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On July 4, we will celebrate American independence from kings who ruled over both church and state. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders of this country put forward a bold and radical idea: that religious freedom is safest when the government neither controls religion nor is controlled by it.
The founders were not perfect; at the nation’s founding, freedom belonged only to white men. But they pioneered the promise of a country where the government is of, by, and for the people—and understood the vital role that church-state separation played in that experiment.
Now, President Donald Trump is doing his best to turn us back to the time of religious kings. We have seen escalating warning signs, including Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, prayer services at the Pentagon, and cabinet secretaries abusing government channels to sermonize to their employees and the public.
On May 17, an all-day government-sponsored evangelical prayer event took place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where the speakers, nearly all of them Christian, dedicated the country to God. The event included video appearances by Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and in-person remarks by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Hegseth urged attendees to pray to “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
These are signs of the growing power of Christian nationalism in our government, a crusade that won’t rest until it has achieved its goal of establishing the United States as a country for only certain favored Christians.
But Christian nationalism is incompatible with the American experiment. Our founders knew well the horrors of religious wars and persecution; they understood that church-state separation was key to our new democracy.
Christian nationalists often point to the Declaration of Independence’s references to the divine to support the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation. But when it came to establishing the legal framework for their new government, the framers were clear. The government derives its “just powers” from “the consent of the governed,” not from any king, clergy, or higher power.
The Constitution contains no mention of God and separates religion from the state. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the forerunner to the First Amendment, declared that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry.”
Last year, a former member of Trump’s so-called “Religious Liberty Commission” quoted John Jay’s private letter suggesting Americans might “prefer Christians for their rulers.” But Article VI of the Constitution bans religious tests for office. The Constitution protects a democracy in which citizens of every religion and those with no religion have an equal voice. That’s why we get to choose representatives who mirror our nation’s religious diversity. Among our elected lawmakers, we have Christians of many denominations, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Humanists.
Church-state separation guarantees a government “for the people”—for all people, regardless of religion. Thomas Jefferson lauded the religious freedom protections in his Virginia religious freedom law for protecting “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in striking down school-organized prayer at a public school graduation in 1992, explained it well: “The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to free government” because when “the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion, it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs.”
When politicians favor a certain version of Christianity, the government is not working for religious minorities like me (a Jewish American) or the nonreligious. It also isn’t working for the many Christians who value their neighbors’ religious freedom and understand that church-state separation protects them, too. Separating religion and government allows us to come together as equals to build a stronger democracy.
In the Gettysburg Address—another pivotal moment for U.S. democracy—President Abraham Lincoln reflected on the founding story of America and predicted that “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” If we use this Independence Day to recommit to church-state separation, we can safeguard the American experiment for the next 250 years and beyond.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.