The Scariest Thing I Heard at the ADF Summit

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 11, 2026

In 20 years of attending Christian conservative conferences, I have never heard a speaker give a shoutout to the Blessed Virgin Mary from the main stage. But that is exactly what Admiral Brian Christine, MD, U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health did at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Summit this week, and that loud whoop you heard from the back of the room came from me. Rod Dreher, who attended the same conference, describes ADF as “mostly Evangelical” and he’s not wrong. Evangelical author and conference regular Os Guiness, for instance, seemed to limit the historical lineage of the American Founding to the Old Testament and the Reformation (“the rediscovery of the Hebrew Republic in the 17th century”), skipping past the shared Christian heritage discussed in my previous column. But in general, what struck me was that this was a more ecumenically balanced conference than those put on by others in the world of Christian conservative activism.

I was at the ADF Summit in my role as head of the Family Institute of Connecticut, one of about forty state-based Family Policy Councils loosely affiliated with Focus on the Family. ADF is our de facto legal arm and not only ours. It has become one of the most effective legal defenders of basic American free speech and religious liberties at a time when those liberties face their greatest threats. As I listened to the stories of ADF’s many clients this week I found myself thinking time and again, “How did it come to this? Aren’t these the things the ACLU used to defend? Doesn’t every American believe in these things and want to defend them?” Sadly, no. It now often happens that freedoms that we thought were sacrosanct have only been preserved because ADF won a battle for us in the courts.

Which is a frightening prospect. It means a Republican administration is the only thing keeping us from losing our fundamental rights. Think about it. It is the politicians who appoint and confirm judges. So conservative political victories are a prerequisite for ADF’s victories in court. What a thin reed upon which to hang our American birthright of freedom. It was not always so. The Obamacare contraceptive mandate in 2012 seems to me to have been the turning point. There was, of course, hostility to religion prior to 2012. But it was more in the nature of, say, whether a Christian club could meet on public school premises after hours, whether a Christmas crèche could appear on municipal property, that sort of thing. Only beginning in 2012 did we become a country where governments would tell a Catholic school “you can be a school as long as you’re not Catholic,” as a priest described a case in which he is ADF’s plaintiff.

None of this is to deny the ways in which the second Trump Administration is falling short of pro-life expectations. But the Administration is overwhelmingly staffed with Catholics who are working to move their bosses in the right direction. That was my impression from the many whom I spoke with at the ADF Summit. My other impression from those conversations is of a closer working relationship between the Trump Administration Catholics and the Vatican than anything you are likely to see in the media. I have warned against efforts by both the left and the right to split Catholics off from our ecclesiastical leaders. There may be less distance between Catholics in Washington and Rome than we have been led to believe. But, as one official told me, “the reality of governing is different than advocating.” This is true in both cities. Much resistance must still be overcome.

My favorite panel of the conference was the one in which the Colson Center’s John Stonestreet interviewed Rod Dreher and the Evangelical author Andrew Walker. Dreher, fresh off five years of living in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, warned that not all populism is Christian-rooted. He quoted Orbán to the effect that churches must step up and give people meaning, that government cannot do it. Church attendance in Hungary—once the poster child for Christian postliberalism—remains low. Dreher said we need real Christians, not just “Oh, I’m thinking the right thoughts now”-Christians. He quoted John Adams’s famous line about the Constitution only working for a moral and religious people and reminded us that our Christianity must be concrete.

“You don’t get cultural Christianity without actual Christians,” Stonestreet responded. Stonestreet noted how atheist writer Richard Dawkins’s recent expression of warmth for Christmas carols, for instance, is not enough. It reminded me of my own negative reaction to Dawkins’s semi-conversion when asked about it by CatholicVote’s Erika Ahern.

Dreher closed by reminding Christians that we must be ready to suffer. Christians in Eastern Europe, and secular hippies like Václav Havel, had courage when they overthrew communism, and we must have it too. ADF and its clients are front and center in the fight against “Weimar America” decadence. Alongside them, we must continue the fight.