Trump Religion Memo Moves Toward Office Proselytizing Everywhere

A Trump administration memo encouraging federal government employees to show off their faith and even proselytize co-workers fuels an emerging and more permissive view on the legality of religious expression at work.

The memo from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor has much of the same substance as Clinton-era guidance on federal workers’ religious expression. But it lacks guardrails about supervisors engaging in religious speech that could make employees less likely to report unwelcome proselytizing, attorneys and law professors said.

The administration’s allowance of increased religious expression in the workplace could easily spill into the private sector—especially after the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Groff v. DeJoy raised the standard for employers to deny religious accommodations.

“What is really significant about this memo is that it’s a shift away from saying, ‘You can practice your religion, but keep it down,’ to now encouraging people to express their religion in the workplace,” Gonzaga University law professor Dallan Flake said.

Administration officials have said they want to bolster religious freedom protections, including in the workplace. President Donald Trump established the White House Faith Office, which gave input on the OPM memo, and acting Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas signaled she will prioritize religious discrimination cases.

Attorneys said the memo’s assertion that workers can attempt to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” until a co-worker requests that they stop could provide a basis for the EEOC to revisit its own guidance. Current EEOC guidance on proselytizing is sensitive to whether it’s welcomed by co-workers and its impact on morale or productivity.

“Government agencies tend to float some of these things within the government first, and then it ends up being applied to the private workforce,” Ogletree Deakins attorney Fiona Ong said. “I would not be surprised to see some of this guidance being adopted by the EEOC in their enforcement activity with regard to private employers.”

Supervisor Sensitivity

Though the Clinton-era guidelines similarly protect government employees proselytizing their co-workers, including supervisors, it notes that “employees may reasonably perceive their supervisors’ religious expression as coercive” and advises supervisors to take extra caution when discussing religion with their employees.

The OPM guidance lacks similar language, saying that supervisors’ First Amendment rights to proselytize “should not be distinguished from non-supervisory employees.”

But employees may hesitate to say when proselytizing is unwelcome due to fears of retaliation.

“The Clinton document was much more sensitive” to power dynamics between supervisors and employees, University of Texas at Austin law professor Douglas Laycock said in an email. “The failure to caution supervisors about how their comments can easily be misunderstood (or correctly understood) as demanding compliance” is “troubling,” he added.

Ong said the memo’s supervisor provision is “not necessarily consistent with existing EEOC guidance” on workplace religious speech.

“I think that this memo goes a little too far with regard to saying that supervisors are on the same level with other employees,” she said.

Post-Groff Directions

The memo follows a march of lower court decisions following the Supreme Court’s 2023 Groff ruling that employers under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act need to meet a higher bar to refuse a religious accommodation as an undue hardship.

But loosening accommodation rules for religious employees in the federal and private workforces could place a higher burden on their co-workers who “want to go about their workday without being inundated with other people’s beliefs,” Baruch College professor Debbie Kaminer said.

“I think it’s really going to be coworkers who are starting to face this increased accommodation burden,” she said. “With this memo, it’s co-workers who are now going to be subject to proselytizing in the workplace.”

Brian Heller, partner at Schwartz Perry & Heller, LLP, said encouraging religious expression could create hostile work environments under Title VII for non-religious workers or those of minority faiths. Federal workers could have a more difficult time getting remedies under the memo.

“It flips the protection from the person who doesn’t want to talk about religion to the person who wants to talk about religion,” Heller said.

Courts have ample experience determining when religious speech becomes degrading, and the OPM memo hews to established law, University of Houston law professor James Nelson said.

But he added that the administration’s maximalist position could create tensions between the favored treatment of religious speech under Title VII and the equal treatment of religious and non-religious speech under the First Amendment.

“I see an emerging tension there,” he said. “And I certainly see the Trump administration and other litigators for sure wanting to go to the maximum on favored treatment within legal constraints.”

Minority Faiths

Michael Ross, legal counsel at the religious advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, in a statement praised the memo as a “critical step in restoring a workplace culture that respects and promotes religious freedom for every American.”

But some law professors said the memo suggests that the administration is expressing an implicit preference for some faiths. While the Clinton guidance includes examples relating to Buddhism and Islam, the OPM memo’s examples do not.

“I see this as the Administration posturing for the evangelical part of its base,” Laycock wrote.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said it worried that the memo would be selectively enforced, potentially disadvantaging Muslim workers.

“It is concerning that the policy mentions numerous examples of permissible activity, discussion and dress related to the Christian and Jewish faiths, but never mentions a single example related to Muslims,” the group’s statement said.

OPM declined to comment on the favoritism criticism.

Brian Grim, president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, said it’s possible the memo’s authors were drawing from their own faith traditions, but “religious freedom includes being literate of other faiths.”

“I read it trying to see how other faiths might read it, and I think they would see that this offers them opportunity for protection as well,” Grim said.