Remembering as Repentance 

In his 2022 article, “Contested Memorials and the Discipleship of Christian Memory,” James Crockford writes that “memory is a vital theological theme. Whether in the Deuteronomist’s repeated exhortation to ‘remember’ the liberation of God’s people from captivity in Egypt, or in Christ’s command to ‘do this in remembrance of me’, calling the past to mind is a constructive and critical force within Christian discipleship.”¹ Cementing the significance of memory with these connections, Crockford quickly shifts to reflect on the moral implications. As Richard B. Miller captures so well, if at least some of our memories, individual and collective, are the result of intentional recall, then “memory can…implicate our agency and, with that, our moral responsibility.”² I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between memory and morality lately – what we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, and the underlying commitments which inform such decisions – as the efforts outlined in “EO 14253: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” have recently come to fruition.  

Issued on March 27, 2025, EO 14253 focuses on public memory, particularly the elements of our collective history which we should choose to reject.³ In the executive order, President Trump directs the Secretary of the Interior to take action “to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”⁴ The EO defines inappropriate disparagement as any portrayal of the U.S. and its legacy as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” which would deepen “societal divides” and foster “a sense of national shame.”⁵ In the first two months of 2026, the follow actions have been undertaken in response to these dictates:  

• Removal of panels about enslavement on the walls of the President’s House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

• Flagging as non-compliant two exhibits which focus on Indigenous history at Montana’s Little Bighorn National Monument. 

• Removal of signage that describes how climate change has impacted the forest at Muir Woods National Monument in California. 

• Removal of visitor brochures from the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Mississippi that refer to Evers’s killer as racist.⁶ 

This non-exhaustive list provides greater clarity into what the Trump administration believes that we as a country ought to forget. I have grave concerns about these decisions. For one, these actions undermine the expertise of historians and other trained professionals and promote, rather than address, distortions of the past and present. Additionally, from a religious perspective, I object to the characterization that anything is irredeemably flawed. Christian understandings of both creation and salvation reject this. Further, I take issue with the assumption that shame will be the primary reaction to a deeply complex history and a response that ought to be avoided.⁷ For Christians, shame is, at once, something overcome by God (Joel 2:26-27) and potentially part of the reconciliation process (2 Thessalonians 3:14-15).⁸ 

Drawn from Scripture and Christian worship, Crockford’s description of two modes of remembering – remember as thanksgiving and remember as repentance – are helpful here, particularly the latter. He writes that in remembering as repentance, we reckon with “historical trauma, failure or self-deception” and, in so doing, enable the possibility of reconciled living.⁹ Though we might wish to avoid such an examination by forgetting, “our aspirations for transformation” cannot succeed if we “fail to comprehend the challenges and complicities we have inherited (and perhaps have ourselves propagated). The wounds need tending if they are to heal.”¹⁰ In EO 14253 and its implementation so far, I do not see any repentance, much less any acknowledgment of historical trauma or failure. If still in place, the panels, exhibits, signs, and brochures might at least point to the latter. Instead, these actions have compromised our moral clarity and further hindered needed discussion about ongoing moral responsibilities. The robust vision of remembering which Crockford gleans from the Christian tradition may be too much to expect regarding public memory but basic fidelity to truth, in all its complexity, ought not be.   

References: 

Crockford, James. “Contested Memorials and the Discipleship of Christian Memory.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 22, no. 2 (2022): 97-110. https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2022.2088666.  

Miller, Richard B. “The Moral and Political Burdens of Memory.” The Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 3 (2009): 531–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40378119. 

Notes: 

1. Crockford, “Contested Memorials,” 99. 

2. Miller, “The Moral and Political Burdens of Memory,” 535.  

3. This was not President Trump’s first executive order related to public memory. During his first term, Trump issued “EO 13934: Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes,” which sought to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a statuary park. The executive order also detailed a number of historically significant individuals that ought to be remembered.  

U.S. President, Proclamation, “Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, Executive Order 13934 of July 3, 2020,” Federal Register, February 10, 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/08/2020-14872/building-and-rebuilding-monuments-to-american-heroes. 

4. U.S. President, Proclamation, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Executive Order 14253 of March 27, 2025,” Federal Register, February 10, 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/03/2025-05838/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history. 

5. “Restoring Truth and Sanity.” 

6. Melissa Hellmann, “‘So shameful’: backlash as US national monuments conform to Trump’s rewrite of history,” The Guardian, February 10, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/national-monuments-trump-rewrite-history-racism-indigenous-people. 

7. Ibram X. Kendi suggested a different reaction was possible in his interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  In response to the objection that teaching elementary school children about the history of racism in the U.S. would make white kids feel bad about being white, Kendi asked “Why can’t we let white children identify with white abolitionists?” For the full interview, see “Ibram X. Kendi: I Suspect Sen. Cruz Didn’t Read “How To Be An Antiracist,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, July 1, 2022, “YouTube” (platform), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skH-evRRwlo. 

8. Joel 2:26-27 (NIV) 

“You will have plenty to eat, until you are full, 
    and you will praise the name of the Lord your God, 
    who has worked wonders for you; 
never again will my people be shamed. 
Then you will know that I am in Israel, 
    that I am the Lord your God, 
    and that there is no other; 
never again will my people be shamed.” 

2 Thessalonians 3:14-15 (NIV) 

“Take special note of anyone who does not obey our instruction in this letter. Do not associate with them, in order that they may feel ashamed.  Yet do not regard them as an enemy, but warn them as you would a fellow believer.” 

9. Crockford, “Contested Memorials,” 100. 

10. Ibid., 101. 

Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash.