Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age

6: Prepare to Believe: Performing the Evangelical Worldview at the Creation Museum

191 Chapter 6 Prepare to Believe Performing the Evangelical Worldview at the Creation Museum ••• I confess: I was taken aback by how professional it looks, this Museum, how slick. Past experience with conservative evangelical productions led me to expect something like hell houses: an earnest but awkward attempt at “science,” a sincere but threadbare facsimile of a secular discoverycenter . But here in July 2008, as my partner and I walk through elaborate portico at the entrance to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky , I decide that my preconceptions need re-aligning. A tall rock face, festooned with fossils and glass-enclosed displays, lines either side of the entry hall, which then opens onto a large foyer dominated by a jungle motif accented with lighting and ambient jungle sound effects. Beside us towers a two-story waterfall stocked with live gar and turtles.1 Above the waterfall sits a life-sized diorama in which brownskinned children sporting rough-spun shifts frolic beside two baby tyrannosaurs . Across from this group, a massive sauropod swings its long neck to and fro above our heads, placidly munching fake ferns. Beyond the waterfall we find a planetarium and a book store, behind the sauropod a 3-D theater. The lower level boasts yet another movie theater, a wellstocked fossil display, and a coffee shop. And straight ahead, a smiling, uniformed volunteer waits to take our tickets at the entrance to the main Museum tour. This, I realize, is no local church effort whose reach 192 • preaching to convert extends its amateur grasp. This is no-expenses-spared, state-of-the-art edutainment aimed at competing with—and bettering—the best familyoriented science museums that secular culture has to offer. This Museum wants a national audience. “Prepare to Believe,” reads the Museum’s motto. And while it didn’t change my views on evolution, the Creation Museum certainly convinced me of the seriousness of its aspirations. Built to the tune of twenty-seven million dollars in 2007, designed by a small army of artists and special effects experts, and stuffed with information from theologians and scientists working for evangelist Ken Ham’s young-earth creationist group Answers in Genesis (AiG), the Creation Museum represents a pinnacle achievement of creation science. To evangelicals invested in a literal interpretation of Genesis, the Museum brilliantly testifies to the solid foundation of creationist beliefs in a six-day divine creation, six thousand-year-old universe, and specially designed (not evolved) human beings. To those skeptical of creationism ’s status as science—a view that includes the vast majority of credentialed scientists2 —anti-evolutionists’ influence threatens the legacy of the Enlightenment itself, promising a renaissance of superstition over rationalism, delusion over critical thinking, and theocracy over secular democracy. From this latter viewpoint, it is difficult not to see the “Creation Museum” as a contradiction in terms, more a temple to ignorance than a showcase of science and inquiry. Although I endorse scientists’ efforts to challenge anti-evolutionist3 claims to scientific validity,4 I write not as a scientist but as a theater scholar. My fascination with the Museum stems less from its notoriety among scientists as a bastion of anti-intellectualism and more from the role it plays in evangelical strategies of survival and outreach in the secular age. Within the atmosphere of existential threat that partially characterizes present-day US evangelicalism, the state of the anti-evolutionist movement often serves as a bellwether for evangelical health more generally. On this score, evangelicalism seems to be in trouble. The creation-evolution war, although far from ended, has not gone well for anti-evolutionists over the last few decades. Anti-evolutionists’ efforts to maintain hegemony (How can we prevent Darwin from being taught?) have gradually become ever-more-harried struggles for legitimacy (How can we ensure that some kind of creationism is taught alongside Darwin ?). Subsequent to the Scopes trial in 1925 (which anti-evolutionist forces won), courts have consistently ruled against anti-evolutionist influence over public school curricula.5 Conservative evangelicals view creationism ’s dwindling authority as but one more symptom of a deeper Prepare to Believe • 193 evangelical malaise, a tragic cultural and political shift away from Biblebased foundations. Given the beleaguered state of US evangelicalism in general and antievolutionist movements specifically, the Creation Museum’s audacious subtext—We exist, and are stronger than ever—takes on a revivalist fervor. In this chapter I argue that AiG’s...