The Freedom From Religion Foundation is castigating the Trump administration’s latest move in its white Christian nationalist campaign to rewrite America’s past.
The administration has outrageously replaced an exhibit at Philadelphia’s President’s House with a sanitized version of history that downplays the realities of slavery. The overnight removal of exhibits detailing the lives of the nine enslaved people held by George Washington while he lived in Philadelphia follows President Trump’s 2025 executive order directing federal historic sites to avoid materials that “disparage Americans” and instead emphasize the nation’s “greatness.” Historians, local officials and preservation advocates have criticized the revised displays for omitting critical historical context and softening or erasing the brutal realities of slavery and treatment of Native Americans.
“This administration is openly pursuing the agenda of white supremacists allied with Christian nationalism,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “A government in our pluralistic democracy should be committed to truth, not erasing uncomfortable facts.”
FFRF notes that the decision is part of an ongoing White House campaign to reshape public education, museums and historical institutions around an idealized narrative of America that minimizes the country’s failures while elevating a preferred vision of its religious identity.
“White Christian nationalism depends on a mythologized version of American history,” says Gaylor. She points out that its adherents portray the United States as a divinely founded Christian nation and that honest discussions of slavery, religious persecution, indigenous dispossession and systemic race or sex discrimination undermine that narrative.
The exhibit changes come amid a series of administration actions targeting what Trump has labeled “divisive narratives,” including executive orders aimed at the Smithsonian Institution, federal museums and educational programs addressing race and discrimination.
When the government begins editing history to serve an ideological agenda, democracy itself is at risk. “Free people deserve facts, not propaganda,” Gaylor concludes.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
