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'Jubilee of Christian Nationalism': Trump Event Denounced as Attack on Church and State Separation
“If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish."
May 15, 2026
An all-day prayer event scheduled for Sunday on the National Mall is set to feature evangelical Protestant leaders as well as top White House and Republican Party officials as speakers, and is being promoted as a celebration of "thanksgiving" as well as an opportunity for participants to learn about the founding of the nation as the 250th anniversary of its independence approaches.
In reality, said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the "National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving" appears to be a "Jubilee of Christian Nationalism"—with evangelical Christians making up three-quarters of the scheduled speakers, despite the fact that they account for just a quarter of Americans overall.
“If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country," said Laser. "Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans."
The event, which is partly funded by taxpayer dollars earmarked for the nation's 250th anniversary, will feature Christian musical performers organized around three "pillars" that are labeled as "miracles" a Christian God bestowed on America, “personal testimonies of God’s healing,” and a "unified moment of rededication."
At a webinar last month, Rev. Paula White-Cain, who serves as a faith adviser to the White House, said the event is "really truly rededicating the country to God.”
The idea that the founders of the United States intended the country to be a Christian one has long been a fixation of evangelical Christian leaders, despite the lack of evidence for such a claim.
“Look at the document," Princeton University history professor Kevin Kruse told The Washington Post, referring to the Constitution. "The only rules they wrote about religion were ones that keep religion at arm’s length. No establishment, no limits on free exercise, no religious test for office... There’s a difference between saying America is a nation with many Christians in it and that America is a nation dedicated to Christianity and defined by it."
Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, told the Post that about a third of Americans currently report that they have no religious affiliation, making the US more religiously diverse than it's ever been.
“We proudly celebrate 250 years of American independence from kings who ruled over both church and state," said Laser. "For 250 years, America has been marching toward the promise of a country where all people can be free to live as themselves and believe as they choose, as long as they don’t harm others. Christian nationalists threaten that promise by undermining church-state separation, a pillar of our democracy."
The jubilee, which will also feature an 18-wheeler "Freedom Truck" featuring educational content made by the right-wing group PragerU and the Christian school Hillsdale College, comes after numerous displays of religiosity from the Trump administration.
Even many of the president's supporters on the Christian right were aghast at an artificial intelligence-generated image he posted last month on social media, appearing to depict him as a Christ figure. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is set to speak at the jubilee, has spoken about the US-Israeli war on Iran as Christian crusade and has hosted evangelical worship services at the Pentagon, while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote, "He is Risen indeed!" in an Easter email to federal employees that recounted the biblical story of the resurrection.
Robert Weissman, co-president of government watchdog Public Citizen, noted that the corporate sponsors of Freedom 250, the public-private partnership that's organizing the 250th anniversary, "may want to curry favor with the Trump administration."
The sponsors, including John Deere, Oracle, and Lockheed Martin, "should be forced to answer whether they support the extreme agenda they are celebrating," he said.
“This outrageous event makes a mockery of a core constitutional tenet of American life, the separation of church and state, essentially promoting a particular flavor of white evangelical protestantism as state-sponsored religion,” said Weissman. “This self-proclaimed day of thanksgiving torpedoes the best of American traditions—inclusivity and diversity—and has no place being connected to the US government."
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Seeing Jesus in the Machinery of Violence
Jesus moved through a world shaped by imperial rule and internal fragmentation. Fear and political instability were not background conditions. And when he was executed by the state, it was not an accident—it was policy.
Apr 23, 2026
In 2001, forensic artist Richard Neave and his team reconstructed a face the world thought it knew. What emerged was not the pale, European Christ of Western art, but a Middle Eastern man with dark hair, brown skin, and features shaped by the climate and culture of his time.
Historian Joan Taylor reached a similar conclusion. Jesus likely had olive skin, dark eyes, and stood at an average height for a first-century Jewish man living under Roman occupation. He was not outside history but fully inside it, shaped by the religious and economic pressures of his world.
He was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. In his own language, he would have been called Yeshua.
This is not a minor correction. It changes the story.
It changes not only who Jesus was, but how systems treated him and how they still treat the vulnerable now.
Jesus moved through a world shaped by imperial rule and internal fragmentation. Fear and political instability were not background conditions. They structured daily life.
When he was arrested, the pattern was familiar. He was identified, taken at night, questioned, and beaten. The Gospels preserve competing accounts of responsibility and meaning, reflecting early struggle over what his death signified. What they agree on is simple. He was handed over to the state.
His execution was not an accident. It was policy.
Crucifixion was a Roman instrument of control, designed not only to kill but to make suffering visible and instructive. The body became a warning. Power was communicated through exposure, through the public display of consequence.
That is what makes the story so difficult. It was legal. It was orderly. It was widely understood as justified by those who authorized it. And it was still wrong.
That is what makes crucifixion more than a method of killing. It functioned as a public technology of state control, designed to bind suffering to authority itself. The body became a message. Power was asserted not only through death, but through visibility, through the instruction embedded in pain made public.
Modern systems of violence rarely depend on that kind of visibility. They tend instead toward distance and procedural insulation. Harm is distributed across chains of authorization. It is classified and carried out through mechanisms that separate decision from direct encounter. What changes is not only the method of force, but the organization of moral perception itself, how responsibility is dispersed and how suffering is rendered remote even when it is extensive.
Today, in the Gaza Strip, images continue to emerge of destroyed neighborhoods, displaced families, and children pulled from rubble. These realities are interpreted through competing frameworks of meaning, including security, survival, trauma, and political necessity, each carrying real historical and emotional weight.
But the scope of this violence does not remain contained in one place.
Across the wider region, children have been killed and injured in multiple arenas of conflict. In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, and in Iran, families have buried children whose lives ended in strikes and attacks justified through competing claims of defense and deterrence. No side is untouched by the loss of childhood life, even if the scale, cause, and context differ sharply across each setting.
This is not equivalence. It is recognition. Distinct political realities can still produce a shared human outcome: children reduced to collateral within systems that speak the language of necessity.
And yet even recognition can drift toward abstraction when it remains at a distance.
That distance collapses when the scale shifts.
A family member of mine is a special education teacher in a district marked by poverty, where food insecurity is a recurring presence in daily life.
Jesus’ teaching becomes sharper here. He does not offer “feed the hungry” and “clothe the naked” as metaphor or aspiration, but as commandment. These are not symbolic ideals. They are the ethical floor of his vision of human life.
The other day, they shared something a student created in class: a graphic novel about home life.
Inside it, a third grader drew a refrigerator marked with X’s and wrote simply, “no food.” He drew his mother in bed with X’s over her eyes. His siblings stood nearby saying the same thing: no food.
There is a silence that follows stories like that. Not because they are rare, but because they are real.
In that moment, the commandment to feed the hungry is no longer distant or theological. It becomes immediate and unresolved. It presses against every broader claim about necessity and allocation of resources.
In a society capable of directing vast resources toward military power, the persistence of child hunger is not a failure of capacity. It is a reflection of priorities.
The same world that produces advanced systems of defense and deterrence also produces a third grader who draws a refrigerator marked “no food.”
In the same moral field where children abroad are killed in war, children here experience deprivation that is quieter but no less real.
The distance between those facts is not only political. It is ethical.
What matters, then, is how violence becomes normalized within systems of authority. Responsibility disperses. Each actor follows procedure. Each decision appears limited in scope. Yet together, they produce outcomes no single participant fully controls or can easily disown.
This is how injustice becomes durable. Not only through hatred, but through structure. Not only through intent, but through obedience.
As Henry David Thoreau argued, when law turns individuals into instruments of injustice, moral responsibility does not dissolve into the system. It returns to the individual. Refusal, in such moments, becomes a form of ethical clarity.
That claim is not simple. It raises questions of risk and competing obligations. It also raises a harder question: what happens when moral clarity demands attention to suffering both far away and right in front of us?
The world does not lack information about Gaza. The images are constant, and the interpretations are global. What remains uncertain is not awareness, but response. Whether recognition becomes action, or whether it is absorbed into the ordinary language of necessity.
To return to the crucifixion is not to collapse history into the present. It is to recognize a recurring structure in how power operates: a Jewish man from the Middle East, judged as dangerous, processed through systems of authority, and killed in the name of order.
That structure does not belong to one century.
It appears wherever human life is subordinated to the maintenance of political, institutional, or economic control.
The question is not only what we see.
It is whether what we see—far away and close to home—will change what we can no longer ethically afford to ignore.
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An Unholy War and the Blasphemy of Donald J. Trump
This must be a moment of entering the public square with the truths of the gospel, with love, the truth of the prophets, and the courage to say we are not afraid of this administration or any, and we won’t be silent any more.
Apr 18, 2026
Editor's note: The following remarks were delivered during an emergency press conference in New Haven, Connecticut on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 in response to recent comments and actions by President Donald J. Trump.
“You shall have no other gods before me.” —Exodus 20:3
“All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless.” —Isaiah 44:9
“Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.” —Acts 17:29
“God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in Spirit and in truth.” —John 4:24
There are times that compel people of faith to speak, servants of Jesus to speak, proclaimers of the gospel to speak and engage in truth-telling and forms public exorcism rooted in deep radical love with the hope of repentance and a commitment to faithful witness—without fear of what any man or woman administration can do to us.
Two weeks ago the Moral Monday movement held Moral Monday gatherings in Washington, DC, 16 states, and Canada to denounce this war and the President’s declaration that if another country didn’t do what he said, he would “reign” down Hell on them and wipe out their entire civilization.
Why has he been talking about “reigning” down hell? Why does he write "reign," not "rain"? What authority is he claiming to serve?
Why was he so threatened by Easter that he had to try to make it about him?
Why is the Pope teaching what Jesus and the church have always taught getting under his skin? The religious nationalist movement for so long has been saying he is an imperfect instrument being “used by God.” But he’s not satisfied with that. He wants to be God.
The AI image of him as Jesus is so bad that some of his own people have called it blasphemy. So now he’s trying to walk it back and say he thought it was a portrayal of him as a doctor.
This is exposing the madness that we’ve seen in policy. He wants to be some kind of God like messianic figure—to decide who lives and who dies; who gets citizenship and who doesn’t; which parts of the Constitution still matter and whose rights have to be respected.
Just 10 days ago, on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, Trump told Russell Vought, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, "Don't send any money for day care, because the United States can't take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can't take care of day care. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars.”
And then during Holy Week, he went to the Supreme Court to seemingly intimidate them to support undoing birthright citizenship for babies.
Not only is war unholy, but when any human or president acts in word and deed as though they can determine who lives and who dies—who has citizenship and who can "reign" down hell and wipe out an entire civilization—assuming God-like authority, represents a war on divinity.
We live in a nation that has declared some things are inalienable, endowed by our Creator. And for people of faith, even if the nation didn’t say it, we believe and know that some things are only God’s authority, and to violate them is sin because the gospel of Jesus says so.
This AI pic represents idolatry—a false image offered for us to bow down to, and it is blasphemy and heresy and an affront to Jesus Christ. To do it represents a kind of demonic madness, no matter who would do it—Democrat or Republican. To equate Jesus with a person, a flag, bombs and war planes—and to say that’s what heals us and saves us: this is sin and attempts to exalt a person above God. It is a dangerous war on divinity that is a turn from the God of the gospels, the truths of the gospel.
This is why Pope Leo said: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the gospel.”
And he said this even after the reports of the Trump administration calling the ambassador of the Vatican to the Pentagon earlier this year.
I’m not Catholic, but as a bishop in the Lord’s church, in this moment, Pope Leo is my pope.
As much as Pope Francis was, as I had the opportunity to respond to his encyclical on the environment and address the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences as addressed the moral issue of poverty and people’s movements around the world.
But we must be careful in this moment to act as though this is the first moral and spiritual violation by Trump and religious nationalism. His embrace of a Messianic-type role has been pushed by the delusion of Franklin Graham and others.
When he allows people in his administration to say empathy is the cause of the decline of Western civilization.
These are deep, sinful contradictions of the gospel which says a nation will be judged by how it treats the least of these.
His constant demeaning of other nations and cultures and his constant claim that no one ever did anything as great and wonderful as him before him—the constant self-congratulation and adoration—is idolatry that, when unchecked, has led to where we are now.
Some of the church must repent of far too much silence in the public square confronting these thing public sins and idolatries and other policies with the truths of the gospel and our response to this image and his ridiculous attacks on the Pope cannot be one off.
This must be a moment of entering the public square with the truths of the gospel, with love, the truth of the prophets, and the courage to say we are not afraid of this administration or any, and we won’t be silent any more. We must lift a clear call that this nation and any nation in its words, deeds, and policies must work to have good news for the poor, healing of the broken hearted, deliverance to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and a declaration of acceptance to all who have been marginalized if we even hope to be pleasing to God.
“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. This is why when we as people of faith enter into the public space, we do so not with partisan facts and focus, but with the truths of the gospel.
This is why we have been here in New Haven. More than 400 public theologians are returning to their communities later today with a renewed sense that we have a responsibility to help the nation make this choice and build a movement that can take back our government and insist that it serve all the people.
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