Trump's America

Trump Administration Puts Faith Back at the Forefront of Free Speech

18 August 2025

3.5 MINS

Trump’s policy to “Make America Healthy Again” is putting faith back at the forefront of free speech.

Public displays of affection for Christ, the cross and Christianity were all given a green light by the Trump administration in July.

Government employees will no longer be discouraged from openly discussing their faith in Christ or offering an apology for it.

Although the fresh policy applies equally to all religions, discretion will still govern expression in official announcements and engagements.

Published by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the restoration of rights is in conjunction with Team Trump repealing an anti-Christian bias embedded within government institutions.

History of Fairness

In a memorandum called Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace, OPM first appealed to historical context. They argued that ridding the civil service of this bias was fundamental to the past, present and future of the United States.

The US, OPM explained, is a nation founded on the right for people to “practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.”

Protections against persecution are “historic and robust”.

As such, “President Trump is committed to [vigorously] reaffirming America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty.”

“Allowing religious discrimination in the Federal workplace violates the law,” OPM added.

“It also threatens to adversely impact the recruitment and retention of highly-qualified employees of faith.”

Consequently, “Agencies should allow personal religious expression by Federal employees to the greatest extent possible.”

That is “unless such expression would impose an undue hardship on business operations”.

Clarity

Pre-empting the inevitable nitpicking, OPM explained that “undue hardship” does not translate into disliking a colleague’s beliefs.

By way of clarification, OPM said legal definitions of belief do not include “social, political, or economic philosophies, and mere personal preferences.”

In other words, not all beliefs are protected or permissible.

Such as a person’s feelings, perceptions, preferred pronouns, activist affiliations, ideology, sense of being offended, or being so-called micro-aggressed.

OPM’s guidelines are pinned down by common sense.

Using work hours for religious observance, like the confessional or Islam’s Salah, which is practised five times a day, may also be limited.

The same rule might also apply to the Marxian-Woke, Critical Race Theory struggle sessions, better known as “implicit bias training”.

Agencies are authorised to “require that employees perform official work while on duty, as opposed to engaging in personal religious observances”.

Freedom of Religion and Speech

OPM’s five-point outline of permissible paraphernalia includes Bibles, posters, jewellery, and artwork.

No employee, they asserted, should be “disciplined or corrected” for displaying items like “crosses, Christian icons, menorahs or mezuzahs.”

Open discussion about faith is to be allowed, “including attempts to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature”.

Under the new US government’s guidelines, employees “may also encourage their coworkers to participate in religious expressions of faith, such as prayer”.

This includes protections against discipline for anyone “unwilling to engage in such conversations”.

Point five argued that the right to free speech is not “limited by the status of government employee”.

Employees, OPM said, can speak about personal religious convictions regardless of venue or audience.

However, these private citizen privileges do not include protection for public statements made as part of their roles as civil servants.

A lack of discretion can still be disciplined. Individual responsibility is still king.

Restoration

OPM’s latest guidelines revoke the demands found in the Democrats’ damaging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policy pushed through the human resource department by Biden in 2021.

Section 9a required agencies to implement “CRT training programs”.

The goal of these struggle sessions was to weed out alleged “systemic and institutional racism and bias against underserved communities”.

Agencies were told to “build skillsets to promote respectful and inclusive workplaces and eliminate workplace harassment”.

A key DEI demand here was to ensure employees had a “knowledge and increased understanding of implicit and unconscious bias”.

Section 11’s Advancing Equity for LGBTQ+ Employees serves as another good reason for Trump’s religious freedom restoration.

Biden told US government departments to turn their agencies into safe spaces for preferred pronouns, “transgender and gender non-conforming and non-binary employees”.

Responses to OPM’s Trump turnaround have been predictably mixed.

Where far-left organisations like Freedom from Religion tried to say the guidelines against persecution breached the separation of Church and State, leaders like Franklin Graham applauded the Trump initiative.

Challenging Big Eva’s “hate Trump because love trumps hate”  dissonance, Graham wrote,

“For all the never-Trumper, so-called evangelicals, President Trump has just scored another victory for religious freedom for all people of faith.”

Author Eric Metaxas added,

“Another reason to love President Trump!”

“But why in the world would Christians ALLOW themselves to be silenced in the workplace and need a presidential memo for permission to speak?”

“We’re SUPPOSED to have courage and faith no matter what the govt says!”

___

Image courtesy of Adobe.

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One Comment

  1. c7a40747ab415df1e3cd10be6ed2635fb15eed19ca9cbf5a9cfda264c76724de?s=54&d=mm&r=g
    Anna Z 18 August 2025 at 6:01 pm - Reply

    Why would Christians allow themselves to be silenced? I suggest that it’s partly due to a wrong understanding or interpretation of Matthew 5’s ” turn the other cheek”

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