Eroding Religious Freedom

The Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management issued a memorandum on July 28, 2025 regarding “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace.” The memo focuses broadly on the rights of federal workers based on the right to religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While these rights are guaranteed for all, the current weaponization of Christianity and religious freedom is cause for concern, along with the on-going attempts to identify Christianity as preferential in the establishment of these rights within the US Constitution.

Religious freedom is guaranteed for all, regardless of the religion practiced. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right of individuals to practice their religion while preventing the government from favoring one religion or another or religion in general. “While this effort may appear to address certain forms of stigma against Christians, particularly against Catholics, in reality it will weaponize a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimize discrimination against marginalized groups like the LGBTQ community, infringe on our reproductive freedom, and hurt our society’s most vulnerable.”

On-going attempts to identify the United States as a Christian nation and to privilege Christianity are at odds with the First Amendment. The February 6, 2025 presidential executive order Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias identifies the targeting of Christians by the previous administration, claims which have been refuted by Interfaith Alliance, which noted: There is no evidence of widespread anti-Christian bias in the United States and perpetuating this myth is deeply offensive to the actual Christian persecution that happens in other countries around the world.

Present in the United States are diverse religious practices which reflect the variety of religions of the world. While it is a challenge to identify the number of religions in the world, some estimate the number exceeds 4,000, with the most widely recognized world religions being Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. The religious landscape in the United States continues to change, even as Christianity remains the dominant religious practice in the country. While studies continue to show a decline in the number of people who identify as Christians, individuals practicing Christianity are still a majority at 67% of the population. Yet, Christianity itself is diverse with different practices, beliefs, interpretation of scriptures, understanding of Divine presence, and the role of God among people.

This week’s memo from Scott Kupor identifies categories of employee conduct which should not result in a disciplinary or corrective action.  Such conduct includes but is not limited to:

Conversations Between Federal Employees: Employees may engage in conversations regarding religious topics with fellow employees, including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature. Employees may also encourage their coworkers to participate in religious expressions of faith, such as prayer, to the same extent that they would be permitted to encourage coworkers participate in other personal activities. The constitutional rights of supervisors to engage in such conversations should not be distinguished from non-supervisory employees by the nature of their supervisory roles. However, unwillingness to engage in such conversations may not be the basis of workplace discipline.

At a time when Christian nationalists are seeking to rewrite the historic narratives from a standpoint of American exceptionalism, with disregard for religious, racial/ethnic and gender minorities, the memo threatens the very freedoms it appears to be reinforcing. Permission to proselytize creates a hostile workplace. “Employees may engage in conversations regarding religious topics with fellow employees, including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature” is a problematic inference. This is not a sharing of religious thought, ideas, or practices. Instead, to attempt to persuade to the correctness of one’s own religion implies the incorrectness of the religion of the other.

“The constitutional rights of supervisors to engage in such conversations should not be distinguished from non-supervisory employees by the nature of their supervisory roles.” Reinforcing the right of a supervisor to persuade an employee they supervise toward that supervisor’s religious practices is additionally problematic given the power dynamics between these roles in the workplace.

The statement represents the latest effort of the six-month-old Republican Trump administration to expand the role of religion in the federal workplace. In doing so, the administration threatens the religious freedom of federal employees who are not Christians.

In 2019, the United Church of Christ General Synod passed a resolution which called for receiving the interfaith statement “A Just World for All: Engaging with All God’s Creation” for use in UCC engagement with world religions and spiritualities; renewing its conviction that God has called the church to affirm new ways in which Christ is reconciling the world; reaffirming with love and certainty, UCC commitment to inter-religious relations with all communities of faith; calling upon National leadership, Conferences, Associations, local churches, and members to continue to study about and engage in inter-religious dialogue and relationships, institutionally and personally, drawing on the experience of our ecumenical and global partners.

The 2019 statement addresses this moment and is “for such a time as this,” calling on the church to “deplore and denounce any and all acts of violence and hatred, be they in thought, word, or deed, directed at individuals and communities, particularly when based on religious identity; and to offer a public witness of support and solidarity when such acts are perpetrated.

The religious freedoms of all are to be protected and promoted in all places, including the federal workplace. The OPM memo is an attempt to prioritize the promotion of Christianity in the workplace at the expense of the rights of all federal workers, regardless of their faith traditions. As Christians, in a predominantly Christian country, protecting religious freedom is paramount.