The Trump administration is looking to take a hacksaw to the constitutional separation of church and state, and there’s arguably no greater cheerleader for this illiberal gambit — no greater epitome of its derangement — than Scott Turner, the secretary of housing and urban development.

Turner made this abundantly clear Friday with a speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual summit, which is basically where Christian nationalist zealots gather to bash liberals and tout their Trump-centered religiosity as the true expression of God’s will (despite all evidence to the contrary).

The speech came on the same day that Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission issued a draft report calling for “building bridges” between church and state. And the remarks came from someone, in Turner, who has brazenly used his position to promote Christian nationalism.

At last year’s summit, Turner defended new work requirements for people to receive housing benefits — requirements that experts have said are unnecessarily burdensome, harmful to people in need of assistance and ultimately ineffective in growing the labor force.

So this was the housing secretary returning to familiar territory to rattle off his Christian nationalist schlock.

Turner’s speech last week was basically an anecdote- and falsehood-filled sermon in which he asserted that the government is no match for Christian charities in its ability to end homelessness, a crisis Trump himself has hardly lifted a finger to fix and has actively worsened. Turner, for example, has touted policy decisions that run the risk of increasing homelessness. And he has done this while using stereotypical arguments that effectively frame addiction and poor work ethic as root causes of homelessness.

In the speech, Turner falsely claimed that the Biden administration “stiff-armed” faith-based organizations trying to help end homelessness, which is demonstrably not true, and went on to say that “prayer is our greatest tool.”

That’s basically the Trump administration’s ethos in a nutshell: using religiosity as a veil to cover its destructive behaviors.

We’ve also seen this out of the Defense Department, which has used Scripture — both real and fake —  to justify military action. And we’re seeing it from Turner’s approach to housing, which evidently includes fewer services and much more sermonizing.

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