- Let Federal employees proselytize!
- Heather Cox Richardson on manifest destiny;
- Arvo Pärt.
As with that notion about regulating AI to be non-woke, have they thought this one through?
Washington Post, 28 Jul 2025: Trump administration urges federal employees to talk religion at work, subtitled “In a shift, the guidance from the Office of Personnel Management encourages religious expression among federal employees.” (Via)
Beginning:
Federal employees can display religious items at work, pray in groups while not on duty and encourage co-workers to adopt their faith, according to guidance released Monday by the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal civilian workforce.
In a 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.
“Allowing religious discrimination in the Federal workplace violates the law,” Kupor said in the memo. “It also threatens to adversely impact recruitment and retention of highly-qualified employees of faith.”
…
Historically, Camfield said, employers have been advised to keep religious conversation at work to a minimum, noting that “the more religion is allowed into the workplace, the more likely it is that differences of opinion are raised.”
“In the current political environment, these types of differences have a way of turning into arguments,” Camfield said. “” In some cases, it leads to outright hostility, which makes it more likely that an employee will feel singled out and discriminated against for their beliefs.”
The article goes on with some perfectly reasonable objections to this policy, but rather than summarize them, I’ll list my own.
First, is this just another reflection of the paranoid view that Christians are somehow discriminated against? That is, are employers supposed to uphold this policy even if an employee who is a fundamentalist Muslim — because you’re not supposed to discriminate in hiring, right? — approached his fellow employees while eating lunch at their desks about how Islam is the most perfect religion and they should convert? I doubt they expect that to happen. (The article mentions that “In February, it issued an executive order geared toward “Eradicating anti-Christian Bias” and established the White House Faith Office…” which focused only on Christianity to me.)
Second, this should be a matter of workplace etiquette and behavior, not orders from the federal government. (Conservatives want small government except when they don’t.)
Third, frankly, if a fellow employee expressed fundamentalist or evangelical religious beliefs, where I worked in, say, an engineering firm, I would doubt his competence. His ability to think rationally. (I do recall one such employee at Rocketdyne, decades ago. He would email photos of beautiful sunsets, with comments about the glory of God. Srsly?)
Fourth, in practice, what would happen if a fellow employee approached you in the lunchroom to tell you about his faith is the bestest? (He “may even attempt to persuade fellow employees of the correctness of their religious views.”) If it were me, I’d tell me I don’t want to hear it, and if necessary walk away. That kind of behavior would be boorish.
This is another problem Christian conservatives think they need a solution for, while acutely not doing anything to solve real problems in the world.
Is this just a sign of Christian desperation? They know they’re losing ground?
\\\
Every culture has its founding myths, and most of them are, at best, idealized, if not actually false. They are views from within nationalist bubbles that deny outside perspectives.
Heather Cox Richardson: July 27, 2025
On July 23 the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled American Progress. Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track behind her.
Over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
From the time Gast painted it, American Progress has been interpreted as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny: the mid-nineteenth-century notion that God had destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least the North American continent, and possibly South America as well. A number of people who saw the Homeland Security post saw it as the Trump administration’s embrace of that ideology.
She’s addressing not just the posting of this painting, but the recent comments by JD Vance.
Manifest destiny both reflected and fed the era’s greed and racism. But there was a key political element in it that adherents to today’s right-wing political movement appear to reject. At the heart of manifest destiny, beneath the language of “civilizing” other peoples and the embrace of human enslavement, was the concept that the lands the U.S. acquired would become states equal to the older states in the Union and that the people in the lands the U.S. absorbed would eventually become Americans equal to those who had been in the United States for a generation or more.
And the “blood and soil” ideology of true Germans. And now JD Vance.
Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.
And then another one.
The use of American iconography to push blood and soil showed in another post by the Homeland Security account from earlier this month. On July 14 it posted a painting of a white man with a white woman holding a baby in a covered wagon, an image the artist, Morgan Weistling, titled A Prayer for a New Life. The HHS account posted the image without Weistling’s permission, retitling it “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage: New Life in a New Land.”
The new name and capitalization are significant. Just as in the words in the post about John Gast’s painting, the two Hs are capitalized, evoking “HH,” accepted in right-wing circles as a way to write “Heil Hitler.”
Used without the artist’s permission, Heather notes.
\\\
Something reminded me of Arvo Pärt today — the Estonian composer of “contemporary classical music” who is, according this Wikipedia entry was “the most performed living composer in the world” from 2011 to 2018.
Pärt came to my attention, I think, via the same ECM recordings that included works by Shostakovich and Schnittke that I’d bought in the early 1990s. My impression of his music is that it was delicate and intense and same time, almost minimalist.
Here’s a good example:
Today I discovered I have nearly 20 of his CDs, down in the CD cabinet in the garage. (As with many composers and pop singers, once I like one album, I keep buying later ones, even if I only listen to them once or twice. There are exceptions.) I brought a few of them up to my desk and I’ve listened to portions of his earliest hits — the albums Passio and Miserere — and have now realized that his music is saturated by religion, settings of the Psalms and the Passions — which are almost agonized in their settings. They’re not celebratory or revelatory in the manner of Bach or, say, Bruckner.
But it’s very easy listening.
I think I will listen to all my Pärt CDs once more, and then let them go.
