The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will this weekend headline a faith rally on the National Mall in Washington DC hosted by a private foundation operating in partnership with the White House, which includes some speakers that experts have characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.

Rededicate 250, billed as the faith-based component of America’s semiquincentennial, features speakers including a Detroit pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic” and launched his own memecoin after praying at Trump’s second inauguration; a rabbi who has defended the use of torture and authored an essay titled “The Virtue of Hate”; and a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.

Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House speaker Mike Johnson are also scheduled to appear. The lineup includes no Muslims, no representatives of historically Black churches, no Indigenous faith leaders and no mainline Protestants.

Hegseth’s own writings foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric and envisage a US military “taking sides” in a coming American civil war, as previously reported in the Guardian. His 2020 book American Crusade depicts Islam as a historic enemy of the west, calls for an “American crusade” against “domestic enemies” as well as the enemies of Israel, and idolises medieval crusaders. Hegseth has “deus vult”, the Latin slogan of Pope Urban II at the launch of the first crusade, tattooed on his arm.

Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, a congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) and a regular worshipper at the CREC’s Christ Kirk DC plant on Pennsylvania Avenue. CREC founder Douglas Wilson told the Guardian in April 2026 he was a Christian nationalist, and that Hegseth’s “worldview is broadly the same as ours”.

CREC pastors who rotate through the Christ Kirk DC pulpit have publicly called for restricting the vote to heads of households, the overturning of Obergefell v Hodges, the restoration of state sodomy laws, the outlawing of mosques, and the application of biblical law through the courts, as previously reported in the Guardian.

Hegseth has hosted a monthly Christian prayer service at the Pentagon since May 2025 and the 17 February 2026 service was presided over by Wilson personally, 11 days before US forces joined Israel in the first attacks on Iran. At a 25 March 2026 service, as previously reported in the Guardian, Hegseth prayed that God would “break the teeth” of US enemies.

Rededicate 250 is one of a string of events organised by Freedom 250, a private nonprofit launched by the White House in December 2025 as a partner to the bipartisan US semiquincentennial commission Congress established in 2016. Freedom 250 is now under congressional investigation over the redirection of federal funds and the sale of access to Trump.

Matthew D Taylor, the author of several books on Christian nationalism, including the upcoming Defying Tyrants, said of the Rededicate 250 lineup of speakers that they “are some of the most active Christian nationalist leaders that you can find in the country”.

‘I cannot influence him if I am not at the table’

Many of the planned speakers at the event have emerged as Christian leaders in tandem with Trump’s ascendancy.

Jentezen Franklin is a televangelist, author and pastor of the nondenominational multi-site Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, and since May 2025 a member of the religious leaders advisory board of Trump’s religious liberty commission.

Franklin attributes much of what he sees as America’s ills to diabolical forces. In his 2013 book Spirit of Python, he wrote: “There are concentrations of demonic atmospheres across America where cities have become drug strongholds, sex-trafficking strongholds, homosexual strongholds, crime strongholds, abortion strongholds, and so on.”

In his 2008 book Fasting, he wrote that homosexuality was a “demonic sexual addiction”. He also wrote that fasting can cure those “diseased and suffering with Aids, leukemia, heart disease”.

Taylor said: “When you talk about charismatic or Pentecostal Christianity, one of the fundamental commitments of that style of Christianity is to a supernatural worldview, a vision that says that there are a lot of forces at work in the world that are not simply human or material, that there are angels, there are demons.”

In Spirit of Python Franklin grouped “Scientology, Buddhism, Islam, New Age, Kabbalah” together as “false religions” and wrote that the teaching of evolution “leads many to sink into wasted, unproductive lives, and it leads others into rejecting the existence of the God of the universe”.

The Guardian emailed questions for Franklin to his church, Free Chapel, but received no response.

‘It’s a Christian Zionist version of Christian nationalism’

Like Franklin, several other billed speakers are concurrently members of or advisers to Trump’s religious liberty commission, established on 1 May 2025 by executive order.

Of the 13 commissioners, 12 are Christians and one is Jewish. The religious leaders advisory board added in mid-May 2025 comprises seven Christian leaders and four Orthodox rabbis, with no Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist representation.

In February 2026 a multifaith coalition led by the Interfaith Alliance sued the administration, arguing that the commission’s overwhelming Christian skew breaches the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s requirement of balanced membership.

Both the commission and the speaking stage at Rededicate 250 are dominated by faith leaders who, like Franklin, are vociferous in their support for Israel. Taylor said this revealed something about the balance of power inside the Christian right, in relation to a Trump administration currently fighting a war in Iran alongside Israel.

“There’s this very sharp tension going on right now, I’d even call it a low-grade civil war, between the more Christian Zionist factions that are very pro-Israel, very pro-war in Iran … versus this kind of rising tide of anti-Semites in the far right coalition,” Taylor said.

“When I look at that list, I don’t see the anti-Semitic faction really represented at all. I think it signals that this is pretty closely aligned more with the kind of old religious right establishment and this kind of new guard of independent charismatic leaders. It’s a Christian Zionist version of Christian nationalism.”

‘Terrorists do not have a right not to be tortured’

The only non-Christian speaker is also an uncompromising supporter of Israel.

Meir Soloveichik is a writer; a podcast host; the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Congregation Shearith Israel; the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University; one of 13 commissioners of Trump’s religious liberty commission; and since February 2025 vice-chair of the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Soloveichik gave the invocation at the opening session of the 2012 Republican national convention in Tampa. In December 2017 he led the prayer at Trump’s first White House Hanukah celebration. In 2019 Mike Pompeo appointed him to the state department’s commission on unalienable rights.

Soloveichik has argued in print since at least 2003 that hatred of his enemies is a religious duty. In his February 2003 First Things essay “The Virtue of Hate”, he wrote: “There is, in fact, no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous … God, Jesus argues, loves the wicked, and so must we. In disagreeing, Judaism does not deny the importance of imitating God; Jews hate the wicked because they believe that God despises the wicked as well.”

Some time between 2005 and 2008, Soloveichik returned to the University of Scranton’s Judaic studies program to deliver a follow-up lecture titled “Torture: Is It Always Immoral?”

In the lecture Soloveichik said: “My presentation will argue that torture can be an appropriate action because, by every just standard, those who attempt to murder millions of people actually deserve to be tortured. Terrorists do not have a right not to be tortured. Indeed, they deserve to be tormented for what they have done.”

He cited Israel’s 1994 torture of a Palestinian driver during the Nachshon Wachsman kidnapping as a positive precedent for US policy. Faced with a similar choice, he said, “an American president would have a similar obligation.”

Soloveichik attacked Pope John Paul II’s classification of torture as an intrinsic evil. The current Catholic approach, he said, “embodies not the wisdom of the ages but the moral equivalence of secular Europe”.

In his January 2024 First Things essay “The Undying People”, written after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, Soloveichik framed Hamas as a contemporary instance of the biblical Amalekites, a people the Hebrew Bible commands Israel to “blot out from under heaven”.

Of US college students protesting the Gaza war, he wrote: “On college campuses across America, little Nuremberg rallies have convened, at which ‘diversity’ is embraced so long as it does not entail the well-being of Jews or the Jewish state.”

The Guardian emailed Soloveichik for comment but received no response.

‘We do believe that the Democratic platform is demonic’

There are no representatives from established denominations that have historically served Black communities. Not all the speakers are white, however, those who are not have benefited from their adoption of charismatic Pentecostal practice and their alliances with Trump.

Lorenzo Sewell is the senior pastor of 180 Church in Detroit, a non-denominational charismatic congregation. Trump’s campaign held a “Blacks for Trump” roundtable at the church in June 2024; Sewell told Fox News later that year that “we do not believe that every Democrat is a demon, but we do believe that the Democratic platform is demonic.”

Sewell stood by this claim in a telephone conversation with the Guardian, saying: “You can’t honor God and be a Democrat. It’s impossible. Because how can you tell me you’re honoring God, but you believe in babies being aborted? How can you tell me you honor God and believe that your sexuality can be changed?”

He spoke on the fourth night of the 2024 Republican national convention, opened the 103rd Michigan house of representatives on 8 January 2025 with an invocation, and delivered one of three benedictions at Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January 2025.

Hours after his inauguration prayer, Sewell launched a memecoin bearing his name and asked his followers to “go buy the official Lorenzo Sewell coin.” Within 24 hours Lorenzo had spiked from a fraction of a penny and then collapsed roughly 93% from a peak market value of about $4.5m.

On the memecoin, Lorenzo told the Guardian that: “It wasn’t something that I did proactively. I wasn’t looking to start a coin. It wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t started by me. It was started by someone who has the freedom in this society to make money. And that’s what they did.”

He said that while he did make money from the coin, it went into his church and its charitable work, “And we were able to help young men coming out of foster care. We made $30,000 that day.”

In March 2025 Sewell testified to the Michigan house election integrity committee, alleging “systemic voter fraud” in Detroit. Democratic members of the committee called the hearing a “circus”. In April 2025, Sewell told the Detroit News that he was considering a 2026 run for the US Senate seat being vacated by Gary Peters.

Sewell also held to this claim, saying that he had seen evidence of “people that had their votes switched. People that were registered without their knowledge”, and he was involved in legal action related to the claimed fraud.

“I’m actually the self-proclaimed, and I believe I deserve the title, as the election integrity evangelist,” Sewell added.

Frederick Clarkson is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates who has written extensively on the New Apostolic Reformation. Clarkson said the NAR’s appeal across racial lines was central to its political reach.

“NAR has never been all white. They’re authentically multiracial and multiethnic. They’ve got the people and they’ve got the leaders and they’re using them,” Clarkson said.

‘I’d be happy to die in this fight’

Some of the speakers were fixtures in an older version of the Christian right before going all in on Trump.

Eric Metaxas is an author, Salem Media radio host, a commissioner in the religious liberty commission and the author of a 2010 biography of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was master of ceremonies of the 12 December 2020 Jericho March on the National Mall, a “Stop the Steal” prayer rally three weeks before the storming of the US Capitol. The march featured Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes warning of a “much more bloody war” if Trump did not retain power.

On a 9 December 2020 episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast, Metaxas said of efforts to overturn the election: “What’s right is right … We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” Nine days earlier, on a 30 November 2020 broadcast of his own radio show, Metaxas told Trump live on air: “I’d be happy to die in this fight.”

Three months earlier, on the night of Trump’s 27 August 2020 Republican national convention speech at the White House, Metaxas punched an anti-Trump protester biking past him on a Washington street. Video of the incident went viral within hours; Metaxas later confirmed the punch in an email to Religion Unplugged, saying, “It just happened.”

The Guardian emailed Metaxas for comment but received no response.