It was never a given that America would avoid becoming a Christian country. It still isn’t.

Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1790 was a city on the edge. A bustling and wealthy seaport in the colonial wea, it had suffered grievously during the American Revolution, when occupying British forces burned hundreds of local buildings and destroyed much of the waterfront. The postwar recovery was proceeding slowly and fitfully. The population had fallen by a third since the prewar days, and the remaining residents were unsure of their place in the new nation, politically as well as economically. Rhode Island was the last of the 13 states to ratify the Constitution, its legislature having reluctantly given its agreement just that May and then only by a two-vote margin and under the threat of a trade embargo by the U.S. Congress.

Anxiety was especially high in the remnant of Newport’s small Jewish community. Angered by the denial of citizenship rights to non-Christians under British rule, the Jews of Newport had largely been supportive of the American Revolution, and many of them fled when British forces arrived. As Sephardim, they carried the ancestral awareness of Inquisition terror in Spain and Portugal, and the thought of life under a foreign occupation was unnerving. Their glorious synagogue, Jeshuat Israel, built in 1763, had been used as a field hospital by the British forces and had fallen into neglect. With the triumph of the Revolution, some Jews returned to Newport, but by 1790 the community consisted of barely 20 families, fewer than lived there before the Revolution. The Torah scrolls were still in storage for safekeeping; a printed book was used for the weekly readings. Moreover, the first years of independence had proved disappointing. Despite Rhode Island’s reputation for promoting religious liberty, Jews in the state found that their right to vote and hold office was still in dispute, as it had been in the colonial era.

With the announcement in early August that George Washington was coming to visit, Newport was overjoyed. The new president had toured the other New England states the previous year, but he deliberately bypassed Rhode Island because of its refusal to ratify the Constitution. That problem now resolved, Washington sailed from New York on August 15, accompanied by Thomas Jefferson, his secretary of state, as well as George Clinton, the governor of New York, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Blair and others. The mission was to welcome Rhode Island into the Union. As their ship came into sight in Newport harbor on the morning of August 17, a gun salute was fired from nearby Fort Washington, and bells in the town began to ring.

The presidential party was met at the docks by the town leaders and notable clergymen. Among them was Moses Seixas, a prominent merchant and the gabbai (lay warden) of Congregation Jeshuat Israel. The group escorted Washington and his party on a tour of the town, where they were greeted by cheering throngs. At six-foot-two, with a lean physique shaped by years of military service, Washington had a confident and commanding physical bearing, and the Newport townspeople who followed him were awed in his presence. At a dinner later that same day, Washington offered a toast in recognition of Rhode Island’s belated ratification: “May the first be the last.”

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The 11 a.m. Sunday service at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is conducted in Spanish. The Richfield, MN, church serves an immigrant population, largely Hispanic, in the suburbs of Minneapolis. The parish staff know some worshippers may be undocumented, but they welcome everyone. When federal agents showed up in Minneapolis in early December, looking for immigrants to deport, church leaders naturally wondered what it might mean for their congregation.

What happened next is part of a story that has become familiar—and has made many observers wonder if history’s darkest chapter could be repeating itself. On the morning of Sunday, December 7, shortly before the Spanish service, people noticed a black Ford Explorer with tinted windows driving repeatedly past the church entrance. Someone notified one of the local “Indivisible” groups, which had begun to monitor the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol. At the time, “Operation Metro Surge,” as the Minnesota intervention was called, involved only about 100 federal agents, and local opposition was just coalescing. A notice was posted on the Indivisible group’s Facebook page calling on community members to go to the Richfield church and find out what, if anything, was happening there. 

A handful of local folks promptly answered the call. Among them were John Biestman, a 69-year-old retired banker, and his wife, Janet Lee, 67, a retired speech pathologist. In sworn declarations filed later in U.S. District Court, Lee said she and her husband went to the church because they were horrified “that the federal government might snatch people off the street outside a house of worship.” Biestman said their goal was to “observe and document” ICE activity.  

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For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—and its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power and scaring Jews.

In the second week of July 2024, in Washington, DC, it was hard to tell exactly where the country was headed. President Joe Biden, fresh off a disastrous debate performance but still pushing for another term, told a meeting of NATO leaders that the United States and its allies had a “sacred obligation” to defend democracies under attack. Donald Trump, days away from an assassination attempt and then his nomination at the Republican National Convention, secured a GOP platform that was more moderate than what social conservatives wanted, with a softened stance on abortion and no mention of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for a second Trump term. Trump said he hadn’t bothered to read it.

What got less media attention that week, but deserved more, was a three-day “National Conservatism” conference at the Capital Hilton Hotel a half mile north of the White House. The conference highlighted an increasingly dominant strain of conservative thought centered on the promotion of America’s white European and Christian heritage and an America First nationalism. Speakers attacked globalism and advocated for greater Christian influence in the country’s social and political institutions. Several Project 2025 contributors were there, as well as eight Republican senators. Among them was JD Vance of Ohio, not yet revealed as Trump’s choice for vice president but a clear front-runner for the position after exchanging his sober anti-Trump politics of a few years earlier for a newly combative posture defending Trump’s most controversial positions.

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Some Jewish students, including reporters and editors, viewed post-October 7 coverage by campus newspapers as biased. Their concerns largely went unheard.

Throughout her first three years at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast, nothing mattered more to her than her work on the student newspaper. Already interested in writing, “Rachel” arrived on campus in the COVID fall of 2020, with students largely confined to their dormitories and all classes conducted online. Only after joining the newspaper staff was she able to meet a few other students and feel some connection to her new college community. In her sophomore year, with the campus coming back to life, she saw the newspaper as her “home base,” the place where she established her closest friendships and did her most meaningful work. In her junior year, she was named one of the editors. Two or three nights a week, the group would gather at the paper’s office to discuss and review stories together, share dinner and socialize until midnight or later. “I looked forward to those nights,” she says. “It was my favorite thing. I loved it so much.”

But in the fall of her senior year, the October 7 massacre and the subsequent campus protests shook up her college community, disturbing many Jewish students like herself. Rachel is not her real name, and she doesn’t want her college identified. Even in her previously cozy student newsroom, she felt increasingly out of place, distressed by the deep hostility to Israel evident in some of the news stories and op-eds the other editors were approving for publication and by a willingness to downplay Hamas terrorism.

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Even at a distance, the fallout from the carnage in the Holy Land was immediate, quickly overshadowing interfaith efforts that had been years in development. October 7 came, and then the bombing of Gaza. Jews, both in Israel and around the world, were shaken to their core by Hamas terrorists’ slaughter of more than 800 Israeli civilians, with some 200 others taken hostage. The catastrophic bombardment of Gaza that followed, burying civilians each day in rubble, enraged Muslims and others around the world—particularly those with Palestinian connections.

Once a stronghold of Democratic-leaning retirees, South Florida is now home to one of the most religious and politically diverse Jewish communities in America.

The news that President Carter’s United Nations ambassador, Andrew Young, had met in New York with a PLO representative spread furiously among the mostly Jewish residents of the new high-rise condominiums along southern Florida’s Gold Coast. Nowhere in the state was there a more dependable Democratic constituency, but the condominium voters were outraged by what they saw as Carter’s disloyalty to Israel. The ace Democratic operative in the condo communities, a diminutive Jewish woman named Anne “Annie” Ackerman, quickly recognized the danger and called her White House contacts with an urgent message: “You’ve got to get someone down here.”

Ackerman had moved with her husband, Irving, an insurance executive, to the Miami area in 1969 from Chicago. She was 55. Irving was 58. They were among the thousands of Jewish northerners, mostly retirees, attracted to the bright sun, the clear ocean water and the balmy climate. “The area was brand new,” Ackerman later told a reporter. “Everybody was coming from someplace else. I don’t think there were two native Floridians in the whole area.” Unlike many of her fellow Jewish transplants, however, Ackerman was less interested in leisure than in political work. Ackerman’s father, a Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrant, had been a garment worker and union activist. At the age of five, she joined him on a picket line, and politicking soon became her life’s work. She had honed her skills canvassing under the tutelage of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, the legendary big city boss. “She loved to organize,” recalls her son, Allen Ackerman. “She would organize the PTA. She would organize whatever there was to organize. If there was a cause, she would go after it.”

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Why we don’t know more about the Uyghurs.

As they strolled down M Street after dinner at Clyde’s, a popular Georgetown restaurant, Ekpar told his sister about the people and places he was encountering as part of his three-week program and how it was giving him confidence about China’s own future. “Look at me,” Rayhan recalls him saying. “I am in Washington, representing China as a Uyghur. China wants us to be innovative and creative.” Before he flew back to China, they met again over pizza in Manhattan. Ekpar told his sister he and their parents would come to Cambridge in May to attend her law school graduation.

The family reunion did not happen. Three weeks after returning from the United States, Ekpar was suddenly taken away by Chinese Communist authorities.

When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn’t know some other details of the city’s role in civil rights history.

The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a busload of Black and white Freedom Riders who had traveled defiantly together to Montgomery in a challenge to segregation. Over the next 15 years, Cross, who is white, would regularly take people to the old Greyhound depot in Montgomery to highlight what happened that spring day.

America, unlike some countries, is not defined by a common ancestry, nor is it tied to an official faith tradition. But it does have a distinct identity and a quasi-religious foundation.

Americans are expected to hold their hands over their hearts when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the national anthem. Young people are taught to regard the country’s founders almost as saints. The “self-evident” truths listed in the Declaration of Independence and the key provisions of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights have acquired the status of scripture in the U.S. consciousness.

U.S. presidents as far back as Harry Truman denounced entry policies based on nationality, calling them discriminatory and un-American.

President Trump’s reported suggestion that the United States needs fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” and more from those like Norway revives an argument made vigorously a century ago—though in less profane terms—only to be discredited in the decades that followed.