Religious liberty has been restored to government institutions as federal employees can now once again express their faith in the workplace, according to a recent memo from the Trump administration’s U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Protections extended to employees include the display of religious items; religious expressions; and religious conversations between federal employees, including attempts “to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature,” reads the policy.
“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement. “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths. Under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, we are restoring constitutional freedoms and making government a place where people of faith are respected, not sidelined.”
Andrew Walker, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary posted on X that the policy is “quite robust.”
“You don’t have to baptize your convictions in secularism to work for the federal government. The new OPM guidance upholds the obvious: religious Americans are full citizens—even at work,” he wrote.
“To me, that’s simply reaffirming the First Amendment, that has proper caveats if you’re not engaging in harassing behavior. I think this is just reiterating basic principles of the First Amendment,” Politico reported Walker as saying.
The policy seems similar to Democrat President Bill Clinton’s policy from 1997, which addressed “employees’ religious exercise and religious expression when the employees are acting in their personal capacity within the federal workplace.”
Focus on the Family, a Christian nonprofit, also penned on X: “What an encouraging moment! As pressure mounts from every side to compromise our values, we are glad to see our country’s leadership standing firm on our constitutional right to express our faith!”
But Lisa Needham, an attorney and contributor for the Daily Kos news site who writes on LGBTQ and reproductive issues, said employees would get lectured about their religious beliefs. “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?” Needham wrote in a recent piece on the OPM policy.
In the policy, OPM stated that this new directive is in accordance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that it gives religious employees “favored treatment,” “obligating agencies not to discipline or discharge employees for their ‘religious observance and practice.’”