Two Fights Over the American Story Are Colliding This Fourth
Blow out 250 candles and you would expect a party. Instead we are having an argument about whose party it is.
On one side, the White House and its allies want the country’s birthday to double as an altar call. Back in May, thousands filled the National Mall for Rededicate 250, a prayer festival organized by Freedom 250, the group working with the administration on the anniversary. The pitch, according to organizers, was to give thanks for God’s providence and rededicate the country as one nation under God. According to NPR, of the 19 faith leaders scheduled to speak, 18 were Christian, and most were evangelical. Axios reported that Muslims, Reform Jewish voices, mainline Protestant leaders and historically Black Protestant denominations were largely missing from the stage.
Supporters see a homecoming, faith restored to the center of the founding story. Critics see something narrow being sold as something universal. Robert P. Jones, who founded the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, told Axios the lineup skipped even the mainline Protestant traditions many of the founders actually belonged to.
Here is the awkward part. The founders make lousy mascots for a Christian nation. George Washington wrote constantly about Providence, yet Jesus was largely absent from his public and private writing, according to historians. Thomas Jefferson rejected core Christian doctrines, took a razor to his New Testament to cut out the miracles, and gave us the phrase about a wall of separation between church and state. John Adams prized religion as fuel for public morality but was a Unitarian who rejected the Trinity. These were Enlightenment men, arguing. The argument was the point.
Now flip to a very different fight over what counts as American. According to a new Economist and YouGov poll, 29 percent of us say we would vote for a candidate who calls themselves a democratic socialist, while 45 percent would not and 26 percent are unsure. The same survey, conducted June 26 to 29 among 1,606 adults with a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points, found 32 percent hold a favorable view of socialism against 39 percent unfavorable.
For a label often treated as foreign contraband, that is a lot of open doors. And it is not abstract. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won City Hall in New York last year, and the movement has since notched wins in Washington, Los Angeles and Colorado. Among voters 18 to 29, according to that same poll, 36 percent say they would back a democratic socialist. Capitalism still wins the popularity contest, 44 percent to 19 percent according to the poll, but the settled question feels a lot less settled.
So what do the two fights share? Both try to freeze a moving thing. One camp wants to declare, by decree and worship set, that America is Christian at its core. Another insists America is capitalist by definition, and that anyone outside that box barely qualifies. The country keeps refusing to hold still for either portrait.
That refusal is not a defect. It is the oldest tradition we have. An interfaith effort called Faith250 has quietly gathered roughly 260 congregations, according to Axios, to read the Declaration alongside Frederick Douglass asking what the Fourth of July meant to the enslaved. That is closer to the real inheritance. Not a finished creed to salute, but a fight worth having.
We are turning 250 in the middle of a family argument about who we are. Good. Before the fireworks, put the harder question to the neighbor beside you: whose country did we say this was? Go beyond the headlines…
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