"Something Terrible is Coming": science denial and why the Creation Museum matters

Welcome to Narrative Nation! I’m working on a book about the way white nationalists interact with important cultural texts in their effort to revise the American narrative. Some of the stories in this column are drafts for that book.

This post collects a series of stories from the first few months of my column when I did not have many readers. Now this material is even more germane to our collective need for understanding than when I published it in August-October of 2023—in the beforetimes when most of us did not think Trump could be elected again.

Now, we gasp for air and truth in a cynical information vacuum after the second Trump administration has installed charlatans like anti-vaxxer and measles fan Robert F Kennedy over Health and Human Services; climate-science underminer Lee Zeldin over the Environmental Protection Agency; and fracking executive and propagandist Chris Wright over the Department of Energy. As we witness the way these dishonest assholes are protected and encouraged by the ongoing presence of Young Earth Creationist “MAGA” Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, the very real dangers of anti-scientific thinking should become vividly important to a greater percentage of the public.

My stories about the Creation Museum and the constellation of false ideas supporting it are largely making fun (an irresistible and, I think, also a useful mode right now)—but they also offer some detailed explanations and point to the reasons we need increased awareness of such garbage. This fringe Christian sect is not engaging in creditable—or even tolerable—alternative interpretations of the material evidence, as their “museum” argues. Instead, they build a pseudoscience platform that undermines both real consensus science and civil rights through disinformation homeschool materials and disingenuous attacks on LGBTQ+ and abortion rights protections.

It no longer works for the rest of us to politely overlook the fact that some people are gullible enough to believe the planet is 6000 years old. It’s impossibly stupid. The far right’s culture wars attempt to destabilize our collective grip on reality so a fascist dictatorship can impose a new one. Stories like the following, stories that expose the errors, are not an example of anti-Christian prejudice (a fever-dream happily fomented by Trump)—rather, this is a type of accountability journalism.

Here is a link to an April 10, 2025 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists with some ways to take action against the widespread attack on science in the first months of Trump 2.0. For a different kind of reading, here is a link to Olga Bourlin’s graceful April 28th essay, “Once We Were Fishes,” on the importance of scientific literacy in combatting tyranny and authoritarianism. I really enjoyed it.

If you decide to read some of the stories I’ve collected below, please let me know you were there by liking, commenting, sharing, and subscribing!

The title quote for this post comes from the Creation Museum’s animatronic Methuselah display — experience this creepy creation in the last link, below.

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