On the ground coverage of the race for the White house
Putting the fun in fundamentalism
- Posted by Jonn Elledge
- 06 November 2008
Ahead of packing up his bags in the wake of the Barack Obama victory, Jonn Elledge treats himself to a unique piece of Americana - a visit to Kentucky's Creation Museum
A look inside Kentucky's rather bizarre creation museum
Imagine that Britain's favourite religious fundamentalist, Stephen Green, had, due to some catastrophic administrative error, become chief curator of the Natural History Museum.
Hold that in your mind, and you've got a pretty good mental image of the Creation Museum in Kentucky.
The museum's raison d'etre is to reconcile everything we know about prehistory - cave men, dinosaurs, fossil fuels et al - with the idea that God created the heavens and the Earth and the world is 6,000 years old.
To that end, the first thing you see on entering the museum is a tableau of animatronic cave kids playing happily with some dinosaurs.
The whole thing does a brilliant job of making fundamentalist religious dogma fun. No hellfire and brimstone here. Instead it's all tactile exhibits, bright and chatty films ("Ever wonder where canyons came from...?") and, outside, a petting zoo. I was happy to skip this part, if only because there's something distinctly sinister about two grown men wandering around a zoo on their own, but my photographer insisted, and promptly got spat on by a camel.
The museum proper begins with a series of nature exhibits, intended to highlight the wonder of god's creation. These follow a consistent pattern of fact, ambiguity, God. To whit: The world features an amazing variety of lifeforms; it's hard to understand how these all evolved in a just few billion years; ergo, God did it.
Then there's a room comparing Biblical and scientific thinking, another (warm, comforting) introducing you to scripture, and a third (dark, alienating) looking at the modern world. This is done up like an inner city crack alley, with the walls papered with secular newspaper headlines, and a scary booming voice that pipes up occasionally to give you some statistics on divorce or abortion or other modern evils.
The best bits of the exhibit, though, are left until last. For one thing, they've got a film of what the world being created in six days might actually have looked like.
Then come a succession of animatronic recreations of the book of Genesis, only with added dinosaurs. Here are Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, accompanied by lion, lamb, penguin and dinosaur. The dinosaur has huge teeth but, since the Bible says there was no flesh eating in Eden, it's a vegetarian. You can tell, because it's nibbling a pineapple.
Then comes Cain and Abel. This isn't very interesting, but does come with a helpful explanation for why incest was okay back then.
Then there's Noah, who bears a suspicious resemblance to Michael Palin. This section of the museum combines recreations of the story of the Flood with practical tips on how to build your own ark. (Use hard wood for nails, as they will expand when wet; place your door on the second floor, and use a wedge shape to make it watertight; if that fails, ask God for help. It really does say that.)
There's also a cutaway of the Ark, with dinosaurs, and a film of the flood overwhelming the world while people, quite understandably, look a bit scared. An extended version of this is available from the giftshop.
At the museum's end they ask you to sit through a 20 minute film about Jesus Christ, and tell you not to leave at the end. Afterwards, a man comes forward, hopes you learnt something and asks you to accept Christ into your life. All the way through this I felt he was staring right at me, and said as much. "But I suppose everyone feels like that," I added. "No, he really was staring right at you," replied my photographer.
To give it its dues, the Creation Museum does a great job of making scripture fun, and beats hands down any religious studies lesson I was ever put through. The right wing political dogma is kept to a minimum (there's a single line about marriage involving a man and a woman, and a few bits about abortion, but it's less than you get in the average Republican party pamphlet these days). Along the way, it offers explanations for how cavemen fit into the Bible (you try building a civilisation when suddenly you can't understand each other), and why the Earth looks like it does (the Flood did it).
But it also makes clear that Asking Questions Is Wrong, and shamelessly manipulates those with low self esteem (one voiceover asks, "If evolution means only the strongest and prettiest survive, what hope is there for me?").
Worst of all, it never does explain what happened to those bloody dinosaurs.
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