Trump’s 250th Is a Festival of Slop History

The narrative reaches
a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious
freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights,
authored principally by George Mason, declares “that
religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging
it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” According
to Hall, this somehow proves that Mason never wanted to separate church and
state. In fact, the point of the Declaration was to do precisely that. Mason
himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry
and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and
clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on
“reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this
declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious
nationalist messaging.

Sure enough, by the time we arrive at the photomontage with
which the video culminates, we are treated to an engraving, based on the 1866 painting by Henry
Brueckner, of George Washington that shows him kneeling in the snow at Valley
Forge. The alleged Valley Forge epiphany has been repeatedly debunked ever
since it was invented, including by the Valley Forge Park Commission, which concluded in
1918, after a comprehensive investigation that included analysis of thousands
of pages of correspondence and diaries of Washington and his staff, along with those
of other officials and personnel who were at the military camp, that “in none
of these were found a single paragraph that will substantiate the tradition of
the ‘Prayer at Valley Forge.’” In fact, Washington was infamous among the
ministers of his time for pointedly refusing to kneel in church. But as with
the Christian nationalist movement’s elevation of the work of revisionist
historian David Barton, the myths, contradictions, and deliberate
decontextualizations are too valuable to reject simply because they are not
true.

This is hardly surprising, given that Mark David Hall serves
on the advisory board of lay leaders on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which was established in May
2025 by executive order. The interests of the commission, which is largely
comprised of conservative Christians, appears to conform to the agenda of the
Christian nationalist movement, whose leaders have played a pivotal role in putting
Trump in office. Its chair has called for a
federal hotline with an automated recording: “There is no separation of church
and state.” Another member pressed for giving a presidential medal to the baker
who declined to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Many members of the
commission, along with those on its advisory boards, are frequently featured at
right-wing and Christian nationalist conferences and gatherings, such as Road
to Majority, Pray Vote Stand, CPAC, NatCon, and the National Pro-Life Summit.