Early this year, we asked our team of writers which stories they were keeping an eye on as 2025 unfolded. Understandably, with the presidential inauguration just around the corner, Trump 2.0 was on the top of everyone’s mind. As a faith-informed media organization committed to inclusion and justice, most of our writers were also curious about how religious communities would respond and bear witness as the year unfolded.
Sadly, few things surprised us in 2025. During the 2024 election, we wrote extensively about Project 2025’s threats to marginalized communities and its promises to roll back decades of progress. Although Trump unconvincingly claimed not to know anything about that document, which was crafted by some of his most loyal supporters, he has essentially delivered on its draconian policies.
But that doesn’t mean the year held no surprises. There were glimmers of hope throughout the year that encouraged us. These didn’t all arrive through policy and politics, but some of them did.
If it is a tad irreverent to paraphrase the Gospel of John here, it is nonetheless entirely accurate to say that if everything that happened in 2025 were written down, the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. While we won’t create a list of our “top stories” of the year, many of them fall within a handful of broad categories.
Because it was 2025, most of these categories are either steeped in or adjacent to politics. While we long for a world where our national politics is more about expanding, rather than restricting the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the reality is that it isn’t. These are the cards we were dealt, and we tried our best to play them as faithfully as we could.
ICE Raids and Immigration Crackdowns
In late 2023, GFM Contributing Correspondent, Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre, wrote a column titled, “I Am Vermin.” In it, he quoted Donald Trump who, in a Veterans Day speech, said, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections . . . they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
In 2024, then vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance spread a false rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other people’s pets. Donald Trump repeated that accusation during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
On the floor of the 2024 Republican National Convention, delegates held up signs reading, “Mass Deportations Now!”
Given all this, the few people in our country who were taken aback by the year of ICE raids and deportations were those who were not paying attention or who have yet to learn that sometimes politicians mean what they say. The MAGA movement has convinced large segments of the population of the lie that there are only two categories of people currently in our country: citizens and those who are here illegally. They ignore the myriad forms of documentation that allow people to be in the country and, even worse, discard the basic human dignity of those without such documentation.
The result has been precisely what the Republicans asked for—mass deportations and draconian immigration and refugee policies that give preference to those deemed “white” enough to be in the country.
Most people of faith in the country looked away. But there were a vocal few who spoke up and put their bodies on the line to protest these horrors. In a column on December 1, GFM Contributing Correspondent Becky Hensley wrote about one such act of witness and resistance. Additionally, many friends of GFM, such as the people of Faith Commons in Dallas and Katie Moore in Los Angeles, shared stories from the front lines of these actions.
Attacks on Institutional Justice Programs
In the years leading up to 2025, conservative pundits co-opted the term “DEI” for their political goals. Rather than meaning programs designed to expand and strengthen “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” they twisted it to mean “hiring unqualified, non-white, non-male, non-straight candidates for jobs” and “telling unflattering truths about history.”
As Donald Trump returned to the presidency, he then installed the most unqualified, mostly white, mostly male, mostly straight people into the most powerful positions in government.
Institutions saw this coming and largely responded by cowering in fear. Walmart was the largest company to lead the retreat even before Trump’s inauguration, as GFM’s Starlette Thomas wrote about last December. Many others followed.
The battles for DEI were most prominent on college campuses. Harvard led the charge, suing the Trump administration’s suspension of federal research funds over its DEI policies. A federal judge ruled in favor of Harvard, an institution with a $51 billion endowment.
Not every institution is afforded such monetary courage.
GFM’s biggest single story of the year was Baylor University’s acceptance and subsequent rejection of a grant that would study belonging among women and LGBTQ+ individuals within churches. Baylor has continued to be less than forthcoming about the processes leading up to their decisions, and to the dean of the Garland School of Social Work “stepping down” from his position.
Evangelical, big-money donors among Texas Baptists were likely behind the decision to revoke the grant. However, it is also difficult to imagine the R1 research institution not putting up a bigger fight in a world where Trump is not president.
The Baylor story was a microcosm of the culture of fear that pervaded institutions in 2025.
Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank
The challenge of covering stories from Israel/Palestine is well known. While other stories fall relatively neatly within the lanes of politics, religion, or culture, events in the Middle East refuse such categorization. How do you untangle the knots when many of the nations in the region, including Israel, arguably the most powerful one, were founded upon religious ideals?
Were the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel religious or political in nature? Has Israel’s subsequent retaliation been mostly about religion or national security? The answer is, of course, “yes,” “no,” and “it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.”
In 2025, Good Faith Media sought to navigate these lines with as much care as possible. But we did stake out a clear editorial position, which is that we would cover Israel’s military actions in Gaza as we would that of any other powerful nation’s actions against a region over which it holds a disproportionate amount of power.
We did so while also recognizing the rising tide of antisemitism around the world, which is coming from all sides of the political spectrum.
We are thankful that the large-scale Israeli bombings have ceased, for now, and we rejoice with the hostages in Gaza who have been returned to their loved ones. But we are also mindful of the horrors that have been inflicted on the people of Gaza.
No other story has caused as much tension between (and among) us and our friends and siblings in the Jewish and Muslim communities. We have, and will likely continue to make mistakes. But we will continue to write about the story with as much care as possible.
LGBTQ+ Stories
In March, GFM launched our Faithful Pride Initiative (FPI). Led by Kali Cawthon-Freels, FPI highlights and amplifies the stories of LGBTQ+ people of faith. In 2025, those stories abounded.
In our “2025 Stories to Watch” article, Cawthon-Freels wrote that she was keeping an eye on state legislation that would restrict LGBTQ+ rights. She also noted that she was watching measures on the federal level that would either eliminate or codify rights that have already been affirmed.
Perhaps surprising to many, the Supreme Court offered a glimmer of hope to the latter. In November, the overwhelmingly conservative court declined an appeal by Kim Davis, a former Kentucky clerk who sought to overturn the 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage. Although the court’s action won’t stop attempts to reverse the decision, it does set a positive precedent against future efforts.
Sadly, the political attacks on trans individuals continued in 2025. One of Trump’s first executive orders, issued on the day he was inaugurated, directed federal agencies to withdraw recognition of gender identity in federal programs. The order also codified gender binaries across all federal documents.
The attacks on trans identities became a political issue in the rare odd-year elections, with political ads from Virginia gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earl-Sears stoking fear of transgender individuals.
Earl-Sears lost the election to Abigail Spanberger, offering a glimmer of hope that perhaps Americans are tiring of the culture wars that put LGBTQ+ people at risk.
Free Speech
On Wednesday, September 10, political activist and Turning Point USA (TPUSA) CEO, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated in front of hundreds of students gathered for an event at Utah Valley University. For GFM, this was a story about political and gun violence, which our CEO Mitch Randall wrote about two days after the tragedy.
Almost immediately, however, Kirk’s followers turned it into a story about free speech, accusing the amorphous “political left” of orchestrating the killing before a suspect had even been identified. Kirk’s alleged killer, a 22-year-old Utah man, appears to be like many young men of his generation—chronically online, immersed in gaming culture, without partisan political attachments.
On September 15, 2025, in the opening monologue for his late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel spoke about how, before information on Kirk’s assassin was ever released, right-wing media “desperately [tried] to [characterize] this kid as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Kirk’s supporters interpreted this as Kimmel celebrating the assassination, even though Kimmel opened his monologue with a clear denunciation of the murder.
On September 17, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcasting license over Kimmel’s remarks. This led ABC to suspend Kimmel, only to reinstate him a few days later.
Good Faith Media’s writers covered the stories surrounding Kirk’s assassination with a two-pronged resolve. We grieved the dangerous effects of toxic political rhetoric that played a part in Kirk’s death, while also refusing to sanitize Kirk’s own words and the divisions that TPUSA has fomented.
In October, Miguel De La Torre wrote about being on the TPUSA professor watchlist, highlighting the free speech double standards of Kirk’s movement.
Addendum: A Story of Hope and Joy
During the Halloween season, I noticed kids dressed up in costumes I was unfamiliar with. It turned out they were characters from KPop Demon Hunters, an animated film that has become a cultural juggernaut.
I still don’t fully know what a KPop Demon Hunter is, and I suspect I never will. But in November, Donald Williams wrote an article for GFM describing the film as a story of redemption and transformation. Among all GFM’s contributions to the news and opinion landscape in 2025, the article became our most widely read single story of the year.
This proves that people are still looking for, and finding, glimmers of light in the darkness.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
