning, recommends that those with an EV with reasonable charge use it as a generator, like your own store of electricity.

In the case of the power system going down, petrol isn’t a totally safe option as queues at petrol stations could be huge and places are likely to run out of fuel.

The longer the power takes to return the worse things are likely to get. In 2021 Storm Arwen physically damaged power lines across the UK.

During the 1977 New York blackout, which lasted 25 hours, there was civil unrest, resulting in widespread looting and arson, although intense heatwaves are thought to have exacerbated the situation.

To get updates during a power cut – a car radio can be used, but in severe weather it might be safer to stay inside.

A minimum of 2.5-3 litres of drinking water per person per day is recommended.

The Government recommends opting for torches over candles, for safety reasons.

The commission’s chairman, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, said in April that the concept of the state and the church being separate is the “biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding”.

But commentators said the report failed to represent the ideological diversity of the country and was a betrayal of the US First Amendment.

Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, told The i Paper the commission is part of Trump and those around him advancing a powerful Christian agenda.

“It’s one spur of a broader effort to frame the American government in terms of Christian nationalist narratives, to erode, if not destroy, separation of church and state, and to enshrine Christian privilege through the federal government, especially through the executive branch,” he said.

Taylor called this a “kind of religious liberty for some but not all,” and said it was “detrimental to democracy itself.”

Keith Magee, a senior fellow and professor at University College London’s Centre on US Politics, said that the American principle of separating church and state “was never intended to push faith out of public life. To me, it is about protecting both religion and government from distorting one another.”

But he said that “history shows that when political power leans on religion for legitimacy, both our democratic institutions and our religious communities can lose something essential”.

Meanwhile, Interfaith Alliance, a US organisation that has criticised the commission, accused the report of reflecting a “narrow, Christian nationalist worldview of the illegitimate commission”.

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Interfaith’s president and a Baptist minister, called the report a “betrayal of the original intention of the promise of religious freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment”.

He added that in the report’s 224 pages, the commission failed to acknowledge the “growing threat of Islamophobia — perhaps because the US President and his allies are waging a coordinated attack on Americans who are Muslim”.

Sameerah Munshi, one of only three Muslim voices on the commission, resigned in March after the firing of her colleague Carrie Prejean-Boller, a Catholic who opposes Christian Zionism, after a heated exchange regarding antisemitism.

Trump’s support for a stronger Christian nationalist platform is likely to be less to do with his own personal views and more to do with shoring up support from his Maga base. Christian nationalists have been among Trump’s key supporters. These include the late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, as well as Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain, a prominent televangelist.

While US Vice President JD Vance has avoided the term Christian nationalist, he was raised as an evangelical Christian and converted to Catholicism as an adult. He has declared that the US “has been and always will be a Christian nation”.

When asked if the commission’s report would change how his Government operates on religious liberty issues, Trump said on Friday that it depends on how well his administration promotes its conclusions. “We’re going to sell it,” he said. “We have some incredible recommendations. This group can sell, and that’s what we are going to be doing.”

Supporters of pushing for a greater connection between the state and the church include the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank, which advocates for robust protections for religious freedoms, arguing that individuals and faith-based organisations should not be compelled by the Government to act against their deeply held beliefs.

This can often conflict with civil rights protections, particularly those regarding LGBTQ+ individuals and reproductive rights.

Recommendations in the latest report include greater access to public money for faith-based agencies and broader exemptions for those claiming conscientious objections to policies such as vaccine mandates. It also recommends getting rid of the “Johnson Amendment”, which bans political activities by tax-exempt religious groups.

Other recommendations include establishing a hotline for public school teachers to report claims of religious liberty violations.

The US Department of Justice has announced that a public comment period for the draft report will close on 12 July, after which the commission will hold a virtual public hearing to review the comments. It will likely then be discussed in Congress to see if some of the recommendations have enough support to be implemented.

This has raised concerns about the path the US could be on.

“A healthy democracy protects the freedom of every faith and no faith alike,” said Magee. The main question, he added, is: “What kind of democracy [do] Americans want to preserve?”