By now it’s clear Donald Trump has ruined America’s semiquincentennial. From the corporate cage fight on the White House lawn to the unloved American State Fair on the Mall and the soldiers keeping people from contemplating the algae-choked allegory of corruption and incompetence that is the Reflecting Pool, Trump and his allies have made our country’s 250th an occasion for national embarrassment.
But things aren’t much better at the bipartisan, congressionally sponsored 250th commission, a body that was created in 2016 to oversee this year’s commemorations, but which had much of its funding diverted to a newer, Trump-controlled rival, Freedom 250. America250, as the official Semiquincentennial Commission is known, has Democratic members, including Senators Alex Padilla of California and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, and is chaired by Biden appointee Rosie Rios, former U.S. Treasurer, but it’s not doing the country proud either.
Case in point: the most important thing America250 can do is to help Americans contemplate the meaning of the country’s first quarter-millennium. Where did the U.S. come from and why was it created? What does it stand for, who belongs, and where are we going? The closest thing you find to an answer at their websites is the sixteen-volume “America250 Celebration Comics Pack” — $69.99 at the online store — licensed by the commission to inspire conversation around these big existential questions. It’s a pretty good idea on the face of it. Comics can be a great way to bring history alive, as the medium packs a huge amount of visual and textual information in an easily accessible, storytelling form. But the America250 Comics Pack, like the displays on Trump’s “Freedom Trucks,” has a single-minded and deeply polarizing agenda.
The comics — beautifully executed and bearing the America250 logo — were produced by Kingstone, a Christian publisher best known for its 2000-page, 10,000 panel graphic interpretation of the Bible. The overarching message is that America was founded under the auspices of the Christian God and built by those faithful to him with frequent miraculous assists from on high. We’re a Christian country, it argues on nearly every page, that only exists because the Lord wished it to. Anything in our history that complicates that story has simply been omitted. It’s a cherry-picking expedition par excellence conducted under the auspices of a federal government that’s supposed to stand apart from religion.
The series — drawn by a world-class Brazilian artist who lost his gig with Marvel comics over antisemitic imagery in cartoons championing Jair Bolsonaro — devotes five volumes to the colonial era, its characters, themes and settings carefully curated to depict the eventual creation of the United States as an outgrowth of divine will and intervention. They all take place north of the Mason-Dixon line, with the action rarely leaving the confines of New England, the only part of colonial North America where Calvinists were the dominant political and cultural force. There are separate titles, appropriately enough, for the Mayflower Pilgrims and John Winthrop’s Puritans, the founders of a regional ideological tradition that argued, as today’s Christian Nationalists do, that America’s founding was divinely directed. The Puritans indeed believed they were in a covenant with God, like the Biblical Hebrews, and tasked with creating a more holy society in the New England wilderness, a theme amply illustrated in the second volume of the series, “A New England,” whose cover depicts settlers facing off against a pack of Satanic wolves. Eleven frames on three pages are devoted to a 1645 court case so as to allow Winthrop to hold forth on why personal liberty — “to do whatever is good in your own eyes” — is evil and the moral liberty of the authorities is “good, just and honest.” The Puritans, we’re told in the epilogue, were full of “love, justice and mercy” but are associated with bigotry and intolerance because of “attacks” in the late 19th and early 20th century. This would come as a surprise to the many Quakers who were whipped, imprisoned, disfigured, or executed under a 1658 Massachusetts law banning their denomination and to the war refugees from Maine and others tortured or hanged in Salem for “witchcraft.” (Persecuted Quakers get an appearance in a volume on Roger Williams, who offered them sanctuary despite their failure to deny original sin.)
More glaring is the omission of the origin stories of all of the colonies south of New England — home to most of colonial America’s inhabitants — which don’t fit so well into Kingstone’s narrative. New York, for example, started as Dutch New Netherland, a multicultural, multireligious corporate colony that emphasized tolerance of diversity and had Muslim, Sephardi, and Catholic founders, not just Protestants. William Penn’s Quakers, believing people had an “inner light,” also put no particular onus on religious or cultural conformity and presided over a culturally pluralistic colony where no ethnic group or religious tradition held sway. The Chesapeake country and Deep South were slave states where liberty was a privilege held by an aristocratic elite and most of the white population was unchurched. The leading figures of 17th and early 18th century Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas didn’t declare that they were in a covenant with God to create a more holy society in the New World: They were, after all, engaged in furthering a lucrative system to produce and export commodities using slave labor within an imperial system unconcerned with individual liberty, divine missions, or self-government. The series editor, Kelly Ayris, wife of the Baptist pastor who founded Kingstone, has constructed the master narrative such that readers won’t have an inkling of any of this.
Miracles abound in the story. Among those explicitly called out in the comics: a young George Washington surviving a rain of French bullets in a 1755 raid; Jefferson writing “all men are created equal” even though he was a slaveowner; the dense fog that fell to protect Washington’s army’s retreat across the East River during the Battle of Long Island; the reversal of fortune allowing Washington’s victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777; the early start to the 1781 hurricane season and the bad decisions made by British generals that facilitated the final British defeat at Yorktown; Franklin’s suggestion that delegates pray to find a compromise solution on legislative representation at the Constitutional Convention; and the Constitution itself, because of its alleged brilliance.
The Constitution, the series asserts, was predicated on Biblical morality. “If we live by virtues, if we follow the laws going back to the time of Moses, our Constitution can hold strong,” the narrator of “The U.S. Constitution” comic tells us. This narrator guides us through the entire text, article by article, and he and his assistants tell us, in no uncertain terms, that: God was displeased by the three-fifths compromise on how enslaved people would be counted in the distribution of U.S. House seats; that Clarence Thomas was “smeared by rumors and mudslinging” in his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings; that the Electoral College should be preserved to force candidates “to care about the needs of small states”; that court packing is bad and “will lead to chaos”; that Originalism is good because Justice Antonin Scalia said so; that Roe v Wade was rightly overturned because it “created law, it didn’t interpret law”; that the proposed Bill of Rights being whittled down from 17 to 10 amendments at the Constitutional Convention made it “like our 10 Commandments”; that there should be no wall keeping religion out of public life or preventing the government from supporting religions; that regulating hate speech or internet propaganda is bad but regulating spending on political ads is a grave violation of the First Amendment; that the personal right to carry firearms bestowed by a 2008 Supreme Court decision is good because “home isn’t the only place you encounter criminals”; that it’s unclear if the 14th Amendment applies to children born to people who are in the country illegally (it is); that the 2023 Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action was good because it “stopped preferential treatment given to people of certain races” (rather than trying to correct for centuries of affirmative action for white people); and, once again, that the Constitution is a miracle.
We’re also told that the French Revolution was evil because of its secular and anticlerical character. “In contrast to the French Revolution, our American Revolution was rooted in the teaching of the Bible,” John Jay tells us. “When people renounce the Bible they swing from their moorings on all moral subjects.” The next frames show Frenchmen decapitating statues and cheering on a provocatively clad young lady in Roman attire and a goblet of wine. “When God is driven from the public square, there are no absolutes,” an omniscient narrator intones. “Anything goes.” In case we haven’t gotten the point, an info box asserts that the Biblical Exodus and the reception of the Ten Commandments constituted a “Sinai Revolution” upon which “our freedoms and liberties are based.”
“Humans create disorder,” the Kingstone writers conclude. “According to the Sinai Revolution, God creates order.”
Just to be clear: you’d be hard pressed to make the case that American Patriots in 1776 were acting on Biblical inspiration rather than the Lockean ideas about national liberty (in the northern colonies) or in defense of the autonomy of local oligarchic power structures (in many of the southern ones). But even if you did, you’d also have to explain why secular revolutions like the Velvet and Romanian Revolutions of 1989 turned out just fine, while the very religious Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a horror show from day one. You’d need to explain why Francisco Franco’s Christian regime was despotic while secular ones in contemporary Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands manage to have produced among the most prosperous, stable, and free societies in the world.
So why is an official U.S. congressional commission effectively endorsing this unbalanced and evidence-challenged version of our national story? I reached out to the commission’s media department to ask, and to learn more about how the relationship with Kingstone came about. They didn’t respond.
