Righting America at the Creation Museum

Since the mid-twentieth century there has been increasing concern among evangelical Christians over the depiction of human origins in American education. For young-Earth creationists, it has been a priority to replace scientific information which contradicts the six-day origin story reported in Genesis 1 with evidence they claim scientifically reinforces their narrative. As this has failed in public education, creationists have switched tactics, moving from “teach creationism” to “teach the controversy”. The struggle over evolution education in the classroom is well-documented, but less attention has been paid to how young-Earth creationists push their agenda in informal educational venues such as museums. Given the authoritative nature of museums and the ubiquity of these institutions in American life, museums have become targets for the creation message. This project was undertaken to critically analyze the use of the museum form as an authoritative source which facilitates the cultural reproduction of young-Earth creationism. I propose a tripartite model of authority and museums is the best way to understand the relationship between young-Earth creationism and American museums, with the creation, contestation, and subversion of authority all acting as critical components of the bid for cultural reproduction. Assessing the utility of this model requires visiting both creation museums alongside mainstream natural history, science, and anthropology museums. Drawing from staff interviews, survey data, museum visits, and the collection of creation-based literature for secular museums, these sources combine to create a comprehensive picture of the relationship between young-Earth creationism and museums in the United States today.

Argumentation and Advocacy

This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the "Answers in Genesis" ministry's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Founded by a $27 million grant, the 70,000 square-foot museum appropriates the stylistic and authoritative signifiers of natural history museums, complete with technically projicient hyperreal displays and modern curatorial techniques. In this essay, we argue that the museum provides a culturally authoritative space in which Young Earth Creationists can visually craft the appearance that there is an ongoing scientific controversy over matters long settled in the scientific community (evolution), or what scholars call a disingenuous or manufactured controversy. We analyze the displays and layout as argumentative texts to explain how the museum negotiates its own purported status as a museum with its ideological mission to promulgate biblical literalism. The Creation Museum provides an exemplary case study in how the rhetoric of controversy is used to undermine existing scientific knowledge and legitimize pseudosdentific beliefs. This essay contributes to argumentation studies by explaining how religious fundamentalists simulate the structure of a contentious argument by adopting the material signifiers of expert authority to ground their claims.

Curator: The Museum Journal, 2011

There has been a little explosion of ''origin'' exhibitions in the past few years. The recent bicentennial of Darwin's birth, in 2009, ushered in a bevy of traveling exhibitions and events. Grandscale permanent exhibitions have recently opened at the American Museum of Natural History (the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins) in New York, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins) in Washington, D.C. A new museology is afoot, and some of the recent changes are worth tracking. And let's not forget the recently opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Even in creationist thinking, where views seem eternally and stubbornly intransigent, there are new fads and museological fashions.

This article examines critical and visitor responses to a section on 'alternative' creation stories located within Life on Earth, a science-led natural history gallery, at Leeds Museums and Galleries, UK. This section, by inviting visitors to express alternative creation stories, appears to allow 'a foot in the door' of the science-led gallery to non-fact-based religious beliefs. The museological debates surrounding this inclusion offer broad insights into the tensions between fact-based, and essentially secular, interpretations within museums displays and the relationships that an increasingly multi-faith public have or can expect to have with the museum as a provider of and location of, knowledge. A consideration of the visitor comments suggests that the public are less concerned with the appropriateness of museum categories than they are with taking the opportunity to express their own thoughts and beliefs.

JRAI, 2019

Materializing creationism in the United States Bielo, James. Ark Encounter: the making of a creationist theme park. x, 223 pp., illus., bibliogr. New York: Univ. Press, 2018. £20.99 (paper) Trollinger, Susan L. & William Vance Trollinger Jr. Righting America at the Creation Museum. 327 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2017. £17.50 (cloth)

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2018

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 2019

Opening in 2007, the Creation Museum of Petersburg, KY presents visitors with a Young Earth Creationist argument against evolution and physical cosmology. Instead, the facility asserts that science proves the biblical description of God’s creation of the cosmos and all life upon it a little less than 6,000 years ago. While official documentation suggests the museum’s intentionally missionary function, closer examination reveals its important role as a memory place that legitimates a Young Earth Creationist identity, as well as identities tied to affiliated “culture wars” issues. The past that the Creation Museum asks visitors to remember, however, contains notable silences with regard to the place of Jews and Jewishness within sacred history, despite structural allusions to the theological framework of Dispensationalism. While institutionally forgetting Jews, the facility emphatically stresses the memory of dinosaurs as part of the biblical, human past. Analysis shows that decisions related to the museum’s theologically diverse audience and a desire to present Young Earth Creationism as “scientific” has led to a surprising discursive connection between the memory of Jews and dinosaurs at the site. In other words, by framing dinosaurs as witnesses to the truth of Christian scripture, the Creation Museum is compelled to depict Jews and Jewishness as quixotic fossils with no particular function in an otherwise purposefully designed universe.

Museums & Social Issues , 2014

Museums have the opportunity to present human evolution to a wide range of visitors, yet few appear to exhibit this topic in an unflinching manner. In a survey conducted at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), the vast majority of visitors thought a human evolution exhibit was appropriate for the museum. However, a small number said any discussion of human evolution would mandate the presentation of Biblical creation as well. Museums have an obligation to meet visitor demands as best they can, but doing so for this particular group would mean compromising scientific fact. With respect to the Milwaukee Public Museum, we have identified that label text within the human evolution exhibit is effectively accommodating religious viewpoints. Although the MPM is not the first museum to take this approach, the longevity of this label without public outcry is notable in light of recent events at other museums—most remarkably, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We consider here the differences between the approaches taken by each museum and whether religious accommodation is a viable approach for museum professionals to consider when exhibiting evolution-related content.

March 9, 2019

The "Museum of the Bible" is a parachurch organization, not a museum

Journal of the American Academy of Religion