Culture Wars Ken (Prepare to Believe, Part 3)
The Creation Museum: Answers in Genesis
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This is where I’ll collect some thoughts and images from my exploration of places with emotional significance for many Americans. Stops include Civil War and Revolutionary War sites and museums; Underground Railroad sites; state parks and historic homes; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to historic places and the events and people they might commemorate, I look at the signage, collect the literature, and talk to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, I mine the gift shops! Other places such as a Christian theme park, a convenience store, and a gun show help me consider how ideas about history influence current American fascinations, conspiracy theories, and cultural conflicts. Sometimes I get way off track too—enjoy!
Some of this will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: White Supremacist Revisions of the American Narrative. For now these are drafts to help me think about what I’m seeing and hearing. If you’re new, you might want to start at the beginning to follow the entire road trip, or you might want to start at the beginning of the Creation Museum series.
“a total wrong understanding”
At 71 years old, Creation Museum founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis Ken Ham is not quitting his argument against almost everyone else’s basic understanding of the world. The Creation Museum and the Ark Experience are going strong, and Ken keeps cranking out content. Earlier this month, he posted a diatribe about the Scopes trial on X (old Twitter).
This is my third story about the Young Earth Creationist effort to push its pseudoscience along with a raft of socially intolerant and restrictive positions (this link will take you back to the first of the series). This topic fits into Narrative Nation’s larger purpose of examining how the American story is explained to the public by stakeholders on various places along the culture spectrum.
Ken Ham, who occupies a distinct and embattled—but also highly profitable— place on that spectrum, begins his recent complaint with this:
Most people have a total wrong understanding of the Scopes Trial in 1925 and its consequences. The media and most educational institutions have misrepresented the truth of what happened at that trial.
Ham’s concern initially seems to be that, while people commonly think the Scopes trial was about teaching evolution generally, it was really a more narrowly focused dispute about teaching that humans came from “lower order” animals. He does care about that distortion of the trial’s emphasis in the public memory, and his choice to blame “most educational institutions” for perpetrating it is consistent with his organization’s preference for homeschooling.
But the central component of Ham’s Beef is that too many Christians publicly sell out by acknowledging that they, too, can see some of the most easily and widely observed realities. After reviewing how the atheist defense attorney Clarence Darrow eventually got the Christian prosecution attorney William Jennings Bryan to admit that the Bible’s six days of creation each could have been million of years, Ham summarizes the value of understanding this case today. William Jennings Bryan’s concession to “millions of years” is taken as an exemplum of bad faith, and the problem of interpretation vanishes.
Sadly, most Christians today have, like Bryan, accepted the world’s teaching and rejected the plain words of the Bible regarding history. Thus, they have helped the world teach generations of children that the Bible cannot be trusted in Genesis. After years of such indoctrination, a generation has now arisen that is also (logically) rejecting the morality based on the Bible.
By adding the threat of “indoctrinating children" to his suspicion of the “media” and “educational institutions,” Ham signals his organization’s place in the culture wars. Though he seems to sincerely fear children are being pulled away from the Bible, the idea of indoctrination is now the rallying cry for a mixed roster of far right groups who want to advance their prejudices and paranoias by pretending to worry about children’s welfare. Ham knows this. The phrase “culture wars” is used in at least one pamphlet written for the Creation Museum, pictured in one of my earlier posts, as a reason adherents need to gird themselves against the majority with the so-called biblical truth that rejects evolution.
“with gentleness and respect”
The whole of Young Earth Creationism is probably too ridiculous even for most of the people who found PizzaGate credible and seemed more comfortable with a president talking about shooting bleach in their arms than wearing paper masks. But this debate over teaching evolution is at a peak of relevance again as Christian extremists scramble to take control of public schools and even alter the standardized testing landscape to reflect conservative European and Christian values.
The number of 6000-year-Earthers is unclear, but a shocking number of Americans do identify as general Creationists, which means they reject evolution, often especially taking exception to teaching children about it in public schools. These people can be swept up into a larger far right army with more nefarious plans.
Ham’s post on “X” ends by admonishing Christians to guard against compromise. He also provides a biblical standard for Christian conduct when defending the faith:
Don’t be like William Jennings Bryan and compromise God’s Word and not be able to defend the Christian faith: “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,” (1 Peter 3:15).
Recently, Christopher Rufo—conservative fellow of the Manhattan Institute, Desantis-appointed trustee of the New College takeover, and disingenuous engineer of the Critical Race Theory panic—declared that now is the time for the far right to “lay siege to the institutions” of this country. What this means is an organized campaign to replace public education and models of shared governance with private religious schools and so-called classical education academies that can ignore science as well as many social justice issues. An organization like Answers in Genesis, advertised and supported by their two high-tech museum/theme park facilities, only brings more potential culture warriors onto the field. Not everyone in the group has to be a neck-tattooed Neo-Nazi, but the larger more diffuse collective of far right activists will carry Nazis along with it and give them space to do harm.
I suspect the fake grassroots (“astroturfing”) hate group Moms for Liberty might also appreciate Ham’s style, which combines the exasperated delivery of anti-factual propositions with a bullheaded insistence that he is the one protecting what really matters. Handling challenges to their faith “with gentleness and respect” sounds great. But a walk through the Creation Museum, especially the gift shops, shows a great lack of respect for women’s bodily autonomy and for the LGBTQ community. And the homeschooling section of one of the compound’s larger gift shops is filled with confusing takes on the world and pseudoscientific falsehoods that could only produce, in short, a fucked-up generation of kids (which is also exactly what Ken Ham fears will happen if kids are taught about the facts of evolution). I’ll have another story on their outrageous homeschool materials before too long.
The “joyful warriors” of Moms for Liberty distort the truth and persecute people by hiding behind a disingenuous version of the noble-sounding tenet of “parental rights.” Immersion into Ken Ham’s empire and the Young Earth Creationist agenda creates similar intolerance in the name of “God’s word.”
“One Blood”
There is one important caveat to whatever negative things I have to say about the impact and intention of Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham personally. They are not a “white supremacist organization.”
When I visited the Creation Museum, I picked up some materials with the label “One Blood” and some other strange texts alleging “Seven Biblical Races.” It’s non-scientific material (surprise!) that aligns more with what I’d call the temporal phases of salvific history than what could be called race, and it doesn’t discuss white superiority or even primacy. In Ham’s September 4th “X” post, he criticizes the biology textbook used at the school where John Scopes taught because of its “blatant racism” in elevating so-called Caucasians above other human populations.
But to be clear, the “scientific racism” that has fueled the rejection of mainstream science for decades is not the reason Ham rejects the teaching of evolution in public schools today. (And though he says racism is wrong, his materials also clarify that the education system is not the way to fight it). The conflict with Young Earth Creationism’s core tenet—a literal interpretation of Genesis that yields a 6000-year-old planet—is the reason Ham throws his hat in with the motley crew of culture wars conservatives who want to roll back at least 60 years of social progress.
The 2016 Trump slogan “Make America Great Again”—and now 2024’s “Take America Back Again” and “Save America Again”—point to the pre-civil rights era and to an explicitly Christian nation. These are Christian nationalist slogans, and that in itself is not very different than the ideal world Ken Ham’s museum envisions. Some overt racists, though Ham does not personally identify with them, are also an overlapping part of that group, adding “white” before “Christian.”
In a podcast conversation with Edwin Eisendrath this July, Williamette professor and historian of the U.S. right Seth Cotlar observed that, while so many issues could catalyze a disgruntled person’s identification with the larger white power movement (whether or not they directly subscribe to that mission), “all you need to do is to hit someone, an individual, on one vector of their identity, and you’ve got them.”
Cotlar described the Republican and far right’s “well-developed propaganda machine” as using “a very familiar kind of formula, whether it be race-baiting or moral panics around sexuality, etc.” Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign has been successful because the concept is a “catch-all” for grievances ranging from vaccines to race relations to LGBTQ identity. The variety of issues and the lack of major political parties to subscribe to “enables them to build this coalition where everybody in it doesn’t have to share the same dissatisfactions and resentments. They just have to have one of them, and then they’re in that bucket.”
Whether consciously part of a coalition or not, members of smaller identity groups collectively populate an enduring, increasingly large, and influential anti-democracy and pro-white movement. Through the mechanism of identitarian coalitions, then, Answers in Genesis does its part to strengthen and accelerate a dangerous cultural slide toward an anti-democratic future by sharing a regressive point of view on numerous social issues with the diffuse white power—or white supremacist extremism—movement.
Next in the series, read about the extinction of the dinosaurs!
As you’ll come to learn, some of the so-called “dinosaurs” the organization’s website talks about are properly termed “dragons,” which we also know were real and lived alongside humans because there are legends that say they did.
But what happened to make them all disappear? And when did this occur? Click below to find out everything God wants you to know about this mystery:
Local Man Shows Off By Killing Dinosaurs (Prepare to Believe, part 4)
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Until then,
That’s all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.
Okay, first off: Ham's Beef. Just had to acknowledge that.
I always recognize in these posts bits of the fundamentalism -- including creationism and millenarianism -- with which I grew up. I don't know the percentages, but I suspect the vast majority of Protestants are creationists. Yet all that is loose.
Here's what I mean. Lots of people call themselves Baptists or Presbyterians or whatever without really knowing what those denominational distinctions mean. They claim those titles because they attended a church of that denomination as a kid, or a parent claimed it, or who knows why; they're much more religious about football on Sundays. I suspect most Americans are just that loose in their understandings about most distinctions. They'd say the U.S. is a Christian nation, though it's not. They'd claim at various times to believe God created the world in six days, at others that dogs evolved from wolves, or some random instance instead of natural selection, but hold firm that "we didn't come from apes" or some such misunderstanding. Truthfully, most of us don't know much about who we are, but get viciously defensive when we feel, rightly or wrongly, we're being challenged.
What's my point?
I find these varied and new lineages of creationism and 6,000 year earthers and so on intriguing, but also can't help but wonder how many people -- and you point out the numbers are hard to come by -- adhere strictly to this belief or the other. I imagine lots of people who move through the creation museum come out feeling utterly convinced and somehow defensively patriotic, but two days later make a half-understanding joke about their Yorkie having come from wolves.
It seems there are always these people who litigate narrow channels of exact beliefs, yet the larger danger is the failure of American education, leaving masses of people easily stirred up by something that taps the god-'n-country defense system embedded in their amygdalas. Still the Sarah Palins of the political landscape can stir millions of Americans' loosely understood beliefs into an uproar to hate those elitist scientists who think they're better than them and reject vaccines and vote.
Meanwhile, other parts of this remind me of Mormon beliefs about various races. I've only read John Krakauer's Into the Wild and have only seen, I'm ashamed to say, the TV version of Under the Banner of Heaven, but I believe Krakauer explores weird Biblical interpretations for explaining the existence of indigenous races, etc. (Then there's the Nation of Islam sci-fi creation of white people, as you reminded me recently.)
This is a really thought-provoking piece of writing. Having grown up in this mess, it's stunning to see all the specific rabbit holes (or rabbit warrens) that have branched off since I was a kid.