Controversy has dogged various activities for America’s 250th anniversary year. Even the sporting events chosen involved squabbling.
The linking of FIFA soccer to the 250th leads some to ask, “I thought we were Americans?” Others have charged that the UFC match “desecrates” the White House lawn. Ironically, many of these critics cheered, defended, or shut their mouths during the public monument iconoclasm of the early 2020s. Now the White House lawn is sacred?
The most controversial of the activities, however, are actually religious. The May 17 event on the National Mall titled “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving” drew criticism for its purported creeping “Christian Nationalism,” the ubiquitous bogeyman of the last decade. The charge never seems to surface when Democrats give sermons in black churches or during photo shoots of the “devout” Joe Biden entering Mass or posing before a stained-glass window, rosary wrapped around his hands.
The problem with Rededicate 250 was that it signaled the wrong kind of religion. CNN’s worried article on the event focused on the speakers, who were mostly Evangelical Protestants. The authors quoted legal scholar Douglas Laycock’s contention that the event was “flagrantly unconstitutional” because by it the government promoted “a fairly specific version of one particular religion.”
While there’s no doubt the event was tilted toward Evangelicalism, I’m not sure the rabbi and two Catholic bishops would confirm Laycock’s diagnosis that they were promoting one specific kind of religion. Readers might get the subtle impression that the theological problem for the critics lay elsewhere; CNN carefully labeled the bishops “conservative” and the rabbi “orthodox.”
If the Puritans, as Mencken (unfairly) put it, lived in the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere was happy,” too many modern journalists covering religion live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, actually believes that stuff.
To be fair, if CNN did indicate its own biases fairly obviously, it included a defense of the event by legal scholar Michael Moreland, who noted that events such as Rededicate 250 were in the strong tradition of prayers that begin congressional sessions, presidential inaugurations, and other events.
Americans do not want a state religion. But, from our beginnings, most have embraced the necessity of a religious populace. John Adams famously wrote in a 1798 letter about the need for Americans who actually believe that God stuff. He wrote that “we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.” Those passions, let loose, “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Though not thoroughly secularized as Europeans are, Americans have seen enough to think that boasts about morality not needing religion are hollow. Atheists and agnostics can lead a life guided (in some fashion) by the laws of nature’s God. But, how likely are they to do so when God is an afterthought at best?
Even the bedrock “thou shalt not murder” business seems to be less a commandment than a helpful hint to too many. 2025 YouGov polling showed that, statistically, more irreligious liberals are about six times more likely to approve of political violence and eight times more likely to approve of celebrating it than more religious conservatives.
RESTORING AMERICA — ‘A REPUBLIC IF YOU CAN KEEP IT’: AMERICA AT 250
Deeper than a prod to morality, however, the value of Americans who believe in God is found in their understanding — also similar to the founders’ — that a nation depends on prayer for its ultimate success. Despite the secular condescension toward “thoughts and prayers” as a poor substitute for (bureaucratic and legislative) action, Americans understand that thinking of God’s providence and begging for his mercy is the ideal context for any action. This past week’s consecration of the nation (including the White House lawn) to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Catholic bishops, and similar services in houses of worship across the country, may well be the most important thing happening in this anniversary year.
Thoughts and prayers? You bet. As it was in the beginning of this country, it is now, and, hopefully, ever after.
David P. Deavel (@davidpdeavel) teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative.