Rewriting America’s Story at the Smithsonian

There’s an old truth worth sitting with for a moment: money and medicine aren’t the only things we can mismanage. So can memory. And a new report out of the White House Domestic Policy Council gives us reason to think that’s exactly what’s happening at one of our nation’s most trusted institutions.

The report follows President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and it takes a careful, sobering look at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Its conclusion is plain enough that it doesn’t need much dressing up: America’s flagship history museum has largely stopped telling America’s story.

Consider what the report actually found. In the year of our nation’s 250th anniversary — a milestone worth real celebration — a visitor walking through the museum today won’t find a major exhibit dedicated to the Founding era. No George Washington. No Thomas Jefferson. No Continental Congress. No Pilgrims or Puritans. Not even Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Where the Founders do appear, the report says, it’s chiefly through their connection to slavery, with their sacrificial, decisive roles in building this Republic minimized or left out altogether. Thanksgiving is presented as a “National Day of Mourning.” The settlement of this continent is framed mainly as a “great unsettling.” And in early 2026, three out of every four advertising boards posted around the museum promoted exhibits about cultures and traditions outside the United States.

Why the shift? The report traces it to a deliberate change in leadership philosophy. The museum’s director has spoken openly of history as a “prime tool of social justice,” described her role as connecting “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy,” and said the museum needs to “problematize” the very anniversary we’re meant to be honoring this year. Under her leadership, the museum’s mission statement itself was rewritten — the phrases “American history” and “infinite richness” were quietly dropped in favor of language about exploring “the complexity of our past,” a change she explained was meant to move the museum away from what she called an “America First” mentality.

There’s more in the report worth knowing, even though it’s hard to read. An internal staff framework treats objectivity, individualism, and what it calls “worship of the written word” as traits of “whiteness” in need of correction. Exhibit content and school programming have been shaped through partnerships with illegal-immigration activists. And some youth-facing exhibits weave gender-identity advocacy into the museum’s treatment of women’s history and childhood development — content the report says includes material many parents would find genuinely inappropriate for their children. The museum has now gone two years running without any Independence Day programming, even while open on the Fourth of July, and it no longer holds its traditional flag-folding ceremony.

Here’s what strikes me most. This museum was built in 1964 to “instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny.” That was the calling. And the report concludes that, in its current form, the museum has become an instrument for teaching visitors disdain rather than the informed, honest patriotism a national history museum owes the people it serves.

As believers, we’re given a different charge — a different duty of remembrance. Scripture doesn’t ask us to hide our history, including the hard parts. It asks us to tell it faithfully. “We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done… that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children” (Psalm 78:4, 6). Passing down an honest, grateful account of where we came from — including our sins alongside God’s providence through them — isn’t just patriotic sentiment. It’s a spiritual discipline.

And that discipline cuts both ways. The ninth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16), calls us to truthful witness — not to shading history toward a false triumphalism that pretends our nation has no sins to reckon with, but also not toward a false shame that teaches our children to see their country as nothing but oppression and suspicion. A museum that omits the Founders and trains the next generation to view America chiefly with distrust falls short of that same standard, just from the other direction.

Which is why this matters for us, practically and immediately. We don’t have to wait on an institution to get this right. The discipling happens closer to home — at our own tables, in our own words, with our own children and grandchildren — telling a history that is honest about America’s failures and genuinely grateful for God’s hand in her founding and her preservation.