Today, May 17, 2026, the National Mall in Washington — the public ground that belongs to every American regardless of faith, the land between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, consecrated by 250 years of democratic struggle — has been turned into what critics across the political and religious spectrum are calling a government-sponsored evangelical revival.

It is called "Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving." It runs from 10:30 in the morning until 6 in the evening. It is organized through the White House’s Freedom 250 task force, backed by a mix of taxpayer funds and private donations from corporate sponsors including ExxonMobil and Palantir, and its central stated purpose — in Trump’s own words from the National Prayer Breakfast in February — is to "rededicate America as one nation under God."

This is worth stopping and examining carefully. Not because prayer is wrong. Not because religion has no place in American public life. But because what is happening on the National Mall today has a specific ideological character that its organizers are no longer even trying to disguise.

The Speaker List Tells the Story

Organizers have described Rededicate 250 as open to "Americans of every background." The actual speaker list reflects a narrower vision.

According to Religion News Service, which reviewed the full program, the speakers are almost entirely Christian and predominantly evangelical. Cabinet members on the program include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has led Christian prayer services at the Pentagon, told the National Religious Broadcasters convention that "America was founded as a Christian nation… in our DNA," and addressed that audience as "brothers and sisters in Christ" — and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, participating via video. House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered remarks in person, using the occasion to attack critics of Christian nationalism as people trying to "silence the influence and voices of Christians."

The exceptions to the all-evangelical roster: one Orthodox rabbi and two conservative Catholic bishops. No imams. No rabbis from Reform or Conservative traditions. No representatives of historically Black churches. No Indigenous faith leaders. No mainline Protestants. No Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, or members of any of the hundreds of other religious traditions practiced by American citizens who also pay the taxes funding this event.

Adam Russell Taylor, a Baptist minister and head of the progressive Christian organization Sojourners, told NPR plainly: "What we are seeing on the Mall — with a predominantly group of white, far-right evangelical leaders that will be praying — is a very Christian nationalist, ideological version that is, in essence, being privileged and is being platformed."

Robert Jeffress — Southern Baptist pastor and one of Trump’s most loyal religious surrogates — stood at that podium today and said: "These leaders who loved our country and loved our God would be called Christian Nationalists today, and it is a title they would have gladly embraced. By the way — if being a Christian Nationalist means loving Jesus Christ and loving America, count me in!"

The mask is off. The label they spent years insisting was a slur is now being claimed from the stage, on the National Mall, at a government-backed event celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

The Historical Claim Being Made Is False

The entire premise of "rededication" — the thing being rededicated America to — rests on an historical claim that scholars across the ideological spectrum have consistently rejected.

America was not founded as a Christian nation. This is not a matter of liberal interpretation or progressive revisionism. It is the documented, textual, legal reality of the founding documents.

The Constitution contains no reference to Jesus Christ, Christianity, or the Bible. The First Amendment — the very first protection the Bill of Rights established — explicitly prohibits Congress from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion." The No Religious Test Clause in Article VI prohibits requiring any religious affiliation for public office. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797 and signed by John Adams, stated explicitly: "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

Gregg Frazer, a professor at The Master’s University — a Christian college — wrote that while there were Christians among the Founders, "they did not intend to create a Christian nation. They were religious men who wanted religion — but not necessarily Christianity — to have significant influence in the public square."

Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted that "most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical or constitutional sense."

The Rededicate 250 website features an image of George Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge — an image that historians have documented is almost certainly a myth, originating in a fabricated account written decades after Washington’s death by a man named Mason Weems who also invented the cherry tree story. Hegseth cited it anyway from the stage today, calling on Americans to "ask our lord and savior Jesus Christ as Washington did on that momentous day."

George Washington was not a conventional Christian. He attended Anglican services but consistently avoided taking communion and never referred to Jesus Christ in his personal correspondence. He referred to "Providence" and "the Almighty" — the deist vocabulary of his era, not the evangelical Christianity being projected onto him 230 years later.

The Funding and Constitutional Questions

White House senior policy adviser Brittany Baldwin described the event’s focus on "our heritage as a Judeo-Christian nation" in a planning webinar posted ahead of today’s event. That webinar was later deleted. Its content was already documented.

The event is funded through a combination of federal resources allocated to the Freedom 250 task force and private donations from corporations including ExxonMobil and Palantir — companies with significant federal contracts and regulatory exposure. The precise breakdown of taxpayer versus private funding has not been publicly disclosed.

Andrew Koppelman, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, told CNN the event is "constitutionally troubling" — noting that while no court issued an injunction to stop it, the government’s active promotion and partial funding of an overwhelmingly Christian religious event on public land raises serious Establishment Clause concerns.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called it a "government-sponsored national church service on the National Mall" that "should alarm all Americans who are patriotic." The Freedom From Religion Foundation went further, calling it "an unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state" — "an overtly sectarian, exclusionary event catering to evangelicals and other conservative Christians" in which organizers are "openly declaring a goal of redefining America as a Christian nation" using the machinery of government.

Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, pushed back on the "Judeo-Christian" framing the administration has consistently used, saying it does not accurately represent either Jewish tradition or the diversity of American religious life.

The Military Dimension

The event did not emerge in isolation. It is part of a pattern that has been building throughout the Trump administration and accelerating since the Iran war began.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received more than 200 complaints from U.S. service members across multiple branches about religiously charged messaging in military contexts, including alleged briefings in which commanders described events unfolding in the Middle East as "all part of God’s divine plan." Hegseth has held regular Christian prayer services at the Pentagon. The administration launched a "Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias." Trump directed the Department of Education to protect prayer in public schools.

Each of these individually might be dismissed as minor. Together, and in context of a nine-hour government-sponsored evangelical revival on the National Mall with partial taxpayer funding, they form a pattern. The pattern has a name. The people on stage today named it themselves.

What the Founders Actually Wrote

Thomas Jefferson — the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence being commemorated — also wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which became the model for the First Amendment. He described the "wall of separation between church and state" in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. He wrote that freedom of religion meant government could not compel anyone to support or attend any religious worship "whatsoever." He created his own edited Bible that removed the miracles, the resurrection, and the divinity of Christ.

James Madison — the Father of the Constitution — warned explicitly against government entanglement with religion, writing that "the establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights" and that "religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

Benjamin Franklin proposed at the Constitutional Convention that the sessions open with prayer. The proposal was rejected, and the Convention proceeded without it.

These men were not building a Christian theocracy. They were building a secular republic specifically designed to prevent any religious faction — including Christian ones — from using the power of government to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

The event on the National Mall today inverts that founding vision completely. It uses the power of government, the platform of the White House, the public ground of the National Mall, and a mix of taxpayer and corporate funds to declare that America is being rededicated to the God of one specific religious tradition — while excluding the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, agnostics, and the millions of Christians who do not share the evangelical nationalist theology being preached from that stage.

That is not honoring America’s 250 years of history.

It is contradicting them.

The First Amendment is the first thing in the Bill of Rights. It is not there by accident. The Founders put it first because they understood, from direct experience with state-imposed religion, what happens when the machinery of government is turned toward enforcing theological conformity.

They built the wall. Today, the people claiming to celebrate their legacy are dismantling it — on their own public land, with their own tax dollars, in their own name.

And calling it a rededication to freedom.