President Trump’s recent announcement of the “America Prays” initiative is a mistake born of historical distortion. It presents the United States as a nation whose foundation rests upon Christian values, when in truth our nation was deliberately designed to reject religious authority over law using Enlightenment values of Classical Liberalism.

It is one thing for private citizens to pray in their homes or churches, or suggest that people should have good moral values, as George Washington said in the quote cited of him on the White House page. It is another for the head of state to declare that national identity itself is religious in nature. This claim is false and erases the very Enlightenment principles upon which our Republic was built, threatening to throw the USA into yet another unnecessary period of social strife and even violence as the mistakes of past theocratic Christian nations from history are repeated, even though the First Amendment was designed expressly to ensure this didn’t occur in America anymore (as it had previously, such as with the colonial witch hunting in Massachusetts) whereas this sort of thing is routine in other theocratic countries, such as the Middle Eastern nations where people are frequently killed over minor religious laws.

It is unfortunate that President Trump has chosen to look backward into the fog of religious nostalgia and that his advisors are poor historians. If he had better counsel perhaps he would see that the way forward for American prosperity is through Reason, Liberty and the cultivation of Virtue without superstition. A Republic is not sustained by prayers. It is sustained by citizens who choose Truth over delusion and Justice over tribalism. Even within Christianity there are hundreds of different denominations that disagree with one another about basic things, such as the precise language and meaning of the Ten Commandments. No one even agrees on how it should be translated into English. This most basic idea of the religion isn’t even universally agreed upon by all Christian denominations and is part of why it will always prevent Christianity from becoming a useful tool for a state to create solidarity, because Christianity lacks solidarity to start with. Indeed, there are very progressive modern forms of Christianity that promote the very kind of Wokeism that Trump wishes to combat with his initiative, so it’s impossible to simply say you can use Christianity to combat Wokeism because Wokeism is a Marxist political ideology that people can infuse into Christianity, as has been done for decades with all forms of Marxism into all kinds of things. There is no means by which the US can endorse one view of Christianity over another without desecrating the First Amendment to do so and will permit Marxist Woke forms of Christianity to also self-justify their existence in the laws of states. The very prayer in schools initiative Trump wishes to compel through the Department of Education will simply be used by these Woke Christian variants to push more Wokeism in the schools.

As such, this is a dangerous and ill-advised path that President Trump is taking his administration on, and in my view, is an unnecessary distraction from solving the real societal issues plaguing the country. It is all very well and good to give states more control over their public education and to permit parents to have more control over the quality of education their children have and what values they learn. It is a separate matter for the White House to suggest America’s social issues can only be solved by eroding the power of the First Amendment, to sacrifice this most sacred of laws in the short-signed hope that it might counter a political ideological trend (Wokeism) that is already on the decline because it too is rooted in pseudo-history and pseudo-sciences.

Trump cites the Declaration of Independence as proof that America is founded on religion, pointing to its invocation of a “Creator.” But this argument collapses under scrutiny. The Declaration was not a founding charter of government; it was a breakup letter to the British Crown, authored by a Continental Congress governmental body that was completely dissolved after the Revolutionary War and purposefully replaced by the incorporation of a new government body, United States of America (there is even another government body between the Continental Congress and the United States of America, the Confederation). That is to say, when American independence was secured, the Continental Congress was dissolved and all decisions made by it null and void in legal precedence, fully replaced by the US Constitution. You therefore cannot cite the documents of the prior temporary government to define that of the permanent one established by the same people decades later, after they had accumulated more wisdom in how to best structure a country for long term prosperity.

The true beginning of the United States as a government came in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, debated and ratified by delegates of all the original thirteen colonies. The Constitution is therefore our first and only founding document, and it contains no mention of God, Christ or any other divine authority. Instead, it begins with “We the People,” grounding sovereignty not in heaven but in the hands of citizens. Its language expressly prohibits the government from promoting or hindering religious freedom, to include the prohibition of requiring politicians to take religious oaths of office. The US Constitution is a secular document that takes no position on the subject of religion other than that private citizens shall not be hindered in their practice of their faith and that the government shall not promote any religious views.

This was no oversight. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights were written to exclude religion from matters of state as a deliberate decision by men influenced by the Enlightenment, who understood from centuries of European bloodshed that faith-based politics breed endless strife. The entire foundation of the Enlightenment was a response to the hundreds of years of religious persecution and conflict between different Protestant factions and Catholics. The Enlightenment values of the US Constitution requiring that the government take no position on matters of religion, and that the courts must conduct trials rooted only in the facts was expressly designed to stop all of the madness that plagued Western history — everything from the witch trials that led hysterical neighbors to hang and burn each other to death, to political factions assassinating one another for differing religious views on the same core religion. in short, the kinds of barbarianism which occurs in Islamic theocratic states doesn’t happen in the United States expressly because the US is not a Christian nation. This kind of barbarianism was commonplace in pre-Enlightenment era Christian nations up until the 18th century.

But you do not have to take my word for it that the founders of the United States did not view the US as a nation founded in Christianity; if Trump and his advisors advisors had read further into the historical record, they would find the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified in 1797 under President John Adams, which clearly stated: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”. Nearly every signer of the Constitution approved that treaty, and several who signed the Declaration of Independence, including then President John Adams, signed this declaration that the US was not a Christian nation.

This is not marginal evidence; it is explicit testimony by the founders themselves about the nature of the nation they built and how they viewed it. For the current President to ignore this is careless and indeed, even dangerous as it attempts to create a pseudo-history about the country.

Of course, over time this intention of a secular nation by the founders has been chipped away at by latter generations of politicians, such as in 1954 when Congress and President Eisenhower inserted the line “One nation under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, despite that it violated Article VI, Clause 3 of the US Constitution which clearly states religious tests in government oaths and pledges are prohibited, and other efforts by Christian nationalists to use the power of their offices to promote their personal religions under the guise of so-called “Ceremonial Deism” (a nonsensical concept in American law given that Presidents and politicians of the time may have used religious references in their speeches but they did not pass religious laws, and indeed the Constitution they drafted expressly prohibited them from doing so) yet these intrusions onto American secularism fly in the direct face of what the founders of our nation intended and which has permitted it to be prosperous without the conflicts of past Western nations. A model which other Western nations around the world used when drafting their own Constitutions.

The problem with “America Prays” is not merely its inaccuracy, but its implication. To tell Americans their nation is inherently Christian is to tell American citizens who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Atheists that they are strangers in their own land. It recasts pluralism as trespass. It transforms the state into a pulpit. This corrodes Liberty, undermines Justice and substitutes Reason for superstitions.

Trump has positioned this initiative as patriotic, yet a truly patriotic leader must resist the temptation to favor his own religious beliefs over that of the values of the country itself. It is understandable that given the attempted assassinations against him that he would turn to his religious faith to find strength to stand before crowds again but many people have narrowly avoided brushes with certain death, myself included. It does not mean there is some divine master plan at hand and that Trump need take on the wishes of Christian nationalists to strip America of the First Amendment so they can create their imagined utopia that is inevitably doomed, as every past attempt to use Christianity to create theocracy resulted in tremendous unnecessary bloodshed, ranging from the Crusader states of the Middle Ages to the Spanish Inquisition to the English Civil War.

As I pointed out in my prior essay, The Fallacy of Cultural Christianity: A Rebuttal to Niall Ferguson, the history of Christianity in government has been a bloody one because different Christian denominations do not agree on what Christianity is supposed to be and react violently when legally compelled to favor one specific interpretation. There is no singular, one true vision for the Christian religion and history has proven that all efforts by a state to unify contrasting views leads to violence. This is why the founders of the United States outlawed state sponsored religion and it is why it is the sacred duty of all Americans, but most especially the President, to ensure such a thing never comes to pass here. The peace and prosperity of the American people depend upon the First Amendment to be untarnished.

It is understandable that many Christians want to use their religious beliefs to combat other ideologies like Wokeism and such, but the problem with the implementation at the state level is that while Wokeism has many pseudo-religious features (most noticeably in how it promotes hysteria and zealotry in its adopters) it ultimately is not a religion. You cannot use a religion to fight a political ideology without that religion therefore becoming political as well. It is therefore impossible for Christian politicians to use their religion in this way that would not violate the First Amendment and other parts of the US Constitution that are essential to our prosperity as a nation.

The way to combat political ideologies is with another better political ideology, and the particular ideology that combats Wokeism already is promoted by the US Constitution; Classical Liberalism, and the secular humanitas values written into the Constitution by the founders which guided their penmanship, these values being Liberty, Justice, Accountability, Prudence, Tolerance, Moderation, Dignity, Solidarity, Fortitude, Societal Progress and Patriotism. These are the genuine traditional values of America and they are universal to all of its people; one need not be religious to adopt them, and any true democratic Republic that has prosperity is one whose people holds such values close in their hearts. The White House need only promote Classical Liberal values to combat Marxist Wokeism; Christianity is not required.

The survival of our Republic depends on citizens who have the fortitude to distinguish facts from fantasies, and not distort the real origins of America to suit their present political situations. Our survival also requires leaders who remember that government is not ordained by heaven but authorized by ballots of the People. The Founders entrusted us with a secular Constitution because they understood that Truth must govern nations, not myths no one can agree on the interpretations about.

President Trump’s recent announcement of the “America Prays” initiative is a mistake born of historical distortion. It presents the United States as a nation whose foundation rests upon Christian values, when in truth our nation was deliberately designed to reject religious authority over law using Enlightenment values of Classical Liberalism.

It is one thing for private citizens to pray in their homes or churches, or suggest that people should have good moral values, as George Washington said in the quote cited of him on the White House page. It is another for the head of state to declare that national identity itself is religious in nature. This claim is false and erases the very Enlightenment principles upon which our Republic was built, threatening to throw the USA into yet another unnecessary period of social strife and even violence as the mistakes of past theocratic Christian nations from history are repeated, even though the First Amendment was designed expressly to ensure this didn’t occur in America anymore (as it had previously, such as with the colonial witch hunting in Massachusetts) whereas this sort of thing is routine in other theocratic countries, such as the Middle Eastern nations where people are frequently killed over minor religious laws.

It is unfortunate that President Trump has chosen to look backward into the fog of religious nostalgia and that his advisors are poor historians. If he had better counsel perhaps he would see that the way forward for American prosperity is through Reason, Liberty and the cultivation of Virtue without superstition. A Republic is not sustained by prayers. It is sustained by citizens who choose Truth over delusion and Justice over tribalism. Even within Christianity there are hundreds of different denominations that disagree with one another about basic things, such as the precise language and meaning of the Ten Commandments. No one even agrees on how it should be translated into English. This most basic idea of the religion isn’t even universally agreed upon by all Christian denominations and is part of why it will always prevent Christianity from becoming a useful tool for a state to create solidarity, because Christianity lacks solidarity to start with. Indeed, there are very progressive modern forms of Christianity that promote the very kind of Wokeism that Trump wishes to combat with his initiative, so it’s impossible to simply say you can use Christianity to combat Wokeism because Wokeism is a Marxist political ideology that people can infuse into Christianity, as has been done for decades with all forms of Marxism into all kinds of things. There is no means by which the US can endorse one view of Christianity over another without desecrating the First Amendment to do so and will permit Marxist Woke forms of Christianity to also self-justify their existence in the laws of states. The very prayer in schools initiative Trump wishes to compel through the Department of Education will simply be used by these Woke Christian variants to push more Wokeism in the schools.

As such, this is a dangerous and ill-advised path that President Trump is taking his administration on, and in my view, is an unnecessary distraction from solving the real societal issues plaguing the country. It is all very well and good to give states more control over their public education and to permit parents to have more control over the quality of education their children have and what values they learn. It is a separate matter for the White House to suggest America’s social issues can only be solved by eroding the power of the First Amendment, to sacrifice this most sacred of laws in the short-signed hope that it might counter a political ideological trend (Wokeism) that is already on the decline because it too is rooted in pseudo-history and pseudo-sciences.

Trump cites the Declaration of Independence as proof that America is founded on religion, pointing to its invocation of a “Creator.” But this argument collapses under scrutiny. The Declaration was not a founding charter of government; it was a breakup letter to the British Crown, authored by a Continental Congress governmental body that was completely dissolved after the Revolutionary War and purposefully replaced by the incorporation of a new government body, United States of America (there is even another government body between the Continental Congress and the United States of America, the Confederation). That is to say, when American independence was secured, the Continental Congress was dissolved and all decisions made by it null and void in legal precedence, fully replaced by the US Constitution. You therefore cannot cite the documents of the prior temporary government to define that of the permanent one established by the same people decades later, after they had accumulated more wisdom in how to best structure a country for long term prosperity.

The true beginning of the United States as a government came in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, debated and ratified by delegates of all the original thirteen colonies. The Constitution is therefore our first and only founding document, and it contains no mention of God, Christ or any other divine authority. Instead, it begins with “We the People,” grounding sovereignty not in heaven but in the hands of citizens. Its language expressly prohibits the government from promoting or hindering religious freedom, to include the prohibition of requiring politicians to take religious oaths of office. The US Constitution is a secular document that takes no position on the subject of religion other than that private citizens shall not be hindered in their practice of their faith and that the government shall not promote any religious views.

This was no oversight. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights were written to exclude religion from matters of state as a deliberate decision by men influenced by the Enlightenment, who understood from centuries of European bloodshed that faith-based politics breed endless strife. The entire foundation of the Enlightenment was a response to the hundreds of years of religious persecution and conflict between different Protestant factions and Catholics. The Enlightenment values of the US Constitution requiring that the government take no position on matters of religion, and that the courts must conduct trials rooted only in the facts was expressly designed to stop all of the madness that plagued Western history — everything from the witch trials that led hysterical neighbors to hang and burn each other to death, to political factions assassinating one another for differing religious views on the same core religion. in short, the kinds of barbarianism which occurs in Islamic theocratic states doesn’t happen in the United States expressly because the US is not a Christian nation. This kind of barbarianism was commonplace in pre-Enlightenment era Christian nations up until the 18th century.

But you do not have to take my word for it that the founders of the United States did not view the US as a nation founded in Christianity; if Trump and his advisors advisors had read further into the historical record, they would find the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified in 1797 under President John Adams, which clearly stated: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”. Nearly every signer of the Constitution approved that treaty, and several who signed the Declaration of Independence, including then President John Adams, signed this declaration that the US was not a Christian nation.

This is not marginal evidence; it is explicit testimony by the founders themselves about the nature of the nation they built and how they viewed it. For the current President to ignore this is careless and indeed, even dangerous as it attempts to create a pseudo-history about the country.

Of course, over time this intention of a secular nation by the founders has been chipped away at by latter generations of politicians, such as in 1954 when Congress and President Eisenhower inserted the line “One nation under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, despite that it violated Article VI, Clause 3 of the US Constitution which clearly states religious tests in government oaths and pledges are prohibited, and other efforts by Christian nationalists to use the power of their offices to promote their personal religions under the guise of so-called “Ceremonial Deism” (a nonsensical concept in American law given that Presidents and politicians of the time may have used religious references in their speeches but they did not pass religious laws, and indeed the Constitution they drafted expressly prohibited them from doing so) yet these intrusions onto American secularism fly in the direct face of what the founders of our nation intended and which has permitted it to be prosperous without the conflicts of past Western nations. A model which other Western nations around the world used when drafting their own Constitutions.

The problem with “America Prays” is not merely its inaccuracy, but its implication. To tell Americans their nation is inherently Christian is to tell American citizens who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Atheists that they are strangers in their own land. It recasts pluralism as trespass. It transforms the state into a pulpit. This corrodes Liberty, undermines Justice and substitutes Reason for superstitions.

Trump has positioned this initiative as patriotic, yet a truly patriotic leader must resist the temptation to favor his own religious beliefs over that of the values of the country itself. It is understandable that given the attempted assassinations against him that he would turn to his religious faith to find strength to stand before crowds again but many people have narrowly avoided brushes with certain death, myself included. It does not mean there is some divine master plan at hand and that Trump need take on the wishes of Christian nationalists to strip America of the First Amendment so they can create their imagined utopia that is inevitably doomed, as every past attempt to use Christianity to create theocracy resulted in tremendous unnecessary bloodshed, ranging from the Crusader states of the Middle Ages to the Spanish Inquisition to the English Civil War.

As I pointed out in my prior essay, The Fallacy of Cultural Christianity: A Rebuttal to Niall Ferguson, the history of Christianity in government has been a bloody one because different Christian denominations do not agree on what Christianity is supposed to be and react violently when legally compelled to favor one specific interpretation. There is no singular, one true vision for the Christian religion and history has proven that all efforts by a state to unify contrasting views leads to violence. This is why the founders of the United States outlawed state sponsored religion and it is why it is the sacred duty of all Americans, but most especially the President, to ensure such a thing never comes to pass here. The peace and prosperity of the American people depend upon the First Amendment to be untarnished.

It is understandable that many Christians want to use their religious beliefs to combat other ideologies like Wokeism and such, but the problem with the implementation at the state level is that while Wokeism has many pseudo-religious features (most noticeably in how it promotes hysteria and zealotry in its adopters) it ultimately is not a religion. You cannot use a religion to fight a political ideology without that religion therefore becoming political as well. It is therefore impossible for Christian politicians to use their religion in this way that would not violate the First Amendment and other parts of the US Constitution that are essential to our prosperity as a nation.

The way to combat political ideologies is with another better political ideology, and the particular ideology that combats Wokeism already is promoted by the US Constitution; Classical Liberalism, and the secular humanitas values written into the Constitution by the founders which guided their penmanship, these values being Liberty, Justice, Accountability, Prudence, Tolerance, Moderation, Dignity, Solidarity, Fortitude, Societal Progress and Patriotism. These are the genuine traditional values of America and they are universal to all of its people; one need not be religious to adopt them, and any true democratic Republic that has prosperity is one whose people holds such values close in their hearts. The White House need only promote Classical Liberal values to combat Marxist Wokeism; Christianity is not required.

The survival of our Republic depends on citizens who have the fortitude to distinguish facts from fantasies, and not distort the real origins of America to suit their present political situations. Our survival also requires leaders who remember that government is not ordained by heaven but authorized by ballots of the People. The Founders entrusted us with a secular Constitution because they understood that Truth must govern nations, not myths no one can agree on the interpretations about.