Alexei Koseff | San Francisco Chronicle
WASHINGTON — Halfway across the world, President Donald Trump is waging a war against a theocratic regime that he considers a threat to American ideals. Back home, Rep. Jared Huffman is doing the same.
Since coming out eight years ago as the only openly nonbelieving member of Congress, the San Rafael Democrat has embarked on a crusade to uphold the constitutional separation of church and state. Through the Congressional Freethought Caucus, Huffman now leads nearly three dozen colleagues in a public defense of secular society against a rising Christian nationalism that he fears will undermine democratic norms and religious freedom in the United States.
His mission is propelled with renewed imperative in the second Trump administration, whose conservative Christian policy agenda aims to “bring God back into our lives,” as the president has put it. This month, whistleblower complaints by U.S. soldiers prompted Huffman and 29 other House members, from within and beyond the Freethought Caucus, to request that the Defense Department’s inspector general investigate whether military officials are using “biblical end-times prophecies” from the Book of Revelation to justify the war in Iran.
In an interview with the Chronicle, Huffman accused Trump of advancing a broader movement to center faith in American government and reconfigure the country as a Christian state.
Those tenets, known as Christian nationalism, have infected the highest levels of the federal government, Huffman argues: The White House hosts a regular Bible study for the Cabinet, the Department of Homeland Security posts Scripture alongside videos of immigration raids, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., last week defended a member who said “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” But this doctrine more closely aligns with right-wing theocracies like the Taliban, he said, than the free democracy envisioned in the Constitution, which prohibits the government from establishing an official religion.
“It’s a full-spectrum assault,” Huffman said. “It’s dark. This is unthinkable. We are being taken to places we have never been.”
The White House did not respond to Huffman’s criticisms of its alignment with Christian nationalism. Spokesperson Anna Kelly provided a statement defending the objectives of the Iran war.
“President Trump and the administration have clearly outlined their goals with regard to Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and production capacity, demolish their navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and prevent them from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon,” she said. “The success of this operation speaks for itself.”
Channeling a ‘moral breaking point’
The dispute goes deeper than the typical ideological clashes between Democrats and Republicans. Huffman said tying American identity to Christian identity not only erodes the country’s founding principles, but is also out of touch with an increasingly pluralistic society, where nearly 1 in 3 people now identifies as religiously unaffiliated.
Huffman is among them. It has occasionally caused awkward tensions for him as an elected official, like in 2013, when he was reluctantly sworn in on a Bible for his first term in Congress because he did not want to cause a scene.
Then in November 2017, Huffman publicly disclosed that he does not believe in God. It felt like a risk, but a necessary one after reaching what he calls a “moral breaking point” over Trump’s elevation of “fringe religious extremists” during his first term. Hearing the head of the Environmental Protection Agency quote the Bible as he dismantled its science advisory boards was particularly distressing for Huffman, a former environmental attorney.
Though Huffman was raised in a fundamentalist offshoot of Mormonism, he had drifted from religion for decades. When Huffman was in college, his father died, and he began to question his understanding of the world. He also grew unsettled as friends from childhood did terrible things because they thought God was talking to them, including one who participated in a mass murder.
“It should be very alarming. And it certainly was to me,” Huffman said.
But coming out as a nonbeliever forced him to finally consider what he did identify with. He settled on humanism, a moral framework emphasizing compassion and a duty to care for other people that Huffman connected to through the books of Kurt Vonnegut. It has given Huffman a sense of sacred purpose, he said, without having to “embrace the supernatural stuff” — when there is no second chance, your actions in this life are all the more important.
“It brings some clarity and urgency to getting it right in the here and now,” he said. “Labels like atheist or agnostic reduced me too much. They didn’t really say what I was for.”
Thinking big about free thought
The Congressional Freethought Caucus, named for the philosophy prioritizing logic and reason over religious dogma, emerged from his disclosure.
Though they did not know each other well before, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., reached out to Huffman about his decision to go public and they began to discuss the history of free thought and people who challenged religious orthodoxy in politics. The following spring, they founded the caucus.
Raskin is a former constitutional law professor who taught a seminar on the First Amendment and cites Thomas Paine as his hero. A concern that “right-wing religious movements have completely derailed our basic constitutional ethos” drives his advocacy for secularism.
He is also Jewish. Raskin praised Huffman for speaking out for the separation of church and state while showing respect for all religions and without attacking people for their faith.
“He feels the constitutional values I’ve got in my head very much in his heart,” Raskin said.
Despite initially worrying that their cause would be too controversial, the Freethought Caucus has gradually attracted more than 30 members. Raskin said some are “constitutional nerds” like him. Others are fighting religious fanaticism in their communities or are looking for a place to discuss their own spiritual journeys.
Some Christian members have joined, citing the importance of church-state separation to maintain the diversity of thought and religion that has always been a strength of the country.
“Everyone benefits when influential policy decisions, government and laws are driven by science and reason, not extremist rhetoric or exclusionary religious beliefs,” Rep. Kevin Mullin, a San Mateo Democrat who credits his Catholic Jesuit education for inspiring his career in public service, said in a statement.
Rep. Julia Brownley, a Thousand Oaks (Ventura County) Democrat who identifies as Episcopalian, noted that the United States was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. She said in a statement that politicians failing to respect the full scope of faiths across the country “undermines the very promise of America.”
“That experiment only works if we protect the foundational principle that government must remain free from religious interference,” she said.
What binds the Freethought Caucus, Raskin said, “is a belief in humanism as a positive principle for government.”
“As champions of free thought, we are not aggressive proselytizers of the dogma,” he said. “The people who have joined us have pretty much found us.”
Partisan divide remains
They all are also Democrats. By comparison, dozens of Republicans belong to the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which promotes “prayer as a fundamental and enduring feature of American life.”
Huffman said he would welcome Republicans into the Freethought Caucus but has not put much effort into recruiting them as the GOP embraces a “performative piety.”
After Johnson was elected House speaker in 2023, the caucus requested a meeting with him to discuss protecting religious liberty, but Huffman said it was ignored. In response, they released a report investigating Johnson’s ties to Christian nationalist groups, highlighting a history of rejecting church-state separation and using public resources to promote evangelical Christianity. A spokesperson for Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
“I don’t think there’s much interest on that side of the aisle in religious diversity,” Huffman said. “It’s a sad testament to where the parties are.”
Even as the Freethought Caucus has grown over the past eight years, Huffman remains the only public nonbeliever in Congress — though two freshman members declared themselves religiously unaffiliated when they arrived last year and joined the caucus.
He is not disappointed. Huffman said he understands the political calculation is more difficult for other members who may privately hold similar views but serve districts that would be less receptive to a nonbeliever than the liberal North Coast that he represents.
And he feels more validated than ever about his decision to identify himself, especially as people of faith have rallied to his cause.
“There’s just no doubt that coming out so that I could speak out candidly and fearlessly was so necessary,” he said. “You can just watch these events unfold and see that we’re going to need a lot more people to break taboo and speak out against this Christian nationalism.”
Holding the Trump administration accountable
Huffman’s call to arms could soon find a new audience: He wrote a book, “No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy From Christian Nationalism,” that is scheduled for release in August. If Democrats win back the House majority in November, members of the Freethought Caucus also gain control of committees that could conduct oversight investigations and hearings into the Trump administration’s embrace of religion.
As the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Huffman is already looking into the upcoming celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States. He said the Trump administration is hijacking the milestone to rewrite the country’s history and promote an explicitly Christian founding.
Huffman is eager to find out more about claims that the military is promoting its operation in Iran as a holy war. The watchdog group Military Religious Freedom Foundation has reported hundreds of complaints from troops who said commanders told them that conflict in the Middle East would hasten the return of Jesus Christ and that the Iran war is “all part of God’s divine plan.” Huffman believes the overtly religious rhetoric of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has promoted “Western Christian” values within the military, is permitting extremism to spread.
“That is madness — that is absolute madness,” he said. “There are so many examples like that where we have just allowed religious extremism to run amok.”
This story was originally published by the San Francisco Chronicle on March 16, 2026.
Issues: 119th Congress