Editor’s note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.
NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 12th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.
MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. WORLD Opinions contributor Daniel Suhr on new federal guidelines meant to protect religious freedoms at work.
DANIEL SUHR: Imagine a Veterans Affairs doctor praying with a patient, or a government worker posting a flyer about a church event on an informal, employee-to-employee informational bulletin board.
Many try to argue that these actions are unconstitutional. They are not…not even close. But, new guidance from the lead human resources agency of the federal government is explicitly seeking to protect the rights of government workers to engage in similar activities…though with the caveat that they must be done in such a way as to respect the wishes of the other party to the conversation.
The new memorandum from the Office of Personnel Management—or OPM—provides a robust view of federal employees’ religious liberties in the workplace, and it could have sweeping influence. The United States government is the largest employer in the United States with almost 2.4 million employees. Like any employer, the government has a basic role to regulate its workspaces and buildings, whether office cubicles or military bases. The OPM memorandum is another building block in the Trump Administration’s continued effort to protect religious freedom.
The First Amendment protects free speech and the free exercise of religion for all Americans. But the U.S. Supreme Court has always recognized that these clauses operate differently for government employees than for everyday citizens. For instance, the government as an employer can search an employee’s workplace desk or locker for contraband drugs—even if it would need a judicial warrant to search the same person’s home.
Two years ago the Supreme Court affirmed the right of public high school football coach Joe Kennedy to pray publicly after a game. The case put front and center the previously ambiguous balancing between the employee’s conscience rights and the employer’s interests in an efficient workplace.
The Biden Administration pressed its own agenda through the federal workforce, using the Transgender Day of Visibility in 2023 to announce guidelines for its transgender employees. In fact, the Biden Administration’s commitment to DEI ran rampant throughout the various agencies and departments of the government. It reached its apex in a 2021 executive order entitled “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.” That was followed by an all-agency implementation strategy led by OPM. Thankfully, that order has since been repealed by President Trump.
Predictably, secularist advocates are already screaming about the Trump OPM’s new guidance on religious practices in the workplace…claiming they are fundamentalist, outrageous, and of course…Christian nationalism overreach.
But most Americans will view these clarifications as common sense. And the OPM action may even be required by law in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Groff v. DeJoy. That case reaffirmed that the federal civil rights law in Title VII provides meaningful protections for religious employees in public and private workplaces nationwide.
We can hope that state and local governments and private employers will follow the OPM’s new guidance for their own settings. In 2017, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions noted in a legal memorandum that federal standards (pause) “provide useful guidance to private employers about ways in which religious observance and practice can reasonably be accommodated in the workplace.”
General Sessions wrote that memorandum reflecting on guidelines issued by the Clinton Administration in 1997 in the wake of the bipartisan adoption of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Those guidelines also provided strong religious liberty protection in the federal workplace. The new Trump guidelines expand, reinforce, and clarify the Clinton standards. But the fact that the Clinton Administration could issue good guidance on such a subject recalls a by-gone era…one when broad religious liberty protections had substantial bipartisan support. The battle over same-sex marriage has largely destroyed that bipartisan consensus. We must hope it may yet come back.
I’m Daniel Suhr.
WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.