Dear friends in Christ,

This past Sunday, an all-day prayer event on the National Mall, attended by about 15,000, was backed by the White House through a mix of taxpayer funds and private donations, blurring a fundamental principle of the nation: the separation of church and state.

One pastor declared, “Today, friends, we are in a spiritual war. This is a battle in our day between good and evil, between right and wrong, between truth and lies, between light and darkness. This is a battle for the very soul of America.”

The long list of faith leaders who attended consisted largely of evangelical Christians except for one Orthodox rabbi and two conservative Catholic bishops. One Hindu from the administration was present.

Over the course of roughly nine hours, attendees and viewers watched a prayer event paid for with millions of American taxpayer dollars, in which many of the nation’s most powerful federal officials made the case that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”

Many historians disagree.

Gregg Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at a Christian college wrote that while there were Christians among the Founding Fathers, “they did not intend to create a Christian nation. They were religious men who wanted religion, but not necessarily Christianity, to have significant influence in the public square.”

Voices of counter-protest point out that the golden calf in Exodus is not simply a story about worshipping false gods in the abstract. It is about a community anxious and leaderless, who collapse the divine into a human-shaped object they can manage and control.

When a sitting president is described as “ordained by God for a time like this,” when his face and his policy agenda are draped in the language of sacred calling, we are not witnessing revival. We are witnessing the ancient confusion of the creature with the Creator.

The Jesus of the New Testament was executed by the fusion of imperial power and religious authority, the very arrangement this event celebrated. He preached from the margins: to fishermen, to Samaritan women, to tax collectors, to the ritually impure. He reserved his sharpest words not for the pagans but for the religiously powerful who used God’s name to consolidate their own positions.

A Christianity that seats itself at the table of power, that speaks of “spiritual war” in a Pentagon briefing room, that wraps a cross in a flag—this is not a proclamation of the Gospel. It is a domestication of it.

A gathering that claims to speak for “one nation under God” while including all but one non-Christian religious leader is not describing the nation that actually exists. The United States is home to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and millions of people with no religious affiliation. The God revealed in the Hebrew prophets—the God of Amos and Isaiah—is obsessed with the stranger, the alien, the one outside the covenant community. Any theology that uses God language to exclude rather than include has confused its own cultural preferences with divine will.

There is genuine and sincere faith among many who attended this event. People travel long distances to stand in the heat because they are afraid, because they love their country, because they believe something essential is being lost; however, the prophetic tradition from Amos to Jeremiah to the cross itself, has always insisted that sincerity is not the same as faithfulness, and that the most dangerous confusions are the ones dressed in the most beautiful religious language.

The Gospel does not need a state-sponsored stage. It never has. Every time the church has accepted that stage, it has paid a price—in credibility, in integrity, and ultimately in its soul.

The deepest irony is that Christian nationalism, in claiming God for America, does not elevate America. It diminishes God.

It takes the One whom the tradition describes as the ground of all being, the love at the heart of the cosmos, the One in whom all things live and have their existence—and makes that One into a tribal deity, a patron of a particular nation-state, a bigger and more powerful version of the household gods that Abraham’s family left behind in Ur.

The God of Christian nationalism is simply too small. The tradition, at its best and most honest, has always known it.

Your fellow traveler,

—Richard