Ahead of an all-day prayer event backed by the White House on Washington’s National Mall Sunday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson doubled down on Christianity as a core part of the American identity — over the objections of religious freedom advocates.
“The naysayers who have created this new term ‘Christian Nationalism’ as a pejorative, a derogatory term, are trying to silence the influence and voices of Christians,” Johnson said in an interview with Fox News before the event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary. “And I think that’s wildly inappropriate.”
In addition to the speaker, the evangelical-style festival — dubbed the “National Jubilee of Prayer” — featured Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several conservative Christian leaders and right-leaning pop-culture figures. They included Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, Jonathan Falwell, son of the late Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell, and Sadie Carroway Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame.
The White House, in a statement posted to social media Sunday, said “thousands of Americans are gathering on the National Mall TODAY for a powerful day of prayer, praise, and patriotism as we chart the course for America’s next 250 years and rededicate ourselves to ONE NATION UNDER GOD.”
In between returning from his official trip to China and issuing fresh threats to Iran, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I HOPE EVERYBODY AT REDEDICATE 250 IS HAVING A GOOD TIME. IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO TO HELP, JUST HAVE OUR BEAUTIFUL, BOTH INSIDE AND OUT, RACHAEL C.D., GIVE ME A CALL. I’M BACK FROM CHINA!!!,” an apparent reference to Rachel Campos-Duffy, Fox and Friends co-host and wife to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Hegseth, who has led Christian prayer services at the Pentagon during his tenure, recounted a story of President George Washington at Valley Forge in a video message.
“Amid all the bleak nights, the loss and despair, the lack of proper support, George Washington performed a profound act: he prayed,” Hegseth said. “And on this day of ‘Rededicate 250,’ let us follow George Washington’s example. Let us pray as he did. Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray for our nation on bended knee. And let us ask our lord and savior Jesus Christ as Washington did on that momentous day.”
Speaking passionately at the podium, Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress told the crowd that “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!”
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Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious freedom advocacy organization, denounced the event as a “Jubilee of Christian Nationalism.”
“As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4 – and President Trump’s Christian Nationalist ‘jubilee’ on May 17 – I urge everyone to celebrate the fundamentally American invention of church-state separation, which promises everyone the freedom to live as themselves and believe as they choose, as long as they don’t harm others,” the organization’s CEO, Rachel Laser, said in a statement. “Church-state separation is what enables us to come together as equals and build a stronger democracy.”
Laser said in an interview with C-SPAN Sunday that the event “should alarm all Americans who are patriotic.” Hailing the separation of church and state as a pillar of American democracy, she slammed the event as a “government-sponsored national church service on the National Mall and it’s extremely problematic. It’s violating our promise.”
“And then I just want to bring us back to something that the founders were focused on that we forget about today, which is that they were avoiding violence, bloody wars, crusades,” Laser added Sunday. “They saw what happens when you don’t have church-state separation. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in America we’ve become more and more violent the more we undermine church-state separation in this country.”
The government watchdog group Public Citizen also condemned the event, saying in a statement, “This highly politicized mess is not what Congress envisioned a decade ago in passing legislation creating an official commission for the 250th anniversary.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.