On Rededicate 250, anointed politicians, and the God who was never domesticated by empire.

I was away this past Sunday. I didn’t preach. Didn’t even open a Bible in front of anyone. And while I was gone, something happened on the National Mall that I cannot quite let pass without saying something.

On May 17, thousands of people gathered in Washington for an event called Rededicate 250, billed as “A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving” and pitched as the spiritual lead-up to America’s 250th birthday this July. The White House announced it. The President invited the country (but didn’t attend because he was busy golfing). Cabinet members spoke. Pastors prayed. People raised their hands and rededicated America “as one nation under God.”

I have to be honest with you. I do not think God needed it. I do not think God asked for it. And I am not sure the God we say we were rededicating ourselves to is the God most of the people on that stage are actually worshipping.

What Actually Happened on the Mall

The event was organized by a group called Freedom 250 in partnership with the White House. The lineup was almost entirely conservative evangelical, with a handful of conservative Catholics added for breadth. Pete Hegseth. Franklin Graham, by video. Eric Metaxas. Sean Feucht. Mark Driscoll. Mike Johnson. Bishop Robert Barron. Cardinal Dolan. The event’s promotional materials featured an image of George Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge, a story, by the way, that historians (including the head of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon) have widely dismissed as fabricated.

That last detail is small, but it tells you something. The American Christian-nation narrative has always had to bend history a little to make its case. Washington was almost certainly a deist or a low-temperature Anglican who rarely took communion. He was not an evangelical. He was not kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge begging Jesus to give him a country. But the painting is useful, so the painting keeps showing up.

That is the pattern. The America-as-Christian-nation story requires you to be a little selective about what is actually true. And once you start being a little selective about what is true, you have already wandered some distance from the One who called himself the Truth.

A Nation Cannot Be Christian

Christianity is not transferred through citizenship. You cannot be a Christian by being born in Kansas any more than you can be a Christian by being born in Norway, Nigeria, or Pakistan. A nation has no soul to save. A nation cannot repent. A nation cannot be born again, to borrow the phrase that confused Nicodemus so badly. Only people can.

Jesus made this distinction explicitly. When Pilate was interrogating him, when his life depended on the answer, Jesus said:

“My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.” — John 18:36

The Roman Empire was the global superpower of the day, and Jesus was being killed by it, and he refused to play that game. He could have. The crowds were ready. He had the standing to launch a national revival in the political sense. He didn’t. He said his kingdom was something else.

The American church, increasingly, does not believe him.

The 2 Chronicles 7:14 Problem

You will hear, around every American Christian Nationalist event, this verse:

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land.” — 2 Chronicles 7:14

It is a beautiful verse.

It was also written, very specifically, to Israel. By God. About Israel. At the dedication of Solomon’s temple. About a covenant God had made with one particular people, in one particular place, for one particular purpose in salvation history.

America is not in that covenant.

We like to imagine the United States as a kind of New Israel, a chosen nation, a city on a hill, a people specially blessed by God. The Puritans certainly thought that. A lot of Christians have thought that since. But the New Testament does not extend the Old Testament covenant to any political nation-state. The covenant gets extended to the church, to people of every nation, tribe, and language (Revelation 7:9). There is no Christian nation. There is a Christian people, scattered across nations.

When we yank 2 Chronicles 7:14 out of its context and apply it to the United States, what we are actually doing is claiming a status for our country that the Bible never gives it. We are saying we are special to God in a way other countries are not. We are saying God has a particular plan for the United States that he does not have for, say, Honduras or Vietnam or Iran.

That is not in the Bible. That is American exceptionalism wearing a Christian costume.

The Cyrus Anointing and What It Doesn’t Mean

Some folks like to argue that even if the leader they are rallying around is not a personally faithful Christian, God still uses him. They point to Cyrus, the Persian king in Isaiah 45 whom God actually calls “my anointed,” and say that is the pattern. God uses pagans to accomplish his purposes. Therefore a leader who does not look like Jesus can still be God’s chosen instrument.

There is something to that. God does use whoever he wants. God used Pharaoh, in his way. God used Nebuchadnezzar. God used Cyrus. So sure, God can use anyone.

But notice what the Bible never does. It never says Cyrus was a believer. It never holds him up as a moral example. It never says we should call him a great worshipper of the Lord and put his face on a banner. The Bible says God used him, past tense, specific situation, particular purpose, and then it moves on.

What we are watching now is something different. We are watching a sustained effort to baptize a particular political figure into Christian sainthood. To call him not just useful, but anointed. To claim him not just as politically convenient, but as personally faithful. To insist his character is somehow Christ-like when his public conduct, by his own choosing and his own words, contradicts the Sermon on the Mount on virtually every point you can name.

Jesus gave us a test for this. He said,

“By their fruit you will recognize them. … A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” — Matthew 7:16, 18

Not by their rhetoric. Not by their political alignment. Not by which side they are on in the culture war. By their fruit.

And the fruit of the Spirit, according to Galatians 5:22–23, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

I would gently invite you to examine the public life of any leader being called “anointed” right now, by their own words, on their own platforms, in their own rallies, and honestly ask which of those nine things you actually see consistently. If the honest answer is “not many,” then we are not looking at a Christian leader. We may be looking at a politically useful one, depending on your priorities. But Jesus did not promise to bless a politically useful leader. He warned us, very seriously, about calling someone holy who is not.

When Isaiah said,

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” — Isaiah 5:20

… this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about.

The Temptation Jesus Already Refused

In the first week of our Lent series this year, we walked into the wilderness with Jesus. Forty days. No food. Three temptations. And the third one, Matthew is very deliberate about this, was specifically political.

Satan took Jesus to a high mountain. Showed him all the kingdoms of the world. And said,

“All this I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” — Matthew 4:9

The political power of all the kingdoms, every nation on earth, was on offer. Jesus could have had it. He could have been crowned king of everything. He could have remade the political order of the entire world by accepting one transaction.

Jesus said no.

And the American church, in 2026, is increasingly tempted to say yes. We are increasingly tempted to believe that the way Jesus’s kingdom will arrive is through political dominance. That if we can just hold enough offices, pass enough laws, install enough Christians in enough seats of power, the kingdom of God will come.

It will not.

That trade was offered to Jesus. He refused it. The fact that we keep accepting it on his behalf does not mean he has changed his mind.

The Test Jesus Actually Gave Us

In Matthew 25, Jesus describes how he will separate the sheep from the goats at the end of all things. Not a single question on that exam has to do with which country you lived in, which flag you waved, or which political party you voted for. He asks one set of questions:

Did you feed the hungry? Did you give the thirsty something to drink? Did you welcome the stranger? Did you clothe the naked? Did you visit the sick? Did you come to the imprisoned? — paraphrased from Matthew 25:35–36

That is the test. That is the whole test.

If I look honestly at the loudest voices calling America to “return to God,” and then I look at how those same voices treat the hungry, the immigrant, the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned, I do not see Matthew 25 behavior. In many cases, I see the opposite. I see contempt for the immigrant. I see cuts to programs that feed the hungry. I see hostility toward people who are sick and cannot afford care. I see rhetoric and policy specifically designed to be cruel to the very people Jesus said we would be judged on.

You cannot rededicate America to a Jesus you are simultaneously ignoring.

You can rededicate America to a flag wrapped in a Bible. You can rededicate America to an ethno-cultural project. You can rededicate America to a particular tribal identity that uses Jesus as a mascot. But you cannot rededicate America to the Jesus of Matthew 25 while spitting on the very people he said we would be measured by.

What Religious Freedom Actually Is

Something that gets confused all the time, and needs addressed: the United States was not founded as a Christian nation. It was founded as a nation in which you are free to be Christian. Or Jewish. Or Muslim. Or nothing at all.

The Founders were not trying to recreate Christendom. Many of them had ancestors who had fled exactly that. Fled state churches in Europe that had imprisoned, exiled, or killed their forebears for believing the wrong version of Christianity. Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and one of the most consequential Christian thinkers in early America, was so committed to keeping church and state separate that he was kicked out of Massachusetts for it. Read his writings. He was a devout Christian. He believed forcing faith on people was the worst thing the church could possibly do to its own gospel.

The First Amendment was written, in part, by Christians who had watched up close what happens when the church and the state get into bed together. They had seen Christendom. They had seen the Inquisition. They had seen state-sanctioned executions of people who chose the wrong denomination. And they wrote a Constitution that said, very specifically, we are not going to do that here.

When American Christians demand that the government endorse our faith, that public events be explicitly Christian, that our doctrines be enshrined in law, that our cultural preferences carry the weight of national identity, we are asking for the very thing the Founders structurally refused to give us. And we are asking for it, ironically, because we have lost confidence that the gospel can compete on its own merits.

That is the part nobody at Rededicate 250 wanted to say out loud. The reason a movement needs the state’s help is because it can no longer persuade on its own. The early church didn’t have political power. It didn’t want political power. It changed the world anyway. The American church has had enormous political power for generations and has watched its actual influence on hearts and lives shrink.

I wrote a few weeks ago, in the Easter post, that the American church’s infatuation with political power is, at its core, a loss of hope in God’s ability to act. I still believe that. If you actually believe Jesus is risen, you do not need the White House to validate your faith.

What Jesus Would Have Done on the Mall

I keep imagining what would have happened if Jesus had wandered onto the National Mall last Sunday.

Would he have prayed alongside them? Maybe. He prayed in unlikely places. He ate with people most preachers wouldn’t share a table with.

Would he have blessed the gathering as it was framed? I really, really doubt it.

I think he would have looked at the flag-draped stage and asked who, exactly, we thought we were rededicating to whom. I think he would have noticed the missing voices, the immigrants, the imprisoned, the sick, the poor, the people of other faiths who are also Americans. I think he would have asked why so many of the loudest names invoking him on that stage were the same names most associated with treating the least of these as enemies.

And, I think he might have flipped a table or two.

That is just what he did the last time he was in a sacred space being used for purposes that contradicted the kingdom of God (Matthew 21:12–13).

Where That Leaves Us

I am not asking you to leave your political convictions at the door. I am not asking you to vote any particular way. I am not even asking you to like the same candidates I do. I am, increasingly, not sure my political convictions are the most important thing about me anyway.

I am asking you to do something harder than that. I am asking you to notice when your faith and your political identity have started to merge. To notice when your loyalty to Jesus has gotten quietly subordinated to your loyalty to a country, a party, or a particular leader. To notice when the things you feel most strongly are the political things, and the things you feel least strongly are the things Jesus actually said.

Because here is the truth. Jesus is not running for office. He is not the head of a political party. He is not waiting for the right administration to bring in his kingdom. He is Lord of heaven and earth right now, and the question he keeps asking the people who claim his name is the same question he asked Peter on the beach:

“Do you love me? … Feed my sheep.” — John 21:17

Not “Do you love me? Win this election.”

Not “Do you love me? Rededicate this country.”

Feed my sheep.

That is the assignment. That has been the assignment the whole time.

We do not need a Christian America. We need American Christians who actually follow Jesus.

And as far as I can tell, you do not need a rally on the Mall to start doing that. You just need to begin.

A Question for This Week

Where in your own life has loyalty to Jesus quietly gotten tangled up with loyalty to a country, a party, or a political leader? What would it look like, this week, to gently untangle them, not to abandon your political convictions, but to put them back in their proper place: beneath Christ rather than beside him?

A Prayer for the Church

God of every nation and Father of none,

We confess that we have made you small. We have draped you in flags you never asked to wear and stood you next to leaders you never chose. We have claimed your blessing for projects you never blessed and called holy what you have not called holy. We have used your name to gather power instead of to feed your sheep.

Forgive us. Forgive the church, and forgive each of us personally where we have gone along with it, in the things we said, in the things we cheered for, in the things we stayed quiet about because it was easier.

Teach us again to follow the Jesus who refused the kingdoms of the world. Teach us to want the kingdom he actually announced — the one that does not run on borders, budgets, or election cycles, but on the slow, costly, table-flipping love that meets the hungry and the imprisoned right where they are.

Make us the kind of Christians who are easier to spot by our care for the least of these than by our flags or our talking points. Make us suspicious of any voice that claims your authority while contradicting your character. And make us, please, more loyal to the cross than to any nation that keeps trying to drape it.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done. In America as it is in heaven — but only the way you intended it, not the way we keep insisting.

In the name of Jesus, who is not a candidate,

Amen.