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Every Restoration Is a Retcon

Every Restoration Is a Retcon

Last updated on: August 20, 2026 at 1:22 pm by Stuart Delony

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Every Restoration Is a Retcon 2026-08-20T13:22:58-04:00 Stuart Delony

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A weathered bronze historical monument plaque with most of its engraved text painted over in thick white correction fluid. Only fragments remain legible: "ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE," "AND," "MANY," "OF," "BY," "THE," "AND THE," and "THIS LAND." A pot of white paint and a wet brush rest on the ledge below, with paint dripping down the plaque.

DALL-E

Every nationalist movement claims it’s bringing something back. None of them are. You cannot restore a past you’re actively setting on fire, and the people promising to return America to its glory days have a curious habit of editing what those days actually contained. They’re not historians. They’re editing the past and calling it a rescue, and they learned the trick from a guy in the Bronze Age.

There’s a word for this, and it comes from comic books: retcon, short for retroactive continuity. It’s what writers do when an old storyline becomes inconvenient. They quietly rewrite what “always happened” so the new story can pretend it was the plan from the beginning. Spider-Man’s marriage gets undone by a deal with a demon. Wait, no, that never happened. Stop asking.

It’s a useful word because it’s honest about the mechanism, which religious and political language almost never is. Nobody calls it lying. They call it continuity, which sounds responsible, like someone’s just tidying up the timeline.

Which brings us to a guy with a temple renovation budget and a suspiciously well-timed scroll.

The Scroll That Conveniently Appeared

The official story, 2 Kings 22: King Josiah orders repairs on the temple. Mid-renovation, his high priest finds a scroll, the lost Book of the Law, just sitting there. It’s read aloud to the king. He’s horrified. He tears his clothes. He launches the most sweeping religious purge in Judah’s history, and it all traces back to one document nobody had noticed was missing until exactly the moment it became politically useful.

Biblical scholars have side-eyed this story for two hundred years, and it’s close to consensus now: what got “found” was Deuteronomy, or an early version of it, and it didn’t so much get discovered as get commissioned. The narrative in 2 Kings 22–23 exists to legitimize Josiah’s reforms, which means the text isn’t independent evidence for the reform. It’s the reform’s marketing department, dressed up as ancient law.

So: a king wants to centralize religious authority in Jerusalem and eliminate two centuries of regional practice. A document conveniently turns up saying this was God’s plan the whole time. This is not subtle. This is a man finding a note in his own handwriting and acting stunned by its contents.

The Past They Actually Erased

The part church curriculum skips: what Josiah destroyed wasn’t heresy. It was the mainstream.

For centuries, Israelite religious practice was genuinely pluralistic. Yahweh was worshipped alongside Asherah, his consort in popular religion, with regional shrines and household worship that blended Yahweh and Baal into the same family tree without anyone losing sleep over it. The archaeology backs this up, with Asherah figurines turning up constantly in Israelite households and inscriptions referencing “Yahweh and his Asherah” like that’s just a normal thing to write down. This wasn’t a corrupted fringe. This was lived, popular, default religion.

Josiah didn’t reform that. He erased it. Shrines torn down. Asherah poles burned. Priests of the old order killed, not retired. The text wants you to read this as a nation returning to its true self after a long detour. The more accurate read is a regime deciding the actual, documented, populated past was an embarrassment and solving that problem with fire.

That’s not restoration. That’s a retcon with a body count.

America’s Own Conveniently Discovered Scroll

You don’t have to go back to the Bronze Age to watch this trick performed. There’s been a decades-long cottage industry built around manufacturing the idea that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, governed by men who were basically founding pastors with land grants.

It runs on the same fuel as Josiah’s scroll: selectively quoted founders and a refusal to engage with the inconvenient parts of the actual record, like the Treaty of Tripoli‘s flat statement that the U.S. government is not founded on Christianity, signed and ratified without controversy by the same generation supposedly building a Christian nation.

This founding myth isn’t ancient. It’s roughly one generation old. And it’s already calcified into something millions treat as self-evidently true, not because the evidence holds up, but because it’s been repeated long enough to feel like memory instead of marketing.

That’s the part that should bother you more than the lie itself: it’s a retcon old enough to be mistaken for the original text.

Defending the Retcon of the Retcon

Which gets us to right now, where the purge isn’t even protecting real history anymore. It’s protecting last generation’s fiction from this generation’s facts.

In March 2025, the administration signed an executive order titled, unironically, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Under it, the National Park Service spent months scrubbing exhibits it deemed insufficiently flattering, including the only federal site commemorating the people George Washington personally enslaved. A federal judge ordered the materials restored this month, writing that the effort amounted to rewriting history “with a white-out pen.”

The LGBTQ erasure runs the same play. The Stonewall National Monument’s website, ground zero of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, was quietly edited to delete every reference to transgender people, shrinking the acronym to “LGB” and scrubbing the activists who actually led the uprising the monument exists to commemorate.

The Christian-nation myth built a story going forward. This reaches into the documented record and edits what’s already there, a true plaque made false, all to defend a fiction manufactured one generation ago and already mistaken for the original text.

Nobody’s Doomed. Somebody Did This.

There’s a quote everyone reaches for at the end of pieces like this one, and I’d like to formally retire it: those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It’s tidy, and it’s wrong in the way that lets the guilty off the hook. It frames repetition as weather, something that just happens to civilizations that didn’t study hard enough.

Nothing in this piece was an accident of forgetting. Someone had to physically remove the plaque. Someone had to edit the webpage. Someone had to decide which enslaved family’s story was the “divisive narrative” and which scroll should turn up exactly on schedule. Repetition isn’t fate finding an opening. It’s the predictable result of burning the records and then acting shocked you’ve got nothing to learn from.

Josiah’s purge didn’t save Judah. The empire came anyway. Babylon doesn’t check your continuity notes before it shows up.

People love to say we’re doomed to repeat history like it’s a force of nature. It isn’t. Somebody has to pry the warning label off first.

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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