Letters

From fighting for religious freedom to social equality to consumer protections, the CFC is a driving force behind executive actions and other causes to advance our core principles. The CFC has sent letters to the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, Congressional Leadership, corporate actors, and others to advocate for our collective mission. 

  • In February 2024, CFC leaders sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and House Chaplain Reverend Dr. Margaret Grun Kibben denouncing Johnson’s sponsorship of Pastor Jack Hibbs as the Guest Chaplain. The members outlined concerns with Hibbs’ egregious record, including his notoriety as a Christian Nationalist, involvement in the January 6th insurrection, and long history of spewing hateful vitriol toward Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone inconsistent with his “biblical worldview.” 
  • As part of their continued work advocating for the House Chaplain to invite the first-ever nontheistic Guest Chaplain to deliver a secular invocation before the House of Representatives, the CFC sent a letter on behalf of Dan Barker. 
  • Health Care Sharing Ministries (HCSMs) are jeopardizing the health and well-being of a reported 1.5 million Americans through deceptive marketing practices and their systemic failure to provide necessary products and services for the consumers to whom they offer “coverage.” So, in October 2021 the CFC led a letter to the Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Consumer Protection urging the agency to take necessary steps to protect consumers from the dangers presented by HCSMs.  
  • In August 2022, the CFC Led a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Charles Rettig urging the IRS to review the status of the Family Research Council (FRC) as a tax-exempt “association of churches.” Tax-exempt organizations should not be exploiting tax laws applicable to churches to avoid public accountability and the IRS’s examination of their activities.
  • The CFC joined with the Democratic Women’s Caucus and Equality Caucus in February 2020 to send letters to nine federal agencies opposing the Trump Administration’s faith-based regulations that curtailed first amendment rights under the guise of religious liberty. The regulations undermined our country’s social safety net by reducing people’s access to critical services, with the most vulnerable in our communities facing the greatest harm. This included removing a requirement for religious providers to notice a beneficiary of alternative providers if they are uncomfortable with the provider’s religious affiliation, doing away with a requirement for faith based providers to give beneficiaries written notice of their rights alerting beneficiaries that they cannot be discriminated against based on the provider’s religious affiliation, and vastly expanding religious exemptions under Title IX. 
  • In May 2020, the CFC sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination of Judge Justin R. Walker to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit based on his alarming record on church-state issues, exemplified most clearly in On Fire Christian Ctr., Inc. v. Fischer.  
  • Ex-religious individuals often find that online groups are some of the only places where they can talk openly about leaving their faiths or being non-religious. However, these communities found that their online groups were being intentionally reported as offensive and subsequently taken down by religious extremists simply because those religious extremists oppose their secular views. In December of 2019, the CFC took action to support the efforts of groups such as Ex Muslims of North America to protect religious liberty for individuals who have left their religious faiths. After sending a letter to Facebook to express concerns about their content moderation policies, the CFC brought Facebook and Ex Muslims of North America together to have a productive conversation about how the social media platform can better understand the concerns of the secular community. 
  • In 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions created a Religious Liberty Task Force in the Department of Justice. The CFC wrote to former AG Sessions to express concerns over the Task Force and noted potential risks such as promotion of policies that come at the expense of non-religious Americans and other vulnerable communities by imposing a specific set of religious viewpoints through the law.
  • The CFC led a letter expressing strong opposition to the appointment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Supreme Court during the 2018 Senate confirmation hearings. The letter detailed concern over Kavanagh’s record of hostility towards church and state separation, women’s rights, Establishment Clause jurisprudence, secular public schools, secular Americans and state-church plaintiffs, and religious freedom.