On July 4, the White House released “Saving America’s Story,” a report charging the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History with treating “the American story” as “a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens,” specifically claiming there is an “anti-Christian, and anti-freedom narrative of America that NMAH and the Smithsonian seek to tell.”

I beg to differ. The staff at the National Museum of American History has followed the same approach used by respected historians across their field. And far from being “anti-Christian,” they are using the same tools to explore U.S. history that millions of Christians use to understand Scripture.

In “Saving America’s Story,” the Trump administration demands that our museums tell “a coherent national narrative” which is “inspiring” and “unifying.” The report was in the same vein as an executive order in March 2025 that called for the National Park Service to take down signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But as a Christian and a historian, I believe the cracks are where the light gets in. The Bible tells of people’s flaws and their graces, and it would be unrecognizable if edited down to a single, celebratory story. The White House claims to be taking action against an “anti-Christian, and anti-freedom narrative of America,” but it fails to recognize the Christian practice of listening to the full choir of history, a shared song sung in many voices, or our faith-driven interest in learning the whole story about those whose lives we study, whether religious figures or political leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Cesar Chavez. 

Reading critical work about imperfect—that is, human—individuals is familiar to many Christians. The Bible well demonstrates how to study and teach human history without hiding the difficult, painful parts. Its many voices and tones, its joys and violences, triumphs and cruelties, are all laid out on the page. For example, Genesis gives us the story of Noah and his ark, with the animals coming up the ramp two by two. This is a story I can tell even my young son, though he has questions about why God would flood the world in the first place. Later in Genesis, Noah gets drunk on his first grape harvest. This narrative is meaningful: It shows a good man making a mistake. Does Genesis “disparage” Noah by including this negative detail at the end of a mostly positive story?

Abraham and Isaac’s story is even more difficult. As a mother, I find the image of Isaac tied up on the altar profoundly disturbing. But as with Noah, the Bible shows the full picture. We hear of Abraham’s joys in his children and of his willingness to kill his child to obey God. Does the Bible “disparage” Abraham by including both?

I grew up thinking of the Bible as a history of a people, so it is a model whenever I study or write about any kind of history. I am currently writing about a relative who died in an explosion while leading an American fireboat attack in Tripoli, in what popular histories call the First Barbary War in 1804, and whose body still lies in a cemetery in Libya. I hope to learn how he died: by suicide, to prevent his cargo of gunpowder from falling into the hands of Ottoman sailors; by accidental spark; or by enemy fire? It is possible I will learn details that could upset my family or cast the United States in a bad light, but I would rather know the complicated truth than a surface-level tale meant only to “inspire.”

When writing this essay, I asked my Episcopalian priest’s wife (herself a chaplain) if I was missing something in thinking of the Bible as being full of flawed people—for example, whether Noah’s drunkenness is supposed to be read as grace, not error. She laughed and reminded me that what many people find comforting in the Bible is how broken so many of the people are, adding that there’s meant to be only one perfect person in the book. 

I also checked with my mother, a jail chaplain in Silicon Valley who teaches a popular Christian theology class to inmates. She reminded me that when figures in the New Testament tell embarrassing stories about themselves—doubting, fearing, running from, misunderstanding or disbelieving Jesus—they are showing their humility and opening a doorway for other people to see themselves in the story. 

This constitutive Christian practice of reading biblical stories prepares me for reading troubling news, like the recent revelation that DNA evidence appears to confirm that Thomas Jefferson impregnated an enslaved Sally Hemings. A lifetime of encountering both pain and joy in the texts of my faith gives me tools to evaluate findings like these and better understand Jefferson as a person.

Ambiguities, not absolutes

After releasing “Saving America’s Story,” the Trump administration ordered the Department of the Interior to erect signs outside of the museum claiming it includes “inaccurate information.” This kind of White House overreach has never happened before and should not be happening now. The Smithsonian has been an independent institution since its founding in 1846 and needs to maintain that independence to remain a world-class source of historical and scientific truth, and not a political mouthpiece.

The Smithsonian has not taken down signs or rewritten wall texts (except for briefly removing references to his two impeachments in the text accompanying President Trump’s portrait). It has stood strong not only because of curators and leaders like Lonnie G. Bunch III, soon to retire as secretary of the Smithsonian, but also because it is not an executive agency. It is “an independent federal trust instrumentality,” with much of its budget coming from Congress, but its board is a mix of citizens, members of Congress from each party, the vice president and the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That structure has protected it from political influence for over a century, though this administration seems determined to find ways to erode that independence.

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, the group I co-founded a little over a year ago with the Georgetown University professors Chandra Manning and Jim Millward, works with 2,700 volunteers to support the Smithsonian against pressures it faces from the White House. We’ve documented every public display in the 21 Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo and the Holocaust Museum, capturing nearly 75,000 photos and videos in our first year. The archive will serve as a backup in case this material is ever removed from public view.

Two of our volunteers also reviewed “Saving America’s Story” and discovered that the White House report flagged only 14 objects (out of 1.7 million objects on display) in support of its thesis that the Smithsonian was disparaging American history and values. One of the objects was a T-shirt from the 1970s with a single word, VOTE, and an image of a butterfly. The report claimed that the butterfly was “a well-known symbol in the illegal alien activist community, symbolizing illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S.” But I have found no evidence that the T-shirt had anything to do with immigration reform. Sometimes a butterfly is just a butterfly. 

The report also includes unsubstantiated accusations about respected people like Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison (described as “an anti-white activist and author”), and it accuses Anthea Hartig, the director of the National Museum of American History, of harboring “anti-white and anti-Christian sentiment.” This simplistic “anti-this and anti-that” talk forgoes the “nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties” of language that Christians bring to the study of biblical figures and saints, to borrow a phrase from Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize speech. It also obscures the reality that Dr. Hartig revealed in her testimony before Congress this summer: “Telling our history fully is not anti-American. It is a form of respect for the American people and a commitment to constantly be in pursuit of ‘a more perfect union.’”

The Bible does not deal only in absolutes but also in ambiguities. It gives us space to see ourselves in others’ faults and come closer to the only truly faultless person in the story. A museum that pretended the Founders—or anyone—were free from flaws would be idolizing them in the very way Exodus 32:1-8 warns against. Telling the full story of a person, with what history has left us as evidence, shows both their value and a respect for their humanity. That is not disparagement. That is history. 

Jessica Dickinson Goodman is a co-founder of Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. She is a graduate student in both the Foreign Service and the Global, International and Comparative History programs at Georgetown University.

Jessica Dickinson Goodman is a co-founder of Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. She is a graduate student in both the Foreign Service and the Global, International and Comparative History programs at Georgetown University.