White House hosts Christian prayer rally
Thousands gathered at the National Mall for a religious-political celebration
What happened
Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall Sunday for a daylong religious-political celebration backed by the White House with public and private funds. The “Rededicate 250” rally was billed as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”
Top Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers addressed the crowd, in person or via video, and the “long list of faith leaders who attended consisted largely of evangelical Christians — except for one Orthodox rabbi and two conservative Catholic bishops,” CNN said. The “Christian focus” was clear from the “worship music,” The Associated Press said, and a stage that “depicted the nation’s founders alongside a white cross” inside “arched stained-glass windows.”
Who said what
Sunday’s gathering was the “most visible example yet” of the Trump administration “elevating evangelical Christianity inside the White House and across federal institutions,” The Wall Street Journal said. “Attendees in MAGA hats and cross necklaces” said they felt affirmed. The mix of “Christian prayer and political fervor,” said The New York Times, aimed to “crystallize the narrative that the nation’s founding was an intentionally Christian project,” despite America’s “bedrock principle” of church-state separation.
What next?
Sunday’s event was the first of several this year organized by Freedom 250, a White House-backed public-private nonprofit that Democrats call an “end run around a separate commission charted by Congress a decade ago to prepare semiquincentennial events,” the AP said.
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