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  "path": "/post/209044/donald-trump-administration-religion-federal-employees",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-14T16:23:47.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Department of Labor",
    "Department of Agriculture",
    "Brooke Rollins",
    "Department of Defense",
    "Pete Hegseth",
    "Christianity",
    "Christian Right",
    "separation of church and state",
    "christian nationalism",
    "First Amendment",
    "Religion",
    "Religion & Politics",
    "Religious Freedom",
    "The Washington Post",
    "Wired",
    "executive order",
    "another executive order",
    "similar memo"
  ],
  "textContent": "The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution explicitly protects freedom of religion, preventing the government from prohibiting the free exercise of one’s own beliefs, and forbidding the government from establishing an official religion or from favoring one over another.\n\nEarlier this month, the Trump administration flagrantly defied it.\n\nOn Easter Sunday, Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, sent out a blatantly Christian email to some 100,000 government employees. The subject line read: “He has risen!”\n\n“Happy Easter—He is Risen indeed!” starts the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.\n\n“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed,” continues the email, signed by the secretary. “Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life—risen life—there is hope.”\n\nStaffers were shocked by the constitutional violation.\n\n“This has never happened before,” one government employee told Wired, describing the email as “grotesque.” “I have never gotten a message like this from anyone.”\n\nThe same employee noted that such a message wouldn’t even be expected from military chaplains, commissioned officers who provide religious services.\n\nAnother employee, a 15-year veteran of the department, told the _Post_ , “I have never seen that overtly of a religious email in all my years of government service.... It’s a separation of state and religion for a reason.”\n\nYet another employee found it telling that Rollins was “forcing religion down everybody’s throat,” noting that non-Christian USDA employees had expressed concern about their futures in the department.\n\nA USDA spokesperson insisted to _Wired_ that Rollins was “within her rights” to issue an Easter-themed missive.\n\nBut the note was just one of many breaches by the Trump administration of America’s longstanding religious freedom. Weeks into his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the official White House Faith Office, led by televangelist pastor Paula White-Cain. That same week, Trump issued another executive order to “end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.”\n\nMonths later in July, the Office of Personnel Management issued a similar memo, effectively allowing federal employees to attempt to convert their colleagues in the workplace and encourage them to pray in the workplace.\n\nThe Department of Labor also established its own faith office, where its religious leader, Kenneth Wolfe, hosts monthly worship services.\n\n“Generally, people who are working for the government understand that their job is to work on behalf of all Americans,” an unnamed source at the Labor Department told _Wired_. “And this is something very different. This is very explicitly Christian, and even within the realm of Christianity, a very narrow representation of that.”\n\n“People are uncomfortable. I know several who are offended and angry,” they continued. “These [worship services] are very Christian in nature.”\n\nThe evangelical infusions have been unabashed and shameless. In January, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and the senior adviser on faith and community outreach at USDA—Alveda King—told DOL employees that “we have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith.”\n\n“Those are the ones I would be more concerned about,” King emphasized.\n\nIn March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged Americans to pray “every day” on bended knees “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Employees say the hyperfixation on Christianity has made the federal government a very uncomfortable place to work, spurring an environment in which staffers fear of religion-based retaliation. Another staffer told _WIRED_ plainly that the “vibes are bad.”\n\n“They always spend a lot of time carrying on like, ‘No one’s forcing you to pray, these are voluntary,’” they said. “But it’s happening in the middle of a government workplace.”",
  "title": "“Vibes Are Bad”: Trump Admin’s Religious Intensity Unsettles Employees"
}