2026 college essay contest: 1st place — Artem Khaiet

God is not a prerequisite for greatness

FFRF awarded Artem $3,500.

By Artem Khaiet

“As I have often said, to be a great nation you must have religion and you must have God,” President Trump declared in a Good Friday message delivered from the Resolute Desk this past April. And more bluntly, when speaking about his “America Prays” initiative, he insisted: “If a country doesn’t have religion, doesn’t have faith, doesn’t have God, it’s gonna be very hard to be a good country.” He even suggested, in a moment of striking theological candor, that without belief in divine reward and punishment, “there’s no reason to be good.”

I am a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, and I have heard this argument before. I did not come to America to hear it again.

I grew up in a country that Russia has spent years trying to swallow whole, and part of the ideological digestion has always involved religion. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has framed the conflict in Ukraine as a metaphysical struggle, positioning Russia as a spiritual and holy nation in opposition to what he calls the sinful and devilish West. The Russian Orthodox Church has framed the slaughter and destruction of the full-scale invasion as a “holy war for all Russians” and a struggle against the “moral decay” of the “satanic” West. This is what happens when a state decides it must have religion to be great. It gets a church that blesses soldiers and calls mass murder divine mission.

I left Ukraine in part to escape the long reach of a Russia that had decided Orthodox Christianity was the soul of civilization, and that those who did not fit that vision were problems to be solved. As a secular Jew, I was never inside Russia’s Orthodox imagination of what a proper citizen looked like, and I was never meant to be. Religious nationalism, wherever it plants its flag, has always required an other, someone who falls outside the circle of the sanctified. For Jews in Eastern Europe, that role is not new.

So, when I hear the American president making the same category of argument, the same conflation of national greatness with religious identity, I feel the specific dread of intolerance, not just political disagreement. Christian nationalism is antithetical to the constitutional ideal that belonging in American society is not predicated on what faith one practices or whether someone is religious at all. When a sitting president declares that religion is the precondition for national goodness, he is signaling which Americans are real Americans, and which are not quite good enough.

Trump’s claim is also, simply, false. The evidence against it is overwhelming and embarrassing. The world’s happiest countries, including Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, which occupy the top ranks of the World Happiness Report, are consistently among the most secular nations on Earth. Countries with higher levels of secularization tend to perform better across indicators such as prosperity, equality, education, life expectancy and democratic freedoms, while also often reporting lower crime rates.

On the other hand, nations with the highest rates of religiosity tend to be the most problem-ridden, with high violent crime, infant mortality, poverty and corruption rates. These are consistent patterns across the world. Religion is not the guarantor of national goodness. From the Inquisition to the Crusades to Patriarch Kirill blessing soldiers headed into Ukraine, religion has often produced the exact opposite effect. The reason most ethical humans in secular societies act decently every day, without divine incentive structures, is the plain fact that cruelty produces suffering and that they would like to produce less of it.

America’s founders understood something Trump does not seem to: that a nation founded on freedom of conscience cannot make religion a prerequisite for belonging. I crossed an ocean partly to live inside that principle. I would prefer not to watch it erode from the Resolute Desk.

Artem, 21, is a senior at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign majoring in computer science.

“Originally from Ukraine and a first-generation college student, I earned my Associate of Engineering Science degree at Harper College before transferring,” Artem writes. “In my free time, I enjoy building technical projects, exploring ways to use technology for social impact, and mentoring or supporting fellow students.”