9th place (tie) — 2026 First in the Family essay contest: Samani Ismail
FFRF awarded Samani $400.
By Samani Ismail
When I hear politicians say America is a Christian nation, as a Black Muslim whose parents are refugees from Sudan, it sounds tyrannical to me.
The way the United States was built is through the hard work of many different migrants and the oppression and culture of slavery. To call it a Christian country — when the reason America is one of the best countries in the world is because of all of those people — is beyond arrogant. It would not be where it is without the hard labor of people who came from other lands, not only to seek refuge but to express their creativity and share ideas freely. You strip that away and America is only a husk of what it was and is.
It goes beyond what the Constitution is about, especially the First Amendment, which literally guarantees freedom of religion. To call it a Christian country when Christians took it over from Indigenous people is ludicrous.
The way I see America is a country being cradled and taken care of by a mother. What mothers do is nurse their young, watch over them and take care of them without prejudice. Mothers do not care how you look or how you talk. They only show love because that is a mother’s duty. That is what America is supposed to be. To call it a Christian nation is no better than a Third World oppressed country. We would become the same things our ancestors and the wars before us fought to stop. My parents fled Sudan because of exactly this kind of persecution — religious and ethnic. They survived refugee camps for over a decade because they believed somewhere out there was a place that would take them in without asking what they believed first. That place was supposed to be America.
When I hear politicians try to claim this country for one religion, I think about everything my family did to get here, and I think about how easily that promise disappears when the wrong people get loud enough.
Samani, 18, attends the University of Berkeley.
“I was born in Kenya to parents from Darfur, Sudan, who fled war and spent years in refugee camps before immigrating to San Diego, where I grew up in a one-bedroom home alongside four siblings,” Samani writes. “Navigating language barriers, financial hardship and complex systems on behalf of my family taught me early that clear communication is not just a skill but a form of care. These experiences led me to volunteer as a computer science instructor in the Refugee Tutoring Program, where I taught younger refugee students digital literacy skills.”
