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Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sunday for "Rededicate 250," a taxpayer-funded Christian evangelical service backed by President Trump. The eight-hour lineup featured songs, prayers and remarks by top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The event included religious leaders like evangelist Franklin Graham and Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
"Nothing was Christian about what we saw yesterday," says Bishop William J. Barber II. "This is idolatry. This is heresy. This is a form of religious nationalism. This is Trump worship. This is trying to make someone a messiah figure." Barber, the president of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, took part in a counter-event on Sunday called Redirect 250.
"This is really a battle for the soul of America," says Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. The Supreme Court has eroded the separation of church and state in recent decades, particularly under President Trump, adds Posner. She also notes that "evangelicals, for decades, have been marinating in Christian Zionist theology and ideology, which holds that, in their view, America has a biblical duty to defend Israel, and in particular defend Israel from aggression, both nuclear and otherwise, from Iran."
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This year's local election results from the United Kingdom are in. The far-right, anti-immigrant Reform UK party made substantial gains, while the ruling Labour Party suffered heavy losses, signaling what London-based journalist Daniel Trilling calls a "wider fragmenting of politics" and a generational shift away from the two-party political system. We get an overview of major developments to the U.K. political scene from Trilling, including how Donald Trump's transformation of the U.S. right-wing movement has inspired Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, and how the Labour Party's crackdown on pro-Palestine activism led to rising support for the left-wing Green Party. Trilling also discusses how populist sentiment continues to influence other countries in Europe after Hungary's extremist leader Viktor Orbán suffered a major election defeat last month.
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