Sean Duffy has spent most of his adult life as a professional attention-seeker. He is a former reality TV star, for one, and also a former Fox News host. Tough luck, then, that in the second Trump administration, Duffy got stuck as secretary of the most dreary of federal agencies—transportation. When was the last time that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went viral?
But Duffy has found a way to turn even the most mundane highway procurement matters into an opportunity for pandering to the MAGA base—and getting back on Fox News. His secret sauce? He has been enthusiastically using the agency to spread the Gospel and advance his mission to make America fecund again. “In Trump 2.0,” laments Peter Montgomery, the research director at the nonprofit civil liberties group, People for the American Way, “every place is a place to wage holy war.”
Duffy was once the “resident playboy” on MTV’s “Real World,” where he danced naked, called a roommate a “bitch,” and talked about getting laid. Now, he’s a devout Catholic with nine children who never misses an opportunity to urge young men to get married and have big families. Legal experts say Duffy’s activities are a stark violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on mixing church and state, but his fervor seems to override his obligation to uphold the law.
Shortly after Duffy joined a Trump cabinet full of MAGA influencers, he made his first attempt to grab headlines and advance his religious mission by promising to prioritize transportation funding for areas with high birth and marriage rates. The policy was roundly panned as unworkable and failed to generate the sort of media coverage a camera-hungry secretary would like to see. Duffy was learning the hard way that, unlike other federal agencies—Health and Human Services, for instance, or Education—the Transportation Department is a tough spot from which to launch a culture war.
After toiling away for a few months to excise Biden-era “woke” procurement requirements and “Green New Scam” projects, Duffy finally landed on a more promising vehicle for his Christian worldview: The US Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York.
Something of an anachronism, USMMA is the only service academy that falls under the purview of the US Department of Transportation rather than the Defense Department. It trains midshipmen in marine engineering and other skills needed to run large commercial ships. Graduates serve as officers in various military branches and in the private maritime industry. But as the US merchant marine industry has dwindled to 188 ships, down from 282 in 2000, it has endured repeated calls to shut it down. “It’s an educational institution for an age that the US doesn’t participate in anymore,” Capt. John Konrad, the editor of the maritime industry blog, gCaptain, told the New York Times in 2012.
A string of sexual assault scandals threatened the academy’s accreditation in 2016. A survey highlighted in a 2017 congressional oversight hearing found that USMMA had the highest rate of sexual assaults but the lowest rate of formal reports of any of the nation’s five military service academies.
For all its shortcomings, the Merchant Marine academy’s backwater status has made it the perfect venue for Duffy’s one-man religious crusade. In early April, the secretary visited the academy and made an official DOT video for Good Friday in which he spoke “with an amazing group of young midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins.” The midshipmen—indeed, all men, even though the student body is more than 20 percent female—are shown talking to Duffy in the chapel, where they take turns quoting Bible passages to him.
During his visit, Duffy discovered the perfect controversy on which to focus his righteous outrage. In his video, Duffy highlighted “Christ on the Water,” a 1944 10-by-19-foot painting near the academy chapel by Hunter Alexander Wood, a lieutenant in the US Maritime Service. In it, a giant glowing Jesus stands on a vast body of water, presiding over an open lifeboat of the survivors of a sunken merchant ship.
The painting originally resided at the academy’s San Mateo, California, campus, but when it closed in 1947, “Christ on the Water” was moved to Kings Point and placed in Wiley Hall, a space that then served as a chapel. But in 1961, Wiley Hall became an administrative office, where for decades, midshipmen facing “honor boards” for misconduct were forced to sit in front of Jesus while they awaited disciplinary action.
In early 2023, a group of more than a dozen fed-up alumni, staff, faculty, and midshipmen reached out to Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, to complain about the overtly religious painting in the public space. Weinstein is a Jewish civil liberties lawyer and third-generation graduate of the US Air Force Academy, who spent 10 years working as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps and served as a legal counsel in the Reagan White House.
The pugnacious advocate has been a thorn in the side of religious fundamentalists in the military for more than two decades. “Jerry Falwell used to refer to me as ‘the field general of the godless armies of Satan,’” he told me in a call from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from surgery.
“Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy officially endorses Christianity over other faiths.”
Immediately recognizing the constitutional issues with the Jesus painting, Weinstein fired off a complaint to Vice Admiral Joanna M. Nunan, whom President Joe Biden had appointed as the first woman to serve as superintendent of the USMMA. The painting, he wrote, has denigrated non-Christians. “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy officially endorses Christianity over other faiths,” he continued, noting that his clients were Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, and one Native American Spiritualist.
Nunan quickly responded and hung drapes over the painting while plans were made to move it. The MAGA faithful in Congress were outraged. In February 2023, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote to Nunan, suggesting that she was “overtly hostile to religion” and called Weinstein’s complaints an “objective absurdity.” (Nunan left her post a few months later.) Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner even got the House Armed Services Committee to insert language in a Defense authorization bill that would have made it illegal for servicemembers and Defense officials to communicate with Weinstein and MRFF. (The language failed to make it into the final bill.)
In September 2023, after a significant restoration, “Christ in the Water” was rehung in the academy’s chapel. But anger over the painting apparently festered, leaving Duffy an opportunity. During his April visit to the academy, he gave a speech in which he promised to get funding to improve the campus, and then closed by saying, “Could we bring Jesus up from the basement?” The room erupted into cheers, which Duffy encouraged while he assured the crowd he would restore the painting to its previous glory in Wiley Hall.
A few weeks later, the Newark airport had a massive meltdown, as air traffic controllers walked off the job and hundreds of flights were canceled for two straight weeks through the first part of May. Nonetheless, Duffy found time to keep the Jesus painting saga alive. He announced on his official government accounts that he had commissioned a replica of the painting to hang in his DOT office.
Moving the painting was “a personal affront to the midshipman at the academy,” he said in a DOT video. “This was such a touching story for me, I thought, ‘let’s get a replica of the painting and hang it in a place of prominence here at DOT.’ It looks beautiful.”
Coming to the rescue of “Jesus in the Water” allowed Duffy “to trash the Biden administration as woke (and by implication anti-Christian), something sure to win him points in the White House,” says Montgomery. “And it generated a whole lot of fawning coverage of Duffy in religious-right and right-wing media.”
Among those who weighed in was Ted Cruz. “Your statement—’Can we bring Jesus up from the basement?’—was more than rhetorical. I trust it will be seen as an imperative,” Cruz wrote in a letter covered in the conservative Daily Wire. “Thank you for your principled leadership, for defending our nation’s religious heritage, and for working to ensure that this government-commissioned memorial is returned to its rightful place.”
Duffy continued to use the academy for proselytizing. During his commencement speech in June, he offered graduates dating advice and urged them to “always work out,” get married, and have lots of kids. And then he declared, “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than themselves…A good sailor knows that in the end, only God can calm the seas and bring them to safety. So stay faithful and never underestimate the power of prayer.”
“There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than themselves.”
His speech constituted “an astonishing violation of the Establishment Clause,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami law school. She says the First Amendment wasn’t just designed to separate church and state, but also to protect religious minorities, who may be coerced by a state-sanctioned religion to violate their own religious beliefs. “I’m willing to bet there are people in the Department of Transportation who have gone along with some religious activities that they felt really uncomfortable participating in,” she says. “And that’s why we have an Establishment Clause: So the government can’t force you to choose between your job and honoring your beliefs.”
Duffy, a lawyer and former Wisconsin congressman, doesn’t seem familiar with that particular part of the Constitution. During a July hearing, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) grilled him about his pledge to return the Jesus painting to the hall. “You don’t think the Establishment Clause prohibits favoring a single religion over all others?” he asked.
Duffy responded, “I would just note that we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.”
Huffman attempted to probe further, asking, “What’s the message to Jews and Muslims and Hindus and non-religious folks in their disciplinary proceedings?” As the two talked over each other in a contentious exchange, Huffman concluded, grumbling, “We have a First Amendment for a reason.”
Duffy’s brazen use of government resources to promote his vision of Christianity doesn’t surprise some observers who’ve been warning of the creep of Christian nationalism in the US government for years. “It’s a pretty standard playbook among MAGA influencers to throw a little God into the mix if you want to make the base happy,” says Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the nonprofit Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. “It’s a great path to career advancement because it builds out their constituencies. [Duffy] just has a much more limited set of options than, say, Pete Hegseth.”
As Duffy has been hard at work imposing English-only requirements on truckers, banning rainbow crosswalks, and making official DOT videos blaming Democrats for shutting down the government, he has continued to visit the Merchant Marine academy to spread the Word. In early September, he showed up for a football game and made an official video of himself praying with the “Christian” players in the locker room before it started.
I was moved by this moment of prayer with the incredible young men of @USMMAFootball before their game on Friday. Thank you! God is good
pic.twitter.com/VoG6mzzpAa
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) September 9, 2025
Then, he walked along the sidelines offering pregame analysis as if he worked for ESPN. “The excitement on this field for this Academy is remarkable,” he said in a video, as players jogged by. “They have the most amazing prayer. You have Christian men dedicated to country, ready for a great game. This is America at its finest.”
The video so enraged Weinstein that he dashed off an op-ed for the Daily Kos calling Duffy a “piece of shit” and noting that he’d “heard from Academy faculty, staff, midshipmen, and graduates who are neither Christians nor male and as you might imagine they are furious.”
Duffy seems impervious to such complaints. On September 29, he put out an official DOT press release celebrating the “restoration” of “Christ on the Water” at the USMMA. The agency also produced an official YouTube video entitled, “Jesus Has Risen at the Merchant Marine Academy!” One of the midshipmen in the video thanks Duffy “for allowing us the opportunity to glorify God on campus.”
Civil liberties groups find Duffy’s shameless use of federal resources to promote Christianity shocking. “The Department of Transportation’s duty is to serve the public—not to proselytize,” says Rachel Laser, President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Weinstein was a little blunter. In a press release, he compared Duffy’s restoring the Jesus painting to “its original unconstitutional place” as “akin to a stray dog urinating on a neighborhood tree to mark its territory.” The Transportation secretary, he fumed, “is making sure to brand the Academy as conquered Christian nationalist territory. All others are not wanted and need not apply.”
Of all the madness coming out of the Trump administration this year— the ICE violence, the destruction of the East Wing, the extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Caribbean—Duffy using his official perch to promote Christianity may seem mild by comparison. But legal experts say his targeting of the USMMA, and the spread of Christian nationalism in the military more broadly, is potentially very dangerous.
“Military officers are trained to resist unconstitutional orders,” explains Robert Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at George Washington University law school. “If you can have the troops believing they are fighting the cause of God and Christianity, you can get them to do things they might not do otherwise.” And in the current administration, where Trump has claimed the Lord saved him from an assassin’s bullet, he says, “You can very easily see how folks could get into a mindset that serving Trump is God’s will.”
As with so many of the norms smashed by the Trump regime, there is no easy remedy for Duffy’s religious crusade. The Supreme Court has made it much more difficult to bring lawsuits over Establishment Clause violations. Weinstein says he’s considering legal action over the Jesus painting, but he needs a midshipman at the academy willing to head up the litigation—an extremely difficult challenge for a young person, he says. “If you become a plaintiff in a military system like this,” Weinstein says, “you are putting yourself in a position where you are like a tarantula on a wedding cake.”
In the meantime, Weinstein has issued an alert urging parents to keep their kids away from the “unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian nationalist filth-saturated institution that the US Merchant Marine Academy has tragically devolved into.” The Transportation Department, possibly too busy figuring out how to keep unpaid air traffic controllers on the job, did not respond to a request for comment.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.