In another world with a better government in power, Americans might well have looked forward to an authentic celebration of the remarkable achievements of the American Revolution. In this world, under the Trump administration and the Republican rubber-stamp chorus in Congress, we are being asked to settle for a festival of corruption, lies, bigotry, and divisiveness.
The Trump Freedom 250 program is embedded with unvarnished Christian nationalist propaganda. It kicks off with a rally on the National Mall called Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, which bills itself as “part of the broader Freedom 250 initiative.” The event, hosted by a private foundation in partnership with the White House, has been described by proponents as “a major faith gathering” that will “bring together faith leaders, public servants, music, prayer, and testimony to honor God’s hand in America’s story.” In fact, it will bring together leaders and representatives of the narrow but powerful Christian nationalist groups dedicated to replacing American democracy with a (supposedly) Christian autocracy.
Key partners include hyperpolitical pastors like “Let Us Worship” founder Sean Feucht, church-planter and “stadium Christianity” leader Lou Engle, and the televangelist Jentezen Franklin, among other hard-line evangelical leaders. Other speakers include Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Crusader-tattooed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Apart from promising to scare up a handful of extremists from other faith traditions—a torture-defending rabbi is apparently on board—the White House is making little effort to disguise its Christian nationalist agenda. Paula White-Cain, senior faith adviser to the president, said the event “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.” She added, “This is really truly rededicating the country to God.”
It would be more accurate to say that Freedom 250 is fundamentally about rededicating the country to outright corruption. The historical ironies here are enough to burst eardrums. America’s Founders were extremely keen to avoid the kind of extractive and imperial system of government they saw in the British Empire. Trump’s Freedom 250 unapologetically aims to give monarchies of yore some competition. The Freedom 250 program diverts tens of millions in taxpayer funds to a nakedly sectarian and partisan festival. It then goes a step further by inviting corporate sponsors and foreign donors to pony up even more boodle for the show. Talk about moneylenders in the temple: For about $1 million, they can secure invitations to a reception with President Trump. Many, no doubt, are hoping that the money will put them on the administration’s good list—or at least keep them out of the doghouse.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump is also proposing to celebrate America’s 250th birthday by offering 250 pardons. What a triumph for the rule of law. The new pay-for-play freedom pardons will no doubt add to a list that includes the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Leaked audio reveals that Hernandez is presently acting as a field operator for the MAGA administration in Latin America, aiming to destabilize left-leaning leaders in Mexico and Colombia.
But there is a higher order of corruption at work here, not unlike that practiced by the remaining “clean” “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court. (I mean the ones who don’t accept free camper buses, school tuition, and luxury holidays from their conservative patrons.) This is where officers of the United States, even while paying lip service to the Constitution, flout their responsibilities and instead pervert our democratic system for power and aggrandizement. When a political leader directs government to reward a particular band of extremist supporters and disenfranchise the rest of the population, that is corruption, not democracy.
On this semiquincentennial, one might have hoped for some expressions of unity. America’s Founders, after all, prized unity almost too much. That is why they made so many compromises in their quest to create a United States of America. But Freedom 250, like everything Trumpian, is about dividing America, not uniting it. It’s there to tell us that there are “good” Americans and “bad” Americans. The good ones are Bible-believing Christians. The bad ones include media that reported accurately on the fiasco of the Iran war, for example; anyone who criticizes Dear Leader; and, of course, those who fail to adhere to the nation’s supposed founding faith.
America’s Founders understood that the surest way to divide the new nation would be to introduce a national religion into a country that was even then incredibly diverse in its mingling of faith traditions. They may have gotten some things wrong, but on this point they were absolutely correct. This is why Thomas Jefferson famously and correctly celebrated the First Amendment as a means of erecting a “wall of separation between church and state.” Trump and his movement now plan to celebrate the Founders’ achievement by demolishing that wall.
America’s Founders thought it vital to give their new democracy a certain kind of dignity. They rejected the aristocratic pretensions of the Old World but made a determined effort to show that a government of the people could also rise to worthy levels of cultural achievement. The Trump administration is giving us the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The same people who blather on about the glories of Western Civilization now promise to entertain us with the spectacle of bare-knuckled men punching one another in the face on the White House lawn.
We can be sure that the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters will deride critics of Freedom 250 as somehow anti-American. We should not let them get away with it. We should oppose this kind of squalid, divisive festival of grift, not because we despise America but because we continue to support the ideals upon which the nation was founded. Maybe the most American thing we can do in this sad and degenerate moment in history is to find a way to celebrate American principles of equality, pluralism, and justice—independent of this partisan rally, which the present malefactors in government are using to destroy democracy itself.
