“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement last month.
Kupor was positively commenting on a July memorandum to federal agencies that explains that federal employees are allowed to, for example, hold prayer circles and discuss their religious beliefs with colleagues. The memorandum even goes so far as to say that civil servants can “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.” According to Kupor, “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”
That doesn’t sound especially dangerous; we want open dialogue about religion, right? Free speech and freedom of religion for all! Where’s the harm?
The harm is that we are, unfortunately, living in an Orwellian nightmare, so this forthright defense of religious freedom is actually window dressing on a policy designed to force federal employees to choose between their faith and their career.
With this memo, President Donald Trump has announced that federal employees, including management, are now encouraged to evangelize and proselytize their coworkers and subordinates. Presidential statements do not necessarily have the force of law, but they do alert workers to what the administration prioritizes and how it wants the federal government to run. As the nonprofit advocacy organization Secular Coalition notes, “We are particularly concerned by the decision to allow supervisors to follow the same guidelines as their subordinates,” effectively enlisting the hierarchy in proselytizing.
This memo is presented under the guise that all religions in the U.S. are equal and can now be equally discussed among federal employees. But not all religions in the U.S. are equal. Christianity is the dominant religion in the United States, with 62% of adults identifying as Christian according to a 2024 study from Pew Research Center. Christians—and specifically white evangelical Protestants—are systematically privileged over people of other faiths. The Trump administration’s outright alignment with white evangelicals and its investment in legislation and ideology connected to Christian nationalism shows how this memo will ultimately be used to target non-Christians as un-American enemies who must be expelled or destroyed.
“Employees may engage in conversations regarding religious topics with fellow employees,” the memo reads. This includes attempts to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature.” The policy explicitly protects the “constitutional rights of supervisors to engage in such conversations,” though it says that “unwillingness to engage in such conversations may not be the basis of workplace discipline.”
Again, in theory, this language seems to suggest that all religious expressions are to be treated equally. A section ensuring the right to display religious items lists as examples “crosses, crucifixes and mezuzahs”—suggesting that Jews, at least, are protected.
But in practice, it’s clear even from this excerpt that Christians are first among supposed equals. The boilerplate lists Christian symbols—crosses and crucifixes—twice. In contrast, there is no mention of Sikh turbans, Islamic hijabs, Rastafarian dreadlocks, or any other visible signs of minority religious identities.
This isn’t an accident. The Trump administration’s memo suggests that Christians have been discriminated against in public life, and in government jobs in particular. But this is nonsense.
The Trump administration’s memo suggests that Christians have been discriminated against in public life, and in government jobs in particular. But this is nonsense.
As Khyati Y. Joshi, professor of education at Fairleigh Dickinson University, explains in her 2020 White Christian Privilege, it’s not Christian symbols but non-Christian religious symbols and expressions that have regularly been stigmatized or even criminalized in the United States.
As recently as 2018—under the first Trump administration—Secret Service Agent Anshdeep Singh Bhatia, a Sikh, was asked to shave his beard and remove his turban when he was assigned to the president’s detail. He had to sue before his superiors relented. “If Christian practice included devotional head covering,” Joshi writes, people like Singh Bhatia “would not have had to fight those fights.” Similarly, scholar Renee Yuengling noted in 2009 that while the Army has “excellent policy on religious accommodation,” those policies assume Christian identity.
“You don’t have to ask to get Sundays off, for example,” Yuengling told SHRM, “but taking other days of the week off for worship requires an accommodation.”
Christian identity in the U.S. is seen as normative. Non-Christian identity is seen as unusual and may or may not be accommodated, depending on the whims of supervisors and courts.
For example, in 2008, Abercrombie & Fitch refused to hire a woman as a sales associate because she wore a hijab; it was seven years before the Supreme Court ruled definitively in her favor. Rastafarians are still, in 2025, trying to navigate cannabis laws, even though cannabis is a sacrament in their religion.
In that context, the Trump administration’s failure to mention a range of examples of religious symbols from different religions speaks volumes. As the examples above indicate, when people are not told, specifically, that they must respect Rastafarian cannabis use, or Sikh turbans, or religious days other than Sunday, they often don’t respect them. By signaling out Christian symbols (twice!) Trump is doubling down on a default culture that privileges Christian identity over all others.
READ MORE: The Gap Between Trump's Rhetoric and Record on Religious Freedom
You could argue, perhaps, that this privileging of Christianity is an example of unconscious bias. But the policies related to religion that Trump made during his first term and the policies he is making now demonstrate a willful intention to elevate Christianity and devalue other religions.
Trump’s attempt to institute a travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries is perhaps the best example of him promoting religious discrimination. This is in line with numerous Islamophobic statements he has made over the last 15 years, in which he has repeatedly linked Islam to terrorism and violence.
Trump has also displayed animus toward other religions. He recently used the antisemitic term “Shylock” in a rant attacking bankers. He’s also rescinded guidelines that restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agents from entering houses of worship without permission or authorization. A group of Quakers, Baptists, and Sikhs sued to block the policy; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also issued a statement affirming their commitment to providing food and clothing to people, regardless of their immigration status.
If Trump is concerned with religious bias at all, it is only insofar as he is committed to the Christian nationalist talking point that there is rampant anti-Christian bias in the U.S. In line with these Christian nationalist sentiments, Trump has established a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, which is supposed to root out anti-Christian animus in government.
But as the Interfaith Alliance points out, there is no actual anti-Christian bias in the U.S. For example, “hate crimes experts have no documented widespread incidents of Americans facing discrimination because of their Christian faith.” Interfaith Alliance argues that what Trump means by anti-Christian bias is “LGBTQ nondiscrimination, vaccine requirements, and reproductive health care protections.”
It’s also quite possible that, in practice, “anti-Christian bias” in the Trump administration could mean anything that Trump and his allies consider non-Christian. Republicans in Florida and elsewhere attempted to censor discussions of LGBTQ+ identity. Jewish groups have brought lawsuits arguing that anti-abortion laws violate Jewish precepts and faith practices. If a Trump-supporting Christian supervisor asked their subordinates to join them in a prayer for unborn souls, and their Jewish coworker said that they did not believe that fetuses have souls, would that constitute an example of anti-Christian bias?
It’s easy to see the dangers of both the memo and the task force.
The practical effects of this memo will benefit Christian nationalists more than any other group. Built into the white evangelical playbook is an ideological commitment to aggressively convert unbelievers. Pragmatically, the memo provides a green light to identify and separate Christians and non-Christians, to promote the former, and to discriminate against the latter. Many non-Christians, faced with this kind of discrimination, will simply quit. This memo, taken together with the anti-Christian bias task force and Trump’s history of Islamophobic and antisemitic statements, further demonstrates how the U.S. is fully embracing Christofascism. Non-Christians who work in the federal government would have to be brave to the point of foolhardiness to speak about religion at all in the workplace, much less try to convert their colleagues.
This memo, taken together with the anti-Christian bias task force and Trump’s history of Islamophobic and antisemitic statements, further demonstrates how the U.S. is fully embracing Christofascism.
The Trump memo is meant to be a green light for white evangelical Christians to pressure and harass Jews, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, and people of all other religions. It is meant to create and encourage a confessional workplace hierarchy based on faith in a particular vision of Christianity—and it’s meant to encourage non-Christians to leave the federal workforce. The claim of the memo—that it’s promoting equality and freedom of religion—is barely a smokescreen. Trump is ruling as a Christian nationalist. This is his latest effort to identify the nation with white evangelical Christianity and to codify Christian power and Christian rule.
Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His poetry collection Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press) addresses the Jewish diaspora. His newsletter is Everything Is Horrible.
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