On 28 July 2025, the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo that forbid disciplinary action against any federal employee for the following actions:

• Displaying or using items for religious purposes or religious icons on their persons or in assigned workspaces.
• Engaging in individual or communal religious expressions, so long as such expression do not occur during on-duty time.
• Conversing with fellow employees regarding religious topics, “including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature.” This includes allowing supervisors to have these kinds of conversations with those they oversee.
• Exercising their right as a private citizen to engage in religious expression, except when making “statements pursuant to their official duties.”
• Expressing their personal religious faith in areas that are both accessible and inaccessible to the public.

It is rare for evangelism to be in the public eye, much less to make the news related to the Federal Government. The last time it was this visible was when the musical The Book of Mormon arrived on Broadway and won the Tony Award for best musical in 2011, with its comic depiction of door-knocking religionists and contextually ignorant missionaries.

In that case, evangelism was clearly on the backfoot. Depicting the evangelists as two-dimensional strawmen who did not think critically nor listen carefully to those they sought to persuade, the musical could double-down on the absurdity of the evangelists and their activities. And, the musical is clear that when the evangelists are confronted with the nuances of real life, they will suffer a crisis of faith. All this made evangelism and its practitioners an easy target to lampoon.

This, however, is very different. First, the OMP memo is real instead of fictional. Second, the memo is supportive of evangelistic sharing rather than dismissive of it.

The memo is setting out personnel policy, which is to say that it clarifies what kind of behavior is appropriate for employees of the US Federal Government to engage in while on the job. Commentators legitimately wonder about the implications of this for the overall relationship between Church and State, especially given the heavily pro-Christian tilt of the document (nearly every example of what “religious expression” looks like in the memo is either taken from Christianity, with a few from Judaism). However, that is not our focus here. Rather, I want to focus specifically on whether the document itself is actually a boon for those who promote and practice evangelism.

So, is this a win for those who promote and practice evangelism? Maybe not as much as they would think.

The separation of Church and State in the United States of America is usually described in terms of freedom from governmental overreach. Classically articulated by Thomas Jefferson as a “wall of separation between Church & State” that protects each person’s “rights of conscience,” the First Amendment insists that the Government shall “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Further supporting this, Article 6 of the Constitution later adjures that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

This argument for the separation of Church and State establishes religion as something that is protected from governmental power, meaning that religious speech, practice, and belief are beyond the pale of the government’s authority. Insofar as people do not violate the rights of others, they are protected from the government’s interference in all things related to religion.

This appeal to individual rights was not the only reason for the separation of Church and State, however. Another was money. An established national church is entitled to financial support from the national government. Indeed, in their earliest years, some of the American colonies followed the practice of European governments by establishing churches and giving them a portion of their tax revenue. By disestablishing the church entirely, this cut off the funding supply from the government. (This was the decision in the US that gave rise to the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” to describe the view of those who wanted to keep an established state church in the US.)

This facet of the separation of Church and State speaks to something different than protection from governmental overreach. It addresses the potential for governmental privilege to be granted to one religion over others. This privilege gives the government’s imprimatur to a specific expression of religious faith, including financial backing. While it is technically possible for a government to protect each individual’s right to practice and believe according to their conscience while privileging a specific expression of religion (this is the case today in many European countries that have established state churches while also granting freedom of religion to their citizens), the potential conflict of interest is obvious. Consider Myanmar, which constitutionally promises freedom of religion but also has passed numerous laws that make it nearly impossible for non-Buddhists to gather publicly.

Does losing privileged status harm the church? The answer of history is emphatic: No! What the church in the United States lost in guaranteed funding and governmental support, it gained back in creativity and energy. An established church has little need to evangelize because the people of the nation automatically are part of its membership by virtue of their citizenship and give to its coffers through their taxes. Assured of both membership and money, the established church will tend to focus on filling a ceremonial role that supports the government’s activities and provides rituals for the populace (for example, weddings and funerals). It has little interest in rocking the boat or challenging the cultural norms with the gospel message because it is comfortably situated.

Once disestablished, however, if a church is to survive it must appeal directly to the people. Does it offer the gospel message in a way that the people find meaningful? Is it so compelling that people want to commit their time, energy, and finances toward supporting the church? This requires the church to be contextually savvy, understanding both the gospel message and the people around them. This dual awareness allows the church to convey the gospel message in a way that demonstrates its relevance to the people such that they will respond positively to an invitation to live according to it. This could–and often does–include counter-cultural teaching that call people to holiness in ways that do not accord with social norms and commonly accepted cultural values. His could even go so far as challenging the political powers in the name of God, something both biblical prophets and faithful church leaders throughout history have done.

The need to offer a compelling invitation for people to accept the gospel is even more important when there are multiple churches, each offering a distinctive understanding of what the gospel is and how to live according to it. As Roger Finke and Rodney Stark showed in The Churching of America, without an established state church taking a privileged place in the nation, a variety of expressions of the Christian faith can form. This is exactly what happened in the United States. Thanks to the lack of an established church, denominations were born. Many of these still exist: Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians to name a few. To remain sustainable across generations, these denominations had to innovative and stay engaged with the American people, intentionally sharing the gospel and inviting others to join them.

Put together, the conclusion is stark: the lack of a privileged status through governmental establishment served as a springboard for Christian evangelistic practice in the United States rather than stymying it. The alternative would have been people unthinkingly claiming they were church members because they were American citizens who were born into the state church and paid taxes to support it. Instead, a visible Christian presence arose in the United States with people not only choosing to become Christians, but to order their lives around the Christian faith.

 It is almost impossible to imagine the United States’ robust evangelistic history if there had been a privileged established state church. There would have been no need for the Second Great Awakening and its raucous camp meetings overseen by multiple denominational leaders, the Methodist circuit riders braving the real possibility of death to convey the gospel on the wild edges of the frontier, the revivals of Charles Finney, the urban rallies and Sunday schools of DL Moody, or even the Crusades of Billy Graham.

By the Federal Government refusing to prescribe religion by not establishing a state church, it freed Christian evangelists across American history to share the gospel in contextually meaningful and innovative ways by both their words and their deeds without being hampered by an established state church. By refusing to proscribe religion through protecting religious rights, the government also guaranteed those evangelists the right to share the gospel and freed the American people to respond to the evangelists as their consciences dictated.

The results have been staggeringly impressive, especially compared with the stagnation of Christian faith that has taken place in nations with established state churches. The recent Pew Research data that describes those who engage in spiritual and religious practices worldwide shows that European countries with state churches have the smallest percentages of their populations engaging in religious practices, including prayer, attending worship services, and fasting.

To have an established church, then, is not an evangelistic panacea. Rather, it is often a hindrance to effective faith-sharing and certainly is a hindrance to people becoming more active participants in the Christian faith.

All this brings us back to the OPM memo. The memo claims that its purpose is to protect the religious rights of federal employees so that their religious beliefs are not curtailed unduly by coworkers who “dislike” those beliefs. This seems reasonable enough. No one should be required to deny their beliefs and values in a nation that honors the right of each person to live according to their conscience. And, if a person’s religion expressly teaches that sharing their faith is part of what they are obligated to do as an adherent of that religion, they should be free to do so. If being assured of this protected right is an encouragement to Christians who were otherwise uncomfortable with sharing their faith with others, then good and well. Let them find support in this memo for sharing their faith.

However, this is where we come up to the line between protection and privilege. If the Christian evangelist is protected in sharing the gospel and inviting others to respond to it, so should the person who has different beliefs that either wants to share those or who would rather opt out of these sorts of conversations altogether. In short, the rights of each need to be honored without anyone having privilege. Both the Christian evangelist who wants to share their faith in earnest and the Broadway writers who want to lampoon the Christian evangelist should have equal opportunity to do so regardless of whether other people like what they are doing.

The memo explicitly acknowledges this equality of protection, stating that co-workers have the right to be left alone if they do not want to participate in religious activities or conversations. It also separates personal expression from official statements made on behalf of the US Government. However, the fact that the memo exists and articulates the need to protect religious expression, including evangelistic invitations, suggests that there is a bias toward privileging Christian expressions of their faith. How should Christians operate in this setting?

With history as a guide, it should be to eschew this privilege. Let me be clear: this does not mean that we should avoid sharing the gospel and inviting others to receive it, but we should not engage in that practice as those who have a privileged place to do so.

As the history of the church in the United States has shown us, American evangelism has been the most effective when evangelists were able to share their message openly, but were not in a privileged position. Rather, they had to make their case for the gospel in the public marketplace of ideas and values. Those who chose to claim the gospel became more committed because they chose it freely, not under any sort of duress and certainly not under an expectation that the government preferred for them to do that.

The fruitful outcome of evangelists refusing to claim privilege is not something that just American church history teaches. Jesus and the Apostles down through the first three centuries of the church preached and taught outside of the privilege that the political and religious leadership of their day could have given them. They did not even have legal protection or rights, leading to many being persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith. Yet, the church grew exponentially during this time! As Tertullian famously wrote, the “blood [of the martyrs] is seed” for planting and growing the Christian faith in others.

Even when that persecution ended in 313 by the newly crowned Emperor Constantine, the church was wary of its newly privileged position. The Bishops, anticipating a flood of new converts who wanted to curry imperial favor, tightened the process for being recognized as a Christian by the church often requiring 1 – 3 years of instruction before granting baptism to those seeking it. They even partitioned the worship service to separate those who were baptized Christians and those who were still in this instructional process (called “catechesis”). This led to what many scholars see as a golden era of Christian teaching and theology that reverberates to this day, not least through the articulation of the Nicene Creed.

Later in church history when parts of the church did begin to recline into a privileged place under various monarchs throughout Europe, evangelistic work was carried on by revival groups that sprang up within these established churches. As groups that challenged the status quo, they were outside of the privileged space the established churches occupied and often faced persecution for their work. Yet, without these reformers, many of the expressions of the church we now know today would not exist, including nearly every Protestant denomination.

This leads to a final reason why privilege is so dangerous. In my classroom where I teach the next generation of church leaders, one of the key points I make is that evangelistic practice starts with the character of the Christian, not with the actual practices of sharing the gospel and inviting others to respond to it. Especially in a pluralistic context, the opportunity to share and invite is earned, and Christians only earn it if we first demonstrate a life that authentically orders itself after the teachings of Jesus. As people see that, we can respond to any inquiries that people make as to why we live the way we do.

As 1 Peter 3:15 teaches, “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” We share verbally because our lives have conveyed the gospel in a compelling way first, and that has earned us the right to explain it. In this case, there is no issue of imbalanced power dynamic or privilege. There is simply an authentic sharing between people, whether they are co-workers or not, and both participants are honored in the process.

Paul offers similar counsel in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12: “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.” Again, there is no claim to privilege here. The Christian witness of the gospel comes first by living graciously and doing our work well alongside of other. Having earned their respect through this, then we may have earned the opportunity to explain why we live as we do. And, notably, Paul gave this instruction to people who were neither privileged nor protected in their religious expression.

The danger of privileged evangelistic communication is that it undercuts the need for Christians to be intentional about ordering our own lives according to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Wrapped in the authority of the government, we can propound our beliefs to others without having to earn the credibility to do so by first demonstrating holy lives in public. This does no one any good. Indeed, it undercuts the practice of evangelism and even the gospel itself.

• It undercuts the practice of evangelism because it treats this practice as if it were just a matter of talking about what we believe, rather than a holistic demonstration of the gospel through our words, deeds, and lifestyle over days, weeks, months, and years as we relate to others. Above all, this demonstration is in being faithful to the great commandment Jesus identified: to love God and to love neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40). If we are not showing real love to our co-workers, we are neither honoring the teaching of Jesus nor evangelizing well regardless of what words we share with them about our faith.
• It undercuts the power of the gospel, turning it into simply a series of beliefs that must be verbalized and intellectually assented to rather than an entryway into a new way of living based on the teachings and example of Jesus Christ.
• In addition, as seen from our historical survey above, it undercuts any conversions that occur because they happen within a coercive atmosphere rather than allowing people to be impressed by the demonstration of a holy life that draws them to claim the gospel freely.

As a Christian who shares my faith with others and as an evangelism professor who teaches others to do the same, I believe that the power to share and invite others to engage with the gospel comes from God, not from the government. I am deeply grateful that we as Christians are free to do this in the United States because our freedom of conscience to express our religion is protected. At the same time, I must decline any offer of governmental privilege lest I grow comfortable and diminish in my zeal to evangelize and/or offer only an inauthentic witness to a shrunken gospel that others may feel obligated to pay lip service to, but will never take seriously as the basis for ordering their own lives.