A nation cannot be Christian. Only a person can, and only with difficulty; and the moment you try to baptize an empire, you do not save the empire, you destroy the faith. On Sunday, as thousands gathered on the National Mall for the “Rededicate 250” prayer rally, with the president and his cabinet reading from 2 Chronicles and calling the country back to God, the men on that stage made the oldest mistake in the history of the Church. They confused the Pentagon with the Upper Room. The Upper Room is where frightened men received a Spirit that sent them outward to die for a kingdom not of this world; the Pentagon is where men plan the application of force to defend a kingdom that is very much of this world, and the two cannot share a roof without one corrupting the other.
A President read scripture on a video, holding up 2 Chronicles and the famous words about humbling, and seeking God’s face, and turning from wicked ways. A Defense Secretary prayed to “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” from a stage near the Washington Monument. A Speaker of the House stood where a pastor is supposed to stand — beneath stained-glass windows depicting the nation’s founders beside a white cross — and made it a campaign rally. The lineup included Paula White-Cain of the White House Faith Office and Franklin Graham, and Orthodox Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and the whole thing was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership backed by the White House. The counterprogramming — the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Faithful America, the Interfaith Alliance, a Trump-like golden calf balloon, a “Democracy not theocracy” projection on the National Gallery of Art — made the disagreement visible. Counterprotesters should not be confused with the argument. The argument is the cross on the Mall.
I will grant the men and women who rented motorized scooters to get down there, the ones who knelt on the concrete believing they were consecrating their country, a sincere and beautiful impulse. They feel the hollowing out of their towns, the loss of the mediating institutions that once held the fabric of their lives together, and they are desperate to see the place they love redeemed. That longing is real. The hunger for a sacred order in a profane and extractive age is the correct diagnosis of our ruin. And the rally’s organizers have a real case. They believe the country is in moral crisis. They believe the founders were steeped in religion. They believe prayer is the answer to national decline. They believe rededication is needed. None of that is to be mocked. The country is in fact in trouble. The founders were in fact men of faith. Prayer is in fact underused in public life.
But.
The cross was not put on the Mall to save the country. The cross was put on the Mall to capture it.
I am a Catholic. I was raised in the Church, walked away from it in the years I was trading agricultural futures in Chicago, and came back to it on the far side of a crisis I will not romanticize. As a man who left the faith to chase money and found it again only on the far side, I know exactly what it costs to earn a salvation back, and I know it cannot be handed to you by a cabinet secretary. The Catholic social tradition, from Leo XIII through Francis, has always held that the state has no business enforcing a moral order. This is not a procedural claim about church and state. It is a religious claim. Faith made automatic by the state is faith destroyed. The state cannot make a person Christian, and the attempt turns the Gospel into a tribal marker and a political instrument.
Søren Kierkegaard spent his last years attacking precisely this — the illusion of “Christendom,” the toxic fusion of the state and the Gospel that turns the terrifying, inward, difficult leap of faith into a cheap civic lapel pin. When the Secretary of Defense asks a crowd to pray to Jesus on bended knee for the nation’s military and political ends, he is not serving Christ. He is drafting Christ as a chaplain to the American empire, using the name of the man who had nowhere to lay his head to bless the guys with the aircraft carriers.
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner gave the cleanest reply from the dissents that day: early America included Jews, Muslims, and Indigenous people, and the welcome of those people is part of what religious liberty actually means. The rally was not rededication. It was erasure — the soft kind, where the people erased are invited to attend as guests in their own country. And it betrays the very religious liberty it claims to defend, because the moment the state favors one confession, it disfavors every other.
I will say what the rally’s critics are too polite to say. The fusion of cross and state does not make the country more Christian. It makes Christianity smaller. It turns a religion whose central scandal is the Sermon on the Mount — the blessing of the poor, the welcoming of the stranger, the refusal of retaliation — into a campaign accessory. It turns a Lord who told His followers to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s into a partisan mascot. It turns a Savior who ate with sinners and tax collectors into a club for people who already agree with one another.
This is the final, saddest irony of the movement that calls itself conservative. For forty years, it has cheered the big-box zoning variances and the industrial-agriculture consolidation that gutted the local parish, the independent parish school, the VFW hall, the farm cooperative — selling them out to concentrated capital while singing hymns about family values. And now, having stripped the towns of the institutions that actually formed souls and sustained communities, it offers the centralized state as the substitute church. Concentrated state power and concentrated capital are the same disease in two coats; both demand the allegiance that belongs only to God, and both treat the local and the rooted as raw material to be managed. Concentrated state-moral power is the worst coat of all.
The defenders will say the country is in a crisis of faith. I will grant the crisis and deny the cure. The country is in a crisis of practice, not profession. The country is short of the corporal works of mercy, short of the small acts of attention and welcome that any parish worth its name can name. The country is not short of a state religion. The country is short of what Oakeshott called “the familiar”: the parish, the kitchen table, the Bible study where the questions are real, the religious community that holds its own side to account — including the parts of the Catholic and evangelical traditions that have failed, and the failure is real, and it is the failure the rally cannot afford to name.
I have seen the alternative in the thick, rooted places the movement forgot. Real faith does not happen on a stage near the Washington Monument, underwritten by a White House-backed public-private partnership. It happens in the small frame parish in Adams County founded in 1884, where the immigrant Catholics who built it knew that the state would never love them, and that only the parish, the family, and the Eucharist would. It happens in the thick, local institutions where the state cannot reach and the market cannot price. You cannot rededicate a nation to God, because a nation is not a soul. A nation is a border, a tax code, a monopoly on violence. Only a person can be Christian, and only in fear and trembling. The men on the Mall on Sunday did not heal the land. They merely took the pearl of great price and pawned it for a partisan rally, leaving the very towns that sent their people to Washington a little more hollow than they found them.
There is a different way. It is older, and it is distributed. It is the parish — the small, mixed, often-boring place where a person meets the actual Gospel, not its political translation. It is the Catholic Worker house, where the welcome of the stranger is the actual practice of the faith, not its symbol. It is the religious order that serves a hospital or a school or a poor neighborhood without asking the resident’s politics. It is the chaplain who refuses to be a mascot for the powerful. It is the bishop, of whom there are a few, who will not let the cross be carried in a campaign parade. It is the layperson who, when asked to render unto Caesar, knows the difference between the two kingdoms and does not confuse them.
I will be told I am a relic. I am fine with that. The relic has a name. It is called the freedom of the Christian person, and it is older than any nation, including ours. It does not need a rally on the Mall. It needs a parish, a kitchen table, and a stranger at the door.