Split Screen: America 250’s Vision

The group ostensibly celebrating a big national birthday has a Christian nationalist plan for this country.

Don’t be fooled. America 250 is a Christian nationalist plan for this country.

As you may have heard, America is celebrating its 250th birthday this year. Because I feel a little complicated about this celebration, I did some digging into the imagery being used to sell this major event by the Trump administration.

What I found was not just cringeworthy or cheesy, but also troubling and dangerous.

The “Freedom Plane” traveling to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Miami, Dearborn, and Seattle will be flying around the country with documents from the National Archives (NARA), including a draft of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Senate markup of the Bill of Rights. In February 2025, Trump fired head archivist Colleen Shogan, and her two deputies were forced out shortly after. NARA has lost nearly 100 employees to DOGE cuts. (The brilliant National Security Archive at GWU tracks the web pages and data loss resulting from these firings and censorship).

Ironically, this administration gutted the essential services of the recordkeeping of our nation’s history and is now flying a plane to various cities to tout its support of the National Archives. The “Freedom Plane National Tour” is, according to the website, enabled by the “generous support of the Boeing Company, Comcast Corporation, Microsoft and P&G.” In this moment of oligarchy, where companies and the wealthy kowtow to Donald Trump’s whims from cruel to inane hoping for favorable treatment, it makes sense that some of the nation’s largest and wealthiest companies would contribute to this effort.

But something more deeply troubling is bubbling underneath the surface veneer of patriotism and history.

Across the government, plans are underway for a series of events referred to as “America 250.” But “America 250” has an emerging partnership with something called “Freedom 250.” According to the AP, these two organizations – one run by the government, the second, a nonprofit – are “collaborating to coordinate the celebrations, though some criticism has emerged regarding the overlap between the two.”

What might be troubling about a nonprofit initiative named for freedom? Oh, how the First Amendment is so tricky sometimes with its “no law respecting an establishment of religion.” I followed the money to see whether there is respect for the establishment of a certain religion among these festivities.

Video from the May 17 Freedom 250 event “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” includes visuals meant to evoke a church gathering. It seems that although they had one token rabbi, every other person on the list of “faith leaders from across faith traditions” is Christian.

The America 250 Civics website, allegedly a resource for educators, has explicit partnerships with organizations like “Priests for Life” and “Faith and Freedom Coalition” in addition to more well-known Christian organizations like Turning Point USA and PragerU.

According to Freedom 250’s own website, its sponsors include Patriot Mobile, self-described as “America’s ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider,” whose website features photos of a pregnant woman, a woman with a baby, and a gun. What does Christianity have to do with a wireless provider? Patriot Mobile is a huge corporation with a political action committee that bankrolls political candidates and donates to right-wing organizations like the National Rifle Association and Students for Life of America.

You don’t have to be a large corporation to become a “partner” at Freedom 250. You just need to have Christian values! Other partners include Patriot Academy, which teaches “Biblical Citizenship”; OneCross Health, which is a medical clinic that describes itself as “rooted in faith”; the Dairy Shack of Eminence, Mo., which posts Bible quotes on social media for various secular holidays.

Every single bio on the Freedom 250 website uses the word “faith” at least once. Its organizers promise “Faith and Family nights” as part of this tour, but it’s not clear if they plan for any religious music outside of Christian gospel. There are no Jewish or Muslim singers, no atheist bands. These descriptions of “faith” mean one religion only, and that’s the problem.

Ewan Palmer of The Daily Beast has investigated some of the financials behind America 250. Not surprisingly, this seems to be yet another “cash grab.” Palmer reported, “Both groups are expected to share roughly $150 million in federal funds appropriated by Congress for the celebrations, which are managed by the Interior Department.”

Worse still, the Daily Beast article reported, “Last month, Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, also accused the Trump administration of “hijacking” the 250th anniversary celebration, citing a New York Times report alleging that Freedom 250 has been offering donors access to Trump for $1 million.”

We must keep our eyes open to the ways in which explicitly Christian organizations are funding supposedly secular programs.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the people who founded this nation prioritized secularism so much they put it into the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights, which makes clear the prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. Let’s make sure the next 250 years of our nation build toward true freedom and justice for all.

Azza Cohen (she/her) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who served as Vice President Kamala Harris’s official videographer in the White House. She recently founded a production company with her wife, Kathleen, and is writing a book about visual sexism from a cinematographer’s perspective. Uncover and address visual sexism alongside Azza every other week here on The Contrarian and on Instagram and Bluesky. The New Yorker distributed her film “FLOAT!” in 2023.

---