Thousands of people streamed on to the National Mall for a daylong prayer rally on Sunday billed as a “rededication of our country as One Nation Under God”.
Against the backdrop of the Washington Monument, worship music blared from a stage that made clear the event’s Christian focus. Arched stained-glass windows, set underneath grand columns resembling a federal building, depicted the nation’s founders alongside a white cross.
“America is done with God, and God is not done with America,” said Pastor Samuel Rodriguez.
The White House-backed event has drawn broad criticism for blurring the lines between church and state, as prominent Republican officials appeared to speak alongside a slate of mostly evangelical speakers.
Only one name on the Rededicate 250 program, Orthodox rabbi Meir Soloveichik, was not Christian. Most were among Trump’s longtime evangelical supporters, including Paula White-Cain of the White House faith office and evangelist Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse.
“We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom,” said the Rev Adam Russell Taylor, a Baptist minister who leads the progressive Christian organization Sojourners.
Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, drew cheers from the crowd as he walked up to the microphone and shouted: “Are you a believer in Jesus?”
The organizers showed a video of Donald Trump reading from the Old Testament. The video was recorded last month for a separate event called “America Reads the Bible”.
The passage Trump read, from the seventh chapter of 2 Chronicles, has often been quoted by partisans of the view that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land,” one line of the passage reads.
In a video message, defense secretary Pete Hegseth recounted the legend of George Washington “praying without ceasing” in Pennsylvania as his troops faced starvation.
“Let us pray as he did,” Hegseth said. “Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray for our nation on bended knee.”
Mike Johnson, the Republican US House speaker, alluded to the Republican cultural war against critical interpretations of the country’s history in his comments.
“In recent years we’ve seen sinister ideologies sow confusion and discord among our people,” Johnson said. “We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation. These voices insist to the young and impressionable that our story, the American story, is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins.”
“Father, we reject that,” Johnson added. “We rebuke it in your name.”
Officials expected some 15,000 people to attend, according to the Washington Post.
Progressive groups staged counterprogramming. Among them were the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which advocates a strict separation of church and state, and the Christian organization Faithful America. The two groups displayed a large balloon near the mall of a Trump-like golden calf, in a biblical reference to idolatry.
On Thursday evening, the Interfaith Alliance projected protest slogans onto an exterior wall of the National Gallery of Art. “Democracy not theocracy,” said one. Another said: “The separation of church and state is good for both.”
More than one-quarter of Americans identify as either atheist, agnostic or religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center.
