Max McCoy: I'm sitting out America's birthday party until everyone is welcome (Opinion)

By Max McCoy

For the Missouri Independent

(Note: Max McCoy was formerly an investigative reporter for the Joplin Globe.)

Today the Trump administration is hosting an all-day prayer festival on the National Mall, partially funded with millions in taxpayer dollars, to “rededicate” America to God — and to promote Christian nationalism.

It’s all part of America’s 250th birthday celebration, which has been co-opted by the current administration and its minions to convey an overtly partisan message. That message seeks to fabricate an American founding that never was in order to justify an imperial presidency that was never intended.

“It will feature mostly evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration,” reported the Washington Post, “many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian.”

The event — called a “jubilee” by organizers — marks the collapse of what remained of the Constitutional firewall between church and state, a concept first articulated by the most famous of founders, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, ratified July 4, 1776. It is America’s founding document and includes the immortal line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Jefferson’s thinking was influenced by British philosopher John Locke, who argued for government by consent of the governed. His writing was informed by George Mason of Virginia, who earlier advanced similar ideas about equality, but without Jefferson’s literary power.

The separation of church and state was formalized by the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is just 45 words long but enumerates our rights concerning religion, speech, assembly and the press, and our right to petition for a redress of grievances.

In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, Jefferson described a “wall of separation” between matters of government and those of religion. This separation was codified over generations of American jurists to prohibit the government from either promoting or inhibiting a religion. But that longstanding separation of church and state is being dismantled by the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts, resulting in events like today’s celebration of Christian nationalism.

The event features MAGA acolytes such as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Hegseth, the architect of the Iran war, has portrayed the conflict in religious terms and has prayed for God’s blessing to kill “the enemies of righteousness.” Johnson, an evangelical Louisiana Republican, has marshalled Congressional cover for Trump’s misdeeds, including the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to build a $1 billion, likely public-funded ballroom with a Hitlerian bunker beneath.

Paula White-Cain, a senior faith adviser to the White House, said in an April webinar that today’s jubilee would focus on a Christian community of believers and would not include individuals “praying to all these different Gods.”

Or, presumably, praying to no gods.

Atheists, agnostics and tree-huggers need not apply.

In Trump’s America, on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the message is, be our type of evangelical political Christian or get out of the way. That message might have grated on Jefferson, who treated his religion as a private matter and who once used a razor blade to cut the words of Jesus from the New Testament and arranged them into a new book, free of the miraculous or the supernatural. In his time, Jefferson was accused of being both an atheist and an agnostic.

But what Jefferson was — despite being a hypocrite for his advocacy of freedom and his status as an enslaver — was a child of the Enlightenment. The American experiment in democracy might be a miracle, wrought not by God but by the power of the rational in service to the good. As miracles go it was an imperfect one, as embodied by Jefferson’s own duality, and incarnated in Abraham Lincoln and passed on to us.

The notion that some of us, by accident of birth or choice or rejection of religion, are somehow lesser Americans is a great regressive lie that threatens the fabric of our democracy. The descendants of slaves must have as much power at the ballot box as the progeny of the enslavers, or we perpetuate America’s original sin. Children born here to Somali immigrants who sought refuge from civil war must be recognized as American, just as are the sons and daughters of our neighbors across the street, or we deny the promise of the great nation we might one day become.

In “Our Ancient Faith,” a 2024 book by historian Allen C. Guelzo on Lincoln and the American experiment, the author cites three tools by which democracies defend themselves.

“The first is to understand all the legal participants in a state as citizens,” Guelzo writes, “possessing equal standing and access to political life — the right to vote, to hold office, to hold leaders accountable, to form political associations that shape policies, to be represented.”

The second tool is elections, in which every office holder knows that accountability is inevitable. The third are forums for discussion and association, with the press being the leading example.

“Democracies that use their tools well accomplish many great things,” according to Guelzo. But the deft handling of these tools relies on something, he said, the ancients called “virtue,” the agreed-upon rules and norms that shape a society and keep it from sliding into chaos.

All three tools of democracy are being blunted by the Trump administration. He has attacked birthright citizenship, has fomented distrust of elections and has consistently described the press as the “enemies of the people.” The idea of any kind of civic virtue in this administration has gone the way of decorum at the White House, where a UFC cage match is scheduled for June 14 on the South Lawn as part of the “Freedom 250”celebration. The date is also Trump’s 80th birthday.

As we have spiraled deeper into a national nightmare of senseless war, wealth inequality and stunning corruption, I have been searching our history like Jefferson did with the New Testament, attempting to razor virtue from chaos. What I’ve been after is an accounting of the civic soul of America, something I’ve sometimes glimpsed, on a rainy afternoon in a federal courtroom in Wichita or at the oldest working courthouse in Kansas.

Today’s “jubilee” on the National Mall is the kind of chaotic dreck that endangers democracy. Because the dreck is going to get deeper the nearer we get to July 4 — and I’m using the word “dreck” here because the actual word I’m thinking is unsuitable for publication — I’ve resolved to avoid all the administration-approved 250th anniversary celebrations.

I’ll celebrate when there is an actual reason to celebrate.

And when everybody is invited to the party.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep looking for civic virtue in the corners accessible to me. Another way of saying it is that I’m seeking virtue in my own backyard, and my backyard is Kansas.

Kansas is not a populous state (we rank 35th, with nearly three million residents) but you can’t sling a metaphor without hitting something of interest. My interests have ranged broadly, as documented in more than 200 of these pieces for Kansas Reflector, but those that linger in my memory are those about people trying to make Kansas a better place for us all. It’s the story of a Coffeyville newspaper exposing the Ku Klux Klan in 1922 or Topeka residents gathering in 2025 for a candlelight vigil after the murder of a 5-year-old girl.

What we fight for defines us.

As Independence Day approaches, my thoughts increasingly turn to Jefferson and his chief rival, John Adams. Both were among the 56 signers of the Declaration, and both became presidents of the United States, Adams in 1797 and Jefferson in 1801.

Adams helped Jefferson draft the Constitution and became its chief advocate in the continental congress. Unlike Jefferson, who was a Virginia planter, Adams was a Massachusetts lawyer and activist and had never owned slaves. While Jefferson was over 6 feet in height and possessed an almost preternatural charm, Adams was short and neurotic, and he relied on his wife, Abigail, as his closest adviser.

The friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams unraveled over differences about an undeclared war, immigration and naturalization, and the role of the federal government. They faced off in the presidential election of 1800. Adams was the incumbent, but lost to Jefferson. The election was nasty, polarizing, and a crisis of the first order, taking the House of Representatives 36 votes to break an electoral tie over whether Jefferson or his running mate, Aaron Burr, would be vice-president.

The men did not reconcile until the death of Abigail Adams in 1804, when Jefferson wrote his old-friend a heartfelt letter of condolence. By coincidence or by providence, both men died on July 4, 1826. Jefferson was 83 and Adams, 90.

As recounted by historian David McCullough in his 2001 biography of John Adams, the old rival Jefferson was true to his character to the last. Not long before his death he composed a letter to the mayor of Washington, D.C., declining because of health an invitation to attend a July 4th celebration of the nation’s founding, 50 years earlier.

McCullough describes it as a “farewell public offering and one of his most eloquent,” and it was reprinted across the country.

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all),” Jefferson wrote of the celebration, “the signal to arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”

All eyes had been opened to the rights of man, Jefferson continued.

“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs,” he wrote, “nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them, by the grace of god, these are the grounds for the hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh the recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

Even in his final thoughts, McCullough notes, Jefferson was borrowing, because the reference to saddles came from a 17th Century British soldier about to be hanged for treason. That Jefferson made no mention of the individuals born enslaved is another example of his peculiar moral blindness.

While July 4th is celebrated as the founding of the country, the date is a “pleasant fiction” that has becomes enshrined in national memory, according to “Signing Their Lives Away,”a 2009 book about the men who signed the Declaration. The authors, Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese, point out that only the names of congress president John Hancock and his secretary, Charles Thomson, appear on the first printing of the Declaration. It wasn’t until Aug. 2 that most signers affixed their signatures, but July 4th is recognized because that’s the date on the document, and many of the founders, including Benjamin Franklin, did not accurately remember when they signed it.

Even then we had forgotten that the signing of the Declaration was not the work of a single day, but that of a month. The Revolutionary War that followed spanned eight hard years. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t ratified until 1788, and the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments from which our civil liberties flow, was not adopted until 1791.

The work of liberty is not accomplished overnight.

As we approach July 4th, let us celebrate not the glory of a single man, but the promise of the Declaration that might yet be made true. The past is as dead as Adams and Jefferson, the chaotic dreck of the present is mind-numbing, but the future is just now being born in the hearts and minds of a new generation of Americans.

To them we must pass the civic virtues to make America anew — and fulfill the promise of equality in our founding.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. A native Kansan, he started his career at the Pittsburg Morning Sun and was soon writing for national magazines. His investigative stories on unsolved murders, serial killers and hate groups earned him first-place awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors and other organizations. McCoy has also written more than twenty books, the most recent of which is "Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River," named a Kansas Notable Book by the state library. "Elevations" also won the National Outdoor Book Award, in the history/biography category. Max teaches journalism at Emporia State University.