Today, Constitution Day, is the anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789. It is also ironically the Trump administration’s day to start removing “inappropriate” content that runs afoul of a March 27 executive order titled: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Truth seems to be the first casualty here. The Trump II administration, with this date in mind, has been doubling down on its directives to remove or cover up displays by the National Park Service that “inappropriately disparage Americans.”

Among recent demands, the administration ordered the removal of an iconic 1863 photograph from Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia (pictured above), showing the horribly scarred back of a survivor of American slavery that became a symbol of abolition and is known as “The Scourged Back.”

How does this photo “inappropriately disparage Americans”? Is the Trump administration worried about the delicate sensibilities of dead enslavers? Does the administration think slavery should not be disparaged? Apparently so.

The executive order is also directed at the capital’s fabled Smithsonian museums, which attract about 17 million tourists from around the world. The order prohibits “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”

The order has a broad geographical scope. The New York Times reports that Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia is planning to alter an exhibit that features nine individuals enslaved by George Washington. The executive order singled it out along with the Biden administration’s so-called “corrosive ideology” supposedly teaching visitors that “America is purportedly racist.” In addition, the Trump administration is ordering the excision of the following sentences from a booklet for children given out at the historic home in Virginia of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee: “In 1829, Robert E. Lee promised to serve the Army and protect the United States. In 1861, he broke his promise and fought for slavery.”

The Trump administration’s campaign is part of a white Christian nationalist agenda to whitewash U.S. history. Let’s take a quick look at that history. The bloody Civil War was fought, in part, because of the bible and the church. Although some denominations and religionists spoke out against slavery, most were late in the game (except Quakers and Unitarians, who were vilified for their abolitionist views). It was the freethinkers and the unorthodox who led the fight in the United States until abolition became more widely accepted. Abolitionist and Unitarian Theodore Parker was oft-quoted remarking that if the whole of American churchdom had “dropped through the continent and disappeared altogether, the anti-slavery cause would have been further on.”

Pro-slaverers like Rev. James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina, in his “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” denounced abolitionists as atheists: “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders — they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground — Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”

Barbaric rules for slavery appear in Mosaic law, including Exodus 21. In the New Testament, Jesus leaves the laws of slavery untouched. Paul, in I Timothy, tells slaves to honor their owners, and Ephesians 6:5 warns them to be obedient “with fear and trembling.” Titus 2:9 says servants must obey and please their owners in “all things.” I Peter 2:18 exhorts, “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear.”

These verses were invoked from countless pulpits to sanctify slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention was created in 1845 expressly to uphold the institution of slavery.

It is a supreme insult that the Trump administration chose Constitution Day as the day to start purging factual references and displays about slavery (along with Native Americans, some women and transgender individuals).

On Constitution Day we should be celebrating the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that, respectively, abolished slavery, declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens and cemented due process of law and equal protection of the laws, and stated that right to vote could not be denied or abridged on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

On Constitution Day, the Freedom From Religion Foundation deplores the degradation of truth and constitutional rights and honors our secular Constitution and its commitment to equal justice under the law.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters of nontheism. With more than 42,000 members, FFRF advocates for freethinkers’ rights across the globe. For more information, visit ffrf.org.

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