The Trump administration is hosting an all-day prayer festival on the National Mall on Sunday that organizers say will reflect the country’s Christian origins and, they hope, spark “a movement of renewal” in America.
“Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” is partly funded by millions in public dollars earmarked for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration, organizers said. It will feature mostly evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian.
In a webinar last month, the Rev. Paula White-Cain, a senior faith adviser to the White House, said the event “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible … This is really truly rededicating the country to God.”
While U.S. presidents through history have typically marked major commemorations with generic prayers of thanks to God, scholars of American religious history say the national jubilee is unprecedented in the modern era.
They say that’s because of its scope — nine hours and dozens of Christian speakers, including top U.S. officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) — and its focus on American identity as aligned with a specific slice of conservative Protestantism.
“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of BJC, a Baptist group that aims to promote religious liberties through church-state separation as outlined in the First Amendment. “Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”
Mark David Hall, an expert on early America and religion at Regent University, also said he couldn’t recall a similar event in America’s recent past. However, he said he views the jubilee as akin to the public Thanksgiving Day proclamations presidents make each year.
“It’s encouragement, not coercion; there’s no penalty if you don’t participate,” said Hall, who created a video for Freedom 250, the public-private partnership launched by the White House in December that is organizing the jubilee.
“It’s possible that it is unprecedented in the same way that an MMA fight on the White House grounds would be,” Hall added, referring to a separate event Freedom 250 is helping to facilitate, a Mixed Martial Arts competition on the South Lawn of the White House.
President Donald Trump is not expected to appear in person but will send a recorded video message.
Many Americans have expressed skepticism about some of the ways Trump has addressed religion-related topics. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll this month found 87 percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus. A Pew Research poll found just a third of Americans say Trump stands up for people with their religious beliefs.
The White House directed questions about the jubilee to Freedom 250. An adviser to the group, Danielle Alvarez, said the organization “welcomed input from faith leaders and communities across the country” and the event “will bring together diverse voices from many faiths, backgrounds, and communities to reflect on the extraordinary story of America.”
In an April 28 webinar, Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, acknowledged that almost all the speakers on Sunday would be Christian. About three-quarters of the 33 speakers listed on the Rededicate websiteas of Tuesday evening are evangelical Christians, compared with about a quarter of Americans overall. Organizers said the final list of speakers is still being determined.
“We are focusing on our heritage as a Judeo-Christian nation,” Baldwin said at the webinar, which organizers said was closed to the press but which The Washington Post later viewed on YouTube.
“We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”
White-Cain assured those in the audience that the jubilee would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”
The all-day event — gates open at 9 a.m. and it will wrap at 6 p.m. —includes military bands, six Christian musical performers and speakers organized around three “pillars,” which the web site listed as “miracles” God imparted on America in the past, “personal testimonies of God’s healing” and a “unified moment of rededication.”
It also will feature one of the six 18-wheeler “Freedom Trucks” created by Freedom 250, which are traversing the country to teach about the founding of the nation. The material was created by two organizations that have led efforts to inject conservative content in K-12 classrooms: PragerU, a nonprofit that offers “a pro-American, Judeo-Christian message,” according to its tax forms; and Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan.
America is more religiously diverse than ever, said Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, with about a third of Americans saying they have no religious affiliation. At the same time, antisemiticand anti-Muslim sentiment has drawn growing concern.
The Supreme Court in recent years has expanded the role of faithin public life. And members of the Trump administration have upended religious-speech norms, with Hegseth hosting evangelical worship services and casting the war with Iran in Christian terms, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins sending employees an Easter emailthat said “He is Risen!” Trump, several Cabinet members and members of Congress last month participated in a Bible-reading marathon hosted by the Museum of the Bible in Washington.
Hall, the Regent University professor, said Freedom 250 organizers who are stressing the nation’s Christian roots are doing so “with the best of intentions.” He noted that at the time of America’s founding, the vast majority of people involved in leadership were Protestant Christians.
“America is basically Protestant, Catholic and Jewish and we need to celebrate what we have in common,“ Hall said. “The problem when you jump to 2026, is we’re very diverse and the founders designed the country to be one open to individuals of all faiths.”
Harvard religious history scholar Catherine Brekus said the focus on how the founders lived comes with a flawed “presumption of originalism” — that if America’s earliest leaders were Protestant, that should endure.
“Many things were true in the 1770s, 1780s we’d never want to bring back now,” such as slavery and no voting rights for women, Brekus said. “What [the founders] did was to create a framework where that diversity could happen. They didn’t foreclose it, and that seems significant.”
To say people who wrote the Constitution believed in God or prayed in public, said Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse, is as revelatory as saying they “wrote by candlelight.”
“It’s not causal,” he said. “Look at the document. 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,” Kruse said. “Those are very different things.”
The non-Protestant religious leaders scheduled to speak on Sunday include two Catholic bishops — retired New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota — and Orthodox Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of New York City, all three of whom serve on Trump’s religious liberty commission.
Two other Orthodox Jewish leaders said in interviews that they were not concerned about the Christian nature of the jubilee, pointing to the White House’s call for Jewish Americans to observe a “national Sabbath” this weekend from Friday night to Saturday night —the traditional Jewish day of rest.
Government should not choose among religions, said Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, and Nathan Diament, executive director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. But that does not mean government cannot acknowledge and appreciate religious practice of all types.
“I think it’s very important that faith is celebrated as we begin celebrating 250,” Berman said.
Pamela Nadell, a historian of American Jewry, disagreed, saying she sees the Sabbath 250 event as a way to whitewash antisemitism “that’s been surging in the Republican Party.” She questioned why any secular U.S. leader should be urging religious observance.
Jenan Mohajir, a vice president with Interfaith America, said the overtly Christian focus of the jubilee ignores other religions, including some that were present at the founding of the nation.
“It creates a certain narrative that is being crafted around who belongs and who doesn’t and what it means to be American,” she said. “I think the picture is a little more complicated and complex, in beautiful ways.”
The post White House to host 9-hour prayer festival focused on Christian roots of U.S. appeared first on Washington Post.
