This year, many agency heads in the Trump administration sent out official Christmas messages that were explicitly religious rather than universal spiritual. So, for example, War Secretary Hegseth said, "Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."
This is just one more example of the Trump administration's distortion and perversion of the principles on which America was founded. (See my posts, "The Far Right's Biggest Lie," and "The Radical Right/MAGA Perspective Is Not True to the Intent of Our Founding Fathers," among others.)
America is not a Christian nation. The majority of the population may be Christian, both now and at the time of our founding, but the Founders made very clear in the Constitution that this was not to be a Christian nation.
First, although the Founders were religious people—note the wording in the Declaration of Independence that we are "endowed by our Creator" with unalienable rights—the Constitution makes absolutely no mention of God.
Second, what the Constitution does say in the 1st Amendment is that Congress shall make "no law respecting the establishment of religion," or prohibiting the free exercise of one's religion.
The Founders were aware of the suffering caused in Europe for centuries by state religions. That resulted in both people of other religions being persecuted and countries going to war over religious dominance. They were determined that the United States government not do anything that raised one religion to a higher status than the others and that no one be persecuted for or prohibited from practicing their religion.
In numerous ways, however, the Trump administration has embraced Christianity. To please his conservative Evangelical supporters, Trump created a repurposed White House Faith Office that seeks in many ways to end the separation of church and state and promotes misleading books such as "The Christian History of the Constitution" to ground its efforts. (See my post, "Trump Violates Freedom of Religion.") He has also embraced the conservative Christian agenda in many ways, most critically in building a Supreme Court that overruled Roe v Wade.
The reader may ask, "What's the problem? The religious wars in Europe were centuries ago. And we would still have freedom of religion even if Christianity were made part of the government's agenda."
Technically, even if Christianity were part of the government's agenda, there would still be freedom of religion under the 1st Amendment. However, if you look at what is labeled "persecution" by Christian media and Trump, you will see that no one has the right to criticize Christians when they act according to their belief.
According to MAGA, Christians have the right to do whatever their religion instructs, regardless of whether it interferes with another person practicing their religion or their right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." So, for example, a public baker has the right to refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding. A Christian who is slandered by someone exercising his right to free speech is being persecuted. And the list goes on.
The point is that with the MAGA perspective that it's only their rights that matter—they have no concern for the rights of others, no one can "unfairly" impinge on their rights—if Christian advocacy by government takes root, no one is safe in their practice of free speech or religion if it conflicts with Christian values/rights. (See my article, "The Far-Right's Biggest Lie.")
But there is another way in which the government's embrace of Christianity would have a chilling effect on freedom of religion. It is a natural desire of people to get ahead in their business/work/school endeavors. Often this has meant assimilating to become part of the majority; history is filled with businessmen, actors, performers, and others who have changed their names and even converted in order not to be stigmatized because of their religion. The psychological push to take this step is increased when there is a state religion, whether official or not, especially if anti-semitism is active.
For context, I should note that at the time of the revolution, 9 of the 13 colonies had official, established religions, a practice brought with them from the old country. The Founders made very clear, however, the importance they placed on the separation of state and church in the new government. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the 1st Amendment created a "wall of separation" between church and state. James Madison wrote that religion was beyond the government's authority. John Adams, in signing the Treaty of Tripoli, stated that the United States "is not in any way founded on the Christian Religion." Ultimately, all of the colonies accepted this new way forward by ratifying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments).
I am not a "religious" person but a very spiritual one, a practicing Buddhist who believes that each of us has within us the force of the Universe, the divine essence. It thus is not for the government to mandate for each individual what his spiritual beliefs are or aren't. And that each individual has the right to practice their religious/spiritual belief, so long as it does not impede the practice by another person of their religious/spiritual belief or any other right that they are guaranteed under our Constitution.
There must continue to be a wall of separation between church and state for the country's well-being. Given that the wall is in the process of being broken down, largely at the urging of evangelical denominations, what can people do to not just stop the process, but restore the separation?
The most one can do is make people aware that the Trump administration is not strengthening our freedom of religion—as he says he is—but instead is undermining that freedom by having the power of government favor the beliefs of one religious group—conservative Christians. By turning those beliefs into law (e.g., overruling Roe v Wade, eliminating LGBT protections, not recognizing gender identity issues), he has made "laws respecting the establishment of religion," and thereby restricted others from exercising their right to religious freedom and their right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Whatever happened to, "We are all children of God" and "God loves all his children?"
Trump's actions threaten the equality of all citizens, central to America's founding principles. (See my article, "What Are American Values?") He is threatening the diversity that our country has been built on.
How do you help make people aware? Go to religious and other organizations in your community and encourage them to have programs about this issue. Go to your local school board and encourage them to address this issue through school programs. Let your representatives in Congress know your feelings.
Since next year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this is a perfect time to advocate for these programs and hopefully persuade your fellow citizens and representatives to argue for the full restoration of the freedom of religion guaranteed by the 1st Amendment.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.