America’s divided political environment has made many religious organizations sensitive about what their employees say and do. “A lot of church leaders are wanting to play it especially safe and not wanting staff members to speak out,” Martin said. This impulse, to quiet political disagreements rather than engage them, will shape how these communities evolve: as places welcome to all who share their creed, or only those who hold certain political beliefs.

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Joy Beth Smith joined Focus on the Family in May 2016 as the editor of Boundless.org, a website for single people in the church. The 28-year-old is fairly media savvy: By the time she started at Focus, she was shopping a book proposal and had bylines at magazines like Christianity Today. When her blog posts for Boundless started getting picked up—including a piece republished by The Washington Post in June—her bosses were thrilled, she told me recently.

But Smith was also pushing the Boundless audience. She commissioned a post about race that she described as “mild”—“it basically addressed that there are still racial divides,” she said. When Omar Mateen murdered dozens of people at Pulse, the gay nightclub in Orlando, she wrote a tribute post, which caused a “bit of a stir” among readers, she said: “I don’t know how you can get stirred up over lives that were lost, but people were. That’s kind of the conservative space we existed in and were working against at times.”

In October, Smith wrote a piece for The Washington Post about her experience with sexual assault, criticizing Trump for his derogatory comments toward women and Christian leaders for not speaking out. And that’s when she started getting serious internal pushback.

Almost as soon as the article went up, Paul Batura, Focus’s vice president of communications, pulled Smith into a meeting with her supervisor, Lisa Anderson, Smith alleges. Batura asked Smith if she could have the piece removed from the Post’s website. That would be impossible, Smith explained; and besides, she had written the piece under her own byline, not as a representative of Focus. Batura told her to remove her affiliation with Boundless from her personal social-media accounts, and at the end of the day, she was given notice of an official conduct warning.

The next day, Focus leadership sent out an email to the staff clarifying the organization’s policy on political speech, according to documents shared by Smith. “The most prudent path for all of us—and the most protective approach for Focus—is to leave the policy statements up to Jim Daly, Paul Batura, the quarterbacks, or others authorized to speak on Focus’ behalf,” wrote Joel Vaughan, the chief of staff and human-resources officer at Focus. He added that “it is permissible of course—and often helpful—to agree publicly with positions Focus has taken, such as linking personal pages to Focus posts … or to Jim Daly’s blog.” A few days later, they asked Smith to take down several social-media posts about Evan McMullin, who she was supporting for president. The message was that “‘sometimes the wisest course of action is not to engage,’” Smith told me. “Of course, that’s what Christianity has been doing for years, and it hasn’t worked so well for us.”