The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifies:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Our good friends on the left seem to believe that it says more than it means, but, of course, they’re idiots.
A Trump administration-backed celebration of U.S. religious heritage on Sunday highlighted conservative Christian leaders’ ties to the president as critics expressed the gathering did not reflect the country’s diverse faith landscape.
Well, of course not: how do you reflect a “diverse faith network” in a single event?
Thousands of people attended the nine-hour program, called “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” for a mixture of popular worship music and speakers from evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholic traditions.
Sunday’s events included video messages from members of the Trump administration such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. All of them generally stuck to the prevailing theme of the day, touching on the Judeo-Christian roots of the country’s founders and the themes they incorporated into some landmark documents such as the Declaration of Independence.
The event mixed elements of a rally and a religious service, where chants of “U-S-A” broke out in the crowd at times with contemporary Christian artists like Chris Tomlin leading the crowd in well-known worship songs.
Further down:
Advocates of church-state separation said the event blurs government and religion.
“This government-sponsored prayer fest is the epitome of exactly what our secular Constitution forbids our government from doing,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in a statement.
Well, of course: the “Freedom From Religion Foundation.” The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a particular state religion, but a public event, regardless of how religious it is, does not constitute the establishment of a state church. The lovely Miss Gaylor seems to have missed that the part of the First Amendment which states that there may be no law “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” when it comes to religion.
Several government leaders attended the event, though President Trump did not, but no one was required to attend.
Faith leaders who spoke included Bishop Robert Barron, from the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester; Jonathan Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University, a school established by Christian evangelicals; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City.
So, the event was neither exclusively Protestant or Catholic, or even restricted to Christians.
The very lovely Amanda Marcotte was appalled in advance:
It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s old Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar. It’s even more telling that the beer advertisement is for Bud Light, of Dylan Mulvaney infamy.
After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why.
Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
Has Miss Marcotte forgotten that many of the people who came to this country came to be able to practice their faiths as they saw fit. The Pilgrims, from whom I am descended, believed that the established Church of England was corrupt beyond salvation, while the Puritans wanted to reform and purify the Church of England from within. Maryland was established as a safe haven for Catholics, who were persecuted in England. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a “holy experiment” to create a sanctuary for religious freedom, particularly for Quakers — Mr Penn was a Quaker — facing persecution in England. These were all Christians, simply of different denominations.
On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Were you alarmed? I know that I certainly wasn’t!
The founders would not doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But Trump’s second term has been dominated by a single-minded determination to erase real history and replace it with self-flattering fantasies of the MAGA movement. As Jason Kyle Howard recently wrote in Salon, Trump’s efforts to inflict his grotesque architectural tastes on the nation’s capital cannot be separated from the administration’s schemes “to undermine the living history of Black and brown Americans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, and to paper over the legacy of the post-World War II liberal order.”
I think she meant “no doubt,” rather than “not doubt,” but of what there is no doubt is that the founders saw the new nation that they created as a Christian nation, not a secular one as Miss Marcotte fantasizes. A couple of the founders, Thomas Jefferson specifically, were “deists,” people who believed that there must be a creator God, but one who does not interfere in human affairs, nor left us with any holy books or instructions. Mr Jefferson had his own ‘cut and paste’ version of the New Testament, one which focused on Jesus’ morals and teachings, while omitting miracles or supernatural references, but we were an almost entirely Protestant Christian nation, and it is the writer from Salon who is attempting to “undermine the living history” our nation.
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