President Donald J. Trump participated in two separate prayer breakfast events in Washington, D.C., on Thursday – one at the Capitol and a second one at the Washington Hilton.
“We have to bring religion back,” the President told those gathered on Capitol Hill. “We have to bring it back much stronger. It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time. We have to bring it back.”
As one means to do so, the 47th chief executive announced plans to establish a presidential commission on religious liberty.
Trump also told those gathered that new Attorney General Pam Bondi will be overseeing a task force designed to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” and weed out or prevent “all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government.”
President Trump pledged:
“While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares,” he said. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God.”
In the opening minutes of his address on Capitol Hill, Trump, speaking softly and slowly, referenced the harrowing Saturday back in July of 2024 when he narrowly escaped the would-be assassin’s bullet.
“It changed something in me,” he said. “I feel even stronger. I believed in God, but I feel, I feel much more strongly about it. Something happened.”
During his remarks, Trump referenced the various giants of the Christian faith who are memorialized in stone and statue not far from where he was speaking in the Capitol.
John Winthrop, who served twelve terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a devout Puritan and worked tirelessly to cast a vision for a culture and country that held high Jesus Christ.
Ronald Reagan, whose birthday was February 6, often quoted Winthrop when declaring America was “a shining city on a hill.” That phrase came from the Puritan’s famous message, “A Model of Christian Charity.”
“We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body,” urged Winthrop. “So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”
President Trump also mentioned the statue of Roger Williams, another Puritan, who is credited with founding the state of Rhode Island.
“How frequent, how constant ought we to be, like Christ Jesus our example, in doing good,” urged Williams. “Especially to the souls of men and especially to the household of faith (yea, even to our enemies), when we remember that this is our seed time, of which every minute is precious, and that as our sowing is, so shall be our eternal harvest.
President Trump rightly observed, “Without faith in God, there would be no American Story.”
Over the years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a bipartisan gathering, though not always without some metaphorical fireworks.
Many of a certain age will never forget a stooped Mother Teresa addressing those gathered inside the Capitol, including President Clinton. It was February 3, 1994. The diminutive nun boldly and courageously raised the subject of abortion.
“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,” she said. “And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion?”
Mother Teresa was right.
Timothy Goeglein, Focus on the Family’s Vice President of External Relations who heads up the ministry’s Washington, D.C. office, has attended nearly every prayer breakfast over the last three decades, including this year’s gathering.
“The encouraging and heartening narrative of this year’s National Prayer Breakfast was a rededication to our fundamental religious liberty and conscience rights,” Goeglein reflected. “Over and again, religious freedom as foundational to our constitutional republic was being discussed by this year’s attendees, and after the regular breakfast, there were a number of breakout sessions and forums where religious liberty was being discussed and celebrated yet again.”
Goeglein concluded, “What a good thing, and what a refreshing subtext to this year’s gathering where there were 2500 of us praying for our nation, for our leaders, and for the next chapter of the American experience.”
Image from Getty.