SPECIAL RELEASE: The Workplace Conversion Memo
The Federal Employee Proselytizing Policy You Were Not Told About
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We know that the Founders of the United States maintained a firm wall between the federal government and any single religion. Christian Nationalists disagree and a July 2025 memo from the Office of Personnel Management, still in effect, has explicitly granted federal employees the legal right to attempt to convert their coworkers to Christianity at work — and the chair of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission is now asking that the federal government issue an official hotline declaring the wall does not exist.
This is not a hypothetical. It is not a slippery-slope projection. It is not hysteria. It is documented federal policy that has been in effect since the summer of 2025 and is actively being expanded as of this week.
On July 16, 2025, the Office of Personnel Management, which sets workplace rules for every federal civilian employee, released guidance directing agencies to grant religious accommodations through telework and flexible scheduling. Twelve days later, on July 28, 2025, OPM released a follow-up memorandum titled “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace.” The plain text of that second memo grants federal employees the right to proselytize their colleagues regardless of their role or seniority. It explicitly states that during a break, a federal employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should rethink his religious beliefs.
Read that sentence again.
The federal government is now telling its own workforce, in writing, that converting coworkers, by name, during the workday, is a protected workplace activity. This is not a clarification of existing free-exercise law. It is a structural shift in the relationship between a federal employee and the people sitting next to them, treating them, or supervising them.
The memo also offers specific scenarios it considers permissible. A Veterans Affairs doctor praying over a hospitalized patient. A park ranger joining a tour group in prayer. A federal supervisor encouraging coworkers to participate in religious expressions of faith. These are not examples critics invented to alarm the public. They are examples in the federal guidance itself.
Your VA doctor can now pray over you, while you are hospitalized, in a religion that is not your own. Your federal supervisor can tell you, in a one-on-one conversation, that your beliefs are wrong. And the OPM guidance makes it institutionally clear that you have very little power to push back without becoming the one accused of religious discrimination.
This did not begin in July.
In February 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14202, creating an “Anti-Christian Bias” Task Force inside the federal government to investigate the alleged persecution of Christians by federal agencies. The Department of Veterans Affairs then established its own intra-agency task force and asked VA employees to report colleagues, programs, and policies for investigation. The OPM memos arrived five months later as the natural workplace-rules companion to that executive order.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the country’s oldest and most consequential church-state legal advocacy organization, has been fighting this since the order was signed. They have filed three separate FOIA lawsuits against the federal government over the Anti-Christian Bias Task Force, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. United States Department of Veterans Affairs, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, along with companion suits against the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. They have publicly described the OPM guidance as disinformation that creates the conditions for coercion and harassment of federal workers and the public they serve. They have distributed a Know Your Rights guide to federal employees navigating the new rules.
And then there is the commission.
In 2025, the Trump administration also stood up a federal Religious Liberty Commission, an advisory body whose final report and recommendations are scheduled for release in the months ahead. Its chair is Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
At the commission’s most recent public meeting in April 2026, Patrick said the following on the record:
“We need to say there is no separation of church and state. That’s a lie.”
He proposed that the federal government print “a million bumper stickers” carrying that message. Other commissioners endorsed a federal hotline whose automated recording would open with the line “There is no separation of church and state.” According to the Associated Press, no one at the meeting disagreed.
The commission’s broader draft recommendations, reported in May 2026, include expanding religious expression in public schools, opening more federal funding pathways to faith-based organizations, and authorizing religious-based exemptions across labor, education, and public-health regulations.
How did a constitutional principle that survived more than two hundred years of American legal history get treated, in less than eighteen months, as a piece of bureaucratic deadwood waiting to be cleared away?
The answer is that the firewall always operated on consent. The wall between church and state was never enforced by physics. It was enforced by people in federal offices who, decade after decade, refused to use the machinery of government to advance a single religion. Strip out that consent, replace those people, rewrite the guidance memos they used to interpret their jobs by, and the wall does not crumble. It simply stops being enforced.
That is what has happened.
This transition did not begin with a constitutional amendment. It began with an executive order in February 2025. It evolved through two OPM memos in July. It was decorated with the language of religious liberty and protected speech. And it is now days or weeks away, by the commission’s own timeline, from a final report whose chair has publicly stated that the separation of church and state is, in his words, a lie.
This is the part of the brand of writing I usually do where I close by saying that recognizing this history does not have to destroy the value of the text. This article is not that kind of article. This is happening in real time, to real federal workers, in real hospitals and offices, this week.
If the separation of church and state matters to you, the most concrete thing you can do today is find Americans United for Separation of Church and State at au.org and add your voice to theirs. They are the legal team carrying this fight in federal court. They take individual donations. They have grassroots networks. They are actively tracking the OPM guidance, the three FOIA lawsuits, and the Religious Liberty Commission’s report, and every signature, every shared.
You will never see a collection plate passed around here for ten percent of your hard-earned money. This historical information should be accessible to everyone. But if you are able to chip in, a monthly subscription of exactly $6.66 is a great way to support.