If public workplaces started treating race and sexual identity the way they treat religion, they would be healthier for it.

There’s been a lot of garment-rending from proponents of various kinds of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workplace about how exactly employees who favored such approaches can survive. How can they work if they can’t celebrate being black or gay or female in the workplace? (Never mind that most of these folks would be even more offended if, instead of ending DEI, the Trump administration was promoting a White Pride Month or some such). But we already have a model for that. Ask Christians, Jews, Muslims, or any other group of religious believers.

Religious believers have legally protected rights in the workplace, especially in government workplaces. The law protects them from discrimination for their beliefs, and, within reason, it provides them accommodations for the things their faith demands. They are free as well to be visibly faithful where co-workers, subordinates, and the public can see them. And Christians in the workplace can find one another easily enough to gather for their own common purposes, such as Bible study or prayer. Things are far from perfect: There are many cases in which religious believers have to sue to vindicate these rights, and many government workplaces are still run by people with unreasonably narrow views of the liberty to be openly religious in the workplace. But most people understand and accept that you can be a faithful Christian and still work for the government — and that the two things are, on some level, separate.

Most people also understand that your employer — particularly a public employer — isn’t going to use its budget and its megaphone to celebrate your faith. You can get some of the big religious holidays off, which (depending on your faith) may or may not correspond to the ones you personally celebrate, and for a big civic holiday like Christmas, you may see a Christmas tree in the lobby. But in most public workplaces, you don’t expect to receive office-wide emails promoting Christian scripture, or have everybody else undergo sensitivity training about the tenets of your faith, or even see a concerted effort to hire and retain people who belong to your church. You likely realize that your identity as a faithful Jew, for example, does not depend on its being affirmed by your boss. You can be a faithful Muslim soldier even if your commanding officer never talks about Ramadan.

It might be objected at this point that we have more limits on how public workplaces recruit religious people and celebrate religion because the Constitution itself treats religion differently, by banning the government from establishing religion and prohibiting religious tests for public employment. But consider why we have those limits. It’s because the Founding generation belonged to the British and European traditions of the 16th through the 18th centuries, during which differences of belief among Christians had been uniquely divisive. Today’s culture war divisions have produced their own recipe for conflict. If public workplaces start treating race and sexual identity the way they already treat religion, they are likely to be healthier for it.