As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.
Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. His agenda is information-averse: Sure, he includes some snippets of texts and historical facts. But he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.
Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.
Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”
The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, declares “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” According to Hall, this somehow proves that Mason never wanted to separate church and state. In fact, the point of the Declaration was to do precisely that. Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.
Sure enough, by the time we arrive at the photomontage with which the video culminates, we are treated to an engraving, based on the 1866 painting by Henry Brueckner, of George Washington that shows him kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge. The alleged Valley Forge epiphany has been repeatedly debunked ever since it was invented, including by the Valley Forge Park Commission, which concluded in 1918, after a comprehensive investigation that included analysis of thousands of pages of correspondence and diaries of Washington and his staff, along with those of other officials and personnel who were at the military camp, that “in none of these were found a single paragraph that will substantiate the tradition of the ‘Prayer at Valley Forge.’” In fact, Washington was infamous among the ministers of his time for pointedly refusing to kneel in church. But as with the Christian nationalist movement’s elevation of the work of revisionist historian David Barton, the myths, contradictions, and deliberate decontextualizations are too valuable to reject simply because they are not true.
This is hardly surprising, given that Mark David Hall serves on the advisory board of lay leaders on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which was established in May 2025 by executive order. The interests of the commission, which is largely comprised of conservative Christians, appears to conform to the agenda of the Christian nationalist movement, whose leaders have played a pivotal role in putting Trump in office. Its chair has called for a federal hotline with an automated recording: “There is no separation of church and state.” Another member pressed for giving a presidential medal to the baker who declined to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Many members of the commission, along with those on its advisory boards, are frequently featured at right-wing and Christian nationalist conferences and gatherings, such as Road to Majority, Pray Vote Stand, CPAC, NatCon, and the National Pro-Life Summit.
In its public-facing media, the commission does address several incidents of genuine religious persecution. But other action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.
Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.
Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.
