Image: Bonnie Cash/UPI Photo/Newscom/picture alliance
Many American Christians celebrated when the nation rededicated itself “under God” last week. They wept. They called it revival. They called it a turning. The men and women who organized it believed they were doing a holy thing.
The event was called Rededicate 250, a nationwide movement and patriotic prayer initiative tied to America’s 250th anniversary, established to celebrate the nation’s heritage, express gratitude, and rededicate the United States as “One Nation Under God.” Men and women from many denominations stood on the platform and prayed the Name aloud, in front of cameras and microphones, in the seat of civil power.
This letter does not begin by calling them liars. Most of them, I think, were sincere. Sincerity is not the question. The question this letter is going to make you sit with is older and harder than sincerity, and it is this: which Yeshua.
There are now, and have always been, many Jesuses in the American religious imagination. The Jesus of the prosperity stage is not the Jesus of the persecuted house church. The Jesus of the Reformed catechism is not the Jesus of the Pentecostal altar call. The Jesus of the Catholic Mass is not the Jesus of the Word of Faith broadcast. The Jesus of the political coalition is not the Yeshua (Jesus) of the gospels read in their Hebraic context. These are not all the same Person. They share a name. They do not share a gospel.
When all of them are invited onto one stage, in one civil ceremony, to pray together to “Jesus Christ” in the hearing of the nation, the prayer cannot be addressed to any single one of those Jesuses. The civil stage will not permit it. The civil stage is engineered for the composite. The composite is the Christ that all the represented confessions can technically tolerate sharing a microphone with. The composite is the Christ the cameras can broadcast without offending the sponsors. The composite is the Christ that the federal tax code can bless.
The composite is not the Yeshua of the gospels.
That is the sentence the rest of this letter exists to defend, to apply, and to charge you with. If you watched the ceremony and felt a quiet dissonance you could not name, you were not crazy. You were correct. What follows is the language for it.
The Mechanism
The argument I am making is mechanical, not moral. It does not depend on the men and women on that stage being insincere. It depends only on what happens, structurally, when a costly thing is rendered customary by a power large enough to render things customary.
Yeshua said, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24). The cross is the price of entry. Not a metaphorical cross. Not a cultural identity called “Christian.” A cross. The instrument Rome used to publicly destroy enemies of the state. Yeshua took the symbol of imperial execution and made it the entry point of His ekklesia [called-out assembly]. He told His followers: if you want to walk with Me, the road begins at the gallows.
A nation cannot collectively take up a cross. A nation can only collectively recite a Name. The recitation is not the cross. The recitation in place of the cross is the danger.
Take any costly thing. Marriage, when it is real, costs a man and a woman their separate sovereignties. The institution of marriage as a tax-filing status costs them paperwork. The first is a covenant. The second is a category. The category is not the covenant.
The same is true of Yeshua. The Yeshua of Matthew 16:24 costs a person their life and gives them a new one. The “Jesus Christ” of a civil ceremony costs the participants a few minutes of bowed heads and gives them a feeling of unity. The category is not the covenant.
Sha’ul (Paul) wrote to the Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Notice the verb. Conformed. Pressed into a shape. The shape of “this world” is the shape of every age’s customary religion. Every civilization has one. The Romans had it. The Babylonians had it. The Egyptians had it. Each one had a state-blessed cult that did not require costly faith because it required only public participation.
The danger of the rededication stage is not that the participants were doing nothing. The danger is that they were doing the wrong-shaped thing. They were doing customary religion. The Yeshua of the gospels does not fit inside customary religion. He breaks it open every time He shows up. And when a system finds a way to invoke His Name without being broken open by Him, that system has done something to the Name. It has not honored Him. It has tamed Him.
The Trajectory
This is not a new problem.
Three thousand years ago, the elders of Israel came to Sh’muel (Samuel) and asked for a king “like all the nations.” YHWH told Sh’muel, “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being king over them” (1 Sh’muel [1 Samuel 8:7]. Sh’muel warned the people in detail. A king will take your sons. A king will take your daughters. A king will take your fields and your harvests and your servants. A king will become your master, and you will cry out, and on that day YHWH will not answer you (1 Sh’muel [1 Samuel 8:11-18]. They asked for the king anyway. Israel chose civil sovereignty over covenantal sovereignty, and the warning was kept on record because the same temptation would come back in every generation.
It came back in 325 CE.
Constantine, emperor of Rome, convened the bishops at Nicaea. He did not arrive as a humble inquirer. He arrived as an emperor with a problem. The empire he had unified politically was fracturing theologically, and theological fracture in his domain was political instability. So he called the bishops. He paid for their travel. He presided. He weighed in. The council that produced the Nicene Creed produced it under the eye of imperial power.
This was not a new invention. Three centuries earlier, Augustus had consolidated the Roman polity through the imperial cult, taking the title divi filius (son of the divine Julius) and binding the empire together under a religious figure who was also the political ruler. Polybius, writing a generation before Augustus, had already named the underlying pattern in his Histories: republics decay through consolidation, and consolidation always reaches for religion to make itself binding. Constantine repeated the move with Christianity as the binding element. The Constantinian shift was Polybian. The form was new. The mechanism was old.
The Creed itself is mostly right. The point is what changed around the Creed. Before Nicaea, confessing Yeshua cost you something. It cost some believers their lives. It cost others their property, their families, their standing. After Nicaea, confession could advance you. It could earn imperial favor. It could secure a position. By 380, under Theodosius, Christianity was the state religion of Rome. Within another generation, the descendants of the persecuted had become persecutors, hunting heretics with the sword the empire had handed them.
State-sanctioned orthodoxy did not preserve the faith. It preserved the state’s version of the faith. That is a different thing. The state’s version of the faith is whatever version is useful to the state. When the state is pagan, the state’s version is “do not confess Christ.” When the state is nominally Christian, the state’s version is “confess this exact Christ, in this exact way, in service of these exact ends.” Neither version is the gospel.
The pattern repeats. The Holy Roman Empire claimed the Name and used it to crown emperors. The Anglican settlement claimed the Name and made it the spiritual department of the Crown. The German state churches in the 1930s claimed the Name and produced a theology friendly to the Reich. Each of these arrangements thought it was protecting the faith. Each of them produced believers who later had to repent of their complicity.
Robert Bellah named the American version of this in his 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America.” He observed that the United States has, alongside its formal separation of church and state, a parallel religious system that uses biblical language to consecrate the national project. Presidents invoke God. Coins bear His Name. The pledge inserts Him. Funerals of statesmen ring with Scripture. Bellah did not call this hypocrisy. He called it a real, functioning religion. He was right.
The 2026 rededication is the latest expression of that civil religion. What was background is becoming foreground. What was implicit is becoming explicit. And the more explicit it becomes, the more it requires the believer to be clear about which Yeshua is being named.
The Stage Itself
What the general public heard on that stage was unity. What was actually present was structural impossibility.
If you watched the stage, there was enough denominational difference on it to prove the point. But denominational difference is the surface. When Yeshua says, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23), the Hebraic reading reaches deeper than the English. The Hebrew verb yada [to know] does not mean cognitive recognition. It means covenant knowledge, the kind of knowing that binds two persons together, the way Avraham was known by YHWH, the way a husband knows his wife. The question that arrives in Matthew 7 is not whether Yeshua has heard of these men. The question is whether they are known by Him in the covenant sense. Are all the men praying on that stage being known by the same Yeshua? Are we all talking about the same God?
On the rededication stage stood representatives of denominations that have, for centuries, not been in communion with one another. Some hold the Eucharist as a literal sacrament; others hold it as memorial. Some baptize infants; others would not consider infant baptism valid. Some affirm the priesthood of all believers; others affirm an ordained sacerdotal class. Some teach that salvation cannot be lost; others teach that it can. Some teach that the Holy Spirit speaks today in tongues and prophecy; others teach that those gifts ceased with the apostles. These are not small differences. They are differences that, in earlier centuries, the parties believed serious enough to die for, or to kill for.
And there they stood, hand in hand, praying together to “Jesus Christ” before a national audience.
The argument I am about to make is structural, not personal. I am not asking whether any one of those men or women was sincere. I am asking what the structure of that prayer made possible.
There are only two options.
Option one: The prayer was addressed to the real Yeshua, in His full identity as the gospels reveal Him. In that case, at least some of the men praying were addressing a Person their own confession does not fully recognize. Their own systematic theology, applied honestly, would say the man next to them is praying to a deficient or distorted version of Christ. To pray together, in that case, is to bear false witness about who Yeshua is by treating contradictory confessions as if they confess the same Person.
Option two: The prayer was addressed to a civil composite. A Jesus shaped by what the stage could hold. A Jesus stripped down to the lowest common confessional denominator, plus a coating of patriotic feeling, plus whatever each denomination silently filled in. In that case, all of them were praying to a Christ who is not the Yeshua of the gospels, because the Yeshua of the gospels is a specific Person with specific teachings, and no committee composite survives contact with His actual words.
There is no third option. Either contradictory confessions cannot both be addressed to the real Yeshua, or all of them were addressing the civil composite. The civil stage required the composite. The composite is not Him.
This is not a small thing. It is what the Second Commandment is about. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image” (Sh’mot [Exodus 20:4]. A carved image is what you build when you cannot bear the unmediated Presence and so you construct a manageable substitute. A civil composite Christ, projected on a national stage, edited for plurality and broadcast for unity, is a carved image of the One who cannot be carved. It is built of words rather than wood. The principle is identical.
The Chain of Control
So how did we get here.
Most American believers have not been told plainly what follows. This is not a conspiracy. There is nothing hidden. The documents are public. Every fact in the next four paragraphs can be verified in the Internal Revenue Code or in IRS Publication 1828, “Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations.” Both are in the Dig Deeper section below.
Fact one. The Internal Revenue Service grants 501(c)(3) status to religious organizations. That status does two things. It exempts the organization from federal income tax. It also makes donations its members give tax-deductible from their personal income. This second feature is the financial scaffolding of nearly every American congregation. Take it away and the tithing patterns of the modern church do not survive.
Fact two. 501(c)(3) status comes with restrictions. The Johnson Amendment, passed in 1954, attached language to the Internal Revenue Code requiring that a 501(c)(3) organization “does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office” (26 U.S.C. §501(c)(3)). Substantial lobbying is also restricted. The IRS retains the authority to audit, fine, and revoke, with elevated procedural requirements for church audits under the Church Audit Procedures Act (26 U.S.C. §7611, 1984). The pulpit operating under 501(c)(3) is, by federal statute, a regulated speech venue.
Fact three. The status is granted, audited, and revocable by an arm of the federal government. The party defining the terms of the religious institution’s operation is the same party the prophetic voice of Scripture is historically called to confront. Read Y’shayahu (Isaiah). Read Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah). Read Yochanan ha-Matbil (John the Baptist). The prophetic office stood outside the throne and named the throne’s sin. The 501(c)(3) pulpit cannot, by law, do that with full freedom, because the throne signs the institution’s tax forms.
Fact four. Therefore, the pulpit funded by 501(c)(3) operates within speech parameters the state has defined. Whether or not any given pastor feels constrained, the structural reality is that the institution he serves cannot function as a fully unconstrained prophetic voice toward civil power without risking the scaffolding the institution depends on. In practice, the IRS has rarely enforced the Johnson Amendment against churches. The constraint operates through institutional risk-aversion, not enforcement frequency. The institution depends on the scaffolding, so it self-regulates well below the threshold of confrontation. Pastors who have tested this line, the Alliance Defending Freedom’s “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” beginning in 2008 and similar exercises, have done so as deliberate civil disobedience, knowing the risk. The very fact that confronting civil power from the pulpit qualifies as civil disobedience tells you what kind of pulpit we have built.
The chain is observable. Government → 501(c)(3) → pastor → audience. None of it requires any individual pastor to be malicious. The system is the system. And the audience that receives only what the pulpit dispenses receives only what survives the filter the system imposes.
Now sit with this passage. “And Yeshua entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers’” (Matthew 21:12-13; cf. John 2:13-17).
The only recorded act of physical aggression in the life of Yeshua was against the marketplace that had been installed inside His Father’s house. Not a metaphorical marketplace. An actual one, with tables, with coins, with commerce in religious goods. He overturned it. He drove it out. He called the men running it robbers, and they were robbing the people who came to worship.
I am not naming any individual pastor or denomination. I am pointing at a system the gospels already judged. When men profit from the Name, in arrangements blessed by the state and audited by the state, and then those same men gather under the canopy of the state to invoke the Name on the state’s behalf, the question of which Yeshua was named on the stage has answered itself. The Yeshua of Matthew 21 was not on that stage. He would have overturned the lectern.
Sidebar: A Berean Field Guide for Next Sunday's Pulpit
This article is most useful if you carry it into the chair you will sit in next Sunday. So before the charge, here is a brief field guide. Below are the sermon moves you are most likely to hear from American pulpits the week after a national rededication “under God, under Jesus Christ.” When you hear them, your ears should go red. Not because the man saying them is insincere, but because the moves themselves do the work this letter has been naming. They take the costly thing and render it customary. They treat the civil composite as if it were the Yeshua of the gospels. They confuse the audience about what kind of moment they are in.
1. “Revival is here. America is turning back to God.” Watch for the framing of a civic ceremony as covenantal repentance. A nation cannot collectively repent the way a person can. Repentance is teshuvah [turning], a movement of the whole self by a covenant member toward YHWH. A staged event with broadcast cameras is not teshuvah. It is theater that uses the language of teshuvah.
2. “If My people, who are called by My name, humble themselves and pray and seek My face…” Watch for this verse, 2 Divrei Hayamim [Chronicles] 7:14, applied directly to the United States. That promise was made by YHWH to Israel, in a specific covenant relationship, attached to a specific land, after the dedication of a specific temple. Applying it to America requires you to believe the United States is covenantally Israel. It is not. The verse is real. The American application is a category error of the first magnitude. When the pastor reaches for it, your ears should go red.
3. “This is what our founders intended.” Watch for selective founder quotation as proof the nation is returning to its Christian roots. Many of these citations are misquoted, fabricated, or stripped of context. Read Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785), the actual founding-era document on state-funded religion. Read Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists. The founders’ relationship to state religion was more complex than any single Sunday sermon can hold honestly. When the pastor flattens it, your ears should go red.
4. “We need to support our leaders who honor Christ.” Watch for civic loyalty smuggled in as discipleship. Yeshua’s only recorded interaction with civil power ended on a cross. The instruction to support leaders because they say His Name is not in the gospels. The instruction is to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to YHWH what is His, and the second category is the larger one (Matthew 22:21). When the pastor reverses that proportion, your ears should go red.
5. “We are not a political church, but praise God for this moment.” Watch for the worst-of-both move. The pastor claims neutrality while explicitly endorsing the ceremony’s frame. The neutrality is the lie. Endorsement is endorsement, whether or not the pastor uses the language. When you hear the pretense and the endorsement in the same paragraph, your ears should go red.
6. Silence. Watch for the pastor who does not mention the ceremony at all. Pastoral silence on a national civic invocation of the Name is not neutral. It is a position, just an unstated one. The pastor either agrees and has no warning to offer, or is afraid, or has not thought about it. None of those are neutral grounds. When the pulpit is empty on the question, your ears should go red.
There is a seventh move you should also watch for, the one that is not on this list. If your pastor does the rare thing this Sunday, naming the composite for what it is, refusing to map a covenant promise made to Israel onto the United States, declining to celebrate civic invocation as revival, and calling his congregation to the inner room and the open Bible, we want to know about him. Write to The Scholar’s Table. Tell us his name, his city, and what he said. We are listening for the pastors who can speak plainly in this hour. They will matter, and we want to know who they are.
The Berean Charge
So what do you do.
You become a Berean. “Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Notice every clause.
More noble. The Holy Spirit, through Luke, commends this posture. Verification of the preacher against the Scriptures is the noble posture. Trust without verification is not the noble posture. Whoever taught you that questioning your pastor is rebellion taught you a system’s value, not the Scripture’s value.
Received the word with all eagerness. The Bereans were not cynics. They came eager. They wanted it to be true. The charge of this letter is not to become a cynic about the church. The charge is to become a believer who tests.
Examining the Scriptures daily. Not once a week, on Sunday, in a portion the pulpit selected. Daily, in a portion they chose, in the Scriptures themselves. The Bereans did not have a study Bible with curated notes from a single tradition. They had the scrolls. They wrestled with the text directly.
To see if these things were so. The Bereans did not assume Sha’ul was right because he was an apostle and they were not. They checked him. He is commended because they checked him. Imagine if every American believer applied that posture to every man on the rededication stage, with the Scriptures open on their laps, asking, is what he is saying what is written.
And do not exempt this letter from that posture. Do not trust me because the prose sounds sober. Do not trust me because the Scripture is sourced. Test what is written here against the text on your lap. If something does not hold up under your Bible, throw it out. The Bereans tested Sha’ul, and Sha’ul was an apostle. I am not an apostle. Listen to the text. Not to me. Not to your pastor. Not to any man.
The charge is direct and it is six commands.
Stop being fed. The pulpit that operates under the filter we walked through is not the source you need for the depth of the moment you are in. It may be one source. It is not enough.
Start hunting. The Scriptures are open. Lexicons are free. Strong’s, Brown-Driver-Briggs, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls in translation. There is no longer any excuse to take a preacher’s word as a substitute for the text.
Start cooking. Read the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible] and the Brit Chadashah [New Covenant] in their Hebraic context. Yeshua was not a Greek philosopher. He was a Galilean Jew who taught Torah. Read Him in His own language and idiom.
Pray in the inner room. “When you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place” (Matthew 6:6). Yeshua warned His disciples explicitly against the prayer made to be seen. The prayer on the rededication stage was, by definition, made to be seen. That is not the prayer He commended.
Take up the cross no nation can ratify on your behalf. National rededications do not save anyone. They never have. The cross is personal. The cross costs you something. There is no way around that, and there is no government anywhere that can shortcut it.
Watch the trajectory. Yeshua refused civil power three times. He refused when ha-satan (the Accuser) offered Him all the kingdoms of the world from a high mountain (Matthew 4:8-10). He refused when the crowds tried to make Him king after the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:15). He refused when Pilate asked Him directly whether He was a king, and He answered, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Three offers of civil power. Three refusals. The Yeshua of the gospels has already shown us what He thinks of the kingdoms of the world claiming His Name.
Revelation 13 names the pattern that follows when the kingdoms claim the Name anyway. There is a beast that holds civil power. There is a second beast that performs religious authority. The second beast causes the earth to worship the first. The second beast makes an image. The second beast issues a mark, and apart from the mark no one may buy or sell. I am not telling you the date. I am not naming the man. I am telling you what Yochanan (John), exiled on Patmos, saw and recorded: civil power married to religious performance, producing an image of the beast, demanding the worship of the earth. The trajectory is observable. The believer who is awake will not be surprised when the next step on that trajectory arrives.
Some of you will be asked, before this decade is over, to do something with the Name of Yeshua that you should not do. To bless something He does not bless. To bow to something He does not bow to. The reason for this letter is that I want you ready, in your inner room, in your Bible, with the Bereans, before the asking begins. Daniel 3 is in your Bible for a reason. Three men, in front of a great image, on a national plain, were told to bow when the music played. They did not bow. Their God was honored in their refusal whether or not the fire took them.
The stage is being set. Be awake. Be Berean. Be ready.
Selah
Selah, in the Psalms, is a pause to weigh. I am not asking you to pause this time. I am asking you to act.
Open your Bible tonight. Not your phone app. Your Bible, the one with the margins where you can write. Open it to Acts 17. Read verse 11. Then open it to Matthew 4 and read the temptation. Then open it to Revelation 13 and read the beast.
Ask yourself, with the text in front of you and no preacher in the room, am I being fed, or am I hunting. Be honest. The Father is not afraid of your honest answer. He is waiting for it.
If the answer is that you have been fed and you have not been hunting, you do not need to feel shame. You need to start hunting. Start tonight. One chapter. One question. One lexicon entry. One prayer in the inner room with the door shut.
The Yeshua of the gospels is not on the civil stage. He is in the inner room, where He told us to meet Him, with the door shut, where the cameras cannot follow. Go meet Him there.
May the God of Avraham (Abraham), Yitzhak (Isaac), and Ya’akov (Jacob) make your heart Berean before the next stage is set. May the Yeshua of the gospels be the Yeshua you confess. May the Ruach [Spirit] of truth grant you discernment to know the difference between the Name carved into stone and the Name written on a covenant heart.
Shalom, b’shem Yeshua ha-Mashiach (Yeshua the Messiah).
Your brother in the Way,
Sergio
