NOTE: This piece was originally published at our newsletter A Public Witness.
On May 13, a multifaith group of employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture sued the agency and Secretary Brooke Rollins for pushing sectarian Christian messages. However, rather than civically repenting, it has now been revealed that just one week later the USDA held an official worship service in the USDA headquarters and plans on doing so quarterly. This latest move adds to a series of one-off worship services and prayer gatherings in the USDA building.
The lawsuit filed in May by Americans United for Separation of Church and State (where I serve as vice chair of the national board of trustees), Democracy Forward, and Bryan Schwartz Law on behalf of seven USDA employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees documented a pattern of sectarian messages sent by Rollins to USDA employees. These explicitly Christian messages climaxed in a missive on Easter Sunday in which Rollins preached to her subordinates and implied that everyone at USDA recognizes and follows Jesus.
“We work for the federal government, not a church. I just want to go to work and make my country better — I shouldn’t have to suffer through sermons and other religious messages forced upon me by the head of a federal agency,” said Ethan Roberts, a USDA employee and one of the plaintiffs. “When the Secretary sends an email, I have to read it. And when those emails are telling me what to believe, they make me feel unwelcome in an agency I’ve dedicated 10 years to.”
Pastor Lorenzo Sewell (center) prays over Secretary Brooke Rollins (right) in her office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 5, 2025. (USDA/Public Domain)
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has now discovered that Rollins and the USDA’s Center for Faith are instead increasing the sectarian programming by organizing, hosting, and leading worship services during work hours in the USDA headquarters. These services follow a model of government worship services started at the Pentagon and also copied by the Department of Labor and the Small Business Administration.
FFRF reported on July 10 that they learned of a service on May 20 that was billed as a “Faith and Fellowship Musical Celebration and Launch of USDA Prayer Service.” The invite was marked as coming from the “Office of the Secretary” and noted it would be the start of “a quarterly USDA Prayer and Worship Service, which provides an opportunity for prayer and worship.”
“Participation is optional, during working hours to accommodate schedules, and focused on seeking God’s presence, wisdom, protection, and blessings for the USDA, the Secretary, her staff, and our nation,” the invite added. “The event features leadership remarks and musical performances highlighting gospel music, and engaging USDA employees in faithful fellowship.”
No details, images, or video from the May 20 event, which was held in the middle of the morning on that Wednesday, were made available by the USDA (and they did not respond to my request for comment). But the invite did add that they were partnering with the “owner and operator of Dunkin Donuts and the AG Connections Café” in the USDA’s headquarters “to host a musical celebration as part of the service.”
From online postings, I discovered the service primarily featured music by Nanum Arts For All, a collective of classical musicians. One announcement about the service called it a “worship gathering” with the theme of “Harmony & Hope in the Capital.” And someone who attended posted a photo of themselves with members of Nanum Arts For All.
In a July 10 letter to Rollins, FFRF Legal Counsel Chris Line noted they had received complaints about the service and its promotion “through official departmental communications.” He added, “Federal agencies exist to serve the public, not to organize worship services or encourage employees to participate in prayer. Government employees remain free to pray privately or gather voluntarily on their own initiative. What the Constitution forbids is the government itself becoming the organizer and promoter of religious worship.” He therefore called on the USDA to cease sponsoring and promoting official prayer and worship services and for Rollins to stop sending sectarian messages to employees.
While much remains unknown about the USDA worship service, this move follows a pattern of Rollins and the USDA holding rightwing Christian gatherings in the department’s building that sits on the National Mall near the Washington Monument. So this issue of A Public Witness documents several events beyond those named in the lawsuit by employees or the complaint from FFRF.
‘Take You to Church Today’
This is not the first time the USDA’s Center for Faith has attempted to create an official prayer service. Last fall, they announced a “Faith and Fellowship Musical Celebration and Prayer Service” for October 8, 2025, during work hours at the USDA headquarters. That announcement said they were “launching a monthly prayer service to provide an open space for USDA employees to worship together and/or enter into quiet meditation with colleagues.” The invite promised it would be livestreamed and that a recap would be available afterward. However, they never posted anything about whether the service actually occurred or why it wasn’t advertised for later months. The service announcement was later even removed from the listing of “past events” on the USDA Center for Faith’s website.
If that service occurred, it would’ve made the USDA the second federal agency in this Trump administration to host an official worship service. Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself “secretary of war,” started monthly services in the Pentagon in May 2025. Rollins attended the Pentagon service in December, during which evangelist Franklin Graham praised a “god of war” and justified genocide. The Department of Labor started monthly services in December 2025, but then stopped after the April service following the ouster of Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Her nominated successor, Keith Sonderling, appeared today for a Senate confirmation hearing in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
The Small Business Administration also launched in March 2026 what they said would be monthly services, though it’s not clear if they held any after the first one. The speaker for the March service was Alveda King, an anti-abortion activist who serves as senior advisor on faith and community outreach for the USDA Center for Faith. King previously preached at a Labor service in January, during which she criticized those who are not religious. In May, the SBA Center for Faith leader who organized the worship service left that post to instead lead the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Faith. The VA announcement of her hiring specifically highlighted that at the SBA “she launched the agency’s Faith & Fellowship Prayer Service.” It has not been reported yet if she is starting a similar prayer service effort at the VA.
While a monthly (or quarterly) worship service does not appear to have taken off at the USDA last fall, there have been other worship events held in the building, both official and unofficial ones.
On Jan. 15, the USDA Center for Faith hosted an event they called “Continuing the Dream: MLK Day Celebration and Prayer Service.” USDA Center for Faith Director Steve Messeh told those gathered in the USDA’s main auditorium that they were “going to take you to church today.” He added, “Secretary Rollins knows that unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. And so she puts the spirit of God in this place every single day.”
Paula White-Cain (left) looks on while Alveda King speaks and Robert F. Kennedy speaks (right) during a prayer service inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 15, 2026. (USDA/Public Domain).
In addition to remarks by Rollins and other administration officials like Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and USDA National Advisor for Nutrition, Health, and Housing Ben Carson, the service included prayers and comments by Alveda King, Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain, and MAGA preacher Lorenzo Sewell.
“We are so grateful for our president that has brought the Holy Ghost back into the White House,” declared Sewell, a charismatic preacher who hosted Trump at his Michigan church during the 2024 campaign and prayed during Trump’s second inauguration.
During the service, Rollins heralded “President Trump’s vision and his spirit and his heart for all communities, but especially for those who are ‘the least among us,’ as preached in Matthew.” White-Cain started her prayer by declaring that they would “enter into the very holy of holies right now.” She asked God that “your mercy and your blood cover this nation. And let righteousness rule, for your word declares that ‘blessed is the nation,’ in Psalm 33, ‘whose God is Lord.’” The service ended with King leading the singing of “This Little Light of Mine,” which she called the “unofficial anthem” of the USDA.
On the morning of the “Rededicate 250” worship rally on the National Mall, the USDA Center for Faith hosted a breakfast and worship service for invited pastors in the USDA headquarters. The event included music by Christian Nationalist musician Sean Feucht, as well as remarks from the USDA-branded podium by Speaker Mike Johnson, former Baptist preacher and U.S. congressman Mark Walker (who recently left the Trump administration to run for the U.S. Senate in 2028), Sewell, and others.
Speaker Mike Johnson (left) speaks and Sean Feucht leads music with Lorenzo Sewell (right) on stage during a worship service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2026. (USDA/Public Domain)
More recently, a worship service was held in the same main auditorium of the USDA building, but this one appears to have not been an official USDA event. Instead, organizers of the “One Nation Under God” service inside a federal building on July 5 were the group Pastors for POTUS and the business Christian Kitchens Coffee. Sewell founded Pastors for POTUS, which is not to be confused with Pastors for Trump created by Jackson Lahmeyer, whose recent campaign for a U.S. House seat in Oklahoma imploded last month amid revelations that he had an affair. Sewell said in a video about the Pastors for POTUS event, from the USDA podium, that the group was using the service to launch an effort to get “senior pastors from all across the country to be a voice for a movement for ‘such a time as this.’” Republican U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana was among the speakers for the service.
Two days after the Pastors for POTUS service, Sewell appeared in a video ad for Terri Hasdorff, an advocate for Christians to take over government, as she runs for a newly gerrymandered U.S. House seat in Florida. In the video apparently filmed at the Pastors for POTUS event, he is holding what looks like a large UFC championship belt and mentions that she’s with him and other pastors and therefore urges pastors to support her campaign. And the two are standing on the stage in the USDA auditorium as they filmed the partisan campaign ad.
Sewell also filmed a short interview at the Pastors for POTUS event with Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted for orchestrating a security breach of voting systems in an effort to prove Trump “won” the 2020 election (which he did not). She was released from prison last month after receiving a controversial commutation from the state’s governor. Peters spoke during the service, and in Sewell’s video she repeated false claims about the election results as the two stood on the USDA stage.
Screengrabs as Tina Peters and Lorenzo Sewell (left) are on stage during a Pastors for POTUS service inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C., on July 5, 2026, and as Sewell joins Terri Hasdroff (right) from that room in a campaign ad.
Help sustain the journalism of Word&Way by subscribing to A Public Witness!
Not a Church
Beyond hosting worship services in the USDA building, Rollins frequently brings her brand of Christianity into government meetings and her public communications. This includes in ways beyond her sectarian emails that sparked the lawsuit.
Bruce LeVell, a former Republican congressional candidate and the current USDA director of public and private partnerships, declared on Facebook in January that “every day before the USDA begins its work, Secretary Rollins and the Faith Department start with a prayer.” In March, he posted a photo of Rollins and him holding hands while praying in a USDA meeting. Rollins has also posted photos (as did a USDA account) of her praying in her office with staff and others (including Sewell). After the killing of activist Charlie Kirk, Rollins gathered USDA staff in her office for prayer and song (with King leading “This Little Light of Mine,” as she also did at worship services at Labor and SBA).
On another occasion, the prayer gathering in her office as part of the USDA “National Prayer Shield” included New Apostolic Reformation pastor Mario Bramnick and Christian singer Danny Gokey. That event coincided with “The Great American Farmers Market” on the National Mall last fall that included a “Faith and Fellowship” day. Gokey performed as part of this “America 250” event, and it featured remarks by charismatic megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin, Rollins, and two Trump Cabinet members who are both former Southern Baptist pastors and who have both preached at Pentagon worship services: VA Secretary Doug Collins, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner.
Members of the USDA National Prayer Shield pray over Secretary Brooke Rollins in her office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 5, 2025. (USDA/Public Domain)
Rollins also frequently posts Bible verses on her social media feeds, sprinkling them in between posts exalting Trump or justifying cutting health programs that assist children.
None of this is surprising given the backing Rollins has long given to Christian Nationalist efforts. She’s a supporter of the rightwing group Capital Ministries and cosponsors a regular White House Bible study by the group’s controversial preacher Ralph Drollinger. When she attended the Christmas worship service at the Pentagon, Jennifer Hegseth (who was filling in for her husband as host until he arrived late) praised Rollins for leading a Bible study every other week for Cabinet members.
After serving in the first Trump administration, Rollins and Larry Kudlow in 2021 founded the America First Policy Institute. With Rollins as its president and CEO until becoming USDA secretary, others involved in leadership roles at AFPI included Alveda King, Paula White-Cain, Linda McMahon, Kevin Hassett, Pam Bondi, Doug Collins, Scott Turner, John Ratcliffe, Kellyanne Conway, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich. In 2023, they released a report outlining “ten pillars for restoring a nation under God!” With the document, AFPI claimed it “interprets the policy objectives of the America First Agenda through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians with more information on the issues and solutions needed to restore our nation that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.” The “biblical” pillars included things like tax cuts, defending the “right to keep and bear arms,” promoting school vouchers, building a border wall, increasing the military, and changing voting rules to cut down on mail-in ballots. Each of these were presented as aligning with various Scriptures, along with the insistence that their interpretation of the Bible should be codified as government policies.
Rollins has carried that Christian Nationalist attitude into her current role. Last year, she told a rightwing Christian magazine that she views her role at USDA as a ministry.
“Through all the years — as an agricultural major at Texas A&M and then earning a law degree at the University of Texas, I really thought I’d end up at seminary and be a youth minister, that’s where my heart was. But I also realized that maybe my ministry would be larger than a church or a youth group. And I think God’s hand was in this 100%,” she said.
While Rollins views her government post as a church position, others are pushing back. As Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, put it when announcing the lawsuit against Rollins and USDA: “Trump is not Jesus, federal agencies are not churches, and cabinet secretaries are not government preachers.”
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
A Public Witness is a reader-supported publication of Word&Way. To receive new posts and support our journalism ministry, subscribe today.
