President Trump’s new foster care order positively impacting the lives of thousands of vulnerable children and restoring the rights of Christians who want to care for them is a good start, but now the Church must step up.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that marks a significant step toward addressing America’s foster care crisis. “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families” directs federal agencies to elevate the welfare of foster children while protecting the constitutional rights of current and would-be foster families.
The latter is an urgently needed course correction at a time when the rights of foster care parents have been jeopardized through violations of religious freedom.
In multiple states, Christian families have been excluded from serving as foster parents because they hold biblical views about family and gender. These are stable households with proven track records caring for foster children. Yet because their beliefs differ from certain progressive political views, families are told they either have to give up their biblical principles or lose the right to help foster children.
Kristen Waggoner, CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom, described the stakes clearly:
“Our nation’s foster care system is in crisis: Vulnerable children are being placed in hospitals, police stations, and institutions to help fill the gap. As numerous states have attested, religious families play a critical role in the foster care system.
Yet instead of inviting these loving parents from diverse backgrounds to help care for kids, government officials are shutting the door on them because of their commonly held religious beliefs.”
Earlier this year, two Christian families took the state of Massachusetts to federal court, arguing that their foster care licenses were threatened or revoked because they would not commit to affirming a hypothetical child’s gender identity.
The plaintiffs, Nick and Audrey Jones and Greg and Marianelly Schrock, have cared for 35 foster children between them.
According to the filings in Jones v. Mahaniah, state officials informed the Joneses that their license would be revoked solely because of their religious views on gender identity and that their 17-month-old foster daughter, who has never known any other parents, would be removed from their care. Meanwhile, the Schrocks’ foster care license was not renewed in June 2025 because they adhere to the biblical belief that human beings are created as male or female and that an individual cannot change their sex.
In Washington State, a Christian couple was denied a foster care license renewal after nine years of service for holding the biblical view that a person cannot change his or her sex.
In Vermont, ADF is representing two more families whose foster care licenses have been revoked over their biblical view of sexuality.
“Vermont’s foster-care system is in crisis: There aren’t enough families to care for vulnerable kids,” said ADF Senior Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse in June. “As numerous states have attested, religious families play a critical role in the foster-care system. Yet instead of inviting families from diverse backgrounds to help care for vulnerable kids, Vermont is shutting the door on them, putting its ideological agenda ahead of the needs of suffering kids. When it comes to finding kids a loving home, everyone should be able to recognize that the needs of kids should come first.”
President Trump’s order recognizes that truth and reestablishes protections that should never have been threatened. One section of the order deserves particular attention.
“Maximizing Partnerships with Americans of Faith” (Section 4) instructs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to address state and local policies that bar qualified families or organizations from federally funded child welfare programs because of their “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.” It also directs the administration to increase partnerships with churches and faith-based organizations to support children in, or at risk of entering, foster care.
This is essential. Churches and religious nonprofits have historically been vital partners in caring for vulnerable children. When the state pushes these groups out, children suffer.
Scripture is unambiguous: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27, ESV). This isn’t a suggestion. It’s a divine mandate that calls God’s people to sacrificial care for the most vulnerable among us.
But notice what James says: Pure religion involves two things, but one of them is demonstrably harmful to children and directly opposed to the biblical witness. This is worldliness masquerading as compassion.
The question before us is not complicated: Do we want more loving homes for children in crisis, or do we want ideological conformity?
There are currently over 391,000 children in foster care nationwide, and only 113,589 licensed foster families. The math doesn’t work. We desperately need more families willing to open their homes, yet progressive bureaucrats are closing the door on the very people most committed to doing so.
Why? Because these families believe what Christians have believed for 2,000 years and the state has threatened to take it all away because they won’t affirm a delusion.
The couple in Washington served for nine years. Nine years of putting children to bed, helping with homework, showing up for school events, and loving kids who had been failed by adults. And the state said, “Thanks, but your biblical convictions disqualify you.”
This is not about child welfare. If it were, these families would be celebrated, not persecuted.
Yet progressive activists would rather see children languish in institutional care than allow them to be placed with families who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman and that biological sex is immutable.
This is insanity dressed up as justice.
Here’s what the left doesn’t want to admit: Their commitment to gender ideology is harming real children. Not hypothetically. Not theoretically. Right now.
When you reduce the pool of available foster families by excluding anyone who won’t bow to the new orthodoxy, you guarantee that more children will grow up without families. You guarantee longer stays in institutional settings. You guarantee more instability, more trauma, and more harm.
And for what? To satisfy activists who care more about pronouns than the well-being of a seven-year-old who just wants a bed to call his own.
The cruel irony is that the very people being excluded are the ones most likely to provide the kind of sacrificial, unconditional love that broken children need. These are families who see foster care not as charity work but as ministry. They’re not looking for applause or social credit. They’re obeying Christ’s call to care for “the least of these.”
Meanwhile, the state is asking, “Yes, but will you affirm our ever-shifting definitions of identity?” As if a child’s need for safety and love should be secondary to whether his foster parents will validate the latest academic theory about gender fluidity.
This isn’t compassion. It’s cruelty.
This matters because the foster care crisis will not be solved by bureaucrats. It will be solved by families. President Trump’s order is a start. But the real work belongs to the Church. We must not shrink back. The call of James 1:27 has not changed, and neither has the urgency of the moment.
Pure religion still means caring for orphans. But if the world demands we stain ourselves to do so, our answer must be clear: We will not comply.
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