The Christian right hijacks America’s 250th

After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why.

Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The founders would not doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But Trump’s second term has been dominated by a single-minded determination to erase real history and replace it with self-flattering fantasies of the MAGA movement. As Jason Kyle Howard recently wrote in Salon, Trump’s efforts to inflict his grotesque architectural tastes on the nation’s capital cannot be separated from the administration’s schemes “to undermine the living history of Black and brown Americans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, and to paper over the legacy of the post-World War II liberal order.”

Trump’s plans of erasure fit in well with the Christian right’s efforts, stretching back decades, to replace real history with a false, sanitized tale of an America founded not to be a secular democracy but something closer to a right-wing Christian theocracy. This includes making phony claims that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington didn’t really mean what they clearly did with their talk of “freedom of religion” and “separation of church and state.” The decision to kick off months devoted to celebrating the nation’s semiquincentennial sends a blatant message of support for this alternate reality in which the nation’s founders were all right-wing Christians who wanted a nation ruled not by reason and the rule of law, but by a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.

The scary thing is that, on its surface, Sunday’s event will likely read as innocuous when compared to the myriad of other travesties committed daily by the Trump administration against our nation’s laws and traditions. Based on Rededicate 250’s marketing, most of the program looks likely to avoid overtly political rhetoric in favor of generic prayers calling on God to bless the country. The event’s organizers have even included a smattering of token Catholics and one rabbi as speakers. The whole thing feels designed to seem inoffensive — and to preemptively paint any progressives arguing that the Constitution clearly forbids government establishment of religion as hysterical.

The speaker list, though, reveals what’s really going on. Rededicate 250 is not just about imposing a Christian identity on the United States; it promotes something more specific — an evangelical, far-right flavor of the faith. According to Pew Research, only 23% of Americans are evangelical Christians, but the event’s program implies that the only truly legitimate Americans are the ones who spend their weekends waving their hands to ear-splitting worship music inside a stadium-sized megachurch. Worse, most of the religious leaders speaking at this event are committed to pushing a political agenda opposed to the basic rights and freedoms of everyone outside their right-wing tribe.

Franklin Graham, who has built his entire career piggybacking on the fame of his famous father, the late evangelist Billy Graham, was rewarded with a plum spot on Sunday’s roster. And no wonder. After Trump posted the picture of himself looking uncannily like Jesus, Graham defended him on social media: “I do not believe President Trump would knowingly depict himself as Jesus Christ.” 

Why Graham is willing to gaslight his followers like this isn’t a mystery. At the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, he argued that Trump is singularly equipped to fight the “godless anti-American agenda,” which he described as legal abortion, “woke culture, critical race theory [and] transgender ideology.” He even invoked a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing progressives of wanting to rename Christmas to hide the word “Christ.”

Also on the program is Dr. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, which boasts “a new 178,000-square-foot Worship Center and a three-story structure with a 3,000-seat sanctuary with a full production and broadcast studio.” From his pulpit there, Jeffress teaches that women should submit to their husbands because the Bible says a woman is “man’s helper,” provided by God to support a man in his life’s purpose. He is also famous for his 2008 “Gay Is Not Okay” sermon, in which he condemned “their filthy behavior that explains why they are so much more prone to disease.” Three years later, Jeffress declared that Catholicism was a “counterfeit religion” inspired by “the genius of Satan.” (It’s unsurprising, then, that Jeffress told Fox News on Saturday that “President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches than the Pope” — a message that Trump, who keeps insulting Pope Leo XIV, would surely enjoy.)

Then there’s Paula White, a charismatic preacher who has long been close to Trump. The thrice-married evangelist opposes same-sex marriage and has equated the Black Lives Matter movement with the Ku Klux Klan. While blamed “demonic confederacies” for the president’s 2020 election loss and spoke at his Jan. 6 rally, praying that the crowd’s adversaries “be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.” More recently, days before Trump compared himself to Jesus, White herself did so at an Easter luncheon, equating the president’s various criminal trials with Christ’s crucifixion. The parallel echoed a recently resurfaced video from 2019 in which she said, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.” White is fond of grandstanding in this manner, claiming, “When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds,” and “where I stand is holy.” 

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The Christian commentator and Trump superfan Eric Metaxes is another prominent speaker; he has repeated variations of the argument “There is no America, period, without Christian faith.” On a recent episode of his self-titled podcast, he and his guest James Howard Kunstler argued that Trump should outlaw the Democratic Party. Metaxes has called anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters “a communist insurgency” and compared Alex Pretti, who was shot while protesting Trump’s mass deportation campaign, to Hamas. After the president lost in 2020, Metaxes went on Charlie Kirk’s show and argued, “We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” 

There are many more: the minister who rose to fame by telling his congregation to refuse Covid-19 vaccinations, another who suggested Christians may be banned from speaking if Joe Biden won in 2020, one who vowed to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Hating LGBTQ people is a common theme among the invited speakers. And of course, so many of them eagerly preach that it’s a wife’s duty to submit to her husband.

That’s why the Rededicate 250 event is so insidious — even if the speakers behave themselves and don’t say anything too controversial on stage. By giving far-right radicals the main stage at an event that’s supposed to be celebrating America’s birthday, the event’s organizers — with the cooperation of the Trump administration — are normalizing and mainstreaming their anti-democracy views. It sends a message that the government that’s supposed to be of, by and for the people actually agrees with the speakers that huge swaths of Americans — including women, immigrants, LGBTQ people and advocates for racial equality — do not count as full citizens.

This is why the founders were wise to insist on creating the United States as a secular nation. When the government gets into promoting religion, it cannot help but separate people into groups who are seen as more or less worthy of the status of citizen. Even if Rededicate 250 somehow manages to avoid presenting outright hate on stage, promoting voices like these sends a message loud and clear: The rest of you don’t matter.