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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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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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.