On America’s 250th birthday, let’s celebrate the separation of church and state

This piece is part of “America in the balance: the fight for our history and future,” a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

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Standing on the National Mall for the “Rededicate 250” worship service in May, House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a prayer that cast the United States as a Christian nation. Johnson claimed in his prayer that God directed the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence to do so, and he called the United States “a place of miracles” and “the light and the glory of all nations.” He then declared that he and the crowd did “hereby rededicate America as one nation under God.”

Neither Johnson nor anybody else can rededicate this nation to God because, by design, it was never dedicated to God in the first place. But he and like-minded Christian nationalists are trying at this moment to redefine what happened on July 4, 1776, and to mold the nation into something our founders did not intend it to be. Thus, during these semiquincentennial celebrations, we have seen them push the myth that the American experiment was sectarian.

We’re told George Washington prayed on bended knee in the snow at Valley Forge. But not only did someone make up that story after Washington died, the original 1808 version of the tale fomented religious bigotry against Quakers by suggesting they were unpatriotic and unchristian for remaining pacifists. We’re told that patriotic clergy members formed a “Black Robe Regiment” during the Revolutionary War to march into battle. But that’s a modern yarn about as accurate as Paul Bunyan creating Minnesota’s lakes with Babe the Blue Ox. We’re told that prayer “saved” the Constitutional Convention in 1787 after Ben Franklin urged it. But the delegates overwhelmingly rejected the call for official prayer as they hashed out the details of the Constitution with dialogue and debate.

From the “Rededicate 250” rally on the National Mall to worship services at the Pentagon to social media posts by federal agencies about the founders and Christianity, the Trump administration continues to amplify fake Christian nationalist history. State legislators in Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Missouri and elsewhere have pushed bills that would mandate the teaching of some of these Christian nationalist myths in public schools. And some states are mandating the posting of a highly edited version of the Ten Commandments that ignores the religious liberty rights of students, parents and teachers. That also sends a message to students with different beliefs that they are second-class citizens in their own schools.

Additionally, in many churches across the country, people will wave the American flag and sing songs about the nation during Sunday services this week, as if the Bible declares this land to be the world’s most blessed and godly nation. I’ve looked, and that idea of the United States being God’s favorite is not even in “Two Corinthians.” But as such church services demonstrate, Christian nationalism fuses and confuses American and Christian identities to the point of transforming the nation into an idol.