US Committed to Advancing Religious Liberty Around the World, Vance Says

Vice President JD Vance speaks at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington on Feb. 5, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance reiterated the United States’ commitment to upholding religious freedom at home and abroad, saying the Trump administration has “much more to do.”

“Our administration believes we must stand for religious freedom—not just as a legal principle, as important as that is, but as a lived reality, both within our own borders and especially outside,” Vance said in a speech at the International Religious Freedom Summit on Feb. 5.

“You shouldn’t have to leave your faith at the door of your people’s government, and under President Trump’s leadership, you won’t have to.”

He said the administration is “intent on not just restoring but on expanding the achievements of the first four years.”

In the first Trump administration, Vance said, President Donald Trump had made promoting religious freedom a foreign policy priority in China, across Europe, and throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Trump in 2019 met more than two dozen victims of religious persecution from countries such as China and North Korea and told them, “Each of you has now become a witness to the importance of advancing religious liberty all around the world.”

The first Trump administration in 2020 also sanctioned a Chinese official for persecuting the faith group Falun Gong, marking the first time the United States had imposed such a penalty over the abuse.

In the last days of Trump’s first term, the State Department declared the repression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang a genocide, and a number of other nations followed suit.

Vance also criticized previous U.S. funding for helping to spread atheism and vowed to end such spending, making reference to a $500,000 funding opportunity from the State Department in 2021 for programs that it said would “promote and defend religious freedom inclusive of atheist, humanist, non-practicing and non-affiliated individuals.”

“How did America get to the point where we’re sending hundreds of thousands of dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe?” he said.

“That is not what leadership on protecting the rights of the faithful looks like, and it ends with this administration.”

Attendees of the International Religious Freedom Summit listen to Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Washington on Feb. 5, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Trump has placed a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid and development funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development to review their alignment with his America First policy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is now on his first foreign trip to Central America, has assumed the director role of the agency.

Vance, in his speech, praised Rubio as “one of the great living champions of religious liberty across the globe, a person whose dedication to religious liberty flows from his faith.”

As a three-term senator in Florida, Rubio championed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, now a U.S. law, to block imports of Chinese goods made with forced labor in Xinjiang camps.

He also led efforts to create the Falun Gong Protection Act in 2024, which aimed to address Beijing’s state-sponsored forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, along with other forms of persecution targeting the group.

Vance said religious freedom is a topic “whose importance unfortunately grows with each passing moment.”

“Both at home and abroad, we have much more to do to more fully secure religious liberty for all people of faith,” he said.

Before he walked off the stage, he twice pumped his fists up in the air, a gesture that Trump had popularized as a meme after surviving an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania during a presidential campaign rally in July 2024. Trump had credited divine intervention for saving his life.