EXCLUSIVE — Bishop Robert Barron believes that for “free exercise of religion” to thrive, the United States must continuously affirm and bolster its explicitly Christian identity.
Barron, the prelate of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, is delivering an address at President Donald Trump’s Rededicate 250 event on Sunday. The event, hosted on the National Mall, is characterized as a “national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving” that celebrates the American ideal of “one nation under God” and the “role that religion has played in the American experiment.”
The bishop, speaking with the Washington Examiner ahead of the address, called belief in the Christian God a fundamental underpinning of American civil society that guarantees minority faiths’ freedoms.
“The God referenced in the Declaration of Independence and assumed by the majority of the founders is the creator of all things and the guarantor of rights, freedom, and equality,” Barron said. “Belief in that God is, I would say, essential to our democracy.”
“Basic to this Biblical sensibility is that each human being, made in the image and likeness of God, is a subject of infinite dignity. And from this it follows that everyone within our system should enjoy freedom of religion,” he continued. “Hence the paradox — the more clearly we affirm the Biblical [and] Christian nature of our country, the more the free exercise of religion for all is guaranteed.”
Rededicate 250 is notable for its explicitly Christian messaging and themes. Brittany Baldwin, a senior leader for the White House’s America 250 task force, previously said that her team is “focusing on our heritage as a Judeo-Christian nation.”
She added, “So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”
The Rev. Paula White-Cain, an evangelical pastor who is among Trump’s closest faith advisors, said last month that Rededicate 250 would not include leaders from non-Abrahamic faiths “praying to all these different gods.”
The Washington Examiner asked Barron to comment on recent remarks from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who in a recent interview with Reason magazine described America as a “creedal nation” based on three great ideas of the Declaration of Independence: “All of us are equal,” “Each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God,” and “we have the right to rule ourselves.”
“Our nation is not founded on a religion,” Gorsuch said in the interview. “It’s not based on a common culture, even — or heritage. It’s based on those ideas.”
Barron said he would agree with Gorsuch “in the measure that no one culture dominates American polity” but contended that the nation “did indeed come up out of a broadly Western culture shaped by Greek philosophy and the Bible.”
“For instance, it is hard to defend the proposition that all of us are equal and subjects with inalienable rights unless you accept that we are all equally children of God, which [Thomas] Jefferson makes explicit in the Declaration,” Barron said.
Asked whether the essentialism of Christianity to America extends to its leadership, Barron said he sees “no problem whatsoever with a non-Christian president” as long as that person holds to the “fundamental principles of the Constitution, including and especially the right to the free exercise of religion.”
Barron stands out among the Rededicate 250 speaker line-up as one of the few non-Evangelical faith leaders. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the retired archbishop of New York who is also a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, will be part of the event. Orthodox Rabbi Meir Soloveichik will also be speaking and representing the Jewish faith.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will be giving an address at the event, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump is slated to appear in a pre-recorded video message.
Barron, who is among the most widely followed religious figures in the world on social media, has positioned himself as a reliable but qualified ally of the Trump administration on faith issues. He is a member of the president’s Religious Liberty Commission and has previously spoken at the White House.
He has been eager to praise the president for actions taken to bolster religious freedom in the U.S. and recenter Christianity in American civics. But he has also found himself occasionally being forced to push back against Trump’s more uncomfortable rhetoric, such as when the president accused Pope Leo XIV of being “weak on crime” and “terrible” on foreign policy after the pontiff voiced opposition to American operations in Iran.
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Barron called those accusations “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” saying such insults “don’t contribute at all to a constructive conversation.
Rubio later flew to visit Pope Leo XIV and reaffirmed the administration’s “enduring partnership” with the Holy See.
