“The United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation,” historian Heather Cox Richardson insisted in her May 17 “Letters from an American” column.
The professor of history at Boston College used her Sunday writing to comment on and debunk the claims of the “Rededicate 250” event held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that day. The nine-hour rally was created by the Trump administration and funded with public money.
Although President Donald Trump did not attend the event — he was golfing — it was created by Trump’s Freedom 250 group, which has hijacked funding allocated by Congress for events related to the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Heather Cox Richardson
The kind of evangelical Christian theology showcased at Sunday’s event was not what the Founders intended, she said. And the Founders were “quite clear about that.”
“In the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate just a decade after the Constitution went into effect, U.S. leaders said, ‘The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion’ and has ‘no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of’ Muslims. They went on to say that ‘no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between’ the U.S. and Tripoli.”
Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, “both wrote explicitly about the importance of keeping the government separate from religion,” she added. “Jefferson wrote that ‘religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.’”
“The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
In 1785, Madison said if lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights, including those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution, Richardson noted. “Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.”
Despite what Trump’s evangelical backers claim, the Founders did not base the United States on religion, she said. “Replacing Americans’ civic identity with Christian nationalism destroys that vitally important understanding of the role of citizens in a democracy. Instead, it demands that Americans do as they are told, turning them into subjects.”
Richardson said Rededicate 250 was “part of the Trump administration’s attempt to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to rewrite America’s history, turning it from one that champions the Enlightenment values of natural rights, equality and self-government to one that requires Americans to accept that some people are better than others and to defer to their leaders.”
After Trump took office again in January 2025, he and his staff “began to take over the planning for the nation’s birthday celebration,” she reported.
“Trump chafed under the idea of congressional oversight and a pretense of bipartisanship, so in December 2025 he created his own new organization, Freedom 250. Congress appropriated $150 million for the Department of the Interior to distribute to organizations for celebrations of the 250th. Of that money, America250 (the original organizing group) has been allocated $50 million and Freedom 250 has been allocated $100 million, although as of February, America250 had received only $25 million.”
Trump has turned the nation’s birthday to be all about himself and obeying him, Richardson said.
“But blindly obeying authority has never been the story of America. From its origins in resistance to the British government, the story of America has been the opposite of obeying. It has been about questioning, debating, criticizing leaders and working to build ‘a more perfect Union,’ as the Framers charged us to do. The story of America is how those who believed in the principles of democracy, those ideals articulated by the Founders however imperfectly they lived them, have struggled to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our government, come true.”