Staff employed by a key Trump goon have accused her of “government-sponsored religious coercion” by regularly invoking Jesus Christ in work emails.
A federal employees union have accused Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins of sending emails that that promote her own Christian beliefs and violate the First Amendment in a new lawsuit.
The National Federation of Federal Employees’ lawsuit alleged that since becoming secretary in February last year, Rollins has sent a number of religious emails to roughly 90,000 USDA employees.
That included an Easter message Rollins sent that celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ, leading to a backlash from religious freedom groups and federal employees. The email hailed Easter as “the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith and the abiding hope of all mankind.”
The lawsuit also references a Christmas email that read, “God gave us the greatest gift possible, the gift of his Son and our Savior Jesus Christ, who came to free us from our sins and open the door to eternal life.”
An email to mark Independence Day called for God’s protection of and favor toward the U.S., while Rollins credited a “gratitude towards a loving God” in her Thanksgiving email.
Rollins, who has posted about attending the mega church Christ Chapel Bible Church in Fort Worth, Texas, was also called out for only marking Christian holidays and not “even acknowledging—let alone celebrating or sermonizing—other religions’ holidays.”
“Secretary Rollins’s practice and policy of subjecting agency employees to proselytizing messages conveys the expectation that USDA employees share in the Secretary’s religious beliefs, even when doing so would betray an employee’s own beliefs,” the lawsuit said.
“It is exactly the sort of government-sponsored religious coercion, religious sermonizing, and denominational preference that the Establishment Clause prohibits.”
The lawsuit noted that “our nation’s Founders—having learned from the harmful effects of past religious conflicts—adopted the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”
The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from promoting a favored religion or preferring one religion over another, or favoring religion over non-religion, to protect religious freedom for all.
The lawsuit said Rollins’ messaging to staff “indoctrinates USDA employees and has caused them to feel coerced, unwelcome, excluded, and like outsiders to the agency.”
One employee claimed in the suit she had been warned it would “create trouble” if she requested to be removed from the email distribution list, while another said he felt Rollins was conveying to him he “going to hell” due to his different beliefs to her.
USDA employee and plaintiff Ethan Roberts said the alleged messaging makes him feel “unwelcome.”
“We work for the federal government, not a church,” Roberts said in a statement. “I just want to go to work and make my country better—I shouldn’t have to suffer through sermons and other religious messages forced upon me by the head of a federal agency.”
The union’s national president, Randy Erwin, said other federal government employees had expressed similar concerns from their workplaces.
“Every agency feels like it’s the epicenter for a new outbreak of Christian Nationalism,” Erwin said. “We just want to do our jobs without having to fend off proselytizing and preaching. That’s a basic American freedom, not something we should have to go to court to secure.”
The president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser, also slammed the Trump administration.
She said, “Trump is not Jesus, federal agencies are not churches, and cabinet secretaries are not government preachers,” and accused his administration of “waging a relentless and increasingly brazen crusade against church-state separation and the religious freedom of federal workers.”
“While we do not comment on pending litigation, we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process,” a USDA spokesperson told the Daily Beast in a statement.
