Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington on Sunday for a mass prayer rally. Organizers billed the daylong event as a "rededication of our country as One Nation Under God."

US President Donald Trump and top officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, addressed the crowd alongside conservative evangelical Protestant figures.

The rally was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership backed by the White House, as part of celebrations marking 250 years of US independence.

Organizers streamed a video of Trump in the White House reading verses from 2 Chronicles in the Old Testament. The same footage was used during a marathon Bible-reading event in April.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referenced the mythical account that first US President George Washington prayed "without ceasing" for his army's salvation in the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. "Let's pray to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," said Hegseth.

Critics decried the event as an overt display of Christian nationalism undermining the separation of church and state protected in the US Constitution. Groups such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and Faithful America staged counter-events.

On Thursday evening, the Interfaith Alliance projected protest slogans onto an exterior wall of the National Gallery of Art. One read: "Democracy not theocracy," another: "The separation of church and state is good for both."

Apart from an Orthodox rabbi and a retired Catholic archbishop, the faith leaders invited to speak were almost all conservative evangelical Protestants.

Source: www.dw.com