Prepare to Prepare to Believe (Creation Museum starts here!)

The Creation Museum, Bullittsburg Church Rd., Petersburg, Kentucky

Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation!

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.

Some of this will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. For now these stories 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 road trip.

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About halfway through my roadtrip to see how the national narrative is told in various locations, I said goodbye to Hillary and Mike and drove about 20 miles down the road to check out the Creation Museum in the far northern tip of Kentucky, very close to Cincinnati. This is a starter post for a short series on the hours I spent inside there.

The night before, Mike had given me one of the many shell fossils they’ve found in their backyard. That turned out to be a good segué into the extended series of convolutions I would encounter inside the Creation Museum: a big theme park, merchandise mall, and re-education center designed to replace nearly all of the planet’s history with a preposterous 6000-year chronology.

But to avoid the impression of bias, I’ve provided a description of the place from their own website:

The Creation Museum shows why God´s infallible Word, rather than man´s faulty assumptions, is the place to begin if we want to make sense of our world.

This 75,000-square-foot facility allows families to experience earth history as God has revealed it in the Bible. . . .

At the heart of the Creation Museum is a chronological retelling of biblical history in seven parts called the Seven C´s. Guests step back in time, beginning with Creation, and fast-forward to Christ´s return. Along the way, they see how God´s Word provides the big-picture answers for our most difficult questions, whether about science, the Bible, or our personal relationship with God. (“About the Museum”)

This “About” blurb can lead only to error. “Man’s faulty assumptions” is code for science. To “make sense of our world” means to bend every observable fact in the service of the YEC (Young Earth Creationist) delusion. Simplistic uses of the term “history” elide the processes by which the past is parsed and negotiated. Here, to learn about history is only to passively “experience” something that is already fully “revealed,” and the historical narrative itself is merely a “chronological retelling” of a fixed text.

Of course that’s not how either science or history work. But to be fair, the Museum’s slogan is “Prepare to Believe,” not “Prepare to Think.”

Before arriving, I had no sense of how commercialized this place would be. When I pulled in at 9:45am, the huge parking lot was already about halfway full. I joined a small line of cars waiting to pay $15 to an extremely enthusiastic teenager. Considering the museum fee is $49.95 per person, and the lot connects to nothing else, I was pretty surprised by the upcharge for parking.

Anyway, I paid and parked. Approaching the Welcome Center, I heard theme music wafting from the PA. It was a little exciting, a little suspenseful, and quite magisterial—like a John Williams theme you would expect to hear in a big production like Star Wars or Jurassic Park. The exterior wall to the compound and the Visitor’s Center were both topped with large metal dinosaur silhouettes. For a museum I expected to deny or avoid discussing evolution, I was curious to know how the dinosaurs would fit in.

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This short post is a starter for the series. There is so much content inside the museum with so many false narratives attached to it, it will take several more posts to organize and discuss even half of what I saw. Link to the next story here: “Think About It: Were You There when God Created the Earth?”

I’m still working through the ways these religious extremist positions may contribute to or cooperate with the larger problems of white supremacy and ethno-nationalism I’m writing about. I have a lot of good pictures to come, along with a video of the real Methuselah!