Trump Leaders Blur Church, State Line in Federal Worker Messages

The rise in explicitly Christian messaging from some of President Donald Trump’s cabinet secretaries is testing the boundaries of protections for and from workplace religious expression.

US Department of Agriculture workers who don’t share Secretary Brooke Rollins’s Christian faith sued in May over her Easter message to agency employees. Workers allege the email—which likened them to Christ’s disciples—ran afoul of the US Constitution’s prohibition on government establishment of religion.

Other Trump appointees have delivered religious messaging, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who launched agency prayer services last year. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit that’s part of the team representing the USDA employees, sued both departments seeking Freedom of Information Act documentation about the services.

Religious references from federal officials, such as legislative and inaugural prayers, are part of a lengthy American tradition; the phrase “under God” joined the Pledge of Allegiance more than seven decades ago. But attorneys and legal scholars say the Trump administration’s specific promotion of Christianity goes beyond established norms and could lead to a reckoning on what religious speech the First Amendment—and federal anti-discrimination law—protects and prohibits.

“The framers were really careful to be non-sectarian and this movement going on today, promoting not just sectarianism, not just Christian versus non-Christian, but a particular kind of Christian versus the rest of Christianity, this is alien” to them, said Frank Ravitch, a Michigan State University law professor who specializes in religion and the law. “The reality is that proselytizing is not something that the government has generally been involved in.”

Older statements from officials generally didn’t discuss theology or Jesus “the way that her messages do,” Ravitch added.

Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel of Christian conservative legal organization First Liberty Institute, disagreed.

“There’s been all kinds of levels of specificity but it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Any level of specificity or generality offends somebody.”

Easter Message

Ravitch took the stance that Rollins’s Easter message is unconstitutional under “any conceivable approach to the First Amendment.”

“She loses under any test, including the history and tradition approach” that the US Supreme Court currently favors, he said, describing the email as “characterizing the agency in a sectarian way.”

The email also builds on last summer’s guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which told federal employees they may attempt “to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” while at work. The memo said agencies could tell workers to limit such proselytizing to break periods and cautioned that while encouraging coworkers to join in religious expression was okay, harassment wasn’t.

“When you read that OPM memo from last year, the lines were fuzzy,” said Seyfarth Shaw LLP’s Sam Schwartz-Fenwick, who represents private employers. The Easter email is “kind of an additional order of magnitude given the position of the sender,” he added.

“To the extent the guidelines are allowing supervisors to proselytize, that’s unconstitutional and it’s illegal under federal anti-discrimination law,” Ravitch said. Rollins’s Easter email—echoing an earlier Christmas message—"talks about ‘our’ lord, as though everybody agrees with her,” he said, calling it “hugely problematic” and “coercive.”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s Easter email to agency workers.

Source: National Federation of Federal Employees v. USDA complaint

Ravitch added that, at the country’s founding, government officials intentionally avoided offending others with religious statements.

“They were trying to navigate the religious pluralism of their time, as limited as that was,” he said. “Here, they’re trying to destroy it.”

But, Sasser said “there’s a difference between being forced to participate in something and then just receiving a message.” He said he thinks the case is “pretty much a slam dunk” for Rollins.

“If you don’t like any prayer proclamation a government official sends out, it takes about two seconds, you hit ‘delete,’” he added.

The USDA declined to comment on the worker suit last month but an agency spokesperson told Bloomberg Law they would “keep the plaintiffs in our prayers.”

Title VII Risks

In addition to First Amendment considerations, proselytization among federal workers risks religious discrimination lawsuits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law requires public and private employers to reasonably accommodate workers’ religious beliefs, but also prohibits bias and harassment based on religion.

Like private-sector workers, federal employees must go through administrative processes before they can bring Title VII cases in federal court—meaning any possible litigation from disputes with current Trump officials would appear further down the road. Americans United President Rachel Laser urged workers at other agencies to come forward like their USDA colleagues.

“When the government signals that religious expression should be maximized, both employers and employees feel empowered to engage in conduct that might toe the line legally,” said Lee Meier Burke’s Kaitlyn Whiteside, who represents private-sector workers.

“The OPM manual has reframed a Title VII religious accommodation right, which absolutely exists, into an affirmative right to promote a religious viewpoint at work,” which “has no clear textual basis in Title VII,” she added. “It’s just not the law.”

Whiteside noted that private-sector religious discrimination cases from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission haven’t involved workers disciplined for proselytizing at work, which is “the conduct that the OPM manual attempts to frame as protected.”

“That just hasn’t been tested as a legal theory yet,” she said.

Employers could face heightened workplace tensions and lawsuits even if they don’t give their employees permission to try to convert colleagues.

“When leadership is speaking in overtly religious ways, it often then opens the door for lower-ranking individuals to do the same thing,” Schwartz-Fenwick said. “You also could just have employees who feel emboldened by this and want to further inject religious discourse into the workplace.”

“Just because the law might allow an employer to do something, there might be really good business reasons not to do it,” he said.