Was 'Rededicate 250' about Make America Christian Again?

I am all for prayer and worship. Rededicate 250 was that, plus a message: rip down the separation of church and state. I'm not comfortable with that message.

May 18, 2026

I caught a bit of the “Rededicate 250” livestream event on the National Mall on Sunday. What I saw consisted of Christian worship artist Chris Tomlin singing “Good Good Father” on stage. I sang along. Worshiping along with thousands of people who showed up is not a problem for me, and the event’s media stream seemed very well produced.

Rededicate 250 Event, May 17, 2026, National Mall. Source: YouTube.

Tomlin was the headliner for a seven-hour event that mixed political speech from Republican leaders and Trump administration officials with prayer and worship. Christian prayer and worship. It was funded as part of the Freedom 250 celebration, which is a public-private partnership between the Freedom 250 Foundation, the National Park Foundation, and public funding from our tax dollars. The Freedom 250 Foundation’s purpose is to create, manage, and produce celebration events all over the nation to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is basically the nation’s founding.

I remember 1976, when I was just a kid, my dad taking us to the Esplanade in Boston, on the Charles River, for the Bicentennial celebration. The great Arthur Fiedler conducted the Boston Pops, as he always did, on July 4th. As the 1812 Overture boomed from the Hatch Shell and remote speaker towers around the riverfront (there were nearly a half million people there), fireworks exploded and National Guard cannon fired in sync with the music. Really it was an unforgettable experience, which made me proud to be an American. Rededicate 250 was not that.

I won’t get into the details of the event’s political tone: the New York Times and other media covered it pretty well. House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke, ending with “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Johnson and other so-called Christian Nationalists believe that the Founders understood America to be a Christian nation, and that the First Amendment was constructed to protect religion from government intrusion.

I agree that the First Amendment does protect religion from government intrusion, but all religions, not just Christianity. And there are many forms of Christianity. Discrimination against Catholics, proposed as the Blaine Amendment, would have codified into federal law what many states had already adopted in their state constitutions: prohibiting public funding of religious schools. This happened in the late 19th century, when most schools had prayer and religious education, but Protestant in nature, while Catholics had their own private parochial schools. It was explicitly anti-Catholic.

There is also a long history of exclusion and legal barriers to Jews in many places. But the Founders welcomed Jews, as George Washington noted in his letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Puritans in New England were less inviting, but still they understood that American religion was pluralistic, and that our government should be free from adopting a state religion of any kind. It was more a warning that moral frameworks are supported by adherence to Biblical principles, though worship and rites, and religious doctrine was not necessary for adhering to those frameworks.

Thomas Jefferson was more a deist than a Christian. Ben Franklin rejected most religious systems, living as a unapologetic romantic, and studying science for the sake of learning. Alexander Hamilton’s view of religion was purely practical. Our founders viewed the Bible with respect for the behavior it commanded, and for the “arts and letters” value of building men of knowledge and virtue. They did not value or view the Bible as a testament to the one and only truth of the universe.

Let’s take this straight-on: The U.S government does not serve God. It was never intended to, because that would make it a church. The U.S government serves the people of the United States, by their assent. The people are free to serve God, or not. The “Rededicate 250” event flies in the face of what our government should be and do. It’s not because the government should not sponsor or allow prayer or worship. The House and Senate have official chaplains and begin each session with prayer. Congress specifically added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and President Dwight Eisenhower signed it into law. This was done as a message to “godless Communism” that our system operates under a better framework, meaning that we take our rights as given by a divine power, a Creator, versus some “arc of history” forcing a proletariat revolution.

The Rededicate 250 event also has a message: that the pluralistic and religion-neutral stance of our federal and state governments is no longer fit to govern our republic. If this is so, then it adds credence to the progressive atheist movements that claim a government founded on God’s providence is also insufficient to handle the modern world. If the government must take a position on religion, and adopt one religious worldview as the state’s own, then why shouldn’t it adopt one that explicitly denies God? The danger in bringing “Evangelical Christianity”—represented by the largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention—into our officially sanctioned public events, like Rededicate 250, is that when evangelicals no longer have political power, or rather, they no longer serve a political power that uses them for its own purposes, the next power in charge can (and will) choose their own deity or worldview to adopt as the government’s own.

How do I know this is true? Look at England, which under Henry VIII established the Church of England, rather than continue to submit to the edicts of the Roman Catholic Church and its papal authority. This was all because the king wanted to divorce and remarry whom he pleased, in defiance of the Church. Look at France, which rejected all religious authority to the point of redefining the calendar, in order to eliminate the holidays and feasts associated with Christianity. Look at modern Russia, in which the Russian Orthodox Church operates as an arm of Vladimir Putin’s war machine and propaganda ministry. Look at Israel, where its Basic Law puts Judaism above all other religions, but also forces the government to submit to religious privileges of nationalists and fringe groups that would re-establish the Kingdom of Israel to its Davidic borders.

Many countries with heterogenous populations can afford to have a state religion, because most people in those countries have similar ethnic and historical backgrounds. But the United States’ motto is “e pluribus unum,” from many, one. A state religion of any kind would violate that motto and the care our founders put into crafting a constitution and government that explicitly recognizes religion but protects its practice from any state intrusion, and places the state beyond the reach of religious domination.

The purpose of Rededicate 250, being most charitable, and extending grace to those who participated, was a public worship event hosted by political leaders in our nation’s capital. That in itself is rather benign. But if those political powers would use worshipers and participants to advance a cause that would eliminate the separation of church and state, it is a terribly pernicious marker. How would we conservatives react if New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted a Muslim Dedication Day event in which he announced New York City will dedicate itself to the tenets of Islam? We would be rightly outraged. We are outraged when some Michigan cities adopt stances friendly to Islam. We are outraged when Minnesota gives room to Somalis to fleece the public treasure chest.

Do we expect anyone to be outraged when the Trump administration, as part of a very public America 250 celebration, puts tax dollars into an exclusively evangelical Christian worship event, and uses it to advance a political stance in contravention of our founders intent? Not only that, but the cynic in me notes that President Trump himself didn’t even phone in a video for this event—he had them use a video recorded earlier for another event and replay it. I’d think even evangelical Christians should question his commitment.

I think Christians need to explore the possibility that we are being used to advance the political power of a group of politicians who may not be as committed to serving God as many think they are. And that group, when it no longer has use for these Christians, will abandon us like a band that achieves fame rejects unwanted groupies.

Make America Christian Again, or some kind of Rededicate event, is not what Christians need to serve God. I’ll say it again: Our government does not serve God. We the People do, and if we do not, then perhaps we don’t deserve the kind of government that counts on moral fiber to operate. We should question who serves God, and who serves themselves, especially in our political leaders. Lip-service to God, or pulling money from the public treasury to preen religion, does not make anyone closer to the Creator. We should take care in which events we choose to participate.

(Also note that the Freedom 250 Foundation’s YouTube account has only 7,500 subscribers. To me, that doesn’t sound very grassroots.)

I’d love to go back to the days of Arthur Fiedler (who was a Jew) and the Boston Pops at the Bicentennial. But I fear those days are over. America at 250 is not like America at 200; it’s more televangelist or reality show than the staccato and wonderous sounds of Tchaikovsky.

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