Why should the church be concerned with what is happening in the field of public history? The Christian faith is historic. A study of the Scriptures is a study of God’s providential acts in time and space. God has acted in the past; He is acting in the present; and He will continue acting for all of eternity. How believers approach history is indivisible from the fundamentals of Biblical faith and practice. The Word of God is true. Likewise, the historical elements of the Biblical narrative are true. Faith and history are joined together because God is at work in the world.
Cultivating a Biblical view of history is a necessary next step so that historical truth can be preserved and taught. History is often taught in academic settings. However, outside of the classroom, history museums have become important centers of education. Museum educators are some of the loudest voices defining historical interpretation, understanding, and practice.
History museums are in every state and in most cities and towns in America. Whether or not we are cognizant of their impact, museums are shaping the public’s understanding of history. Museums appeal to a wide audience. Even those uninterested in history will visit museums.
The Mediums Utilized by History Museums
Historians and museum curators use historic sites and museums to communicate social, political, economic, and religious ideas. The docent, the museum tour guide, is no longer considered a teacher but is called a “historical interpreter,” emphasizing that a public historian interprets the meaning and significance of history as he communicates that history to his audience (in fact, my own job title is “Historical Interpreter”).
This form of history began with Robert Kelley, who is credited with establishing public history as an academic program. His article “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” published in the fall of 1978, defined public history as “the employment of historians and the historical method outside of academia: in government, private corporations, the media, historical societies and museums, even in private practice.”[1] His purpose, in part, was to expand the scope of historical work to include any discipline that references or makes use of past precedent.
For the purposes of this article, history museums are our primary focus. By means of collections, education, events, exhibitions, programs, publications, research, signage, and tours, these institutions proclaim confidence in their own authority as the sole interpreters of history. For example, the Tennessee State Museum’s permanent exhibit “The Civil War and Reconstruction” frames the narrative as a battle among Tennesseans to be either “Union supporters” or “Confederate sympathizers.”[2] The language here is significant.
In the center of the exhibition, dioramas of Union soldier encampments teach the visitor about the Union’s successful liberation from Confederate occupation. Displays containing Confederate relics are relegated to the back corners of the exhibit hall. The focus of the exhibit is Union victories as well as post-war emancipation.
“The Civil War and Reconstruction” exhibit’s primary color is an overwhelmingly bright red. The red paired with navy blue and a dull gray communicate a divided and bloody war. A major theme is the struggle to “take sides” in the Civil War. The tone is heavy and serious. This museum display is a medium for historical interpretation. The Tennessee State Museum’s retelling of the Civil War is formatted and staged in order to impart a certain moral teaching. Whether a museum’s interpretation is correct is not the object of this illustration. The object is to demonstrate that public historians communicate their interpretation of past events through the mediums uniquely available to museums.
Another common avenue for retelling historical events is reenactment. Historic sites like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia advertise “living history” where guests are transported back to the early beginnings of America. Reenactors wear hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-sewn clothing made of natural fibers. These public historians follow in the traditional methods of tradesmen such as apothecaries, carpenters, potters, and wigmakers. History museums across the United States recreate history, inviting guests to imagine themselves as living within that historical period.
This medium has philosophical roots in the thought of idealists like R. G. Collingwood, who held that historical understanding comes from “re-thinking” or recreating the events of history in one’s imagination. For Collingwood, “All history is the history of thought. . . . The historian not only re-enacts past thought, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgement of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it.”[3] By experiencing the thoughts of history, a deeper understanding may be attained. However, Collingwood overemphasized the role of subjective recreation or rethinking history. All history is not the history of thought. Yet reenactment is a significant tool for understanding aspects of history. But that subjective experience is properly meaningful only insofar as it is grounded in objective historical truth.
The Messages Reframed by History Museums
Touring historic sites fills an empty time slot on travel itineraries. Historic site museums are often destinations for school field trips or senior group outings. Visiting museums is an amusement, where guests walk through an old house, look at old stuff, and listen as docents recite old stories. Even so, these institutions are not neutral. In fact, they are far from neutral. History museums, through mediums such as exhibitions, tours, and reenactments, have an intended message.
Public history organizations like the National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) see themselves as advocates who encourage historians to tell the “stories” of history. Such organizations call for historians to teach “complete” and “accurate” history. What constitutes complete and accurate history is informed significantly by leftist political and social ideas. A key underlying assertion of these historians is that history has excluded the common man from its pages for centuries. The common man, by lack of elevation, is the “oppressed,” and the elite are his “oppressors.” Oppression is a major theme in these organizations. Whether on the basis of economics, gender, race, or sexuality, the oppressed must be advocated for through the reframing of historical narratives. Writers of history, according to these organizations, selected stories that intentionally hid the economic, political, religious, and social perspectives of the majority. History was not discovered; it was made. The public historian’s task is to reveal what he believes has been hidden.
History museums encourage the use of those hidden stories as a means to protest injustice, which is synonymous with promoting the true stories of history (as long as those stories agree with the organization’s preferred political platforms). Broadly speaking, museums are reframing history, shifting the focus to the experience of the racially or sexually oppressed, as if the oppressed is representative of the majority’s experience. In effect, public historians select different stories, stories that fit within their purview.
Many historians will explicitly say that we must reframe history in order to understand what truly happened. Teaching History through Museum, a strategy manual written by a group of public historians, asserts that history will be whatever culture decides it should be. What a people choose to remember is history: “Museums select the narratives they desire to tell, often limit the perspectives revealed within a narrative, and can reflect the society within which they exist, sometimes more than the time period within which a narrative exists.”[4] The goal of this approach to history is to establish personal connections with the past insofar as the past is relevant to current political goals. To borrow phrasing from Ronald H. Nash, these historians are “making history in their image and in their own likeness.”[5]
Nash offered a good corrective for this reframing mentality. He asserted that history is “concerned only with the important things that have happened in the past. The trivial, the commonplace, and the insignificant are not grist for the mill of history.”[6] One historical fact may be more important than another. Selection does not necessarily produce a false or distorted historical record. The historian has a responsibility to evaluate the facts before him critically, and he must be aware of his own presuppositions when interpreting history. Furthermore, Christians have a unique responsibility to teach history in a truthful way.
Conclusion
The field of public history is growing more prominent. History museums are reaching the public, shaping their understanding of history and truth. Field trips, guided tours, holiday events, and museum exhibits are avenues through which museums teach. We ought to be aware of how museums are teaching and of what they are teaching because history museums are, in a manner of speaking, in our own backyard. They are in our communities, our states, and in the places we travel.
The church ought to be concerned with what is happening in public history because history is part of the Christian faith. If history museums undermine the objectivity of history in favor of a more culturally relevant narrative, historical truth is threatened. We must hold fast to truth in history because of its strong ties to Christian faith.
[1] Robert Kelley, “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” The Public Historian 1, no. 1 (1978): 16. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377666.
[2] https://tnmuseum.org/permanent-exhibits/exhibits/civilwarandreconstruction.
[3] R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 215.
[4] Alan S. Marcus, Jeremy D. Stoddard, and Walter W. Woodward, Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K–12 Social Studies (New York: Routledge, 2017), 11.
[5] Ronald H. Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding (Dallas, TX: Probe, 1989), 25.
[6] Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding, 13.
October 8, 2026
A very insightful article, Sarah. Thank you for sharing how history is often being re-shaped and thus being skewed, distorted, and made inaccurate. History is His Story, and God has told it to us through His Son and through His Word.