What I saw and heard in DC this weekend

Evangelicals flocked to Washington, D.C., over the weekend to attend the Trump administration’s “Rededicate 250” event on Sunday, which was billed as “rededicating” the country to being “one nation under God.”

The night before Trump’s official event — funded by public money — Sean Feucht led his annual worship event on the National Mall at the Sylvan Theater in front of the Washington Monument. That was not an officially sanctioned event.

One of the controversies that has spread on social media in the wake of both events is about how many people attended. That was the most commonly asked question I have received by far.

While Feucht claimed to have thousands of people at his event, many online observers said the videos made the crowd look sparse. While Trump officials haven’t released any attendance numbers for Sunday’s event, lots of empty chairs were visible on video footage. The Daily Beast reported that the attendance was so low that Trump was “humiliated” as he “spoke via video to a sea of empty seats.”

I was in attendance at both events. And whatever the final numbers were at either event, the videos didn’t do them justice. Remember, the National Mall is a huge space.

Feucht’s gathering had thousands in attendance. And Trump’s gathering had so many people it took three hours to get through security. At one point during the day, I stood in line an hour and fifty minutes to buy lunch.

One reason the chairs were sparse was that they were reserved for specific people. Another was that it was blistering hot outside. So many people were cramming around the perimeter of the event underneath the shade of trees. Any reporting that Trump would’ve felt humiliated by the crowd size doesn’t make sense compared to what I experienced.

What matters, though, isn’t crowd size, but the message being preached by those whom these crowds put in power.

While the two events were organized separately and had different atmospheres, they featured overlapping speakers and both had a similar message. They were sacralizing a theocracy by emphasizing a created order under God that requires rewriting history, redefining freedom, redefining equality and promoting the rise of conservative Christian men.

A created order under God

Throughout Sunday’s event, between the worship and the speaking, videos played of earth being seen from space while a narrator read from Genesis 1. Then when the narrator quoted God saying, “It was good,” the video showed U.S. soldiers.

Various speakers mentioned how creationism is no longer taught in public schools. One speaker went so far as to say that many years ago, the Bible was the only textbook used in U.S. schools.

Whether discussing history, freedom, equality or gender roles, everything ultimately went back to being under God as the Creator. God was writing our history and defining our freedom and equality under a hierarchy of authority and submission.

Both events featured speakers contrasting the American Revolution with the French Revolution. According to their story, the French Revolution failed because it was being pursued through the values of godlessness, while the American Revolution is succeeding because it was and has always been the pursuit of God as defined by evangelicals.

Rewriting history

Feucht began his event by having a Native American man wearing a headdress welcome the crowd of mostly white worshipers. When the man finished praying in his native tongue, Feucht took the mic and yelled, “We thank you, Father, for the history of revival! We thank you, God, for how you moved on the reservations! For how you moved in the colonies! We thank you for the Great Awakenings! We thank you for the Jesus People Movement! We thank you for Azusa Street!”

To the worshipers in attendance, the troubled history between white colonizers and Native Americans was one of revival to be celebrated. There was no mention of violence, of genocide, of broken treaties or of sorrow over what white colonizers did.

All this was all God’s doing and worthy of praise.

Eric Metaxas spoke at both events. He said the Founders “were all fire-breathing, born-again believers. And even those that weren’t agreed with all the doctrines.” He said anyone who claims many of the Founders were deists are lying.

Similarly, Mark Driscoll said the Pilgrims were young Christian men in their teens and 20s.

And Catholic Bishop Robert Barron said the Founding Fathers were biblical Christians “almost to a man.”

Trump’s event was filled with constant talk about the Founding Fathers being committed Christians who knew and loved their Bibles. It was stunning how many people cheered at these statements rather than scratched their heads in confusion over how it wasn’t lining up with reality.

One of the most disturbing moments was when Republican Sen. Tim Scott began claiming the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Church and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. as inspiration for the kind of twisted justice Republicans are pursuing today. Given the efforts to deport immigrants, fire Black employees under the guise of eliminating DEI, and taking away the Black vote through gerrymandering, one could imagine many Black leaders would be hurt and angry about Scott’s twisting of their tradition in liberation.

Redefining freedom

With a conservative Christian God at the top establishing order through writing our history, this God also gets to define what it means to be free.

In one of the rare moments a nonevangelical showed up at Trump’s event, Catholic Bishop Robert Barron said freedom is “essential to human dignity.” He acknowledged that “Nobody wants to be under the boot of somebody else. Nobody wants to be oppressed, put down, ignored, bossed around.”

But Barron went on to say the “freedom of choice” that “dominates the consciousness of many people today” is an “arbitrary freedom.” Rather, he said freedom must be “for excellence,” which he defined not as “the liberty to choose,” but as “the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.”

To illustrate, he said for skilled musicians to be free, they must submit to the laws of the musical instrument. So he suggested, “Law is the friend of freedom, for it shapes desire in accord with the good.” And he concluded, “This is the kind of freedom the Founders are talking about.”

In other words, freedom in the United States must be defined as being “under God,” in submission to God’s law. That’s not what the Constitution says.

Similarly, at Feucht’s Saturday event, Metaxas declared: “Every one of them understood that we are about God’s business. There is none of them. None of them. When I say none, I mean not one of them that did not understand the narrative. The narrative was we are reestablishing the Sinai Covenant. We are reestablishing the idea that we have no king but the Lord, and that we look to him directly. And it is only by looking to the Lord directly and bowing to his authority and loving him, it is only in that way that we can be free.”

He later added, “We’re gonna govern ourselves the way the Israelites did at Sinai. It hasn’t been done since.”

It was unclear how governing the United States according to the Sinai Covenant would function specifically. And it was unclear how this teaching fit into the broader Christian narratives about Jesus fulfilling or becoming a new covenant.

The Sinai Covenant, also known as the Mosaic Covenant, was a conditional agreement between God and the Israelites, mediated by Moses at Mount Sinai. God promised to make the Israelites “treasured possession” and a “holy nation” while Israel agreed to obey a long list of divine laws. The covenant also required animal sacrifice.

Redefining equality

One surprising theme of Trump’s event was how all men are created equal. But rather than being defined in a way that gives space to everyone to pursue life, liberty and happiness according to their own consciences, Barron redefined human equality as being dependent on submission to God’s created order.

“In what sense precisely are all people equal?” he asked. “We’re plainly unequal in size, intelligence, creativity, beauty, energy, moral virtue, etc.”

Contrasting philosophers, societies and people who believe in God from those who don’t, Barron said, “All people, despite their enormous inequalities, are equally children of God and therefore equal in dignity.”

But then he warned, “Take God out of the equation and equality quickly disappears.”

The rise of conservative Christian men

Eventually, human freedom and equality submitted to the story that this Christian nationalist God is writing in the United States leads to specific gender scripts.

According to one prayer offered at Trump’s event, there’s a battle in the U.S. between the serpent and the lamb, we must oppose abortion, and the most powerful spirit isn’t the spirit of Jezebel, but the Holy Spirit of God.

The language of gender and power, in some ways subtle, was quite clear through the way men and women were talked about. Both events emphasized men, especially young men, founding the nation by fighting battles as Bible-believing Christians.

For Driscoll, this means young men becoming like his idea of our Founding Fathers.

“Our Founding Fathers were young men. Our Founding Fathers were Christian men. Our Founding Fathers were strong men. And our Founding Fathers were husbands and fathers,” he said.

To young women, Driscoll simply said, “You have been brainwashed to hate Jesus Christ, to despise the Bible, to reject femininity, and to terminate life in your own womb. Your generation is the most brainwashed and depressed in the history of the United States of America. It’s because it is against Christ. And if you will return to Christ, you will return to joy.”

He had nothing positive to say to women.

But back to the men, he said, “You need to be working and building, sacrificing and serving. The nation needs you. The kingdom of God needs you.”

Then he offered three recommendations. First, “You need to turn to, and trust in, and come under the authority of Jesus Christ.”

Second, “You need to get married to a girl.” At this point, the crowd erupted into cheers, with some around me saying, “Yeah, a girl. Not no man!”

Third, plagiarizing Charlie Kirk, Driscoll said, “You need to have more children than you can afford and make sure they all enter this world from the womb, and that you love your job of being a father and raising up future gladiators for the kingdom of God.”

His words about gender were echoed the next day by Franklin Graham, who spoke of the nation becoming lovers of money, boastful and arrogant. But while some of us had a very specific person in mind who fit that description quite well, the people Graham had in mind were transgender people.

The entire weekend promoted a very specific vision of God. It wasn’t a God who identifies in and among the least of these. It was a strongman God at the top who aligns everyone underneath his footstool in gender hierarchies that define freedom and equality in terms of submitting to God through men. So of all the names they gave God during the event, perhaps the most accurate one according to their theology came from Tulsi Gabbard, who called God the “Supreme Controller.”

And it all served to control everyone into hierarchies not under God, but under men, with women simply being acknowledged as brainwashed Jezebels who need to submit to being in the home and being impregnated.

As Driscoll put it, “It is time, young men, to serve Christ, to get married, to build your business, to get into politics, and also to in every way empower your church to be the tip of the spear for the fight against evil. Because here’s what I know. Evil never stops itself. So good men need to get in the way and they need to be up for the fight! And that’s where we are!”

 

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.