The most revealing passages in the White House report on the Smithsonian are not the ones about statues or “anti-American ideology.” They are the ones about God. Amid its complaint against the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of the American Indian, the report faults curators for portraying the Christianization of Native peoples as coercion. It insists on “voluntary conversion,” mourns the museums’ silence on Christianity’s “civilizing and liberating contributions,” and recasts European conquest as the work of men fleeing persecution to carry the Gospel to a new land. This is not a correction of the record. It is a theology of it, and a familiar one.
Its lineage runs back to the sermon that gave English America its earliest image of itself as a chosen people. The text traditionally attributed to John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” is remembered for one phrase, the colony as “a city upon a hill,” but its argument is a covenant. Winthrop (or, as textual scholars now suspect, one of the ministers who sailed with him) tells the emigrants they have “entered into covenant” with God for their errand into the wilderness, taken out a “commission,” and will answer for its keeping. Keep faith, and they prosper in “the good land whither we are going.” Break it, and the Lord “will surely break out in wrath against us … and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.” To press the point, the sermon reaches for Saul and the Amalekites, a king handed a divine commission to destroy a people, faulted for carrying it out only halfway, “upon a faire pretense.” Providence, in this idiom, can commission the clearing of a land as easily as its blessing.
It would be a mistake to draw a straight line from a shipboard sermon in 1630 to the killing grounds of the nineteenth century. Winthrop’s text went unprinted until the 1830s, and the “city upon a hill” was installed as a national origin myth two centuries late, by Americans who needed one, a retroactive making that Abram Van Engen traces in City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (2020). The covenant did not cause the conquest. What it furnished, and still furnishes, is a grammar: a way to narrate the taking of a continent so that it is lived not as theft but as inheritance, not as crime but as commission. Under that grammar, dispossession becomes providence, and the people already in the promised land become souls to be gathered or obstacles to a covenant. Vine Deloria Jr., the Standing Rock Sioux scholar, named the structure beneath this in God Is Red: covenant faith is a religion of time, its promise portable, so that any land can be made Canaan; Native religions are religions of place, whose sacredness cannot be packed and carried. The grammar of the errand is what happens when a portable promised land arrives at an unmovable one and declares itself supreme. The violence had its own mechanisms, particular to places and decisions; the grammar is simply what let those who carried it out call it something else. It is the grammar the report speaks when it renames conquest as evangelism and calls the result “liberating.”
The law learned to speak it too. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), the foundational case of federal Indian law, a unanimous Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall rooted the nation’s title in the doctrine of discovery: the principle, descended from fifteenth-century papal bulls, that a Christian sovereign’s “discovery” of lands held by non-Christian peoples gave the discoverer title, and left the continent’s original nations a mere right of occupancy that the government alone could extinguish. The theology had become a deed. What the report offers as a plea for balance, a little more credit for the civilizing mission, is a motion to restore that deed’s preamble: the assurance that what was taken was, providentially, always meant to be given.
Here the report breaks faith with the very tradition it invokes. The Puritan covenant was never a creed of self-congratulation. Its central public form, as Sacvan Bercovitch showed in The American Jeremiad (1978), was the jeremiad: the ritual naming of the community’s sins as the condition of its renewal. To keep the covenant was to lament its breach, loudly, by name, in public. A people that had “dealt falsely” with God did not restore itself by revising the ledger but by confessing. Winthrop’s sermon makes fidelity itself turn on knowing “the price of the breach.” By that measure, the museums the report attacks are performing the covenant’s central rite, and the report is preaching apostasy: do not dwell on the wrongs, it says, for they breed “division” and “dissolve” the nation’s story. This is the covenant demanding Canaan while forbidding Lamentations. It is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing against a state church that had made the Gospel an organ of national glory, called cheap grace, forgiveness announced without repentance required, absolution bought not by facing the sin but by striking it from the record. When the report is scandalized that the National Museum of the American Indian lets a curator say plainly that the destruction of Native nations was genocide, what offends it is not an error. It is the confession.
And yet the museums cannot be let off so easily, because cheap grace has more than one liturgy. If the report absolves the nation by erasing the sin, the liberal institution has learned to absolve itself by naming it and stopping there. The land acknowledgment read before ceremonial events; the wall text that concedes the theft in the past tense; the exhibit that mourns what was taken and then leaves it taken, these too can be covenantal performances that skip the covenant’s cost. They reconcile the speaker to standing on the land without unsettling the holding of it. Confession becomes a genre, repentance a tone; the sin is named so that it need not be repaired.
The asymmetry matters, and it is easily abused, so let me be plain: these failures are not equivalent. One is a bad-faith use of state power to compel a flattering silence; the other is a good-faith reckoning that halts too soon. To equate them would be its own dishonesty, the false balance the report is angling for. The museum that names the wrong and stops is failing forward; the report that forbids the naming is failing on purpose, and with the force of the state behind it. But the jeremiad’s demand falls on both, because the tradition is unbending on one point: a confession that costs the confessor nothing is not repentance. It is performance.
The Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior made the deeper point decades ago: read from the Canaanite side, the conquest narrative is not a story of deliverance at all, and no amount of covenant-keeping redeems a story in which the people of the land appear only as its obstacle. The jeremiad corrects the covenant’s conduct; it does not unseat its cast. That is why confession alone, however sincere, cannot close this account.
Which is why repatriation sits at the theological center of this fight. The Congress that created the National Museum of the American Indian required the Smithsonian to give back what it held: to inventory the remains of the tens of thousands of Native people warehoused in its collections and return them, with sacred objects, to the nations they were taken from, the mandate that became the model for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Repatriation is not a wall label. It is restitution: confession that surrenders something the confessor would rather keep. It is the museum doing what neither the report nor the ritual acknowledgment will, paying the price of the breach. In the grammar of the covenant, it is the one move that is not cheap, because it is the only one that costs. It returns the dead. And the nations who receive their ancestors home are not granting the nation absolution; they are burying their dead. It concedes, in the single currency that cannot be counterfeited, that the taking was a taking.
Set the report beside that act and its offer comes clear. It wants a city upon a hill with the lament edited out, a national memory in which the taking was always a gift and the only sin left is naming the sin. But the covenant it means to inherit was more exacting than that, and so are the institutions it means to discipline. The museums that tell the whole story and then return the dead are the faithful ones. They have understood what the report has not: that a nation cannot absolve itself, not by forgetting its sins, and not by reciting them, because absolution was never its own to grant. Winthrop’s God, the sermon warns, is not answered by “a faire pretense.” Neither, in the end, is history.
