If it sometimes seems like the American cultural mainstream is ignorant of the role of Christianity in the founding of the United States, or even hostile towards it, that’s because it is.

The story told about America’s founding by the corporate media, book publishers, libraries and other institutions is one in which the Christian faith, so central to our history and founding, is almost wholly absent.

I don’t mean that anecdotally. A recent report by conservative book publisher Brave Books analyzed more than 300 books across 25 reading lists curated by children’s publishers, public libraries, and other institutions for our country’s upcoming 250th anniversary. The report found that these lists contain zero titles that directly addressed religious liberty, faith, or the role of Christianity in the founding of the United States.

Instead, the books on these reading lists included titles like Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped for Kids and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Born on the Water, a picture book that’s part of the discredited and ahistorical 1619 Project. According to Brave Books, the central themes of these reading lists were the American Revolution, minority perspectives, Black history, civil rights and women’s history. But nothing about the Christian faith — or even about religious freedom, which is enshrined in our First Amendment.

In other words, the lists are nothing more than left-wing propaganda designed to erode patriotism and reframe American history as a catalogue of crimes rather than a noble endeavor in republican self-government. Their purpose is to destroy patriotism in the hearts and minds of young Americans and inculcate hatred and contempt for our history, our founders, and our people.

I mention this not because it will be news to anyone who has been paying attention to the drift of American culture over the past half-century, but because it illustrates what a fraught thing our 250th anniversary has become. Celebrating this milestone as a nation, together, is no longer possible because, practically speaking, we are no longer a single nation.

The simple yet shocking reality is that generations of Americans have been taught since early childhood to hate their country and despise their heritage. How can you celebrate a nation you have been taught is morally corrupt, hypocritical, and responsible for a legacy of oppression and violence? You can’t, which is why so many Americans are greeting our semiquincentennial with a shrug or an apology.

And that points to a deeper problem with the state of America in 2026, a problem that won’t be solved with better reading lists or institutional reform or a GOP victory in 2026 or 2028. The problem is this: too many people in this country either despise America or are completely indifferent to it.

Among these are the tens of millions of foreigners now living in the United States who don’t just reject the natural law principles upon which our form of government rests, but also have no intention of adopting American culture or an American way of life. Many of them have made little or no effort even to learn the English language. They are here, essentially, to make money, and have no real vested interest in America as such.

Many others are not just indifferent but actively hostile toward their adopted country. This tendency seems especially pronounced among the adult children of immigrants, who grew up in the United States but were taught by liberal public schools and the mainstream culture to despise their country and resent it. They essentially revived the Third World politics of their parents’ home countries and adopted the anti-colonialist mentality of their leftist teachers and professors.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. For a long time, open-borders advocates in academia and the media argued that the Third World politics of immigrants would get washed out through assimilation, and by the time second- and third-generation immigrant families gained real political power, they would have shed their Third World sensibilities. But what we have found out is that under conditions of mass immigration, that simply isn’t how it works. Instead of shedding their third-worldism, immigrants and their children are assimilated into an American mainstream that itself has been captured by Third World politics.

The predictable result is a growing category of Americans, both immigrant and native-born, who are not merely indifferent toward their country but actively despise it. Such people now account for something like half our population, including both the native-born and recent immigrants and the children of recent immigrants. These are the people who reliably vote Democrat, for candidates and agendas bent on remaking the U.S. into something other than what our founders created and intended. They follow Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi, placing the “true” American founding in 1619 because to them, America was founded on exploitation and violence — a legacy that continues to the present day.

Consider the cadre of candidates connected to the Democrats Socialists of America that are finding electoral success in deep-blue areas. In New York, self-described democratic socialist Aber Kwas, an American-born daughter of Palestinian refugees, just won the Democratic primary for State Senate in District 12 (Queens). Kwas has said publicly that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were America’s fault, brought on by our supposed “system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy and Islamophobia.”

As the DSA continues its takeover of the Democratic Party establishment, this kind of anti-American rhetoric hardly stands out anymore. It is regularly espoused by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Reps. Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and others. And those who hold such views appear to be ascendent within the party. All three of the New York candidates Mamdani endorsed won their primaries this week; all three of them are avowed socialists with virulently anti-American views. One of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, was a founder of was a founder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an anti-American, antisemitic organization with the stated goal to “undermine and eradicate America,” and achieve “the total eradication of Western civilization” through the use of violence.

Such people cannot celebrate 250 years of American history because they are ashamed of that history and they are opposed to the very existence of America as it is today. And it’s not just radical socialist candidates in New York. Just last week an Economist/YouGov survey found that 38 percent of Democrats admitted they are ashamed to be Americans. Another recent survey found less than half of Democrats agreed with the statement, “I am proud to be an American.” And a new NBC News poll found that overall, 56 percent of Americans are proud of their country, but only 29 of Democrats.

The message, injected into our cultural mainstream for decades now, that America is fundamentally imperialistic and exploitative, has gotten through. We now have large numbers of Americans that might at times pay lip service to things like free speech, separation of powers, and civil rights, but they don’t really believe in these things because they don’t really believe in America. They will gladly cheat in elections, for example, if they can get away with it, or pack the courts if the judiciary impedes their agenda. They don’t really believe in equal treatment under the law, and have no real interest in preserving the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. They think these things were just cynical ploys to oppress women and blacks, or to expand American empire, and they hope to amass enough raw political power to stage a revolution, jettison all of it, and institute a new form of government that treats citizens differently based on which group they belong to.

This is an existential crisis for our country. The conditions for the crisis were created by both Democrats and Republicans over the course of decades. Both parties supported open borders and multiculturalism, and demonized anyone who objected that radically changing the ethnic makeup of the country through mass immigration would imperil the republic. But those who objected were right. Mass immigration and multiculturalism are a fatal combination, and here on the eve of our 250th anniversary, they have brought forth their poisoned fruit.

What can be done about it? One immediate step that could be taken, if the Trump administration and the GOP had the political will (which they don’t seem to right now) would be mass deportations coupled with mass denaturalization. Get the people who have come here only to make money, or stage a revolution, out of the country. Mobilize the National Guard, if that’s what it takes. If American cities riot, as they did in Minneapolis, send the National Guard into those places and declare martial law. If Democrat mayors and governors impede these operations, arrest them.

If that were accomplished, the native-born Americans who hate our country could probably be managed and contained. Removing illegal immigrants and anti-American naturalized citizens would deprive them of a crucial voting bloc and support. It is still the case, even at this late hour, that most Americans love their country and don’t want to see it fundamentally transformed. But time is running out, and if patriotic leaders don’t act decisively, there’s a good chance America as we know it today won’t be around to celebrate the 275th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.