USDA employees sue after Sec. Brooke Rollins promotes Christianity in official emails
The Plaintiffs say the Agriculture Secretary illegally used her position to preach Christianity and pressure employees
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In an attempt to beat back the rising tide of Christian Nationalism in the government, federal workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are suing the agency and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins for using her position and the department to illegally promote Christianity.
They say she’s actively and regularly proselytizing in work emails, “promoting her own preferred brand of Christian beliefs and theology to the captive audience of employees that report to her.” And she acts like her religion is the default faith for the entire agency.
They have plenty of examples, too. Like on Independence Day last year, when she concluded an email with the phrase, “May God continue to protect the United States of America and may His favor shine over all her land.” Or in November, when she cited “gratitude towards a loving God” for inspiring the first Thanksgiving. Or just before Christmas, when she sent out a video saying “The spirit of generosity flows from the very first Christmas when 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. This is the reason for the season.”
While the first couple of examples might be forgivable, the Christmas one was more of a sermon, and the pattern is one of escalating religious rhetoric. And that really came through in an email sent to everyone on April 5 to mark Easter.
Notice the wording (emphases mine): “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind… [T]his Easter let us too be alive with hope, full of Paschal joy, and confident in the mission each of us has been called for… One Nation, Under God.” The lawsuit adds how she also references “the foot of the Cross on Good Friday,” “sin” being “destroyed,” “Hell” having “t[aken] a body, and discovered God,” and Jesus being “raised from the dead.”
On the same day she sent that email, she blasted out an equally deranged message on her official X/Twitter account, saying “Death has been defeated” and “Christ is King!”
You expect a pastor to lie like that, not a government agency head. Her mythology doesn’t speak for the department. Yet Rollins has repeatedly acted like her personal religion represents everyone who works under her. “It is exactly the sort of government-sponsored religious coercion, religious sermonizing, and denominational preference that the Establishment Clause prohibits,” say the Plaintiffs.
When a complaint was filed over that Easter email sermon, a USDA spokesperson told CNN, “The Secretary 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.” Obviously, that didn’t address the substance of what she actually did. And acknowledging the holiday like other government officials in the past is very different from promoting one in particular, which is what Rollins did. It also meant she wasn’t going to stop using her platform to promote Christianity.
Like this tweet from September, honoring her God because it was a Sunday:
Or this one from early November. It wasn’t even connected to a holiday. It was just an unnecessary merging of her job and Christianity:
And just last week, she promoted the National Day of Prayer, quoting the Bible and falsely stating that “our country’s foundation is built on faith”:
It’s notable that Rollins hasn’t bothered paying even cursory attention to religious holidays for other faiths. (You won’t find a Hanukkah video, for example.)
Those seven Plaintiffs say they feel pressured to agree with Rollins on matters of faith and that refusing to go along with her delusions could lead to “negative consequences.” None of them has suffered those consequences yet, to be clear. But legally speaking, Christians have won plenty of legal battles arguing that they might be harmed in the future if they practice their faith, like refusing to make wedding websites for same-sex couples even if no one had asked them about it.
The Plaintiffs include religious and non-religious people who say they feel like they cannot be open about their faith because Rollins has made it clear only her religion matters. One of them asked to be removed from the email list Rollins was using to proselytize, but she was told by a higher-up that she couldn’t do that and that elevating the request even higher might “create trouble” for her. They’re asking the court—in this case, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California—to declare Rollins’ actions violate the Establishment Clause and therefore must stop.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Democracy Forward are the two groups representing the Plaintiffs, along with Bryan Schwartz Law. The National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents about 19,000 USDA employees is also a party in the lawsuit. They called the Easter email a “particularly egregious example of Trump administration officials abusing the power of public office to impose their beliefs on others and promote one narrow view of Christianity.”
In a sane world, this would be a straightforward case. But the Trump administration and its allies in the courts have repeatedly allowed Christians to get away with shit that no other religious or explicitly non-religious people would be allowed to do. No Muslim Secretary of anything would ever get away with sending a similar email about Ramadan.
And as if to dig in even more, when ABC News asked the USDA for comment, a spokesperson said, “While we do not comment on pending litigation, we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process."
The irony is that the Department of Agriculture is very much an agency that should care about science and facts, not prayer and mythology.
Before Rollins was installed as Agriculture Secretary, she worked for Texas governor Rick Perry and led a couple of right-wing think tanks. She’s pretty much every character in The Hunting Wives rolled up into one. She’s been under fire for rescinding a Clinton-era rule that said no roads could be paved within national forests, a move that would further destroy our nation’s natural beauty. She also suspended financial awards to Minneapolis (and the entire state of Minnesota) for alleged fraud claimed by a right-wing provocateur even though his claims were wildly misleading. Which is all to say Rollins, like everyone else in the Trump administration, isn’t interested in doing her job but rather using her position to promote right-wing talking points no matter how much harm she causes to farmers and other people directly affected by her agency.
To be clear, the issue here isn’t that Rollins is religious. It’s that she’s apparently incapable of separating her personal faith from the institution she’s supposed to run. The Department of Agriculture isn’t a church. Federal employees aren’t her congregation. Either she’s unaware of all that or she doesn’t care.
That’s the arrogance at the core of Christian Nationalism. Rollins sees herself as a missionary in a position to force her views on tens of thousands of people at once. Her message isn’t subtle either: If you don’t share her theology, you don’t fully belong. And yet lawsuits like these are often treated, by conservative Christians, as evidence that Christianity is somehow under attack. As if saying “Merry Christmas” is now forbidden. That’s not what this is about. That’s the straw man we should all expect in response, though.
Even worse is how mundane this whole lawsuit feels. While the Plaintiffs are absolutely right to challenge all this, it’s hardly the most egregious violation of church/state separation we’ve seen from Republicans in charge. They’ve normalized abusing their positions so much that major scandals in previous administrations are just days that end in “Y” for this one. But the bottom line is that Rollins’ conduct is still illegal and the courts should say so.
But when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites for they love to pray in public to be seen by men.
I'm sick of Christian privilege.