What Is There to Rededicate?

Does America have a divine covenant to renew? Or is the Church is led by a Lamb worthy of worship that no nation can claim?

The dedication of Solomon’s Temple, Jan Luyken, 1703 - 1762, via thetorah.com

I’ve been doing some honest digging the last few weeks. Started with a phone call from a friend. He was invited to lead worship at a rally on the National Mall: Rededicate250. Eight hours of prayer, preaching, and singing popular worship choruses, framed as a rededication of America to God in honor of the country’s 250th birthday. Pastors and politicians, the president among them, would give speeches to a faith-filled crowd and a global online audience.

My friend was torn. He sees the political coopting of religious songs and symbols as an obvious problem. He believes Christ will not be pressed into the service of any rival powers. On the other hand, he’s convinced the gospel belongs on every platform that will have it, and that the name of the crucified and risen Christ is not diminished by the room it’s sung in.

So my friend asked for my advice. We talked for a while. He ended up taking the gig, and posting an open letter to his networks before the event: an acknowledgment of the divided moment, a stated intention to bring the gospel to any platform that didn’t control his speech, in the spirit of public churchmen such as Billy Graham and Rick Warren as precedents. Many of his friends thanked him for it. Some were offended.

My goal here isn’t to litigate whether my friend made the right call. What I’m more curious about:

Why is an eight-hour rally on the National Mall, led by a sitting president, even legible as Christian worship in the first place? Where did we get the idea that rededicating America to God is a coherent spiritual act… that there is an America with a divine covenant to renew? A founding promise to return to?

Is there a Christian identity buried somewhere beneath those amber waves of grain that the right kind of revival could uncover?

That story has a history.

---

Most American Christians (including me) inherited a story that goes something like this: The US was founded by people of deep Christian conviction. They built its laws and institutions on biblical principles. They would be grieved to see how far we’ve drifted. The work of faithful Christians today is to call America back to what it once was. To rededicate it.

The story is so familiar it feels like memory.
But what if it’s not?
What if it’s really just that: a story, with it’s own history worth knowing?

First, it’s important to acknowledge the tension here:

Indeed there was, at the beginning, a Puritan inheritance. I remember learning about John Winthrop in my private Christian school history classes. On board the Arbella in 1630, Winthrop told his fellow settlers they would be like a “city on a hill.” That’s divine covenant language at Massachusetts Bay. A genuine Reformed Protestant vision of a new Israel planted in the wilderness.

These are real rhetorical starting points for the Christian nation story.
It’s where the modern ‘rededicate’ language gets its emotional weight.

But Winthrop was describing a colony. Not a nation.

He was describing one specific Reformed Protestant community. This seems honest and important to acknowledge. His rhetoric and vision was not shared by the Anglicans of Virginia, or the Catholics of Maryland, or the Quakers of Pennsylvania, or anyone else who occupied the other twelve colonies.

Which explains why… when the framers sat down 150 years later to write the founding documents of a nation, they very consciously did not repeat Winthrop’s language. The US Constitution names no god.

And then the First Amendment establishes non-establishment of any religion.

And then the Treaty of Tripoli, agreed upon unanimously by the US Senate in 1797, states plainly that the government of the United States “is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”¹

The more I read, the harder it became to square the Puritan inheritance I’d been taught with what I found in the actual founding documents.

And people seemed to understand this at the time.
In fact, it bothered some people enough to try to fix it.

In January of 1864, in Allegheny Pennsylvania, representatives from eleven Christian denominations met to form what would become the National Reform Association. Their argument: the Civil War was God’s judgment on a Constitution that had failed to acknowledge Him. Their proposed solution: to amend the preamble so that “We the people of the United States” would instead read as people who acknowledge “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government.”² They sent a delegation to Lincoln. They lobbied Congress for over a decade. The amendment never passed. It didn’t even come close. In 1892 the Supreme Court offered an offhand line in Holy Trinity v. United States … “this is a Christian nation”… which was not a binding part of the decision, but would be quoted forever after as if it were.

I assumed for most of my life, if anyone had tried to make America officially Christian, it would have been the Founders. I was wrong. The serious attempt didn’t come until the Civil War. And it failed.

The version that succeeded came later, from a place I didn’t expect: corporate America in the 1930s.

This is where Kevin Kruse’s work is so clarifying.³ He traces the modern American idea of a “Christian nation” not to the Puritans or the Founders or even the nineteenth-century reformers, but to businessmen who hated FDR’s New Deal (get your laws off our big money, FDR!). The richest 0.01%-ers convinced American pastors to preach against the New Deal as a kind of godless slavery, and to frame free markets as a kind of spiritual freedom. Corporate America intentionally manipulated preachers to spread their anti-FDR campaign into the hearts of America. This culminated in the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The Eisenhower years are when the “Christian nation” software (which many assume is original American programming) was actually installed at scale. Granted, some of the pieces were older. “In God We Trust” had first appeared on a two-cent coin during the Civil War, in the same years that produced the failed Christian Amendment. But it was a selectively-used inscription, never the national motto, until the 1950s gathered the loose pieces into a single coordinated package. The National Prayer Breakfast was inaugurated in 1953. “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. And in 1956, “In God We Trust” was made the official motto of the United States, replacing E Pluribus Unum, and stamped onto paper currency for the first time the following year. Most Americans, when asked when these phrases permeated our civic life, might guess Washington or Lincoln ( I would have!). But the answer is Eisenhower. The phrases many assume are most ancient are among the most recent.⁴

From there, it was a popularization snowball effect. Through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, a network of authors and schoolbook publishers (David Barton and Wallbuilders chief among them… and yes, that was my private elementary “history” textbook for sure!) flooded the homeschool and private-school curriculum world with a version of American history that basically painted all the Founders as evangelical Christians, the Constitution as a Christian document, and the separation of church and state as modern fiction. Professional historians, including evangelical historians like Warren Throckmorton and John Fea of Messiah University, have documented in detail the many fabricated, decontextualized, and misattributed quotations on which Barton’s version rests. But his version traveled fast anyway. Because it traveled through the channels that formed American Christian conviction most deeply: the family, the Christian school, and the church.

And it seems to me, that conviction lingers on, strongly. This year alone, the country’s 250th has been stamped onto a worship rally rededicating the nation to God on the National Mall, and onto UFC Freedom 250, a championship cage-fighting card staged on the south lawn of the White House, scheduled for the president’s eightieth birthday, with fighters weighing in at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. You can’t make this up. Worship choruses and title belts, the same sacred “250” on both, and nobody involved seems to find it strange. That’s how civil religion works. From the inside it never feels like idolatry. It feels like patriotism and celebration and blessing.

So, fair question: was any of it ever true? Well, it seems the Puritans really did believe that older language. So did the abolitionists. And Reformers across two centuries have thought God bound himself to this land. But the package most of us were handed in American evangelical schools and churches didn’t resemble the complicated and contested realities of the past. It looked more like the tidy, manufactured certainty that America was founded Christian and need only return.

The conclusion I keep coming to: we didn’t inherit the Christian nation story. It was sold to us.

And the most dangerous thing about the Christian nation story is that it’s aimed at the wrong kingdom.

There’s an older letter, written to people in a city far more religiously enmeshed with its empire than America has ever been. This letter shows us what the right story looks like.

Ephesians.

Ephesus was not neutral civic ground waiting to be Christianized. It was already a religious-political fusion with its own pledges and liturgies and holy sites and claims about whose divine authority held the city together.

The temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the world. The imperial cult boasted temples to the Emperor himself. It was all one big hairball: Roman identity + religious devotion + political loyalty. To be a good Ephesian was to worship those gods that made Ephesus great.

Into this city, Paul writes a letter. He doesn’t tell the Ephesian Christians to take their city back. He doesn’t give them a strategy to restore Ephesus to the right gods, or to Christianize the temples, or to rededicate the civic festivals on the lawn of city hall. The rededicate idea is nowhere in the letter. Of course it isn’t, because the whole premise of rededication… that there’s a once-holy-now-fallen civic entity that the faithful must restore… is not the gospel Paul preached.

Instead, Paul tells them they were once far off and have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Not into a restored Ephesus. But into something with no national precedent at all: one new humanity, made out of previously hostile ethnicities. Jew and Gentile. Not civic Ephesus renewed. Not ethnic Israel restored. One new humanity that no empire can contain and no nation can claim.

For members of this new humanity in Christ, our true citizenship is in heaven. It’s not a dual citizenship, an enmeshment of both Roman and heaven. It’s just heaven. Full stop. This doesn’t make us escapists or separatists. It does the opposite. Our loyalties are exclusively reordered and subservient to Christ now, which makes us the best temporary residents of whatever earthly government we happen to live under. And as we live out the ethic of God’s kingdom by the Spirit’s power in obedience to King Jesus alone, Ephesians and Judeans and Romans and Europeans and Africans and Americans and slaves and free and immigrants and men and women all become co-equal heirs of Christ’s kingdom and members of the same body forever.

The Christian nation story asks: which nation has God covenanted with?

Paul’s answer: God’s covenant people are being gathered around a slain Lamb out of every nation into one new humanity that belongs to no nation.

The dividing wall that America’s civil religion depends on is precisely the wall the blood of Christ tore down.

And the Christian nation story is dangerous precisely because it gives a nation the devotion that only belongs to a kingdom.

It asks worship leaders to sing over America what the church should only sing under Christ.

It is, in the oldest biblical category, not patriotism but idolatry. The worship of a real and good thing as though it were the ultimate thing.

Back to my buddy at the National Mall. I feel for the guy, and I’m in his corner 100%. He did not choose his predicament. Unfortunately for him (and for many others I know personally), he was being asked to lend his gift to a liturgy whose central claim the gospel will not bear.

There is no America with a divine covenant to renew.

When the Rededicate250 organizers played the video of the sitting US president reading 2 Chronicles 7:14, the irony nearly knocked me over.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)

Those words were spoken by YHWH to King Solomon, to the people of God, at the dedication of the first temple of the living God three thousand years ago. They were never about a nation. They were about a temple, and the people who gathered there to belong to God.

And here’s the thing: the church is now that temple. Paul says so plainly in the very letter we’ve been reading. The people of God, drawn from every nation, are themselves the temple where the Spirit dwells. 2 Chronicles 7:14 doesn’t belong to any nation, because the temple no longer stands on any nation’s soil.

Which is what made it so disorienting to watch the video. A sitting president, reading words spoken by God to a king about a temple he is not part of, deployed to rally a political base and rededicate a country that was never the temple in the first place.

All I can say is, the true King of every nation is not worried. And neither am I.

America has no divine covenant to renew. But the Church is led by a Lamb worthy of worship no nation can claim.

He has a people from every tribe and tongue. Our worship songs and liturgies, in all their multiethnic and multicultural glory, find their true home not on any national stage, but in gatherings that face one another in global unity.

This is the song we were always meant to sing.

1. It’s the first line of Section 11… which also states “no enmity” toward Mulsims, explicitly.

2. Fea, John (2016). Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Revised Edition: A Historical Introduction. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 25.

3. Much of the history in this essay comes from Kruse’s diligent work here.

4. Is Kruse airtight? No historian is. Some say he leans too hard on the corporate angle and not enough on the Cold War, and that Americans were calling themselves a Christian nation long before any ad man got involved. Fair. But nobody serious disputes that the official motto, the pledge language, and the whole mid-century machinery were built in the 1950s.