US President Donald Trump and many of his leading Republican and Christian supporters are taking part this week in a marathon reading of the Bible in an America 250-themed event encouraging a “return to the spiritual foundation that has shaped our country.”

The America Reads the Bible event — with each participant reading a passage aloud — is being livestreamed from the Museum of the Bible in Washington and other locations. It featured a video of Trump from the Oval Office on Tuesday evening reading an Old Testament passage that called for national repentance in ancient Israel — words that have been used prominently for decades by those promoting the belief that America has been and should be a Christian nation.

Trump recited the passage from his desk with his hands folded on an open Bible in front of him, though he was looking straight into the camera. The video cut back and forth between two camera angles.

The Bible is “indelibly woven into our national identity and way of life,” Trump said in a statement commemorating the event. The statement cited historical figures such as the Puritan leader John Winthrop as “imploring his fellow Christian settlers to stand as a beacon of faith for all the world to see.”

Critics say the event has a highly partisan list of participants and is part of a larger project to connect the United States’ upcoming 250th birthday with a Christian nationalist vision that portrays the nation’s founding as essentially Christian, something many historians dispute. White Christians, particularly evangelicals, have been crucial to Trump’s electoral base.

The list of participants — which overwhelmingly includes Republican politicians and Christian supporters of Trump — shows it to be “very much a right-wing MAGA, Christian nationalist effort,” said Brian Kaylor, author of “The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power,” referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

“If they wanted this to be a unifying American project, there would have been a whole lot more attention to getting political diversity and ideological diversity,” added Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, a progressive site covering faith and politics.

NOW: President Trump took part in America Reads the Bible this evening, reading 2 Chronicles........

© The Times of Israel