The Trump regime’s aggressive Christian nationalism will be on full display at two events being held in Washington, D.C. this coming weekend whose stated purpose is to “rededicate” the United States to God.
The government-sponsored “revival” reflects the extent to which the Trump White House has embraced the religious right’s contempt for the constitutional separation of church and state.
And it’s part of the Trump team’s hijacking of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to turn it from a bipartisan national celebration into a massive corporate-backed promotional campaign for Trump and the MAGA movement and what Rep. Jared Huffman has called “a platform for Christian nationalism.”
Here’s what to look forward to this weekend.
The Warm-Up Act
On Saturday, May 16, dominionist musician and MAGA activist Sean Feucht will host a worship service at an outdoor theater on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Since launching his “Let Us Worship” campaign against COVID-era restrictions on worship gatherings in 2020, Feucht has toured the country holding high-energy public worship services that double as Christian nationalist MAGA political rallies. He says his “Roots of Revival” tour, being conducted in partnership with Trump’s Freedom 250, is “going hard for Jesus.” He is urging people to join the “army of God” in D.C. this weekend.
Feucht, who is aligned with the apostles-and-prophets crowd that has gained unprecedented political influence thanks to Trump and White House Faith Director Paula White, has already conducted worship services in the White House and Capitol Rotunda and on the National Mall. In an online video promoting his May 16 “holy ghost revival service,” Feucht said, “the White House is behind us.” Back in February when the official event was announced, Feucht gushed, “I never would have imagined our own government getting behind revival meetings!”
Feucht is a controversial figure even within evangelical circles, and his honesty and financial integrity have been challenged by former ministry employees and volunteers as well as Christian podcasters and journalists. He has been sued by a major donor who is alleging misuse of funds. He has made anti-Catholic comments on social media—he accused the current pope of being “a woke Communist”—and has expressed his opposition to interfaith prayer gatherings.
In addition to worship musicians and some figures who will also be speaking on Sunday, like MAGA pundit Eric Metaxas and Trump-boosting pastor Lorenzo Sewell, Feucht has lined up a couple of other particularly controversial figures to join him in Washington:
- Mark Driscoll is a megachurch pastor known for preaching toxic masculinity and practicing spiritual abuse; after being ousted from the Mars Hill megachurch he founded in Washinton state, he started over in Arizona, where he has been dogged by similar allegations. Driscoll announced that he was asked to speak at the main event, but the White House said he had not been invited. Driscoll is promoting the May 16 event on social media, describing the event as “four hours of prayer and worship to Jesus Christ, recommitting, rededicating this nation, one nation under God; we know that God is Jesus Christ.”
- Greg Locke is a far-right preacher for the social media age, building an audience through a perpetually angry persona. In 2024, Right Wing Watch described him as a radical right-wing pastor and fervent conspiracy theorist who has incessantly refused to accept that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. He was among the speakers at a rally in Washington, DC, the night before the Capitol insurrection. Locke's sermons frequently consist of him screaming conspiracy theories from the pulpit. In 2024 he called Oprah Winfrey “one of the most evil people on the planet,” claiming, “She 100 percent worships Satan.” Locke recently retracted previous allegations of pedophilia he had made against televangelists Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen. Last year, two former pastors at Locke’s church accused him of spiritual abuse and financial mismanagement. It is possible Locke will not make the event, as he tragically lost his son to a drug overdose late last week.
Feucht has also been using the run-up to the event to promote his new album “Days of Awakening” and his new book, “No Turning Back.”
The Main Event
Feucht’s event is serving as a warm-up for the official day-long “rededication” on the National Mall on Sunday, May 17, which is being organized by staff from Trump’s Freedom 250 and the White House Faith Office. The White House calls it a “national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.” It will feature Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, along with other administration officials and political leaders like Secretary of Defense—he prefers Secretary of War—and Christian nationalist crusader Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Department of Agriculture advisor Ben Carson, former Fox commentator and chief of protocol Monica Crowley, House Speaker Mike Johnson (who is set to lead the actual “moment of rededication), Sen. Tim Scott, and a cast of right-wing Christian nationalist Trump supporters. A number of Trump officials have recorded videos promoting the event.
Here’s how the White House website describes the day:
At sunrise, the National Mall will transform into a large-scale revival, beginning with worship, testimonies, and music, and culminating in a powerful national moment of prayer. Streamed to parishes, the event is amplified through coordinated media and a lead-up series with pastors and partners highlighting the Church’s role in history and civic life. A main stage and faith-based activations will set the scene for high-energy praise, prominent Christian artists, and major faith leaders, creating an energized moment of unity.
There is not much of an effort to portray this as an event that recognizes and respects America’s religious pluralism, other than the inclusion of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, an Orthodox rabbi who serves as the lone non-Christian on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
Indeed, the “rededication” event is being relentlessly promoted by Christian nationalist and dominionist figures, including New Apostolic Reformation apostles Dutch Sheets and Abby Abildness and WellVersed Ministry’s Jim Garlow, who continues to host prayer calls that were begun as an effort to help Trump hold onto power after losing the 2020 election. MAGA pastor and GOP congressional candidate Jackson Lahmeyer says the event is a "resurrection" of the nation from the death it suffered under Biden.
According to Intercessors for America, a pro-Trump network of prayer warriors closely aligned with the White House, “This is a truly historic moment for our nation, and a turning point for America as we turn our focus away from the temptations of this world and into the arms of Jesus.”
The May 17 event, which will be livestreamed, is being organized around three “pillars”:
Pillar I — The Miracles that Made Us: A reflection on God’s providence throughout 250 years, honoring the faith that inspired America’s founders and has carried us forward in every generation since.
Pillar II — The Miracles Still in Our Midst: Personal testimonies of God’s healing in our lives and in our land.
Pillar III — A New Birth of Faith and Freedom: A collective expression of gratitude for 250 years of freedom — and a unified moment of rededication asking for God’s blessing, guidance, and grace for the next 250.
A conference call organized by Garlow to promote the rededication featured Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House task force on the 250th anniversary, and David Donaldson from the White House Faith Office. Donaldson called the May17 event a “Holy Spirit-driven moment” and predicted, “We’re gonna be hosting the presence of God. There are gonna be miracles. There are gonna be deliverances. And we’re gonna see thousands upon thousands find their hope in Christ.” On the same call, Rosemary Garlow said the event was preparing for “perhaps the greatest revival the world has ever seen, in prelude for the Lord’s return.”
The “rededication” is a profoundly political event, as evidenced by the list of administration and congressional figures on the speakers list, along with religious-right figures who declare that Trump is anointed by God and therefore, as White House Faith Office Director Paula White has claimed, that opposing him is opposing God.
Recognizing that there are likely to be changes and additions to the lineup, here are some of the speakers that have been announced, in addition to the political leaders already mentioned:
- Paula White is a longtime friend and advisor to President Trump and has served as a cheerleader for Trump within the Christian right. White, who is allied with other dominionist New Apostolic Reformation figures, has used her White House positions in both Trump terms—and the National Faith Advisory Board between them—to promote Christian nationalist ideology and run a virtual 24/7 public relations operation on his behalf to conservative religious leaders through allied groups like Intercessors for America. She has repeatedly denounced his opponents as demonic and asserted that anyone who opposes Trump is opposing God. In an opening prayer at Trump’s pre-insurrection rally on Jan. 6, 2021, White asked God to give Trump’s supporters “holy boldness” and prayed that “every adversary” would be “overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”
- Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, insists that “America is a Christian nation” whose Constitution has been perverted by secularists and “infidels.” He argues that the purpose of the First Amendment was to put all Christian denominations on an equal footing. He is an ardent Trump booster with a shrine to Trump in his office. In 2020, while campaigning for Trump, Jeffress published a book that called for a commitment to truth and civil dialogue and denounced “fake new.” It told readers to “Ask God to silence those who strive to spread division and hatred and to bring any slanderers in the media to repentance.” Jeffress told the Christian Post, “If America is going to experience revival, then I first have to have a revival in my heart. For America to rededicate herself to Christ means I must rededicate myself to Christ. And that’s the angle that I’m going to take in my talk on the National Mall on May 17.”
- Jentezen Franklin, an Atlanta-area megachurch pastor and longtime Trump booster, will offer a prayer as part of the afternoon rededication moment. During the 2020 campaign, Franklin warned Christians that if Trump lost, “You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.” In 2024, Franklin told Trump he is a “chosen vessel” and compared him to the Apostle Paul and to the biblical King David. And he told his fellow pastors that his ministry had brought in tens of millions of dollars since Trump promoted his church. In a pre-debate prayer call with Trump that year, Franklin prayed that God would use the debate to expose the “wickedness” and “evil intent” that he said were in President Biden’s heart. Last year, Franklin told Trump that he had survived an assassination attempt because God had assigned an angel to protect him.
- Jack Graham, a former member of Trump’s religious advisory council, will be part of the morning worship service and will speak with Abigail Robertson Allen on modern day miracles. Graham, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is a megachurch pastor who has told his Texas congregation that they are engaged in a “spiritual war” against liberals. In 2024, he denounced the Harris-Walz ticket as “the death of America.” After Trump won the 2024 election, Graham’s sermon was a celebratory recap of Trump campaign talking points. “This is why Trump won,” he said. “To preserve and protect our country as one nation under God.” Graham and his Prestonwood Baptist Church were cited in a 2022 report as an example of a Southern Baptist Church that protected sex abusers. Years earlier, when he was the denomination’s president, he “thwarted efforts to establish a child abuse study committee,” according to the website Watchkeep.
- Lou Engle is a dominionist associated with the New Apostolic Reformation who has hosted a series of huge political prayer rallies over the past few decades, including one in California in 2008 called to help pass an anti-marriage-equality referendum. A longtime anti-abortion activist and member of the pro-Trump POTUS Shield network, he led prayers in 2017 and 2018 for God to “remove” pro-choice Supreme Court justices so that Trump could replace them. In 2024, Engle and other NAR leaders organized a gathering on the National Mall that Engle called “a last stand for America.” Engle teaches that “The church’s vocation is to rule history with God…The same authority that has been given to Christ Jesus for overwhelming conquering and dominion has been given to the saints of the most high….We’re God’s rulers upon the earth…We will govern over kings and judges will have to submit…We’re called to rule! To change history! To be co-regents with God!”
- Samuel Rodriguez, who repeatedly urged Latino voters to support Trump despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, will be part of the morning worship service. Rodriguez, who is associated with New Apostolic Reformation figures, heads the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. He portrays himself as nonpartisan but has functioned as a MAGA activist and has long urged Latino voters to support right-wing policies and politicians, while denouncing the Democratic Party as anti-Latino. In 2024, he promised Latino voters that Trump’s deportation campaign would not target people who have lived in the country for many years; when that didn’t turn out to be true, he criticized some enforcement actions but has continued to defend Trump, whom he has called a “brother.” Earlier this year, more than 100 Latino Christians urged the news media to stop treating Rodriguez as if he were the only representative of their communities.
- Gary Hamrick is pastor of Cornerstone Chapel church in Leesburg, Virginia, which hosted the Family Research Council’s 2021 Pray Vote Stand activist conference. Hamrick portrays politics as “spiritual war” and has denounced the Democratic Party as evil and demonic. In 2020, Paula White’s One Voice Prayer Movement distributed a pre-election sermon in which Hamrick told congregants who don’t like Trump to “get over it. Last year he prayed unsuccessfully that God would make Winsome Earle-Sears the next governor of Virginia. Hamrick is pastor to Hung Cao, who recently became Pete Hegseth’s Acting Secretary of the Navy.
- Lorenzo Sewell is a Detroit pastor and African American Trump booster who delivered the benediction at Trump’s second inaugural in which he said God had called Trump “for such a time as this.” In January he complained that Democrats “have raised up these demonic judges” who he said were “killing our president” In March, Sewell told Sean Feucht, “This is a Christian nation that was meant to be led by Christians.” Last year, after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in the New York mayor’s race, Sewell warned that Mamdani “could be a son of Satan,” saying that “this is a demonic spirit” and calling on Christians to stand up and say, “Devil, you will not have our biggest city.” During a Paula White prayer call before a 2024 presidential debate, Sewell prayed that the debate would make it clear that God had “anointed” Trump to “break the shackles that have bound our country.” A few months ago, Sewell warned that if protesters disrupted his church, they would meet Jesus “a lot sooner than you want to meet him.” Sewell and Kelvin Cobrias will lead a part of the program devoted to the church’s role in the abolition movement.
- Kelvin Cobrias is a Black pastor who says he lost most of his congregation in Orlando, Florida, after deciding to support Trump, but that God used that as an opportunity to give him an expanded audience and shower him with money. He has become a member of Paula White’s National Faith Advisory Board and a regular visitor to the White House. One donor he met at the White House sent him $10,000, he says, adding, “Hallelujah! I should have went this way a long time ago.” He says he tells people “not to see church and state separate.”
- Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, will join by video. Franklin is a sycophanticTrump loyalist, responding to criticism of the Trump-as-Jesus meme by calling it “a lot of to do about nothing” and calling Trump the most “pro-Christian” president in his lifetime. He has claimed that anti-ICE protestors are “underpinned by the radical socialist left” whose goal is to destroy the country. During the Obama administration, Franklin said that White House staff were “anti-Christ in what they say and what they do.” He warned that the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision would bring God’s judgment on the nation and suggested that rainbow lighting on the White House to celebrate the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision could incite a lightning strike from God. In contrast, he praised Vladimir Putin for enacting anti-gay policies. Franklin told this year’s CPAC gathering that Trump standing up to “secular socialists” and using the phrase “Merry Christmas” was “huge because it put the woke world on notice that we’re not gonna take it anymore.” Graham’s daughter Cissie Graham Lynch, who works with the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Samaritan’s Purse, will also appear.
- Jonathan Falwell, son of the late founder of the Moral Majority, is senior pastor at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and chancellor of Liberty University, whose Standing for Freedom Center promotes Christian nationalist ideology.
- Eric Metaxas, an author, conspiracy-promoting MAGA pundit, and full-blown Trump cultist, is set to narrate the section on “God’s Hand in the Foundation of a Nation,” which is likely to feature a lot of Christian nationalist lies about our history. Metaxas claimed that anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis were part of “a communist insurgency.” In March, he agreed with a guest that Trump may be forced to declare the Democratic Party a seditious organization and outlaw it. Metaxas recently called Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a seminarian and Democratic Senate candidate, “diabolical” and a “fake Christian.”
- Guillermo Maldonado is a Florida-based dominionist “apostle” whose church hosted the campaign kickoff for Evangelicals for Trump in 2020. Maldonado said God told him that civil war was coming to America; he believed that God raised up Trump as part of his End Times plans. He is a repeat visitor to the Trump White House. He has told parishioners he is training them to be militant spiritual warriors. During the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic, he mocked people who skipped church for fear of contracting the virus. He later told his congregation not to get vaccinated for COVID-10 because he said it would “alter your DNA” as part of globalist plans “preparing for the structure of the Antichrist.”
- Larry Arnn, a founder of the far-right Claremont Institute and current President of Hillsdale College, will be talking about Abraham Lincoln. Arnn was the head of the “1776 Commission” Trump created in his first term. Hillsdale College promotes right-wing ideology well beyond its campus through its Imprimis newsletter, its free online courses about history and the U.S. Constitution, its “1776 curriculum,” and its “classical” charter schools. It is a driving force behind the right-wing war on public education.
- Alveda C. King is a longtime anti-abortion and religious-right activist who was a member of the “prophetic” pro-Trump POTUS Shield network during Trump’s first term, and has continued to be a Trump booster. King trades on her status as niece of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.; in dismissing the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality, Alveda King once said, ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”
- Jonathan Pokluda is another Texas-based Baptist pastor and author of a book about spiritual warfare who a Good Faith Media commentator accused of “sanewashing” Donald Trump by denying that Trump had incited the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Pokluda’s books for young adults promote traditional gender roles.
- Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, former archbishop of New York, are also set to speak; both are members of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
Rejecting the Trump Team's Deployment of Christian Nationalism
Among the critics of the Christian nationalist “rededication” event are Christians at Faithful America who "reject Rededicate 250" and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which calls the event “Christian nationalist pseudohistory” and “an unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state.” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said “The 250th anniversary of our nation should celebrate liberty, equality and the constitutional separation of church and state. Anything less betrays the very ideals the Declaration of Independence set in motion.”
People For the American Way President Svante Myrick also criticized the event in a recent commentary in The Hill that criticized the Trump regime’s multiple assaults on church-state separation. “I am no preacher,” Myrick wrote, “but what I have learned in my Baptist Church about the Old Testament prophets makes me suspect that God may not look very favorably on being asked to bless a government that is busy slamming its doors to refugees and taking food out of the mouths of hungry people while its corrupt leaders manipulate the system to enrich themselves.”