You may have missed it but Jesus showed up on the National Mall last week for “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” a day-long event of Christian music and mostly evangelical Christian speakers. The stated goal was to rededicate the United States of America as ‘One Nation, Under God.” House Speaker Mike Johnson took it upon himself to say they accomplished that goal there on the Mall on Sunday. No one really explained when America was officially dedicated as One Nation Under God the first time, or when or why that dedication had worn off.
As for Jesus, he came by our counterprotest which was also on the Mall and featured an inflated Donald Trump golden calf. As a reminder, the golden calf was the idol the faithless Israelites created to worship while Moses was up in the mountains getting the Ten Commandments so they could be displayed in Texas school rooms a few thousand years later. Armed with a bullhorn and a few good jokes, Jesus spoke truth to power, meaning to our golden calf, and moved on down the Mall to the main event.
We worked with our coalition member the Freedom from Religion Foundation and with Faithful America to get the calf onto the Mall. We didn’t know for sure that we would even get a permit from the National Park Service until two days out so we didn’t have a formal program, but we all brought our own crowd of supporters. Plenty of people walking by stopped for pictures as well.
The Rededicate 250 event featured videos from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. President Trump was so invested in this event that his video was just a replay of a video he did several weeks earlier for a “people read every verse in the Bible” event. The President actually spent the afternoon playing golf at his course out in Virginia. The shepherd hit the links while his sheep, many in Trump attire, hit the Mall.
The Rededicate 250 event was part of the year-long celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The general theme among the numerous speakers was to reinforce the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. Even though no one wrote that down 250 years ago. We were happy to present the opposite view to people who dropped by the golden calf wondering what was going on.
Regular readers may have noticed that I’m a fan of historical events disproving the “founded as a Christian nation” theory. (See the Treaty of Tripoli.) The latest example I ran across comes from Ben Franklin. He was a noted deist, not a Christian. In 1787, after weeks of little progress on drafting the Constitution, Franklin suggested in a speech that the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention start opening their meetings with a prayer.
Maybe Franklin thought a prayer would motivate the Christians in the group to make some compromises and some progress. There was, however, not much support among this collection of the nation’s founders for a prayer. In his notes at the bottom of the speech he wrote, ‘The Convention, except three or four persons, thought Prayers unnecessary.’
So there you have it from the 55 most influential people in the new country who were setting up the new government; “An opening prayer? Nah, we’re good.”
The post Heretic on the Hill: A National Prayer Service in DC Gets Golden Idol-ed appeared first on Secular Coalition for America.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.