President Trump recently ordered federal officials to post signs outside the National Museum of American History (NMAH) warning visitors that the exhibits inside don’t tell an accurate story. The July 24 executive order is an unusually confrontational move, and it’s worth asking what, specifically, is inaccurate enough to warrant a warning label on a national museum.

The answer, according to the report behind the order, is not a matter of a wrong date or a misattributed quote. It’s that the report identifies a specific, glaring omission: The museum leaves out the Christian faith that shaped American history.

What the Report Found

The order follows a 162-page report the White House Domestic Policy Council released July 4, which concludes that NMAH consistently presents Christianity as chiefly an instrument of conquest and cultural erasure, while the faith’s constructive role in shaping the nation’s freedoms goes largely unmentioned.

• The Pilgrims are recast primarily as colonizers rather than as people fleeing religious persecution to found a self-governing colony.
• Thanksgiving is reframed around the National Day of Mourning observed by many Indigenous communities.
• The Declaration of Independence and Constitution are quoted selectively in ways that mute their claims about equality, natural rights, and the divine source of those rights.

This should trouble every American, not just people of faith. But it should trouble Christians most of all, because the story being erased is, in large part, ours.

A Story Needs Its Source

The idea that human beings possess dignity and rights no government may rightly take away originated far before the American Founders. It is rooted in scripture and inherited from centuries of Christian moral and political thought, from a tradition insisting that every person bears the image of God and is therefore answerable to a higher law than any king’s. No other worldview has advanced a comparable ontological basis for human rights because none carries the same doctrine of creation.

That is why the Declaration grounds its case not in the goodwill of Parliament but in the authority of Nature’s God and a Creator who endows rights that no government bestowed and none may legitimately revoke. Strip that conviction out of the story, and you are left with a founding that makes no sense and a document asserting rights it cannot actually explain.

The museum’s own director has said her role includes treating history as a “prime tool of social justice,” and Smithsonian leadership has spoken about moving visitors away from a Britain-centered focus on the Founding altogether. NMAH’s director, Anthea Hartig, has pushed back on the report, telling lawmakers the broader story she’s telling is “a form of respect for the American people.” But no version of respect for our story can leave out the conviction that gave the Founders their case against tyranny in the first place: that every person carries the image of God, and that those rights are not the Parliament’s or any government’s to grant or to revoke.

That is the thread missing from the museum’s account of Jamestown’s charter, the Mayflower Compact, the abolitionist pulpits of the Second Great Awakening, and the biblical cadences of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and King’s “I Have a Dream.” A story told without that thread is diminished in its richness and is certainly less true.

Telling the Truth Without Erasing the Truth

None of this requires pretending America’s history is free of sin, or that faith was always practiced faithfully by those who claimed it. It wasn’t, and a museum should say so plainly. But acknowledging failure and erasing the source of the ideals by which we recognize failure as failure are two very different things.

You cannot coherently condemn slavery as unjust without appealing to a standard of human equality that has to come from somewhere. For America’s Founders, and for the abolitionists and civil rights leaders who followed them, that somewhere was, again and again, explicitly biblical. Even Abraham Lincoln argued that the framers of the Constitution understood slavery as a moral evil they expected to see ended, not an institution their founding principles were meant to defend.

What the Museum Owes the Public

A national museum funded by every American taxpayer, to the tune of more than a billion dollars a year, owes the public an honest accounting of where its highest ideals originated, not a curated omission designed to make that origin unrecognizable.

A sign on a sidewalk can notify visitors of their “sin of omission” but it doesn’t make up for it. Restoring that thread to the American story with accuracy and without apology, inside the galleries and not just outside them, is the very least our national institutions owe the people they serve.