As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial
into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White
House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda
videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America:
The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features
narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member
of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you
don’t have to.  

Hall opens by dismissing
the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.”
Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that
the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the
MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during
this video. His agenda is information-averse: Sure, he includes some snippets of
texts and historical facts. But he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never
intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment
of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians
would assume their natural right to rule the country.

Hall starts with the
claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this
logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in
order to make the point that, as he wrote,
“it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must
count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.

Hall then dwells on comparatively
minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who
resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he
led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President
Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to
separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural,
miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating
“diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote
in an 1813 letter to John Adams.

Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also
known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their
religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the
faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a
handful of individuals.”

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.

In its public-facing media, the commission does address several
incidents of genuine religious persecution. But other action items include
expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money
and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they
have a faith-based excuse.

Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be
standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal
educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s
Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself
an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled
by a sector of the ultrawealthy.

Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the
commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our
many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the
centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus
unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of
America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was
exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White
House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of
corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate
those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original
version of an America that has never in fact existed.