The British Museum is using the coronavirus crisis to rearrange its exhibits—putting a new focus on the evils of empire, colonialism and slavery.

In a show of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the British Museum took down the bust of its founder, Hans Sloane, last month. Curator Hardwig Fischer said this was “part of a wider process of acknowledging the museum’s links to slavery,” according to a Telegraph interview. The bust is now in a new display that highlights “his legacy as a ‘collector [and] slave owner.’”

Fischer has wholeheartedly endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement. In June, he wrote a blog post stating that he and his colleagues were “aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere.”

Fischer has wanted “more air” (i.e. fewer displays) from the start of his tenure in 2016. Coronavirus has provided a convenient excuse to make these changes. And the museum is using the lockdown to redesign and permanently change its exhibits—as guided by radical-left ideology.

An example of the changes includes some of the pieces brought to Britain by Capt. James Cook from his voyages of discovery. These will be displayed in the context of “colonial conquest and military looting.” Neal Spencer, the custodian of artifacts from the Nile and Mediterranean regions, said, “Eventually we’re going to be redisplaying the whole British Museum” with a special focus on how the British Museum was founded “in the exploitative context of the British Empire.”

Hans Sloane (1660–1763) was governor of Jamaica and later court physician to Queen Anne, George i and George ii. Through his marriage to a wealthy colonial Jamaican heiress, Sloane did own slaves. Jamaica’s economy at the time was primarily based on slave-run sugar plantations.

But there is a lot more to Sloane’s legacy than the fact that he partook in something that was common for people of his time and place. While living in the New World, he collected over 800 species of plants and eventually wrote two books on the natural history of Jamaica. As a physician, he helped found the Foundling Hospital, a London care home for orphans, and volunteered his time as a doctor, donating the wages he earned to Christ’s Hospital in London.

He was also a noted collector and left the approximately 70,000 artifacts in his collection to the British nation on the condition that the government pay £20,000 to his estate, roughly a quarter of the price the collection could have sold for. His collection became the basis for both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum and was an early addition to the set of manuscripts that would eventually become the British Library.

But these positive aspects of his legacy do not seem to matter to the British Museum anymore. Neither do the positive aspects of the legacy of another giant from the age of empire, Capt. James Cook. The founding father of modern Australia and New Zealand and one of the greatest explorers of human history is now to be painted as a warmongering pirate.

Why is the British Museum changing the way it portrays its founding benefactors, especially in the new focus on “the exploitative context of the British Empire”? Who is to say the British Empire should be contextualized as being “exploitative”?

A recent series of scandals at the British Museum’s sister institution, the British Library, may prove to have part of the answer. Leaked memos reveal a staff network that claims to exist to fight racism within the British Library has been aggressively forcing its agenda on the rest of the institution. These staff members have been encouraging library employees to study Marxist literature and donate money to Black Lives Matter (the same organization setting fire to American cities). They have deemed anything glorifying the British Empire is “racist,” claimed that “color-blindness” is actually “covert white supremacy,” and even called for the removal of the British Library’s busts of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, claiming that the two composers represent “Western civilizational supremacy.”

An openly far-left group has infiltrated one of Britain’s most important cultural institutions and is pressuring others, not of their ranks, to conform to their worldview. Is the same thing happening to the British Museum?

The worldwide protest against these symbols of Western civilizations, especially those of Britain and America, obviously cannot be caused simply by the desire to cleanse society from the effects of slavery. Captain Cook and Beethoven do not typically come to mind when one thinks of the slave trade. And it should be common sense that the colony of Jamaica, even if it was primarily a slave-based economy, does not have the moral equivalency of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as some claim.

The far left is hypocritical when it reprimands institutions like the British Museum for being “exploitative” in how it acquired its artifacts when many Communist regimes have done far worse. For example, during the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks confiscated aristocrats’ art collections without compensation to be added to the collections in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Despite the petitions of the descendants of those aristocrats, the artwork remain in the Hermitage to this day.

The reason Britain and America became great was not slavery. It was not because they exploited the rest of the world or because their colonial systems were inherently evil. Neither was it because of the natural talent and genius of several great men who happened to be alive at the right time in the right place. It was God who brought the English-speaking peoples, as the modern descendants of ancient Israel, to greatness in fulfillment of a promise He made to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob millennia ago (explained in our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy).

This promise of national greatness culminated in part with the sudden explosive growth of the British Empire, the largest empire the world has ever seen. The British Museum is a product of that Empire. Many of its celebrated exhibits, like the Rosetta Stone and the sculptures from the Parthenon, were acquired by Britain through its victories against Napoleon. Others, like the Egyptian and Indian art collections, came through London’s imperial ventures.

It is this legacy that the far left detests most of all and seeks to blot out from memory. But why? It isn’t because Britain was worse than the other empires of history (it wasn’t). It is—whether people realize it or not—because God was behind the British Empire.

Trumpet contributor Richard Palmer wrote in the September 2020 Philadelphia Trumpet:

If you believe the Bible, you must accept the existence of an evil spirit being who hates God’s plan, and who hates what God is doing through Israel. This spirit works through human beings to “blot out the name of Israel” (2 Kings 14:27). He wants to wipe it out so thoroughly the name isn’t even mentioned.

You see this in the self-hatred among the radical left in Britain and America. You see it in that hatred for Britain and America in nations around the world. And you see it today in the hatred for this history.

That is what the attacks on Nelson, Drake, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and more are all about: blotting out the name of Israel.

Attacking the legacy of the British Museum is more than an attack on British imperialism but an attack on the veracity of the Bible itself. There are few, if any, institutions that can do a better job of proving the authority of the Bible through archaeology and other scientific means than the British Museum. Its collection of biblical artifacts can be considered unrivalled.

For example, an artifact in its Assyrian galleries, the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, contains what is one of the only known depictions of an Israelite king. Another artifact, the Taylor Prism, chronicles a passage of biblical history recorded in 2 Kings 18-19 from an Assyrian perspective.

Rather than criticized, the British Museum should be cherished for how it can prove both the accuracy of God’s Word through archaeology and the faithfulness of God’s promises. To learn more of some of the inspiring artifacts displayed in the British Museum, please read our reprint article “Inside the British Museum.” To learn more about God’s promise to Abraham and what it means for Britain today, please request our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong.