Employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture were greeted Monday by a rare — and what some saw as an alarming — email from the department’s secretary, Brooke Rollins.
“Happy Easter — He is Risen indeed!” starts the email, which was reviewed by The Washington Post. It appears to have been written on Easter Sunday and was sent to the roughly 100,000 federal workers across USDA. “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.”
“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed,” continues the email, signed by Rollins. “Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life — risen life — there is hope.”
The USDA email was the latest in a string of seemingly unprecedented expressions of Christian proselytizing by an administration that has made it a hallmark — not just in the federal workplace but also across the world.
In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged Americans to pray “every day, on bended knee” “in the name of Jesus Christ” for a military victory in the Middle East. The “Religious Liberty Commission” created by the administration is almost exclusively conservative Christians. President Donald Trump himself this week said he believed God supported the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and derisively referred to the beliefs of Iran’s Muslim majority.
Rollins, in her email, told USDA workers that, “like the very first disciples to encounter our risen Lord in the Upper Room almost two thousand years ago, this Easter let us too be alive with hope, full of Paschal joy, and confident in the mission each of us has been called for.”
Four USDA employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, expressed dismay over Rollins’s use of explicitly religious rhetoric, saying that a department secretary had not spoken to employees like that in recent memory. The email also stunned some legal experts, who said the message defies a norm of government officials steering clear of such overt and specific religious language and a constitutional ban on an official state religion.
“I have never seen that overtly of a religious email in all my years of government service,” said one 15-year veteran of the department, who said they were “floored” by the email. “It’s a separation of state and religion for a reason.”
The staffer said USDA leaders during the second Trump administration have sent other messages with some religious rhetoric in them for Christmas, another break from the past, but none as extensive and explicit as Rollins’s Easter message.
“I think it is telling when the head of a department is the one that is forcing religion down everybody’s throat,” the employee said, noting that USDA workers who are not Christian, or who have separated from the church, are wondering “what are we going to be subjected to” if this is the department’s messaging going forward.
A USDA spokesperson Wednesday said Rollins “is within her rights to send a message to employees and the public on the Easter holiday. Just like Secretaries of Agriculture and Presidents have in the past.” USDA did not respond to a request to provide examples of previous messages similar to Rollins’s, nor did it respond to questions about employees’ concerns over the email.
James Nelson, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in religion and speech rights in the workplace, told The Post that Rollins’s email was “very unusual” and that it probably would have violated rules issued during the Clinton administration against official government endorsement of religion. However, Nelson noted that under “recent changes in church-state law under the First Amendment, the current administration seems to have concluded that those rules against government endorsement of religion are no longer operative.”
“One might also argue that the email risks impermissible coercion of employees,” Nelson said. “The Clinton guidelines were sensitive to the special risks of coercion from supervisors’ religious expression. But the current administration has indicated that religious speech by supervisors should be treated the same as speech by nonsupervisory employees.”
Nelson said he’s not aware of any similar messages being sent to federal staff members in previous administrations, and added that he’s noticed an uptick in the use of religious language in official government communications under this Trump administration.
Other departments, including Education, Energy, and Health and Human Services, publicly marked Easter with a flood of explicit social media posts that would have been unheard of before the second Trump administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted the three-word quote “He is Risen” with a video that appeared to include audio from his memorial speech for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, in which he predicted that Jesus would return and that “there will be a new heaven and a new Earth, and we will all be together, and we are going to have a great reunion there again.”
Hegseth, who has frequently invoked his evangelical faith in ways that have upended norms, also celebrated the holiday on his official government account: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed.”
“On this solemn day, we reflect on the ultimate sacrifice our Savior made for all humanity,” read the Department of Homeland Security post on X.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner wrote that “our living hope is anchored in our risen Savior.”
The flurry of posts appeared to be an acceleration of the religiously nationalistic messages some agencies shared at Christmas, and suggested that “we” Americans share a common faith. According to the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of Americans identify as “Christian,” representing many different denominations, faith expressions and beliefs.
Over the summer, the Office of Personnel Management put out guidance about religion in the federal workplace. In the memo, titled “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said that the government workforce should be “a welcoming place” for employees who practice a religious faith.
While the core of the guidance did not really differ from that of past administrations, it encouraged federal employees to express their faith in the workplace, which experts on the federal workforce said was a significant shift.
Brian Grim, founding president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting “the positive power” that religion and religious liberty have in the workplace, told The Post that while in general it is “appropriate for organizational leaders to acknowledge religious holidays” and that “it can also be appropriate for a leader to acknowledge their own observance,” they should only do so as long as the message “remains clear that this is a personal or community-specific observance rather than one shared by all.”
Grim expressed some uncertainty over Rollins’s message to USDA employees, noting that “messaging from agency leadership that is highly devotional and directed to a broad, captive audience risks crossing from permissible acknowledgment into perceived endorsement.”
“Leaders should be mindful not to assume a single, uniform set of beliefs or practices even within a particular faith,” Grim said. “Where challenges arise is in how those messages are framed and the context in which they are delivered. It is one thing to note that, for example, Christians are celebrating Easter and to offer respectful greetings and congratulations. It is another to present a message in a way that assumes shared belief, promotes a particular faith as universal, or calls on all employees, regardless of their own beliefs, to participate in or affirm that religious perspective.”
Bryan Schwartz, a California-based employment attorney, said that he has been contacted by dozens of federal workers with concerns about overtly Christian messaging and that he is considering the employees’ legal options. He cited the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.
“Thomas Jefferson would be turning over in his grave,” Schwartz said, referring to the Founding Father who has been quoted for his argument to keep the government out of religion. “What makes this particularly egregious is that it is a Cabinet secretary who is being overtly religious, sermonizing using the government system to a captive audience of her employees.”
Some USDA employees The Post spoke to said the email is among a slew of disconcerting issues at the department. One staffer contacted by The Post said that while they had heard some employees discuss the possibility of filing a complaint over the email, there has been “such an onslaught of workplace upheaval and upheaval to programs that people are frustrated about, but they just feel like they need to put their resources elsewhere.”
“It’s not worth the potential retaliation raising this when their jobs might be on the line for other reasons,” the USDA employee said.
Another USDA employee said the email came amid the department’s announcement that it will move the headquarters of its Forest Service from D.C. to Utah, an announcement the employee noted Rollins has not addressed directly with USDA employees, only commenting about it during a news conference last month.
The employee said that while some colleagues were upset by Rollins’s Easter message, they may be reluctant to file an official complaint about it because “we’re already in an organization that had a bunch of people pushed away, and now it’s restructuring.”
“I know [the Easter email] upset a lot of people,” the employee said, “but people are just dead scared to put their name to anything.”
Sim J. Singh Attariwala, who headed the faith office at the Justice Department during the Biden administration, called the USDA email and the string of Christmas and Easter social media posts by Trump administration officials a “departure” from the past.
“Public servants all the way to the president take an oath to uphold the Constitution — not any one viewpoint,” he said.
Attariwala reestablished the Justice Department’s faith office, which had been dismantled by the first Trump administration along with some other agency faith offices.
“What’s dangerous is it weakens the neutrality that protects all. And that’s how trust in our government will break down further,” Attariwala said of Trump officials’ posting. “That is deeply alarming.”
Since the administration of George W. Bush, many federal agencies have had offices dedicated to faith issues.
Maggie Siddiqi, who directed the faith office at the Education Department during the Biden administration, said it was “very clear” to her and to then-Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that they had to, “no matter how much he and I, and many others in the department, felt very religious … we still had to honor the many people that shared those religious beliefs and that did not.”
“We could speak personally and publicly about our own faiths as long as we never portrayed that as speaking on behalf of the American people,” she said. “That was the line.”
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