April 10 (UPI) — Employees at the Department of Agriculture filed a complaint about an Easter email sent by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins they said was an outright religious message.
The email, which Rollins sent to about 100,000 employees of the department on Easter Sunday, called the day “the foundation of our faith” as it is marked in Christian faiths as the day that Jesus Christ was resurrected.
Ethan Roberts, a USDA employee and head of a federal employee union local, filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel because the “pro-Christianity sermon” violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, CNN and Scripps News reported.
“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed,” the news organizations reported the email as saying.
“Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where this is life — risen life — there is hope,” the email read.
The USDA, through a spokesperson, said that Rollins is “within her rights” to send a message on Easter.
Rollins herself, in a post on X, later cited a 1778 order from Gen. George Washington to the Continental Army — a decade before the Constitution, Bill of Rights or United States existed — that “it should be to our highest Glory to add the more distinguished Character of Christian.”
The full text of the email, which was published in a press release by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization that advocates for the separation of church and state, further said that on Easter morning, “‘Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven’ … now that is a reason to rejoice.”
“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 int he mission each of us has been called for,” Rollins wrote in the email.
The FFRF sent a letter to Rollins after they were contacted by USDA employees who called the email “inappropriate and insulting” and said that “public servants should not be confronted with overtly religious messaging from the head of a federal agency.”
The organization said that the email crosses the line between wishing observers and the public to have a good holiday to appearing to endorse and encourage a specific religious belief and following.
“By framing Easter as part of the ‘foundation of our faith,’ your message signals governmental endorsement of Christianity and conveys to employees that adherence to a particular religion is favored,” Chris Line, legal counsel for the FFRF, said in the letter to Rollins.
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