What MAGA doesn't know about American history as historians demolish Trump report

Attendees react during the AmericaFest 2024 conference sponsored by conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 19, 2024. REUTERS Cheney Orr

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission released a draft report on American religious history that, according to experts, gets a lot of basic facts wrong about its purported subject.

“A new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life,” Vox’s Christian Paz wrote on Sunday. The report also claims that the Founding Fathers’ seminal documents like the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights were based explicitly on religious concepts.

Paz spoke with experts who push back against that narrative.

“The First Amendment is also about a practical response to the fact that you have 13 colonies that you need to unify, and many of them have established churches, but they’re different churches,” historian Matthew A. Sutton told Vox. “The First Amendment is not this kind of high ideal about freedom of religion. It’s simply about how can we keep these people from killing each other when we know for the last 300 years, different groups of Christians have killed each other in Europe.”

This was ultimately why the 13 colonies forming a new nation settled on the statement that in America “there will be no establishment of religion.”

He also placed in context the fact that Benjamin Franklin asked to open one of the early Continental Conventions with a prayer.

“In 1774, it’s not clear there’s going to be a revolution,” Sutton told Vox. “They have not left, and the clergyman they chose for this prayer is a member of the Church of England. They were trying to signal to England that they did want to maintain their unity, that they wanted to keep their religious bonds together. It was very practical. But this is the selective cherry-picking that the Trump people do. They didn’t have a prayer at the Constitutional Convention. So you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to talk about when you do, you need to talk about when you don’t and see those as equally valid.”

University of Notre Dame politics and religion scholar Dave Campbell also pointed out that it is misleading to describe the “Founding Fathers” as a monolithic group, as they often had wildly varying opinions about what American religion should look like in a free society.

“It’s a misnomer to speak of the Founders as though they had one view,” Campbell told Vox. “They had different views, but they did agree, even though they had to compromise, on the wording of the First Amendment. Whatever this amorphous group that the Founders is, they disagreed, and yet they nonetheless could come to consensus that there should be no established religion, which was very novel at the time, and there should be as much latitude given to the free exercise of religion as possible.”

In contrast to this, he characterized the Trump administration’s attitude as being biased toward one particular approach to religion.

“To them, religious freedom means not respecting all religions equally, but instead ensuring that Christianity and particularly their flavor of Christianity has a favored place in the public square and in law,” Campbell said.

Sutton echoed that view.

“The Bremerton decision on the high school football coach being allowed to pray [at games], the recent debates about whether or not Christian charter schools are going to receive state financing, debates about the Ten Commandments on school grounds — we can see just a concerted effort by attorneys through these religious organizations that have made this kind of document essentially marching orders and used it to try to reestablish or bring us back to a world in which the Protestant majority can try to impose its will on everybody else,” Sutton told Vox. “The courts seem more open to that than they have been in a couple of generations.”

Back in May, Paz also drew attention to the Trump administration’s numerous mistakes when it comes to accurately representing the Christian faith it claims to propound.

“The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state,” Paz reported on Thursday. “Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.”

In April a former staffer for a different Republican president, Ronald Reagan, also argued that Trump’s behavior and that of his supporters is anti-Christian.

"The past few days have featured the vice president of the United States lecturing the pope on morality and church doctrine; Sean Hannity making it official that he worships at the Church of Trump; Pete Hegseth quoting made-up verses from Pulp Fiction as if they were actual scripture; and Trump styling himself as Jesus Christ," The Bulwark’s Charen wrote. "A few years ago, one might have wondered how these acts of contempt toward Christianity would go down with the religious right, but after 10 years of cultishness, it would be foolish to expect many defections."

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