When critics raged at American leaders for openly proclaiming Christ’s resurrection at Easter, they exposed how public Christianity has become alien in a nation unmistakably shaped by it.
This past Holy Week, the Trump administration spoke of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection publicly, which would have been utterly ordinary to earlier generations of Americans yet apparently intolerable to many in our current generation.
On Good Friday, President Donald J. Trump delivered a video message from the Resolute Desk reflecting on Christ’s crucifixion: “On Good Friday, the Son of God was nailed to the cross, crucified, and He died for all of us. It was a day of darkness, but it wasn’t the end.”
The Department of State posted a concise reflection: “On this Good Friday, the United States joins Christians around the world in reflecting on Christ’s sacrifice, the power of redemption, and the hope of the Resurrection.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a Gospel video message on Easter Sunday with the caption “He is Risen.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted, “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth—Happy Easter.” The Department of Homeland Security quoted Luke 24:6 and declared simply, “He is Risen. Happy Easter, America.”
Other federal agencies joined in with comparably restrained yet explicit recognitions of the holiday, while President Trump issued a formal Easter message rejoicing in the Resurrection and noting that “the life of Jesus Christ and the truths of the Gospel have inspired our way of life.”
The backlash began almost instantly. Former Congressman Denver Riggleman III, R-Va., replied to the Department of Homeland Security’s Good Friday post quoting Luke 23:46: “This is inappropriate. Government accounts should not be posting religious content. This isn’t Iran.” His remark quickly surpassed two million views and set the tone for a wave of similar objections. I remind you, this is a former congressman.
This says more of our American age than of the administration’s posts.
The Double Standard No One Wants to Name
The critics’ selective outrage grows even more telling when juxtaposed against their tolerance for other official messaging — and against the markedly different approach taken by progressive leaders.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted on Good Friday framing the day as a generic “day of sacrifice,” noting fasting and silence but omitting any reference to Jesus Christ or His crucifixion. The post drew swift Christian backlash for diluting the holiday’s explicit theological meaning. Only after the criticism did his Easter Sunday message explicitly mention “the resurrection of Jesus Christ” followed by words of vague spirituality.
A similar pattern appeared in former President Barack Obama’s Easter message. He and Michelle Obama wished “a joyful holiday filled with reminders of the enduring power of faith and hope” — a generic invocation that conspicuously avoided naming Jesus Christ, His sacrificial death, or the resurrection. Former Vice President Kamala Harris offered a comparable Resurrection Sunday greeting that spoke of “the promise of renewal, the power of faith, and the enduring hope” without referencing Christ by name.
What a trend. It echoes the pattern under the previous administration, when federal emphasis during Holy Week highlighted the Transgender Day of Visibility — an observance fixed on March 31 that, in years when it overlapped with Easter, received prominent presidential proclamations alongside, or instead of, Christian observances.
The operative principle, it appears, is not the exclusion of religion from the public square but the exclusion of Christianity alone. What is presented as even-handed secularism is in practice the elevation of a rival metaphysical framework enforced through cultural suasion and institutional gatekeeping.
The First Amendment Myth Critics Keep Invoking
Whatever modern secularism now demands, the American founding did not conceive of Christianity as a private eccentricity but as a public good essential to the moral architecture of the republic. The very Congress that drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights simultaneously elected and compensated Christian chaplains to open its sessions with prayer — a practice unbroken since 1789. When the seat of government moved to Washington in 1800, the House chamber itself became a venue for weekly Christian worship, drawing thousands, including sitting presidents. No contemporary voices decried these arrangements as violations of the Establishment Clause.
The Founders wove biblical premises into the republic’s foundational instruments. The Declaration of Independence locates inalienable rights in endowment “by their Creator,” not in governmental concession. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, enacted by the same Congress that framed the First Amendment, affirmed that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” Congress endorsed the first complete English Bible printed in America as “a pious and laudable undertaking” meriting national encouragement. Together, these features of the founding reflect a coherent worldview in which ordered liberty rests upon a transcendent moral order.
That inheritance remains inscribed in the nation’s public architecture and civic liturgy — Christian values etched in marble, engraved into law. Moses bearing the Ten Commandments graces the Supreme Court frieze. “In God We Trust” is statutorily mandated on the currency. The Pledge of Allegiance affirms the nation as “under God.”
Congressional prayers, presidential thanksgiving proclamations, and invocations of divine providence in state papers constitute the unbroken warp and woof of American public life. To cast modest Holy Week acknowledgments as radical is to treat two centuries of constitutional practice as an historical aberration.
The critics of these recent Holy Week posts often speak as though any explicit Christian witness from government is automatically unconstitutional, un-American, or authoritarian. History leaves them on very shaky ground.
What We Lose When We Forget Our Roots
Such historical forgetfulness is not benign but a distilled product of decades of reinterpretation or, might I say, replacement: judicial doctrines that recast the First Amendment as a prophylactic against public faith rather than a safeguard for its exercise; educational narratives that reduce the nation’s biblical roots to a regrettable footnote; and elite consensus that regards any governmental nod to Christianity as evidence of atavism. The consequence is a public discourse in which a majority of citizens are implicitly asked to view the faith that formed their country as uniquely suspect when voiced by their own government.
Many today champion a vision of America as a patchwork of separate cultures and faiths, each preserved in isolation. Yet the republic was never intended as a multicultural mosaic; it was founded as a melting pot in which diverse ways of life are forged into one American way of life.
That way of life — ordered liberty, equality under law, and respect for the dignity of every person — was explicitly rooted in the Christian message, as the Trump administration rightly observed. The Founders did not imagine a neutral public square stripped of its biblical substructure. They presupposed a shared moral consensus drawn from Scripture. Sever that consensus, and the very concepts of constitutional rights and limited government lose their foundation.
The irony runs deeper still. The very concepts critics invoke to police these expressions — human dignity, limited government, the rule of law — derive their American vitality from scriptural convictions about the imago Dei, the fallenness of man, and the sovereignty of transcendent justice. Sever the republic from that intellectual and moral subsoil, and the language of rights becomes untethered rhetoric, hostage to whichever faction momentarily commands the levers of power.
The controversy over these Holy Week posts is therefore not merely procedural; it is civilizational. It signals a sustained effort to detach the American experiment from the philosophical ground that sustained its freedoms — and to redefine religious liberty itself as a threat rather than a right.
The real question is whether Christianity may still appear in America’s public square without being treated as an offense.
The reflexive portrayal of these Holy Week acknowledgements — from the president’s Resolute Desk video to agency posts quoting Scripture — as unconstitutional tells us more about the critics’ historical blind spot than about any defect in the administration’s conduct.
The United States was not founded as the secular republic some now imagine. It arose within an overwhelmingly Protestant Anglo-American culture that understood liberty, virtue, and public life through a biblical moral vocabulary. To pretend otherwise is not to advance constitutional fidelity but to guarantee that future generations inherit a republic stripped of the convictions that rendered its liberties possible in the first place.
The recent federal observances of Holy Week were modest, historically literate, and culturally unexceptional for most of America’s existence. That they provoked such condemnation illuminates how thoroughly the project of cultural excision has progressed — and how urgently it must be answered if the republic is to retain the character that rendered it exceptional.
If you believe America cannot stay free while forgetting the faith that helped form it, make a tax-deductible gift today. Your support helps the Standing for Freedom Center defend religious liberty, expose cultural amnesia, and equip Americans to lead with biblical clarity when the public square is on the line.
