Bishop Barron defends taking faith into public space after criticism from ‘liberal’ columnist
The Catholic Herald• June 25, 2025
Bishop Robert Barron has addressed the issue of the separation of Church and State and taking one’s faith into the public space after being critiqued on the matter by a columnist with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, a well-known and respected legacy media publication in the US.
The bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota and founder of Word on Fire Ministries, who is one of the US Catholic Church’s most prominent voices on social media, hit back at the columnist for espousing a position that Barron said is prominent among an “elite liberal class” that controls many of society’s institutions and which, he said, fears “confident and assertive religious people” who refuse to conform to secular mantras.
The columnist, Karen Tolkkinen, accused Bishop Barron of engaging in an “unnecessarily militant turn of phrase” during recent comments made in his role on the US president’s newly formed Religious Liberty Commission, reports CatholicVote. The bishop discussed threats to religious freedom in the US today and the need to resist such oppression, urging Americans to carry their faith into public spaces instead of keeping it exclusively in the more private realm of their churches and own lives.
“A rather silly article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune concerning my participation in the President’s Religious Liberty Commission,” the bishop posted on X. “The author, Karen Tolkkinen, claimed that I ‘advocate erasing the boundaries between Church and State.’ This is a gross mischaracterisation of my position.”
The bishop went on to cite the US Constitution’s First Amendment in the context of the criticism from Tolkkinen in her Sunday column.
“The First Amendment to the Constitution does indeed say that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, and I completely support this. But the amendment contains a second clause in regard to religion, namely, that Congress shall make no law ‘prohibiting the free exercise thereof’.
“Though there can never be an official American religion, there can indeed be expressions of religion in the public space and in civic life. The relegation of faith to the private sphere, which has been encouraged by some of the regrettable jurisprudence of the last seventy-five years, is happily being overturned by a number of recent decisions of our Supreme Court.
“It is no accident, in fact, that freedom of religion is the first liberty guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. For if the capacity to express one’s deepest moral convictions in public is denied, all of the other freedoms can and will, in time, be denied.
“Ms. Tolkkinen represents the elite liberal class that, unfortunately, controls many of the institutions of our society.
“What she and her colleagues fear the most are confident and assertive religious people who refuse to stay sequestered in private. So I say: fight hard against any formal establishment of religion, but fight just as hard for the right to exercise religion in the public space.”
The Religious Liberty Commission, which includes other leaders from the US Catholic Church, was formed after the second Trump administration promised that it would prioritise advancing religious freedom both domestically and abroad.
RELATED: Vance pledges religious liberty prioritised in US and abroad by Trump administration
Photo: Bishop Robert Barron, alongside US President Donald Trump and other religious leaders, speaks during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden at the White House, Washington, DC, USA, 1 May 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.)