As my son and I walked through the press screening and out to the gathering space for Rededicate 250, I began having flashbacks to my years in a white evangelical megachurch. With a pre-roll video set to worship music filling the space with energy, a congregation of mostly white people began casually strolling in, sipping their coffee and waiting in anticipation.
The morning worship indeed felt like an average Sunday morning megachurch service, as worship leaders like Andy Frank and Sadie Robertson led such popular songs as “Revelation Song,” “Way Maker” and “Agnus Dei.” The songs flowed from one into the next, with no interruptions of Scripture readings or liturgies other than emotional, seemingly spontaneous prayers.
Later in the day, the music included more traditional sounds from the U.S. Armed Forces trumpets, the Grand Canyon University Canyon Choral Society, the Hillsdale College Choir, the U.S. Marine Band, and SMSgt Adam Tianello. Liberty University’s LU Praise and Aodhan King also brought more contemporary sounds throughout the day.
But the headliner who brought the entire gathering to its final crescendo was Chris Tomlin, the superstar worship leader TIME magazine called the “most often sung artist in the world.”
A growing number of people are learning about how Christian supremacist worship leaders like Sean Feucht are wielding worship as a weapon to fight battles against their neighbors at Christian nationalist worship gatherings for the cause of extremist, right-wing politics. And Feucht had plenty of that at the Sylvan Theater in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday night. But many have been surprised at Chris Tomlin’s choice to headline the Trump administration’s Rededicate 250 event on Sunday. And yet, if we take a look back at Tomlin’s history, the signs he embraces Christian nationalism have been there for decades.
Chris Tomlin performs onstage during the 2026 K-LOVE Fan Awards at Grand Ole Opry House on May 24, 2026 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
Tomlin’s recent embrace of extremist politicians
Tomlin’s appearance wasn’t the first time he’s attached himself over the last year with extremist politicians. He also opened worship at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service last September.
With American flags hanging over the stage, the Turning Point Action logo featured on the screen behind the band, and the piano beginning its intro, Tomlin led worship while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his top officials entered State Farm Stadium.
“I’m still in the glow of it,” Tomlin confessed days later in an interview. “For Jesus to be proclaimed so boldly throughout the whole day by everyone, basically pointing people, what an awakening moment in our nation. It feels like a shift. It feels like this real awakening that so many people have been praying for.”
In evangelical worship gatherings, the music moves the hearts of the congregation to celebrate and give their lives for the values they’re declaring, while at the same time preparing their hearts for the preacher. So when the sermons at Kirk’s funeral included the likes of President Donald Trump admitting, “I hate my opponent,” and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller raging about those who oppose the Trump administration, “You have nothing, you are nothing, you are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred,” many people wondered why Tomlin would’ve characterized the day with such glowing praise.
After all, Tomlin isn’t regarded as an extremist. Other than his 2010 endorsement of his high school friend and current U.S. Senator James Lankford, who was running for Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District at the time, Tomlin doesn’t publicly endorse candidates.
But with Tomlin headlining the Trump administration’s “Rededicate 250” event on the National Mall where the administration rededicated the country to being “one nation under God,” many are rightly beginning to ask why such a mainstream, nonpolitical worship leader like Tomlin would promote a theocracy.
Coming to America
Years before Tomlin would go on to earn more No. 1 hit singles than any other Christian artist ever, sell more than 12 million albums and garner 6.8 billion career global streams, one early catalyst for his career happened on a cool and rainy day in May 2000 on the grassy hills of Shelby Farms in Memphis, Tenn., where 40,000 students gathered for what many have called an evangelical Woodstock.
The worship featured plenty of popular songs as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” which was given a strong, driving new chorus bidding the worshipper to “come and die and find that I may truly live.”
According to Louie Giglio, who founded the Passion movement and organized the event, the cause worth dying for is “the glory of God … that God’s name and his renown are echoed through eternity.”
But after singing about God’s glory throughout the event, Tomlin gave it a political twist by beginning a song called “America” with the line, “Let your glory fly.”
The first verse of the song quoted 2 Chronicles 7:14, which is a favorite passage among Christian nationalists and the one Trump read to the nation during April’s America Reads the Bible event as well as at Rededicate 250. It’s a promise to ancient Israel that God would heal their nation if they humbled themselves by praying and submitting to Yahweh.
“The Lord is coming, coming to America.”
But on the chorus, Tomlin applied it to the United States with the line, “The Lord is coming, coming to America.”
So the 40,000 worshipers, many of whom were worship leaders, went back to their churches with a curiosity for what political positions they must hold for the United States to glorify God as a nation. And when virtually everyone around us was a Republican, that meant being a Republican was central to the ultimate reality of glorifying God. For those of us who were caught up in this movement, to compromise our Republican politics would be to compromise our worship.
Again, this was 26 years ago.
Worship as the celebration of hierarchy
Like any rock concert, evangelical worship services have a heightened energy of collective effervescence that happens when a group of people sing together. But no matter how much evangelicals resonate with the horizontal togetherness of their gathering with friends, worship is by definition a vertical practice between them and God.
This may seem overly obvious. But worship wasn’t formed in a democracy. It was formed in ancient empires. As Andrew Hill points out in Enter His Courts With Praise!, the Hebrew words for “worship” have such definitions as “submission to the will of the deity and compliance with his divine directives,” “falling down and groveling or even wallowing on the ground before royalty or deity,” “an inferior being in the presence of a superior being … like a loyal subject before his or her king.” or “a vassal’s submission and loyalty to the authority of the overlord.”
These relational categories, created by ancient empires, sit uneasily alongside modern democratic ideals of equality. As New Testament scholar Mark Strauss points out regarding the first century Greco-Roman empire, “Democratic values of equality and equal rights were almost nonexistent. … The greatest goal was … to protect the status quo. This was done by serving those above you and exercising authority over those below.”
“This is the world that modern worship draws its language from.”
This is the world that modern worship draws its language from. So that’s why much of today’s “worship” music is about Jesus being the greatest, the highest and standing above them all. The language of modern worship often casts Jesus in imperial terms: the highest ruler, enthroned above all powers. Then it invites evangelical worshipers to imagine themselves inside that kingdom.
So they sing about going from being slaves to being adopted into the divine imperial family, while their nonevangelical neighbors remain slaves or worse, members of an enemy empire. And when it’s utilized in Christian nationalist political gatherings, it becomes the soundtrack that accompanies straight white conservative men whose greatest concern isn’t liberation from the empire but protecting the status quo by exercising authority over those below them.
Wielding worship as a weapon
The modern worship movement Tomlin helped create fails to subvert the values of ancient empire. Instead, it sacralizes the empire’s interest in power by mapping it onto evangelical interpretations of reality and cultivates an identity within them of being in the imperial family at the top.
And as every empire does, it strengthens the power of those at the top, dehumanizes those below and wages war against those who won’t submit.
Although Tomlin hasn’t explicitly promoted the authoritarian politics of the Trump administration, he’s spent the past 20 years singing about evangelicalism’s God being the “God of this city” and the “Lord of this nation.” He’s explored such warfare themes as “the battle rages on” and “we raise our white flag.” He’s sung about the “God of angel armies” crushing the enemy “underneath my feet.” And in perhaps his most popular empire-like song, he sings of the evangelical God being greater, stronger and higher than all others, and then asks, “If our God is for us, then who could ever stop us?”
What might stadiums full of evangelicals mean when they’re conditioned to connect God’s glory with authoritarian politics and then ask, “Who could ever stop us?”
According to a study by Public Religion Research Institute, white evangelical Protestant Republicans are “most susceptible to authoritarian views.” If more than two-thirds of white evangelical respondents are adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism and score “high” or “very high” according to PRRI’s assessment, how are they going to hear and interpret these songs?
This should be no surprise, given the fact that the songs they sing valorize the dynamics of empire.
As white evangelicals are having their senses drawn into the ecstasy of a modern rock concert, Tomlin’s script tells a story of God’s glory flying by coming to America through demanding total surrender to God’s lordship over the nation. Paired with the imagery of God crushing the enemy under the worshipers feet and declarations that “nobody can stop us,” this narrative doesn’t require explicit endorsements of the Trump administration to become politically combustible. It’s a narrative Trump can slip right into and then co-opt for the pursuit of a modern crusade.
The soundtrack of a modern crusade
The goal of worship gatherings is to take the dynamics celebrated within its walls out to the world. During Tomlin’s rendition of “How Great Is Our God” at Kirk’s funeral, the camera panned to Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio looking on as Tomlin quoted Philippians 2, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow.”
Tomlin later recalled, “I’m thinking of all the powers and positions in that room and that are tuned in. And I’m thinking to point people to the name that is above every name … what a privilege!”
Then at Rededicate 250, Tomlin led these exact same songs.
To evangelicals, the idea of those in the highest positions of power in our government submitting to God feels like humility. But by the Trump administration bending its knee to white evangelicalism’s authoritarian deity, it rules over the nation by prioritizing white evangelical morality over our Constitution.
When the weekend’s worship begins with Eric Metaxas declaring they were “reestablishing the Sinai Covenant,” and then climaxes with Chris Tomlin singing, “Who could ever stop us?” the entire weekend begins to feel less like praise and more like propaganda. It’s the type of language one would expect from religious crusaders.
In the months between Charlie Kirk’s funeral and Rededicate 250, Pete Hegseth has ratcheted up this Holy War language during his monthly worship services at the Pentagon in support of his crusade against “Islamism,” which he identifies in his 2020 book American Crusade as “the most dangerous ‘ism,’” and specifically locates it in Iran.
Hegseth claims: “America is … always at war with Islamists,” who he says desire “to bring the West to its knees.”
At the Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall, Tomlin and Hegseth stood as headliners calling the United States to being “under God.” And as I looked around at the crowds of conservative Christians being swept into the sound and caught up in the glow of it all, I wondered, aren’t the Christian supremacists in the Trump administration also trying to bring the West to its knees?
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.
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