A closed-door White House cultural event last month began with the Tony-nominated Broadway star Laura Osnes singing “America the Beautiful.” A few minutes earlier, a painter named Johan Andersson had placed an enormous portrait of the first lady, Melania Trump, on an easel at the front of the room.
It might have seemed like another afternoon at the Trump White House. But it was also a window onto the ideas driving the administration’s approach to this year’s 250th anniversary of American independence — including a strong emphasis on the religious roots of the nation’s founding.
The private event, held on Feb. 27 in the ornate Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, was billed as an “Arts and Culture Summit for America’s 250th Anniversary.” It featured nearly two dozen panelists drawn mostly from Trump-friendly corners of entertainment, the arts and academia, along with roughly 100 guests, according to accounts from attendees and a schedule of events reviewed by The New York Times.
The gathering was hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Task Force 250, a group Mr. Trump created shortly after returning to office to support his call for “an extraordinary celebration” of the nation’s birthday. Several speakers had recently received funding from the humanities endowment, which, after canceling all previous grants last year, has pivoted to supporting Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.
The event’s goal, a White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, said, was to “share the task force’s vision and plan for America’s 250th birthday,” as well as to inspire others to create their own initiatives and to collaborate on aligned projects.
The program included the news that Michael Franck, an architect and a founding director of the National Civic Art Society, will be an adviser to the National Garden of American Heroes, Mr. Trump’s planned patriotic sculpture garden. The nonprofit art society has influenced the White House’s views on classical architecture and on projects like the East Wing ballroom.
Mr. Franck, who spoke on a panel dedicated to the arts — the first of four panels at the event — offered few details about the garden, whose location has not been announced.
The three other panels — dedicated to film, religion and public history projects — included a heavy focus on the religious dimensions of American history and the importance of “awakening America’s virtuous character through patriotic storytelling,” as the title of the film panel put it. A majority of the speakers from outside the administration were connected with religious colleges, faith organizations and “values-based” entertainment companies.
The panel on history included the best-selling evangelical writer and radio host Eric Metaxas, who has endorsed Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of 2020 election fraud and who calls the country’s 250th anniversary a “SuperCentennial” during which the nation should renew its spiritual foundations.
The film panel included the actor Zachary Levi, cited on the program for his work on “American-driven content,” who warned of the threat of artificial intelligence to the movie industry and the need for tax breaks to encourage productions to film in the United States.
There was also a teaser of “Young Washington,” a biopic of George Washington’s experiences in the French and Indian War that Angel Studios, a Utah-based distributor of “values-based” productions, will release on July 3.
Angel Studios, which scored a surprise box office hit in 2023 with “Sound of Freedom,” about a Homeland Security agent battling child trafficking, recently collaborated with Freedom 250, a Trump-backed group supporting the 250th celebration, on an advertisement that aired during the Super Bowl last month, as a cross-promotion for “Young Washington.”
But David Shane, a spokesman for Angel, who attended the event, said the invitation was “a matter of history, not politics.”
“The film celebrates the coming-of-age of the first president of the United States on this country’s 250th anniversary,” he said. “It would be inappropriate not to show a clip.”
The proceedings were introduced by Vince Haley, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council who is overseeing Task Force 250, and Brittany Baldwin, a senior adviser to the task force. Keith Krach, the chief executive of Freedom 250, created last December to support Mr. Trump’s signature projects, also spoke.
Freedom 250’s religious programming was teased last month, when Mr. Trump announced plans for Rededicate 250, a “national jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving” to be held on May 17. It will include what the White House has described as a “large-scale revival” on the National Mall in Washington.
The panel on historical projects focused “making American history relevant” through books, exhibitions and digital projects.
One slot went to Mr. Metaxas, whose forthcoming book, “Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” argues that there would have been no war of independence and no United States without the faith of the founders.
Another went to Matthew Spalding, a constitutional scholar at Hillsdale College, a Christian institution. Mr. Spalding was involved Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission, whose final report in January 2021 emphasized the centrality of religion to the founding. At the gathering, he spoke about helping create the “Freedom Trucks,” a fleet of federally funded mobile history museums that include discussion of the nation’s roots in “Western and Judeo-Christian values.”
The panel on religion, titled “Recovering a Freedom Like No Other — the Roots of the American Republic,” was moderated by Carlos Campo, the president and chief executive of the Museum of the Bible, where last fall Mr. Trump announced an initiative called “America Prays.”
Speakers on the panel included Os Guinness, a British-born Christian theologian; Eric Cohen, the chief executive of Tikvah, a conservative Jewish educational organization; and Rabbi Stuart Halpern, the deputy director of a center for Torah and Western thought at Yeshiva University in New York.
In September, many in the scholarly world were surprised when Tikvah, which had never previously received a federal grant, was handpicked for a special $10.4 million grant from the humanities endowment — the largest in the agency’s history — to support a broad project promoting the study of Jewish civilization, including its connections with the American founding.
Mr. Halpern also recently won a $30,000 grant, for a forthcoming book called “Two Nations Under God: How (Biblical) Israel Inspires the United States.”
In an email, Mr. Halpern said his panel “looked at how the Bible has shaped the American story, including by providing the country with many of its core values, including the inherent equality of humans who are created in the image of God.”
Mr. Halpern said his own comments focused on how the story of Queen Esther had inspired a diverse group of Americans, including the theologian John Witherspoon (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
R. Scott Stephenson, the chief executive of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, who spoke on the history panel, noted that his museum, a private nonprofit, emphasizes the complexity and diversity of the revolution, including its darker aspects. In an interview, he said the audience had seemed receptive, and called the event a valuable experience.
“Coming from an institution that is very committed to broad, inclusive storytelling about the founding, it was wonderful for me to get a better handle on the breadth of organizations that are exploring their own ways to reflect on the significance of the American founding,” he said.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Andersson, the artist behind the portrait of the first lady, also spoke positively of the conference, saying it included “some great talks about the virtues of America.”
He said Julie Carmean, a senior officer for 250th programs at the humanities endowment, had invited him to the conference. After the event, he gave his painting, which he said he had created from photographs found online, to the White House.
“Her gaze is quite interesting,” Mr. Andersson said, referring to his rendering of Mrs. Trump. “It is very ambiguous as to what she is feeling, and her eyes follow you around. It felt like I was capturing her fearless beauty and the soul of America itself.”
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
The post A Peek Into Trump’s Planning of America’s 250th Suggests a Religious Focus appeared first on New York Times.
