Monday, August 25, 2025

Part I

A Museum is an Argument: Trump Takes DEI Culture War Agenda to the Smithsonian. What’s It All About?

Well, the museum world is under fire. Here in the United States, President Donald Trump and his administration has sent notice to the Smithsonian Institution and to other institutions that of course receive federal funds, that they are expecting a realignment of the museum’s exhibits in such a way that they will present what’s defined as a more truthful narrative concerning the United States or telling history in a more positive way.

The President made a specific criticism of the Smithsonian saying that in some of its exhibits, it focuses too much on “how bad slavery was,” but it is also clear this is part of the White House attempt to try to limit and roll back DEI–diversity, equity, and inclusion–agendas that are basically, well, they’re established in a motivation that largely believes that the United States was born in inequity and that our history is a history of oppression and that is showing up exhibit by exhibit, course by course, professor by professor, and museum by museum. Now, the museum industry, so to speak, the cultural elite are hitting back saying that there is no warrant for this whatsoever. That this is the White House treading on territory where it doesn’t belong, and just also claiming that they have the right to tell the story.

Now, in order to understand the museum controversy, I want to make an assertion. It comes in the form of a single sentence, and I’m going to stand by this sentence and that is that a museum is an argument. That’s what it is. A museum is an argument. It’s an argument in terms of the artifacts that are displayed, the story that’s told, the context that is explained, the decision to put this, not that, in the museum, the decision to establish a museum. All of this is deeply rooted in some kind of argument.

Okay. Let’s just talk a little bit about history here because that helps us to understand. There were certainly collections in times past, especially the rich, the powerful, kings, emperors, pharaohs, all the rest. They collected things, but they didn’t exactly establish museums. The museum as a cultural artifact really does go back to the age of empire. It goes back to the Enlightenment as well. It goes back to the idea that there should be a teaching about the essence of human thinking, human history, particularly the history of a nation or a civilization.

So that’s to say that there is no such thing as just a museum. It’s a museum of something. It’s located somewhere. It was established to tell some story. It was funded by some source. It’s being managed and administrated by some professionals. All that is a part of understanding what exactly we’re talking about when we talk about a museum.

Now, on the one hand, in the West where the museums really emerged in the sense we know them at this point in the Enlightenment. Those museums emerged in order to tell a story, and that story was inseparable from the story of the nation. If you go to the Hungarian National Museum, well, here’s a little hint for you, you should expect to learn a lot about the history of Hungary. If you go to a museum that you would see in the eastern world, say in Beijing, especially under the dominance of the Communist Party there, you’re going to find a very different kind of story, but it’s going to be the story of China primarily, and it’s probably going to put China at the center of world civilization. That’s basically how you would expect an official Chinese museum to tell much of the story.

But it’s not just about telling a story of the nation or of the interest that establishes the museum. It’s also about displaying knowledge acquired from elsewhere, and that’s a part of what makes the museum world so interesting. I would take as a classic example, the British Museum in London. It’s the quintessential Enlightenment museum and, at least by some estimates, it holds more items than any other museum in history. Only a tiny percentage of the total holdings are on display or ever have been on display.

You can go to see all kinds of things that tell the story of England. You can look at the entire story of humanity in one sense. You can also look at efforts to try to tell the story of much of the world, but it is through the lens, at least originally, of the British Empire. And it was because of the reach of the British Empire that many of those artifacts, say, let’s just take Egypt for example. Most famously in Britain, in the British Museum, it would be the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Greece. Well, those things didn’t just end up in London. They were brought to London and this was a part of the reach of the British Empire.

Now, of course, a lot of the current world of museums, academics, intellectuals, historians, and all the rest, they are ardently anti-colonial. They are ardently anti-Empire, and so far as they see the museum world, it should be about undoing the empire rather than telling the story of the empire. And no doubt there are some justice and equity issues that arise here. There were some things taken from some countries without any kind of adequate process, and so you’ve got the British Museum and other museums returning some things.

Famously, a museum island in Berlin, you have the Pergamon. You’ve got basically the entire Acropolis of a Greek city there in a museum in Berlin that is undergoing renovation. That’s going to take actually several years, but they’re not returning it. And even as some museums have returned some rather famous or infamous items, the reality is that the Elgin Marbles, or as they are more properly identified, the Marbles of the Acropolis, they’re still in London. And if you go to the Smithsonian, you would see other issues.

And by the way, it goes in another direction as well. There are those who have said it’s not just colonialism by going somewhere. It’s also the age of empire right here. And so some of the hottest controversies in at least some museums have to do with arguments about the relative rights and the priorities of those identified as indigenous peoples. And no doubt there were peoples here before other peoples and in the United States that’s made most clear in the reality of Native Americans. And so there’s a lot of politics that’s baked into all this, a lot of ideology that’s baked into a lot of this. A lot of this is just pretty much straightforward Marxism transmitted into some forms that aren’t always labeled as such.

But one of the problems in even thinking about justice and indigenous peoples is that it’s probably wrong to use the word indigenous, as in, there was no one here before them. The reality is in the main, it means people who have been here for some time before someone else came. And that’s exactly what we’re looking at. And by the way, you look at indigenous peoples in the United States, there’s some very legitimate moral issues there, but there are also some ridiculous claims made, but we’ll have to leave that for a moment.

Let’s just say that a museum’s an argument and that argument can create other arguments. And there are arguments about all these arguments. And right now, the White House has made a major argument and the museum world is an absolute apoplexy, and the cultural elites are in absolute outrage. The point I want to make is that we just need to be honest. The museum is an argument, and the question is who gets to make the argument? What would be the national purpose of having a museum if not to tell a national argument? And we want to tell that kind of argument honestly, but it still needs to be in the context of telling the story of the nation in a way that serves the nation and serves its people.

And I will say right up front that slavery is a major part of American history. It needs to be dealt with straightforwardly and honestly. It needs to be put in its historical context. But that context includes the fact that what you have is an unfolding story of liberty and justice as a nation in constitutional self-government that went through even the trial and turmoil and horror of a civil war and emerged on the other side as a nation. And that needs to be told in that context, but that’s by and large not what the museum industry, if you want to call it that, has been about for some time.

And the reason for that is that if a museum is an argument, somebody’s making that argument and the professionals who are behind the museums tend to be the same kind of professionals inhabiting the same kind of worldview as you would find on the major liberal academic campuses, as you would find in so many of the other arts, the elites in the arts. Another way of putting it is they’re overwhelmingly liberal. And it’s one thing for me to just say that. I want to back that up with some statistics. I want to back it up with a statement made from inside the museum industry, so to speak.

Just a couple of years ago, the organization known as the American Alliance of Museums in its magazine called Museum, they put out a major report on what was identified as the partisan divide. This was posted on January the 13th of 2023, and this came even as many of these issues were already in public debate, and this is in the Biden administration, but the same kind of arguments had already emerged. And the re-emergence of these arguments in a very assertive form by the Trump administration just reminds us these things have been in public conversation for some time. They just rarely made the front page of the paper. They rarely made headline news.

All right, so in this article, again from the American Alliance of Museums, we are told that 69% of the people working in the museum sector identify as somewhat or very liberal. All right, I didn’t come up with that number. This is reported in this article, 69% and it’s straightforwardly cited, and it’s acknowledged that that’s compared to about one quarter of the public. The article then states, “These political differences may become relevant as museums come under pressure from inside and outside the sector to take positions on issues whether directly related to their mission or of importance to society generally.”

Now, that is also interesting because it says there could be pressures from the left and the right. And I think that’s exactly what you’ve seen. From the elites and from so many activist groups on the Left, there’s been a lot of pressure for years, and this is where the artistic community, the cultural elite, basically have caved to all those pressures because they love the accolades of those groups. And furthermore, they’re liberal already, and so their instincts are already in that direction.

But it is also interesting to know that this is generalized across American professions in a way that it’s just good for us to think about. And so there is a difference when you look at the makeup, the partisan alignment profession by profession. Even inside professions, there’s some specializations in which there’s a direction of Democrat or Republican. We’re in a deeply divided society and on so many of these issues of public contention, it’s interesting to see there is this alignment.

You have the arts community, the academic elite, you have so many in the liberal side of politics. They are just absolutely together. They operate out of a common worldview and it shows. And among conservatives, you also have a common worldview that begins to show. All right, so the best American infographics put together in 2016 a partisan breakdown occupation by occupation. So we began thinking about museums, the museum curator, the museum professional, that culture, and it’s admittedly very liberal, no surprise there, very liberal. And you can also look at these organizations and see what kinds of statements, policy statements they’ve taken on contentious issues.

So I’ll just say they’re not trying to hide, they’re very liberal. But looking at the larger layout of professions, it is very interesting to look at this. And I can convey this in general terms. Red means Republican, blue means Democrat, and here’s some things. Flight attendants, overwhelmingly Democrat. Pilots, pretty significantly Republican. Bartenders, very Democrat. Beer wholesalers, very Republican. Librarians, oh my, overwhelmingly democratic. Just a tiny little slice of Republicans among Librarians.

Meanwhile, you compare that to loggers, okay? You already know where we’re going. The loggers, overwhelmingly Republican. Taxi drivers, very liberal, urban settings. Truck drivers, very conservative, less rural settings. You just go down the list. Sometimes, as I say, inside a profession, it also breaks down. Pediatricians, overwhelmingly democratic. And also, if you take another graph, overwhelmingly female, in terms of more recent additions to the field. Urologists, I have no good explanation for this, overwhelmingly Republican. How that breaks down, I just don’t know.

Sculptors, very democratic. Plastic surgeons, at least slightly Republican. Floral designers, oh my, my, you saw this coming. Floral designers, overwhelmingly democratic, fully in bloom. And the exterminators on the other hand are overwhelmingly conservative. All right. Why exactly on the exterminator side, I don’t know other than I would simply say they have to deal with, well, reality. It is interesting. You look at different things, the context, urban, rural, the educational context and requirement of the social location, the professions, or occupations. For instance, architects, overwhelmingly liberal. Democrat, overwhelmingly. Meanwhile, home builders the opposite.

So this gets to another pattern you see here. People who work with their hands, in terms of building things or making things, tend to be more conservative than those who operate in the world of ideas or art. Union organizers, so blue that there’s only the tiniest little sliver of red. No real surprise there. That also tells you how distant they are from the people who are in their unions, the members of their unions who don’t line up that way at all. Business owners, not just overwhelmingly Republican, but generally Republican, more likely than not to be Republican. And environmental scientists, again, you do the math already. Overwhelmingly democratic. Petroleum geologists, overwhelmingly Republican.

So we’re looking at a cultural divide in this country that comes right down to occupations. The museum occupation is one of those. It’s way over on the left. And so when you look at this kind of controversy between the Trump administration and the museum establishment, you can count on the fact that sparks are going to fly because it’s not just a clash of political ideologies, it is a clash of worldviews and it’s fundamentally a clash about the purpose of museums.

Now I’ll say that once again, a museum is an argument and we want to make a good argument. And so there could be a process whereby there could at least be a good discussion nationally of what a good argument would be. But the political divide in this country is now so deep, it’s hard to imagine how a consensus could develop, but it’s also really clear that the museum establishment, the cultural elites, intend to fight back hard.

All of this gets intertwined with ideological capture, the adversary culture on the part of the artistic world, critical theory, accusations of patriarchy and oppression, the effort to even deny there are such things as artistic standards, certainly in line with say, historic achievements of Western civilization. So it’s going to be very interesting to see where this goes, but I just want to remind you that as Christians, we need to look at something like this and recognize there are far deeper issues here than what’s shown in a museum and how things are labeled and how stories are told.

It’s an entire system that comes down to argument and essentially will always be an argument, but one side’s been telling the argument. And so a little bit of pushback here is a very interesting thing because it’s going to be fascinating to see where this goes.

I guess I want to make one other comment about the museum debate, and that is that what you’re going to hear is a discrediting argument made by some. It’s rather condescending, but just wait you’re going to be hearing this and that is that unless you are inside the tribe, the profession, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.

And so from the elites, you have this condescension that says, unless you know what we know, have the degrees we have, and have the social connections we have, frankly, you don’t have any right to speak to this. And at least one achievement right now of the current moment is that the White House has said, “We’re not putting up with that.”17

Part II

A Call to ‘Decolonize Scientific Institutions’: The Leftist Elites are Pushing Their Agenda Far Beyond DEI Initiatives

But just shortly, now, I want to go to a different issue, though it is related. I saw a reference to something in the Wall Street Journal and I decided I wanted to go find it myself. So I went to the journal Nature. It is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world, both in print and online. It too goes back to the 19th century in Britain. It emerged in 1869. Being published in Nature is a major achievement for a natural scientist, and it still has a lot of prestige, but it also is very liberal and has been for a long time. 

For instance, what the Wall Street Journal pointed to was an article by several authors identified as “indigenous scholars” who mapped out “eight steps to stop marginalization in academia and to enable a shared indigenous agenda in science.” Okay, the headline in the article though is this: “Decolonize Scientific Institutions. Don’t Just Diversify Them.”

So this is an argument from the left saying that DEI is not enough. One of the things you see in the US right now is I think very valid and necessary calls to end DEI, but this is an argument from the left saying DEI is not enough. Instead, what you need here is decolonization. This goes back to some of the neo-Marxist critiques of the far left in the 20th century, and again, it identifies colonization, the age of empire and all the rest is the great evil, and it claims the way to remedy this is by a form of scientific or academic reparations, and by the way, money’s involved in order to undo colonialism, decolonize. It’s kind of like the debate over being a non-racist or an anti-racist that you see in some debates, especially on the Left today. But it is really interesting to look at this and see that, for instance, one of the things I want to go at is the idea that scientific standards established in the West apply everywhere.

And so this is going to be a real challenge for the world of science and for its peer review, for its journals, its articles, its progress and all the rest, because yeah, it’s very much based on that kind of understanding of peer-reviewed science. And I think the Wall Street Journal had a little bit of fun pointing to this, and I looked at it and I recognized, again, here’s just evidence of how the conflict and the culture plays out.

By the way, Nature, on the 30th of October 2008, it endorsed a presidential candidate in the United States presidential race. It said it was doing so in the name of science. It endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 over against John McCain. And so when people say, “Oh, these are just situations that have been broken by Trump.” This isn’t Donald Trump. This was John McCain. This was Barack Obama. This is how the cultural elite works. Barack Obama is presented here as the great champion of science. Yeah, you heard it from the editors of Nature.

Part III

A Lion of the Pulpit: The Life and Legacy of John MacArthur

But now I want to end our considerations for the day. By reflecting upon what happened in California on Saturday. It was the memorial service for Dr. John MacArthur, pastor teacher of Grace Community Church, and of course teacher on Grace to You, president of the Master’s University and Seminary. So many other roles and responsibilities he fulfilled. But the point I want to make is that it was the funeral for the man who probably influenced more preachers around the world towards biblical exposition than any other in his time.

He was singular, not in the fact he was the only one doing it, but he did it in a way, and he taught others to do it in a way, that I think is not matched or eclipsed by any other preacher living in his time. Dr. John MacArthur was the son of a preacher. Indeed, the grandson of a preacher. And he would, in 1969, become the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church there in Sun Valley, California. And as a very young man, he began preaching the way he ended his ministry preaching, and that is word for word, verse by verse, book by book throughout the Bible, particularly the New Testament.

Through thousands upon thousands of sermons, John MacArthur simply opened the text and read it and preached it. He was known for not making many references to contemporary events. He was known for drawing congregations deeply into the Word. His soft voice and his firm convictions when mixed together. They were a remarkable combination. And his attentiveness to the text and his serious walking through the text set the standard for biblical exposition among so many preachers around the world.

Furthermore, he wanted to influence preachers. He took the stewardship of that with tremendous seriousness with the Shepherds Conferences and other things, including the MacArthur Study Bible. And one of the things I wrote about in an article published at World Magazine right after his death in July, one of the things I talked about is that wherever I go in the world, if I see someone carrying a MacArthur Study Bible, I have a pretty good idea this is a preacher of conviction who at least knows he is supposed to be about the task of exposition.

It’s also interesting that when John MacArthur preached his first sermon, I guess you’d call it something of a trial sermon there at Grace Community Church, it was a long sermon. And I think there are probably some people, in fact, historically, I’ve heard this, who said at the time, this is a first effort, he’s young, he’ll get over it. No, he didn’t get over it. Instead, he really taught the congregation into understanding what the sermon, what preaching was all about, which was reading the Word of God and then teaching the Word of God.

And in John MacArthur, teaching and preaching were combined, I think, in a very powerful sense. I don’t think it’s possible to say that in the pulpit at this moment, he’s teaching at this moment, he’s preaching. It was all combined in such a way that his faithful exposition would eventually, of course, be recorded and available on recordings like cassette tapes when I was a teenager. And then, of course, now it’s available streaming this massive library of biblical exposition.

He also completed an entire expository commentary on the New Testament. And the other thing about John MacArthur is I said he had a soft voice and firm convictions. His delivery was characteristic, and I don’t think he thought he had any style. I’ve often argued he had just a little more than he thought he had because his personality did show up in certain ways in the pulpit. For instance, he could say something and then look up at the congregation and lift his eyebrows. And everyone knew exactly what that meant. And it’s because God doesn’t have the Bible preached by machine. He has ordained that the Word shall be preached by preachers. Earthen vessels, yes, but God called preachers. And when you look at John MacArthur, you recognize there are very few preachers in the history of the Christian church who had the opportunity to influence as many preachers in direct and indirect ways as John MacArthur.

And part of this isn’t God’s prophet, it’s the man in his time. The fact that he was in Southern California just as that region was about to explode. The fact that he was in a church accessible to so many thousands of people who could drive, some of them, for an hour, two hours and more, just drawn to hear his exposition, week by week, Sunday by Sunday, service by service, sermon by sermon.

The other thing about John MacArthur is that he didn’t run away from a theological battle. And as a matter of fact, I think perhaps the most important certainly that I think of was the battle over against easy believism, this casual Christianity, in which you had people making the argument and they were making the argument in bestselling books at the time that you could believe in Jesus as Savior and at some point in the future, if you wanted, acknowledge him as Lord.

And to this, very famously, John MacArthur responded in his 1988 book, The Gospel according to Jesus, in which he made very clear that the gospel underlines the reality not up to us that Jesus Christ is Lord. He is the reigning Lord. He is the saving Lord. And there is no way to separate belief in Jesus as Savior, to separate that from worshiping Jesus Christ as Lord, and also following him in discipleship. Discipleship is not an elective, it’s not a choice. It’s not just an accessory to the Christian faith. It is the visible evidence of the gospel.

He would take on the excesses of the charismatic movement, and he had some epic battles in his day, and he was something of a happy warrior. He didn’t particularly care, I think, that he looked happy, but he was happiest when he was in the pulpit. And it made other people happy that he was in the pulpit teaching and preaching the word of God. And this is happy in the Gospel, happy in the things of God and happy to the glory of Christ.

His ministry to other preachers is, I think, one of his lasting legacies. He invested in preachers, the Shepherds Conference year by year. I had the honor of preaching at many of those and knowing John MacArthur as a dear friend, and that was a great privilege. And I think of all the preachers around the world who, even if they didn’t know John MacArthur personally, they did know him as a friend. A friend, a preacher who invested in them by his preaching, by his outreach to many, many people. I mean an enormous influence in places such as Russia where John MacArthur’s influence continues. And it’s not just there, it’s other places around the world, but in particular in some of the places which really hadn’t received that kind of model, heard that kind of model, and had that kind of teaching, John MacArthur invested in preachers. He did so in his schools. He did so just in his life.

John MacArthur died, as I said, back in July at age 86, and with his death, we saw the passing of an age. Now, it’s not the age of preaching. John MacArthur would be the first to insist no, the age of preaching continues until Jesus comes. But the age of a particular generation of preachers, I think, came to a definitive point with John MacArthur, and thus, it’s absolutely right that we thank God for him. We recognize his influence, and we also understand that our generation and the generations of younger preachers coming, they must meet the same challenge with the same conviction and the same passion, the same joy, and the same commitment, and the same preaching of the same book, the same gospel to the glory of Christ.

As I said, he had a big impact on my life, and I was among those who got to know him so well personally and to know him as friend. So it’s a tremendous loss to the Christian church. But another profound reminder that we are all earthen vessels for the cause of Christ and the glory of the gospel, and it is to the glory of Christ. So we reflect upon earthen vessels who have contributed so much to Christ’s church. In this case, that vessel was Dr. John MacArthur.

These things should also humble us. Just think of this. Thursday of last week, Dr. James Dobson died. Saturday of last week was the funeral for Dr. John MacArthur, two men of a similar generation, different in their own ways, but both fighting a fight on behalf of the Christian faith and the passing of a generation as symbolized certainly in the juxtaposition of Thursday and Saturday of last week. We must pray that God will raise up a generation to take their place.