Xavier Becerra has a religion problem. Not the kind a campaign strategist can paper over with a press release, either. Long before he was the Biden administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary, and long before he became the apparent frontrunner for California governor in 2026, Becerra was on the floor of the United States House of Representatives publicly going to bat for the Church of Scientology.
Today, with surfaced video and a fresh news cycle threatening his momentum, his campaign is suddenly very concerned about “deception, abuse, and coercion.” The trouble is that when actual religious institutions—Catholic nuns, Catholic hospitals—needed protection from the heavy hand of government, Becerra was the heavy hand.
According to RedState, Becerra currently leads the gubernatorial field at 19 percent in the Emerson/Inside California Politics poll, with Republican Steve Hilton and billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer tied at 17. That lead now meets a piece of footage from 1997 in which then-Congressman Becerra urged his colleagues to support a resolution defending Scientologists in Germany, telling the House, “Many of my constituents are members of religious minority groups like the Church of Scientology,” and they “deserve this protection.”
Three years later, he appeared at the grand opening of ABLE, a Scientology-affiliated group, and praised the organization for “kindl[ing] the spirit and determination of those of us who… have an opportunity to work with ABLE to make life better.” In 2003, he attended a gala at the Church’s Hollywood Celebrity Centre in his official capacity as a U.S. representative.
Becerra’s campaign is now in full retreat. Spokesperson Jonathan Underland told the San Francisco Standard that “the Church of Scientology is facing the reckoning it deserves for decades of deception, abuse, and coercion,” and added that “it is dishonest to apply what we know today to decisions made in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the truth was public record.”
That is a remarkable line for a candidate whose entire pitch is supposed to be moral discernment about which institutions prey on Californians.
The Selective Conscience of a Career Politician
Set aside, for the moment, the question of what Becerra actually knew about Scientology in 1997 or 2003. Plenty was already in the public record by then, including investigative reporting from major outlets across the prior two decades. But grant the campaign its premise. Grant that a young congressman from Los Angeles might genuinely have believed he was defending an embattled religious minority abroad.
The question is not whether Becerra was wrong about Scientology in the 1990s. The question is what he did with that same instinct for “religious minority protection” when the religious minority in front of him wore a habit.
The answer is in the court record. In 2017, after the Trump administration broadened religious exemptions to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, Becerra, as California Attorney General, sued the federal government to take that exemption away. The Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns whose ministry is caring for the elderly poor, intervened to defend the protection they had fought for years to obtain.
As Sen. Tom Cotton documented, Becerra “fought this exemption in court for the next three years.” When confronted at his confirmation hearing in 2021, Becerra famously chose his words carefully, claiming he had “never sued any affiliation of nuns.” The Ninth Circuit case caption read California v. Little Sisters of the Poor.
An Eternal Flame and a Federal Threat
The pattern continued at HHS. In May 2023, Becerra’s department, through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told Saint Francis Health System, a major Catholic hospital network in Oklahoma, that it could either extinguish a small sanctuary candle in its chapel or risk losing the Medicare and Medicaid funding that allows it to serve elderly, disabled, and low-income patients.
The candle, an eternal flame, has burned in Catholic sanctuaries since the early Church. Becket Law, representing the hospital, had to publicly remind the federal government of something called the First Amendment.
Pause on the sheer pettiness of that scene. A Cabinet secretary’s agency, with the entire weight of federal health care policy at its disposal, decided the most pressing fire safety issue in America was the small flame in a Tulsa hospital chapel. Not the bureaucracy that turned a blind eye to thousands of missing migrant children at HHS. Not the catastrophic Medicare fraud regularly documented by the inspector general.
A candle. In a chapel. In a Catholic hospital.
The Tell
This is what makes the Scientology video damaging. Not because it proves Becerra was a Scientologist, which there is no evidence he was, but because it lays the contradiction bare. The Becerra of 1997 reached for soaring language about religious minorities deserving protection from government persecution. The Becerra of 2018 turned the apparatus of California’s Department of Justice on nuns. The Becerra of 2023 sent his department’s lawyers to threaten a hospital over a candle.
The throughline is not religious liberty. It is power, deployed selectively, depending on whether the religion in question is fashionable in Hollywood or inconvenient to the Democratic Party’s sacraments of contraception and abortion.
The campaign’s defense, that the public didn’t fully understand Scientology back then, is also a confession. It concedes that Becerra’s judgment about which religious groups are worthy of his protection runs about a decade behind reality—and only catches up after the cultural elite has rendered its verdict.
Catholic moral teaching on contraception, abortion, and marriage has been the same for two thousand years. There is no new exposé coming. The Little Sisters are not hiding anything. Becerra targeted them not because he discovered something troubling, but precisely because their convictions are stable, public, and inconvenient.
Newsom’s Shadow, and a Corruption Probe
The Scientology story also lands at an awkward moment for other reasons. Becerra is already tied to the federal corruption case in which Dana Williamson, who served as both Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff and Becerra’s former campaign manager, has now pleaded guilty. That is a different kind of scandal, but it feeds the same narrative. The candidate who is supposed to clean up after Newsom turns out to be sharing staff with Newsom’s mess.
Californians do not, as a rule, punish Democrats for ethical lapses. But Becerra is asking for promotion in a year when Democrat brand damage is unusually pronounced and when the GOP has fielded a credible candidate in Hilton. The Scientology footage gives Hilton, Steyer, and every other rival a clean line of attack. It is not that Becerra defended Scientology. It is that he defended Scientology while suing Catholic nuns.
A Standard Older Than Sacramento
There is a useful scripture for the Becerra moment. “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD.”
The verse is not pulled out of nowhere. It is the natural moral standard against which any public official’s record on religious liberty has to be measured. The state’s coercive power is not a neutral instrument. When it is wielded to protect the connected and harass the principled, that inversion is not merely a political failure. It is the precise inversion the prophets and the proverbs warn against.
Becerra’s campaign wants voters to believe his instincts have evolved. The record says his instincts were always the same. He has consistently extended the benefit of the doubt to institutions favored by Hollywood and Sacramento, and consistently denied it to institutions accountable to a higher authority than either. That is not a coincidence of timing. That is a worldview. And it is the worldview California voters are being asked, in 2026, to install one rung closer to the top.
The Real Question
The interesting question is not whether the Church of Scientology deserved a defense in 1997. Reasonable people, including many religious liberty advocates, defended Scientology’s right to operate without state harassment in Germany. The interesting question is why a man who once spoke that language so fluently about a controversial group lost the ability to speak it at all when the group in question was the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Becerra’s spokesman says he will “go after powerful institutions that prey on Californians.” It is worth asking who, exactly, the Little Sisters of the Poor are preying on. It is worth asking what predation a sanctuary candle in an Oklahoma hospital chapel commits. And it is worth asking, with the gubernatorial polls tightening and a corruption probe inching closer, whether the voters of California are about to hand the keys of the nation’s most populous state to a man whose religious liberty principles run only one direction.
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