Outside the Beltway

The Trump Administration’s Not-So-Quiet Advance of Christian Nationalism

We are observing an effort to embed democratically questionable sectarian norms into the day-to-day life of federal workplaces. 

Michael Bailey · Sunday, August 10, 2025 · 5 comments

The Trump Administration has found God. 

To be fair, the content of the right-wing Christian nationalist statements making headlines today, along with their theological and political justifications, are not exactly new; they’ve been percolating for decades. But for many of us—including myself, a boring, off-and-on church-going Methodist—some of the wildest proclamations and intra-faith arguments propelling this many-sided right-wing religious movement have stayed under mainstream radar, even if they’ve been in plain view to the conferences and virtual chatrooms of the Evangelical Right. 

That is changing fast, and ignoring them is no longer a luxury we can afford. Accordingly, Steven Taylor’s recent, passionate critique of the growing influence of Christian Nationalism—both in our rhetoric and in the hearts of Trump’s leaders—is a must-read. 

Trump has already normalized every manner of awful in our politics: election denialism, shameless chronic lying, open defiance of the rule of law, and the torching of a billion and six norms of civility. (Consider his own son’s recent extremely weird and pretty much inexplicable x-rated WNBA-related meme.) Now, Trump is normalizing something else. He’s encouraging explicit religious proselytizing in the operations of government.  He’s eroding the bedrock of our centuries-old separation of powers system, cynically doing so in the name of restoring our tradition. 

The public stays tuned to rhetoric, particularly outrageous soundbites, but what quietly reshapes government more often than not are memos and executive orders. They decide who gets what, when and how.  They rewrite agency priorities and redefine the boundaries of law. And in this boring world of executive orders, we are genuinely beginning to see the presence of Christian Nationalism, even if the term itself never appears.

To be clear, when I say the Trump administration has “found God,” I think pretty much everyone knows that it doesn’t mean Donald Trump himself has undergone a religious awakening. What he has exploited more potently than in his first term is the political utility of invoking religion and the promise of more power to his religious devotees to delight and mobilize his most fervent base, Christian evangelicals.

To make my point, I’ll set aside for now some red meat he has thrown his base, such as his culture-war attacks on transgender rights and diversity initiatives. Here I want to focus on something narrower and more direct: government actions explicitly promoting religion inside the machinery of the state.

Here are a some examples:

• Creation of a White House Faith Office to “assist faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship” in strengthening families, promoting work, and protecting “religious liberty.”
• Executive orders aimed at eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”
• Establishment of a “Religious Liberty Commission” to advise the White House on securing domestic religious liberty via executive or legislative action.
• Articulation of more lenient guidelines for granting religious accommodations in the federal workplace. These more expansive accommodations rules were issued in pursuance of a 2023 SCOTUS ruling in Groff v. Dejoy. These new standards hold that “Agencies should allow personal religious expression by Federal employees to the greatest extent possible unless such expression would impose an undue hardship on business operations.” 
• Reinterpretation of IRS rules to gut the Johnson Amendment, which for 70 years put restrictions on churches endorsing candidates from the pulpit.
  

These measures have been sold as mere restorations of “ancient” Constitutional and cultural norms. Nothing to see here, folks. Everything is normal. Just move along.

Kupor’s Recent Memo

The same logic of nothing-to-see-here restoration has now been applied to what appears at first blush to be a seemingly modest, even anodyne, measure: a July 28, 2025, memo from Scott Kupor, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, entitled Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace. 

Boring, right? 

On its face, the title sounds like something only a committed anti-religious bigot would oppose. But the substance is more revealing.

The memo appears to do three key things:

First, it avidly encourages, rather than merely permits, open religious expression in the federal workplace.  Such expressions, among others, may include prayer, displays of religious items and text, and even evangelizing or proselytizing, including persuading colleagues of the “correctness” of one’s faith. From what I’ve gathered, this particular shift from the original Clinton-era standards, the position from which this action is departing, is largely one of a new tone. Religion is no longer viewed as a valuable component of one’s personal identity but one that must be artfully navigated in a religiously pluralist work setting. Rather, it is depicted as essentially unproblematic. Workers are free to express their religious beliefs “to the same extent that they may engage in nonreligious private expression.”

Second, this memo removes the old Clinton-era-established standard that distinguished supervisors from rank-and-file employees. Clinton-era rules essentially discouraged, but did not explicitly prohibit, supervisors from discussing their faith.  It did prohibit them from discussing their faith in ways that might pressure subordinates. That guardrail is removed. Both supervisors and employees will be limited in their free-time religious expressions in the workplace only insofar such expressions must not be “harassing in nature.”  Supervisors may now openly invite subordinates to join prayer groups or attend religious services, so long as it’s “non-coercive” and, again, not deemed harassment. Of course, supervisors themselves will often be the ones deciding what constitutes harassment. This surely cannot be much comfort to non-religious employees who simply want to go to work without also feeling like they’re going to someone else’s church at the same time. 

Third, this memo is directed at recruiting federal workers. Not qualified workers in general, mind you, but believers.  Past standards, the memo claims, threatened “to adversely impact recruitment and retention of highly-qualified employees of faith.”  In other words, this change is a recruitment tool for a certain kind of person. 

Most of us agree that religious liberty is precious, but many of us also agree that our nation’s religious pluralism–itself directly a product of its religious liberty–is a complicated affair, the success of which is predicated on abiding by standards of public respect for the view of others.  Taken as a whole, the changes articulated in the memo raise two concerns. First, as Steven Taylor has noted, the version of “freedom” it champions may mask a form of dominion, namely control over public spaces and institutions. While this memo may indeed protect minority religious expressions, it also removes any brakes on the (more likely) expressions of religious majorities. Accommodating and even encouraging majority religious expression in the federal workplace risks coming at the expense of everyone else’s comfort and freedom.  

More mundanely, but no less importantly, the memo risks violating basic norms of workplace and vocational professionalism. It’s fair to wonder whether these rules will foster an environment where the non-religious and adherents of minority faiths are made to feel marginalized (or worse). Presumably many federal workers believed they worked for an institution wholly removed in mission from promoting any particular religion, or even religion at all. The overall tone of the memo intimates that a coworker’s dislike of religion in a secular workplace carries no weight.  To be sure, the memo provides an addendum stating that if an employee asks a co-worker to stop evangelizing specifically to them, “then the employee should honor the request.”  However, the word “should” rather than “shall” opens the possibility that this is not intended to be an enforceable standard but one that banks on the good will of the evangelizing party.

Imagine, for example, a federal employee decorating their cubicle with a bumper sticker reading: If you think this cross is offensive, just wait until Judgment Day. Or: Don’t let your children burn in Hell—tell them about Jesus. These are not fringe slogans where I live—they’re actual bumper stickers that (seemingly) half the trucks in my county display. Would such displays be allowed under Kupor’s memo? Almost certainly. The guidelines tie permissible expression to one’s personal identity, not to the formal tenets (or requirements) of a faith tradition.

Who Benefits? 

What motivates Trump in these executive orders?  Certainly not Trump’s personal religiosity, which, insofar it is detectable, is minimal and abstract. But clearly they serve his political purposes well. The measures strengthen his alliance with evangelical leaders, offer symbolic victories in the culture war, and—perhaps most significantly—will help populate the federal bureaucracy with ideologically aligned Christian nationalists.

The memo’s justification that it will “attract top talent” to federal service is preposterous given this administration’s contempt for bureaucratic expertise. Trump’s appointments have been driven almost entirely by loyalty, not competence. His own OMB director has said he wants to “traumatize” career civil servants so they quit. Why, then, the sudden concern for attracting “talent”? Perhaps because “talent” here means something else: the right kind of believers, and in particular those who will be loyal to Trump.

This is why the rhetoric of mere “restoration” should not fool us. We are not observing a return to some lost Golden Age of a free Christian administrative state; we are observing an effort to embed highly contested and democratically questionable sectarian norms into the day-to-day life of federal workplaces.  Why? Because it advances Trump’s power. This is a culture-war tactic disguised as good civics.  

Christian Nationalism is here not because Trump is one of its true believers, but because his politics of maximum disruption have created an opening for it. And also, more importantly, because it serves Trump’s own purposes.

Trump will work to maintain his connections to Christian Nationalists so long as they strengthen his hold on power.  And that, just always, is the primary lens by which we must understand the actions of the Trump administration.  We mustn’t forget that Trump is not above pressuring churches to do his bidding.  Already we see that ICE is searching for undocumented workers on church grounds, a traditionally taboo area of search.  Equally chilling, Trump administration changes in the federal government’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program now require all nonprofit recipients of these grants, including churches, to cooperate with immigration enforcement agencies, including,  “participation in joint operations, sharing of information, or requests for short-term detention of a noncitizen pursuant to a valid detainer.”  

In theory, our pluralist liberal democracy belongs to us all.  Whether it will continue to feel as if it is jointly shared enterprise, or whether it will feel as if it is owned by a select group of the religiously devout, remains to be seen.