The claim that the founders meant America to be a Christian nation isn’t just bad history—it’s a declaration of war by the religious right.
President Donald Trump holds a cross given to him by Archbishop Elpidophoros of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.
(Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photo)
The day after President Donald Trump told a reporter that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” in the wake of his economically ruinous war in Iran, the White House duly stepped up with a let-them-eat-loaves-and-fish pronouncement to drive the point home. This Sunday, the Trump administration will kick off its grift-laden commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary with a nine-hour prayer jubilee on the National Mall, meant to signal “a moment of renewal” for the Christian nationalist project at the heart of the MAGA spiritual agenda.
It’s rare that you see the bait-and-switch logic of right-wing culture warfare in such stark relief, but the prayer marathon is very much in line with the broader cultural messaging that spurred Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The central theme uniting Trump’s far-flung attacks on the Biden White House, his fury at the interlocking scourges of wokeness, trans tolerance, and CRT indoctrination, his hate-fueled mass deportation rhetoric, and his tariff-and-tax-cuts vision of a new economic golden age was that this iteration of MAGA was a revival movement in political guise. Seizing on the militant rhetoric of spiritual warfare crafted by self-styled movement prophets aligned with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) like Lance Wallnau, an oil-industry PR flack turned preacher, Trump campaign strategists positioned the president as a vessel for the country’s divine deliverance. Standing athwart political and theological rivals who, in the NAR’s apocalyptic telling, are actual demons seeking to wreak destruction and mayhem on Christian believers, Trump is channeling the righteous fury of the divine elect who have been cast out into the cultural darkness by satanic fifth columnists. Armed with this bellicose version of the gospel, the NAR preaches a full-fledged evangelical siege of what Wallnau and others call the “seven mountains” of cultural power: politics, education, the media, the family, business, arts and entertainment, and the church.
This is the broader polemic backdrop to an event launching a months-long celebration of the country’s founding that explicitly endorses fallacious Christian nationalist accounts of the American past. Project 250, the White House’s umbrella group programming the official recognition of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is dispatching a caravan of “Freedom Trucks” across the country to promulgate an AI-enabled experiential tour of the country’s past—outfitted with instructional materials from PragerU and Hillsdale College, both premier outlets of Christian nationalist agitprop masquerading as respectable academic discourse.
Another program operating under the remit of Project 250 is the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which counts both the right-wing advocacy groups Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty as partners—thereby irreparably deranging the founders’ core understanding of what civics is and how it works. Still another initiative affiliated with Project 250 is America Prays, which has partnered with Wallbuilders, a nonprofit headed by Christian nationalist pastor David Barton, and the NAR TV show FlashPoint, which was pivotal in mobilizing evangelical support for the failed coup on January 6. FlashPoint features MAGA spiritual enthusiast Gene Bailey among its hosts—who has repeatedly interviewed Trump and who by his own account subscribes to a “Christo-fascist, Christian nationalist” agenda.
Not surprisingly, Sunday’s Jubilee is featuring speakers cut from the same ideological cloth. There’s Eric Metaxas, a member of the Trump White House’s Religious Liberty Commission and a lead orator at the pre–January 6 “Jericho Rally” for evangelicals seeking to overturn the 2020 election, who announced in a December 2020 Charlie Kirk podcast, “What’s right is right.… We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit-based NAR pastor, will also hold forth; he announced to Fox News in 2024 that the Democratic platform was “demonic,” while offering the generous Christian disclaimer that “we do not believe that every Democrat is a demon.” He is also a diehard election denier, who testified in the Michigan state legislature’s farcical hearings on post-2020 election integrity. Without citing any credible evidence, Sewell claimed to know of “people that had their votes switched. People that were registered without their knowledge.” He went on to say, “I’m actually the self-proclaimed, and I believe I deserve the title, as the election integrity evangelist.” And be sure to catch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Reconstructionist believer (and parishioner at the Church of Tarantino) who sports Crusades-themed tattoos, and who will no doubt deliver his trademark gloss on the gospel as a handbook for both spiritual warfare and the blood-soaked actual variety.
These belligerent apostles of MAGA impunity are, it bears reminding, a universe away from an American founding that sought to firmly distance itself from the corruptions of state-established religion—and expressly stipulated in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by John Adams, that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” The MAGA grifters presiding over Sunday’s rally are also defying the religious-liberty case for the separation of church and state—it was, after all, leaders of the breakaway Baptist denomination, not a clutch of secular Enlightenment philosophes, who successfully fought to disestablish the Massachusetts Congregational Church in the 18th century, and create a model of competitive worship free from state interference for their many later successors.
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But figures like Baptist pioneer Roger Williams and the pious but establishment-averse Adams have no real place in the MAGA-branded spectacle of faith convening on the National Mall. In their place, we have prosperity preacher Paula White-Cain, Trump’s closest spiritual adviser and the head of the White House’s National Faith Advisory Board. White-Cain has explained that the Sunday prayer event will stress the nation’s ostensible Christian identity—religious figures “praying to all these different gods” will not be welcome. In the same vein, she has nonsensically solemnized the event as an occasion “about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.… This is really truly rededicating the country to God.” At this year’s White House Easter celebration, White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus, and she has also announced that “saying no to Trump would be saying no to God.”
In other words, something is being rededicated at Sunday’s marathon prayer jubilee, but it’s not the fabricated tale of the country’s Christian founding; it’s the blasphemy that a serial sexual abuser, compulsive liar, self-dealing aspiring dictator, vicious warmonger, and recidivist fraudster can claim any position of moral leadership in the country’s tattered civic religion. It seems fitting here to summon the authority of Isaiah 1:15-16: “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.”
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