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The six mobile museums Pres. Donald Trump sent around the country to commemorate America’s 250th birthday are carrying hidden cargo: Antisemitism and Christian nationalism.
The so-called “Freedom Trucks” present narratives primarily about America’s founding, while also celebrating notable figures from the nation’s history. The exhibits and displays are largely anodyne. The biases are mostly subtle, in the choice of subject matter and what’s said about it.
There are also falsehoods and undocumented stories presented as facts. The trucks carry echoes of a canard about Jews in the American Revolution. Christian nationalist myths peer out from some displays. America is back, the trucks proclaim over an image of Trump, without saying from what.
Christianity is elevated, the founders’ Deism and skepticism are erased. The nation’s origins are given religious emphasis over mercantile motives. The Aitken Bible, an obscure footnote to American history but a key tool for rewriting it, is featured.
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QR codes send visitors into the theocratic, right-wing realms of PragerU, which created content for the trucks. It’s not a university but an openly ideological advocacy organization that says it promotes “American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment … while upholding Judeo-Christian values.”
I asked a reader of mine to take video and pictures of one of the trucks (they feature identical displays). Then I asked Military Religious Freedom Foundation Senior Research Director Chris Rodda to review the images she had captured.
PragerU was right: It is creative.
Rodda has years of experience researching and writing about Christian revisionist history portraying America’s founders as building the new nation on a Christian foundation. Although the founders were nominally Christian, many of the most influential were Deists, and the intention to create a secular nation was explicit in their writings and the nation’s founding documents.
This hasn’t stopped a cottage industry, funded by rich, right-wing Christians, from cherry-picking historic quotations and elevating specious, disproven, and unsourced secondary accounts to undermine America’s secular roots and nature.
As others have reported, that cottage industry — organizations such as PragerU and Hillsdale College — was handed the wheel to drive the content of the Freedom 250 trucks.
The trucks are part of Freedom 250, activities and events ostensibly intended to mark in nonpartisan fashion the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A public effort years in the making toward that same goal was effectively sidelined after Trump took office and handed off anniversary events to a privately funded organization led by his appointees.
The private Freedom 250 endeavor has led to multiple embarrassments, with July 4 still almost a month away. A music festival collapsed when performers pulled out, prompting Trump to denigrate them, suggesting the festival would have been low-quality even if it happened.
Freedom 250’s corporate “partners” include ExxonMobil, Oracle, Penske, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, John Deere, Palantir, Deloitte, United Health Group, United Airlines, the Blockchain Association, and several right-wing organizations such as the openly theocratic Museum of the Bible.
The traveling Freedom 250 trucks could be requested for stops in municipalities around the country.
Ironically, New England — site of much of the history found inside the trucks — has shown little interest. At least one appearance there was canceled after local police discovered the role of PragerU, the Hartford Courant reported.
The main page for all the Freedom 250 events is overtly partisan, featuring an image of Trump and his political rhetoric, implying America went away when he wasn’t president.
A Freedom 250 spokesperson told NBC that “Freedom 250 is a nonpartisan organization singularly focused on celebrating America’s 250th anniversary and bringing Americans together around this historic milestone. From the outset, our work has reflected the unifying spirit of this moment.”
But the Freedom Truck is more divisive than unifying. It pressures visitors to identify as patriots.
Exhibits steer obviously and ahistorically toward Christianity, amplifying its role in the nation’s birth and erasing real religious beliefs, and skepticism, of America’s founders and influential figures in its history.
Capitalists and mainstream personalities from arts and sports are featured. Union leaders are in short supply. Political and cultural subversives who challenged convention or fought to make America a more perfect union only appear if smoothed over by time and appropriation.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported that some Freedom 250 donor companies have business before the government that they could be hoping to sway by supporting Trump’s anniversary efforts.
A dozen Democratic senators have pressed the administration for an accounting of $100 million Trump appropriated from Interior Department funds for Freedom 250.
Christian nationalism has already taken center stage in Freedom 250 events. Rededicate 250 was overtly and predominantly right-wing, evangelical Christian. in March, historians and scholars told journalist Nancy Levine Stearns that Rededicate 250 offered a vision of America and its history that falsely paints Christianity as a driving and inherent force.
Less overtly than the Rededicate 250 spectacle, the trucks, bedecked with the word “patriot” and cartoonish imagery of heroic realism, carry a religious message that veers between ignorance and fabrication.
Last month, The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington found that the rolling exhibit credits God for America’s greatness, even though the founding documents have only meager and mostly euphemistic references to God.
“[O]ur rights are a gift from God,” says a computer-generated George Washington like the real one was never documented saying, Pilkington reported.
One placard reads, “The truth that each person is made in the image and likeness of God is the basis of human equality.” This is a claim never advanced in founding documents.
Rodda found more, some subtle, some not previously reported, endorsing narratives that Christian history-revisionists would recognize but casual visitors wouldn’t know as controversial, let alone false.
Perhaps the most notable is a long-standing slur against American Jews: A putative reluctance to fight for their country.
A display entitled “England’s Most Wanted” lists categories of those who aided the colonial cause in the Revolutionary War. Under the mantle of celebrating non-military supporting players, the display ostensibly honors the contribution of colonial Jews1.
“Victory came not from military might alone, but from countless unsung heroes,” it says. Unsung non-military heroes included “Jewish merchants funding the cause.”
Rodda highlights two antisemitic sides of this coin.
The implication, however well-meaning the intent, is that Jews didn’t fight; an antisemitic canard. They handled the money; another antisemitic canard.
While the Revolutionary War still raged, antisemitic slanders began. A Georgia newspaper accused Jews in 1778 of profiting and fleeing, “turning their backs upon the country when in danger.”
In an analysis that Rodda wrote for me, she said, “[T]here were Jews who fought in the Army. They didn’t just fund the cause.” She said, “This plays right into the stereotype of Jews avoiding military service.” Rodda dug into the reality.
Jews weren’t even the biggest funders of the war. People of all denominations contributed.
Financiers Robert Morris and Haym Salomon partnered to supply the Army. They put up their own money and drew on their credit2.
Morris, not Jewish, was the war’s biggest financier, responsible for about $1.4 million. Salomon, who was Jewish, contributed roughly $650,000.
Reportedly, an estimated one third of the colonial Jewish population fought in the war. Some died or were captured. Salomon himself did more than fund the war.
He was captured by the British as a suspected spy. And escaped.
Another placard points again toward Jews not fighting. As the British swept through Manhattan, the placard notes, Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas “made the bold decision to seal the synagogue and flee to Connecticut.”
Jews did more than flee, and contributed more than blood and treasure. They pressed America’s leaders to make sure the new nation was not a Christian nation.
Washington agreed, writing that Jews deserved more than to be “tolerated,” because that implied a lesser claim than others had to “inherent natural rights.”
Atheism, agnosticism, and even mild skepticism toward Christianity and the concept of an anthropomorphic god — common among the founders and other colonial figures — are erased entirely on board the Freedom Trucks.
A display about the Declaration of Independence simply asserts that “The Founders … believed God created humans for liberty,” a concept found in neither the declaration nor the Bible.
The mobile museum simply invents a Christian tradition of human liberty that surely would have come as a surprise to centuries of monarchs who claimed divine authority. Not to mention the crusaders who expanded Christianity through subjugation and torture.
One section on liberty even tips its tri-corner hat to modern libertarianism. “True flourishing comes only with the liberty to make our own way in the world and pursue the happiness of human life,” the display simply asserts, implying the founders all shared this belief.
While Christianity is mentioned frequently in biographical profiles, no such references are made to well-known doubters.
The animus of revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine toward organized religion and Christianity specifically are nowhere to be found.
Deism, the belief in a non-Christian supernatural force behind the universe, is never mentioned despite being a common belief among leaders of the day and far closer to the divine “Creator” the founders invoked than the god of Christianity.
Instead, “The Roots of America” display asserts the existence of “foundational principles of America … rooted in the Western and Judeo-Christian traditions that the colonists inherited through their British roots.”
Setting aside that not all colonists had British roots, the display highlights Jerusalem as a city relevant to America’s roots without even a cursory effort to explain why. The Jerusalem section doesn’t even mention the city. It’s about Christianity. And it’s false.
“Religious faith – especially Christianity – shaped European and colonial thought and tradition, teaching that ‘the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God’ serve as the best foundation for government. The truth that each person is made in the image and likeness of God is the basis of human equality and underscores the principle that governments should protect individuals rights and equal dignity.”
The idea — let alone the “truth” — that people are made in God’s image doesn’t appear in America’s founding documents. Even many of the religious founders rejected the idea that God was an actual being with any kind of likeness.
The phrase “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” comes from the Declaration of Independence, but not as a foundation for government. The Declaration says “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” are what entitle a people to “separate and equal station” to the people from which they’re severing themselves. The basis not for a government but the right to self-governance.
The phrase “Nature’s God” came from Jefferson, a champion of government removed from God and religious faith. Jefferson rejected the New Testament’s miraculous stories so profoundly that he cut out the supernatural parts to create his own version focused on Jesus’s moral teachings. As a man, not as a god.
Jefferson drew on Enlightenment and Greek intellectual traditions of the idea that nature followed set laws due to something other than an anthropomorphic entity. His phrase “Nature’s God” was a rejection of what the trucks claim it proves.
Next to the Jerusalem entry is another artifact of Christian right attempts to rewrite American history. It’s the Aitken Bible, printed by Robert Aitken, the story of which Rodda has been sleuthing and debunking for years.
An accompanying QR code takes visitors to a trove of PragerU videos. They include one specifically about the Aitken Bible, narrated by right-wing commentator and former Fox host Glenn Beck.
The placard that introduces the PragerU QR code says “Congress passed a resolution to print the Bible” and says the Aitken Bible “remains the only edition of the Bible authorized by Congress.”
Rodda has been debunking these claims for more than 16 years.
In reality, Aitken sought all kinds of things from Congress that Congress denied him. All Congress ended up doing was having congressional chaplains affirm that his version was an accurate edition. The purpose, Rodda writes, was to help bolster book publishing in the colonies so the nascent industry might compete with imports after the war.
The congressional resolution did not direct Aitken to print his Bible nor “authorize” it, as selective editing of the resolution implies.
The full resolution affirmed Aitken’s textual fidelity to the King James Bible, recommended the version to American readers, and authorized Aitken to print not his Bible but the congressional recommendation of it. Rodda published the full resolution as early as 2010:
“Whereupon, Resolved, That the United States in Congress assembled, highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report, of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorise him to publish this recommendation in the manner he shall think proper.”
Another story Rodda points out has even less basis in fact.
You probably never heard of Peter Muhlenberg in your American History classes. With good reason. But his inclusion in the mobile exhibit, with his own placard, suggests he was a towering figure in The Revolutionary War.
And yet the sole anecdote presented to justify including him at all has no basis in fact.
The placard says Muhlenberg is “best known” for this anecdote, even though he’s not known outside the circles of history revisionism, and certainly not known for anything else.
Visitors to the Freedom Trucks might well believe the anecdote that Muhlenberg did, in fact, dramatically tear off his clerical vestments after reading the Ecclesiastes verse about “a time of war, and a time of peace.” They might even believe that the colonial military uniform he was wearing underneath, somehow, inspired “several” members of his Lutheran church to enlist while drummers who were outside the church for some reason somehow knew to start playing a martial beat.
They might believe all of that except that, in 2007, the Lutheran church magazine wrote that the story was “deemed a myth.”
That was based on the findings of the PBS show, History Detectives. Rodda already knew this when the show aired, almost two decades ago.
Ironically, given today’s politics around Trump and the right, PBS concludes that the story was most likely invented by Muhlenberg’s nephew 75 years later to bolster the image of immigrants, as a surge from Germany spurred anti-immigrant sentiment.
An interviewee from the German Society of Pennsylvania told the show, “It is quite possible that immigrant groups like the Germans felt the need to explain their contributions to American society, their contribution to the building of the nation and the Revolutionary War. And Peter Muhlenberg would have been a perfect candidate.”
Christian revisionism of American history doesn’t just elevate obscure figures on whom inspiring if questionable tales can be hung. There are also fables spun about the known giants.
One of PragerU’s Glenn Beck videos to which the Freedom 250 trucks direct visitors depicts one such tale about the father of the country, George Washington.
The story of Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge has such currency on the Christian right that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cited it in his Rededicate 250 appearance. It’s no more legitimate than the Pulp Fiction prayer he recently offered.
As Rodda explains, it’s a posthumous invention about Washington’s life by Mason Weems, inventor of the cherry-tree story. Weems was a bookseller who peddled fiction by marketing it as non-fiction, right down to the lie that he was once the rector of Mount Vernon Parish, which he wasn’t, because it didn’t exist.
There are other, less blatant examples. Rodda caught religious quotations about seminal moments included for no reason relevant to the history of those moments.
Important events are portrayed as of solely religious motivation. The landing at Cape Henry. The Mayflower.
The role of mercantile funding is not mentioned. Freedom 250 would have visitors believe these expensive, risky ventures were motivated solely in service to Christianity.
The majority of the verbiage and text are anodyne, to be sure, if embarrassingly simplistic, sanded smooth, and, frankly, nowhere near as interesting as the full, flawed, complex reality. The effect of cartoonish truth and created lies is the same, however.
They reduce the American story to a matter of God’s will falling neatly into place, rather than flawed humans fighting each other and the worst human impulses. Ultimately the Freedom Truck mobile museums erase what America truly can claim as inspiration for humanity: The endless effort to recognize the nation’s flaws, improve upon them, and pursue a more perfect union; and the recognition that the road there is paved on secular values.
MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda contributed essential research and expertise to this article. You can find more of her work debunking Christian nationalist history lies at The Original Source.
This article would not have been possible without the work of Jessica Allen, who shared photos and videos from inside one of the Freedom 250 trucks.
I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.
Other groups are marginalized here, as well, ascribed motivations other than the good of the new country. “Slaves seeking freedom.” “Women holding families together.” The group “igniting revolution”? That was pastors.
This is fantastic. Your reporting, not the reality of these trucks. Thanks for the rundown.
"Weems was a bookseller who peddled fiction by marketing it as non-fiction..." Apparently Reality TV wasn't an original idea & it SUCKS.
I'm grateful for smart people to parse this crap out because the it's still really hard for me, even much more aware now of all the malevolent brainwashing, to separate what I think is a common desire, of "higher purpose", a belief in a power of common good, from self-serving manipulation. I appreciate all the work that goes into helping each of us develop our own discernment!