2026 college essay contest: 2nd place — Astrid Jepson

The wall, not the altar

FFRF awarded Astrid $3,000.

By Astrid Jepson

I was watching television when I first understood that some of my fellow citizens did not believe people like me belonged here at all. It was Jan. 6, 2021. Beneath the flags and the smoke were wooden crosses, “Jesus Saves” banners, and a man in face paint leading a prayer on the floor of the Senate, thanking God that “patriots” had retaken the chamber for a nation that was theirs and not their enemies’. I am one of those enemies. I have never believed in God, and I do not think the country is worse for people like me. I think it is better.

It is fashionable to call that day a perversion of faith; the hijacking of an otherwise gentle religion. I don’t believe that. What stormed the Capitol was not a distortion of religion’s logic, but its oldest ambition laid bare: the conviction that one people, holding one truth from one God, should rule everyone else.

I grew up around belief, and proximity has only sharpened my conviction that it has no business near the levers of power.

Four years later, the president handed that movement its motto. At the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2026, President Trump said, “You just can’t have a great country if you don’t have religion,” and he has said it for years, insisting that a great nation needs God. He has it exactly backwards.

Whatever greatness this country can claim, it owes not to religion but to the wall built to hold religion off. The founders did not raise an altar; they raised that wall. The Constitution never mentions God and forbids any “religious test” for office. The First Amendment bars an establishment of religion. In 1797, a Senate full of founders unanimously ratified a treaty, signed by President John Adams, declaring that the government of the United States is “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Thomas Jefferson named the achievement “a wall of separation between church and state.” They feared the very spectacle I watched on that screen, and they built their republic to prevent it.

As a moral compass, religion is worthless: Scripture has been quoted to defend slavery and to abolish it, to bless wars and to damn them, bending to whoever holds the pulpit. A book that can sanctify anything is a foundation for nothing.

Trump’s claim is not only false; it is dangerous. In “Rebellion,” the historian Robert Kagan argues that the radical American idea — that your rights, including the right to believe in no god at all, are yours by birth and not by permission — was never inevitable. It has always been hunted by an antiliberal, theocratic countertradition that wants the country to belong to one people and one faith, and that erupts, generation after generation, whenever the promise of equality starts to feel like a threat. Trump’s sentence is the newest war cry of that very old rebellion, and Jan. 6 is what waits at the end of it.

So, let me say it with more humility than the president can manage: I do not need this country to be mine. I ask only to share it, as fully and as unconditionally as anyone who kneels. But I will not accept the lie he is selling — a nation is not made great by God. It is made great by its refusal to let God (or any of its self-appointed enforcers) rule the people who do not believe.

Astrid, 21, attends UCLA and is majoring in economics and minoring in philosophy.

“I am interning for a political campaign in Los Angeles while studying for the LSAT,” Astrid writes. “I am half Norwegian, and, before law school, I plan to spend a gap year (or several) working and studying in Scandinavia. My ultimate goal is a career in diplomacy.”