Oriel Ekşi's remarks for the Hearing on Religious Liberty in the U.S.

 Remarks by Oriel Ekşi, The Woolf Group’s Managing Partner, for the Hearing on Religious Liberty in the U.S. by the Federal Religious Liberty Commission, April 13, 2026.  

“Chairman Patrick, Dr. Carson, and distinguished members of the Commission, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

My name is Oriel Ekşi, and I serve as Managing Partner at The Woolf Group, a government relations firm based here in DC focused on social impact initiatives. Our firm works with organizations across the country, including many faith-based organizations, to help them navigate government systems, serve victims of crime, and build sustainable programs that protect human dignity and strengthen communities.

But long before any title, long before Washington, and long before policy work, I was a little girl growing up in rural Kentucky.

I was raised in a Catholic environment. I attended Catholic school. My mother was heavily involved in the parish and in the school as a parishioner and a donor. Faith was not something distant or occasional in my childhood. It shaped the rhythm of my life. It formed my understanding of right and wrong, sacrifice and mercy, truth and hope.

And then, beginning at the age of thirteen, my mother trafficked me. She sold me to men.

That kind of betrayal changes a person forever. It attacks not only your safety, but your very identity and sense of worth. It attacks your ability to trust other people, and for many … it attacks faith itself.

There are people who hear a story like mine and assume that the natural result would have been bitterness toward God, anger at religion, or the complete collapse of belief. They assume that suffering like that would make faith impossible.

But that was not my experience. Instead, it is when God held me closest.

My faith did not disappear in suffering, but carried me through it.

It gave me a language for dignity when other people treated me like an object. It gave me a conviction that my life still had inherent value even when the people closest to me acted as though it did not. It reminded me that evil is real … but so is truth … So is mercy ... So is purpose …... So is the image of God in every human being.

I have often thought about Viktor Frankl’s insight that suffering, when it cannot be avoided, does not have to be meaningless. That has been true in my life. My faith did not make suffering good, and it did not make evil less evil. But it kept suffering from having the final word. It taught me that pain could be carried without surrendering resolve to survive through it, to see light in the distant future, and that even wounded places in a life can become places where God builds resilience, clarity, and purpose. 

During my trafficking, at age 16, I became pregnant, and the first words out of my mother’s mouth were “What about an abortion?”

I was aghast. “What about it?!” I snapped back with an absolutely not stance in my heart. Even though I was talking to my trafficker, someone I feared and who had put me in this situation... all trepidation vanished in that moment of rebellion, consequence be damned, because it was a line I would never cross.

Again, I was at a point where other people wanted power over my body, my future, and my choices. But I fought back.

And I fought back with courage because of my faith.

In the years since, I have often thought of the words of Saint John Paul II:

“The Gospel of God’s love for man, the Gospel of the dignity of the person and the Gospel of life are a single and indivisible Gospel.”

I did not have that sentence in front of me at sixteen, but I knew its veracity. My child was not a problem to be erased. She was a person with value, a life with purpose, and a gift entrusted to me. 

Today, that baby is named after a nine-day prayer for special intervention that I prayed over her, and a Saint who lived and died in the name of God’s love for mankind. Valentine is a faithful, beautiful, clever, athletic, cheerful fourteen-year-old girl. And every time I look at her, I am reminded that faith is not merely a private comfort. It is a force that shapes choices, preserves lives, and changes generations.

That is why I am here today.

For me, religious liberty is not an abstract legal theory. It is not a slogan or a talking point. It is the freedom to live according to what I know for a fact to be accurate.

It is the freedom to remain rooted in faith in the face of evil. It is the freedom to reject coercion.

It is the freedom to choose life.

It is the freedom to heal without being told that faith has no place in healing.

And it is the freedom to serve others openly, generously and genuinely.

That brings me to the work I do today.

At The Woolf Group, I lead a team that helps organizations navigate the complicated relationship between mission and government. Many of the organizations we support serve victims of crime, survivors of trafficking, women facing violence, vulnerable children, and struggling families. Many are organizations of faith. Some were founded by people of faith. Some maintain an explicitly faith-based identity. Others simply carry religious conviction into the way they show up to serve.

And what I can tell you from direct experience is this:

faith-based organizations are often among the first to show up, the last to leave, and the most trusted by the people they serve.

In the anti-trafficking field especially, faith communities are often where survivors first encounter consistency, compassion, and hope. Sometimes it is a church member. Sometimes it is a pregnancy resource center. Sometimes it is a faith-based nonprofit, a volunteer mentor, a safe home, or a local ministry willing to walk with someone through the long and difficult road of recovery.

These organizations do not merely provide services. They restore belonging. They remind people that they are more than what has been done to them. They often reach the people that formal systems have missed, and they do it with extraordinary sacrifice, love, and endurance.

But too often, government systems treat faith-based service providers not as valued partners, but as problems to be managed.

Sometimes the barrier is direct. A faith-based organization is told, either formally or informally, that to participate in a program, qualify for funding, or partner with a public entity, it must effectively secularize itself. It must mute its religious identity. It must strip away the very convictions that motivated the work in the first place.

Sometimes the barrier is bureaucratic. Small and mid-sized ministries doing life-saving work are buried under layers of compliance, procurement requirements, reporting structures, and cultural assumptions that large secular institutions are simply better equipped to absorb. The result is that trusted organizations closest to the suffering are often kept furthest from the resources.

Sometimes the barrier is ideological. Faith-based groups are viewed as inherently suspect because they believe that moral truth is real, because they maintain convictions about life and family, or because they believe spiritual care can be part of holistic care.

And sometimes the barrier is subtler but just as damaging: the assumption that religious belief is acceptable in private life but unwelcome in public service.

That is not religious liberty.

A nation that truly values religious liberty does not tell people of faith, “You are free to believe whatever you want, as long as your beliefs do not shape your work, your institutions, your hiring, your witness, your compassion, or your service to others.”

That is not freedom. That is containment.

And for survivors, that kind of containment can be devastating.

Because survivors are not simply bodies with material needs. They are whole people. Many are wrestling with shame, identity, purpose, motherhood, forgiveness, and whether their life still has meaning. Many want their faith respected as part of recovery, not dismissed as irrelevant to it. If religious liberty means anything, it must include room for faith-informed care when it is freely offered and freely welcomed.

This Commission has an opportunity to say clearly that religious liberty must include the freedom of faith-based organizations to serve the public without surrendering their identity.

That means, first, that faith-based organizations should have equal access to grants, partnerships, and public programs without being forced to choose between participation and religious integrity.

Second, organizations serving victims of crime should be allowed to offer holistic care that includes spiritual support when requested and welcomed by the person being served. Respecting faith is not coercion. In many cases, it is part of respecting the survivor as a whole person.

Third, conscience protections must be real, not theoretical. People working in victim services, healthcare, pregnancy support, foster care, education, and other mission-driven fields should not be forced to violate deeply held beliefs as the price of service.

Fourth, we should reduce unnecessary barriers that keep smaller ministries and faith-based nonprofits out of the room. Some of the most effective organizations in this country are not the largest or the most polished. They are the most trusted. Government should not make trust, conviction, and community roots a disadvantage.

And finally, we need to remember that protecting religious liberty does not only protect institutions. It protects people like me.

It protects the girl who still believed God saw her when the world did not.

It protects the young mother who refused to sacrifice her child.

It protects the survivor who needs care that does not ask her to leave her religion at the door.

And it protects the people and ministries who open those doors in the first place.

For Christians, we may call that kingdom work. Others may describe it differently. But in a free country, government should not stand in the way of people living out their faith through service, prayer, mercy, and love of neighbor.

My daughter and I are living proof that faith not only matters, but saves, preserves, and perseveres. The ability to practice faith matters. The ability to serve through faith matters.

Religious liberty matters because it protects the freedom not only to believe, but to live out the meaning that faith gives to suffering, to life, and to service. In my own story, faith transformed survival into responsibility. It called me not only to endure, but to fight for others. 

I am deeply grateful to President Trump for making religious liberty a national priority, and I am grateful to this Commission for taking seriously the role that faith plays in human flourishing, moral courage, and service to others. 

Thank you for your time, for your work, and for the opportunity to share my stance on the most important of issues.”