(Zer0 Hedge)—The mainstream media’s outrage over religious expressions by government institutions and politicians is highly selective. At bottom, it the event is Christian, they attack. If it’s any other religion, they applaud.
Did the mainstream media publish indignant diatribes when leftist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani held Muslim dinners at City Hall and Gracie Manor for Ramadan? The answer is no, of course they didn’t. Because Islam is celebrated by modern liberal movements and Christianity is despised. And, it’s important to take note of what leftists hate, because if they hate it, it’s probably good.
Progressive outlets are in an uproar this week over a White House sponsored Christian prayer event scheduled to take place on this Sunday at the National Mall. The Trump administration and the Freedom 250 nonprofit will host “Rededicate 250,” which will feature Cabinet members and conservative religious leaders to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary.
According to event organizers, the program aims to reflect on the faith of America’s founders and serve as a national moment of rededication. Participants include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Leftists journalists and Democrats are accusing the Trump Administration of violating the US Constitution and the “separation of church and state” by sponsoring the event. This is, of course, a blatant misinterpretation of the 1st Amendment, but it’s also an opportunity to debunk many of the claims made by the left-wing when it comes to religious expression by government officials.
It might come as a shock to those that religiously follow leftist propaganda, but the words “separation of church and state” do not appear a single time in the US Constitution. The phrase comes from a 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, where he described the First Amendment as building “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Jefferson was primarily concerned with the use of government as a weapon to persecute people of various denominations that refused to submit to a singular state sponsored church, which was a common practice of the English Crown. It should be noted that there was, essentially, no other prominent religious groups beyond Christians recognized in the colonies at the time of the formation of the United States, aside from a small population of around 2000 Jewish settlers.
The US was, by every measure, founded as a Christian nation, even if there was no official state church.
The Founding Fathers are often described by leftists as “followers of the Enlightenment”, as if this means they were not Christian. All of them were in fact Christian while also promoting some ideals of the Enlightenment. Many prominent figures of the enlightenment were religious, including Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Christian Wolff.
Their goal was to seek harmony between faith and reason, not erase the practice of faith from society or government. As John Adams said:
“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity…I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
He also stated:
We have seen how governments devoid of religious principle behave – The atheistic regimes of communist Russia, China, Cambodia and North Korea have murdered millions upon millions in the name of “saving” the populace from the “opiate of religion”. We have also seen how movements like the political left behave when they gain power, injecting authoritarianism and degeneracy into every facet of society and even targeting children with irrational and anti-science indoctrination.
The phrase “separation of church and state” was popularized by the Supreme Court in 1947, notably in Everson v. Board of Education, as a metaphor for interpreting the First Amendment. It is not the law, however. In the sense that it is not illegal for government officials to sponsor religious events or to speak their minds when it comes to religious issues.
Furthermore, it’s not against the law for government officials to point out that the US was founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers did the same. No one’s religious practice is being suppressed and no state religion is being established by doing so. The media’s efforts to shame this generational reality by exploiting misinterpretations of the Constitution might have worked a decade ago, but not anymore.
