When the Office of Personnel Management isn’t busy overseeing mass firings, it’s busy figuring out ways to force a very narrow, very conservative version of Christianity on those federal employees it hasn’t yet sacked. OPM’s latest guidance to all agency heads, titled “Protecting Religious Expression in the Workplace,” is a permission slip for evangelicals to foist their religious views on everyone else.
That’s not an exaggeration. The memo explicitly says it: “An employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should re-think his religious beliefs. However, if the nonadherent requests such attempts to stop, the employee should honor the request.”
Who doesn’t love the idea of going to work at a shattered, decimated government agency only to be buttonholed by an evangelical weirdo telling them their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, are wrong? Totally what everyone wants from their job, and not at all entangling church and state.
Bosses can get in on the action too. A supervisor can post a message inviting “each of his employees to attend an Easter service at his church.” Supervisors are also welcome to do the whole bit about telling employees their views are wrong and why they should “re-think” their religious beliefs. Surely no non-Christian employee will feel at all coerced by having their boss tell them they should convert.
What other cool things can happen in Donald Trump’s brave new world? A park ranger can pray with a tour group. Veterans’ Affairs doctors can pray over patients. Security guards and other front-facing employees can cover their desks with crucifixes, a Bible, or rosary beads. It’s unclear how this doesn’t look, to a member of the public, like official government endorsement of Christianity.
And it really is just Christianity. There’s no mention of, say, having the Quran or a Tibetan prayer bowl on that imaginary security guard’s desk.
Somehow, all of this is actually about “restoring constitutional freedoms,” per OPM director Scott Kupor, who is making it his mission to smash the remaining barriers between church (Christian only, thanks!) and state. This isn’t even the first religious liberty memo Kupor has issued since taking the reins at the OPM two weeks ago. On his first day on the job, he issued a memo all about how federal employers have to allow religious people—but only religious people—to telework, get comp time, have flexible schedules, and time off for travel in order to adhere to their religious beliefs. Anyone else who wants to telework is a lazy sod who should be fired, however.
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It’s not just Kupor or OPM. The Trump administration is committed to reframing religious freedom as the freedom to impose religion on others, not the right to be free of religious coercion by the government. So we have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leading prayer services at the Pentagon and Trump’s “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” which the Baptist News even characterized as “an exercise in airing conservative evangelical grievances.”
At the same time, the administration is actively hostile to people whose faith compels them to show care to others. Trump greenlit efforts to let Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest people in churches and continues to relentlessly fight religious groups who sued on the basis that it burdens their free expression of religion to have ICE goons stomp into their places of worship. Per the administration, that’s fine because it’s not at all coercive and totally wouldn’t cause people who fear arrest not to attend church or require faith leaders to compromise their faith by not sheltering immigrants.
Except that’s exactly what is happening. Two Catholic bishops have already issued dispensations, telling people they do not have to attend Mass if they fear harm over the possibility of immigration raids. Bishop Alberto Rojas of the San Bernardino diocese, about an hour away from Los Angeles, has pleaded with the administration to stop terrorizing people, saying.
“Please reconsider and cease these tactics immediately, in favor of an approach that respects human rights and human dignity,” Rojas pleaded. Somehow, there’s no religious freedom to oppose violent immigration raids, but the hypothetical boss who wants to corner you in the break room to tell you the good news about Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of that freedom.
Don’t expect federal workers to be able to sue to stop this, given that anything that hits the Supreme Court docket will likely lead to a Trump-friendly conservative majority enthusiastically endorsing the government’s right to force religion on you at work. The court has steadily, relentlessly eroded the boundary between church and state, and doesn’t appear to have any intention of stopping.
Let’s hope federal employees enjoy having their offices draped in crucifixes and a boss who won’t stop talking about how you need to come to their megachurch and get saved.