The Frances Perkins Building in Washington, D.C., serves as the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor. Its dedicated employees implement and enforce labor laws passed by Congress. It’s not a church, or a synagogue, and its mission is not to serve or praise any religious deity. But if you stopped in at the Cesar Chavez auditorium on Dec. 10, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

On that day, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer hosted the Labor Department’s Inaugural Prayer Service, to which all employees had been invited via an email from the department’s recently created Center for Faith. Though it was billed as nondenominational, it nonetheless featured only Judeo-Christian speakers, including Secretary Chavez-DeRemer, in addition to one Orthodox rabbi. No Muslim imam, no believer in Buddhism, no representative of the religiously unaffiliated.

Secretary Chavez-DeRemer was apparently inspired to offer this gathering after observing what has become a monthly “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service” led and promoted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. At the first such service, held in May, Brooks Potteiger, the pastor of Hegseth’s Tennessee church Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, delivered the sermon.

Potteiger’s message was unambiguous: “Lord, may this become a place where Christians come together to do just this, and we see you move in power, not just through the Pentagon, but through our nation’s capital and down throughout this great nation.”

I worked as a lawyer for the Labor Department for nearly four decades, spanning Democratic and Republican administrations from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump’s first term. During all this time, I can attest, the Frances Perkins Building was never used as a place for worship. And it shouldn’t be now.

Hegseth’s inaugural service was promptly criticized by lawyers concerned about the First Amendment’s prohibition on the government’s “establishment” of religion. According to a report by CNN, a former Pentagon lawyer who left the department in April found the service “incredibly problematic.” Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham — a national security law expert and professor of law at Southwestern Law School — called the event and Hegseth’s sponsorship of it a “clear violation” of the establishment clause.

Chavez-DeRemer was apparently undeterred, despite complaints from employees and protest letters filed on their behalf. Among her selected speakers was Alberto Calimano, reportedly a “Catholic anti-abortion activist” and senior advisor for the Labor Department’s Center for Faith. He preached to the assembled government workers about the importance of Advent as “a time of waiting, of longing, and of joyful expectation for the coming of the light of the world, Jesus Christ.”

The sole Jewish speaker, a right-wing orthodox rabbi leader in the pro-Trump Coalition for Jewish Values named Yaakov Menken, is reported to have disparaged gay marriage, transgender people and people’s use of gender pronouns. It’s worth noting that these views, which are widely promoted by the Trump administration, are held by only a small sliver of American Jews.

One Labor Department employee condemned Menken’s remarks as “purposeful cruelty meted out for no reason whatsoever on a very small portion of the population” and “despicable.” Another, who identified as queer, professed to be “appalled” to hear such things said at a federal workplace event.

Of course, Secretary Chavez-DeRemer, Calimano and Rabbi Menken all have a fundamental right to their religious beliefs, worship and expression. That’s what the First Amendment is about. But it is also, for very good reason, about keeping the government from endorsing religion.

Here’s how the American Civil Liberties Union sees it: “The government must remain neutral on matters of faith. When the government breaches this fundamental principle by promoting prayer, it unfairly pressures people to adopt the favored beliefs, devalues those beliefs by co-opting them for official, unsacred purposes, and is a recipe for religious conflict.”

And yet Trump and his minions appear hell-bent on promoting their brand of government-backed religion. Secretary Chavez-DeRemer’s prayer service is another piece removed from the precious national armor that is our First Amendment.

Our nation’s government offices were never meant to house prayer services. If we value our religious freedom, let’s keep it that way.

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Michael Felsen concluded a 39-year career with the U.S. Department of Labor in 2018, serving as New England regional solicitor from 2010-2018. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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