A Walk through the Creation Museum

When visitors enter the Creation Museum they wait in line to buy tickets and walk through exhibits in a museum that is 70,000 square feet and counting. To guide the reader, this walk through provides an overview of Answers in Genesis’ core arguments on display at the Creation Museum and provides a layout of the museum that will be revisited in more detail in subsequent chapters: the exhibits, the private headquarters, the gift shop, the cafes, and the outdoor grounds.

ConclusionThe Future of Plausibility Politics

Why did creationists build a museum? The short answer is because the Creation Museum would be unexpected. Who would anticipate that an extreme, creationist group would build something that professional—or for it to endure so long? This conclusion summarizes a key argument throughout Creating the Creation Museum, that Answers in Genesis’ success is about a distinction between accuracy and plausibility. Rather than making claims to the accuracy of knowledge, AiG’s focus is to provide enough evidence to make its narrative plausible to a broader public. This chapter concludes with how the Creation Museum is a site of social movement activity, a place to contest the secular mainstream, to persuade people of AiG’s point of view, and to provide believers new narratives to defend their beliefs. The Creation Museum and other AiG sites like the Ark Encounter anchor the movement for outsiders so that when other sites emerge, such as the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C., AiG is positioned to yoke themselves to these broader-reaching, less extreme sites, securing their continued relevance and affirming steady persistence.

Enacting a Museum

In order to understand whether or not visitors to the Creation Museum ‘buy’ the message or think of it as a museum, this chapter unpacks how Answers in Genesis went about making choices to try and achieve its desired effect. It relies on primary data from fieldwork observations including walk-alongs with visitors, internal organizational documents, and interviews with key movement stakeholders to provide insight into how social movements use particular sites to leverage their claims and develop an oppositional stance. Being attuned to how multi-sensory engagement is activated and the material culture is wielded—everything from auditory cues and lighting choices to color palette and the spatial arrangement of each room—underscores how all of this is created to be ‘read’ by visitors at the Creation Museum.

The Creationist Movement in the United States

Through a close historical examination of archived newsletters (1963-2007) from four different creationist organizations, this chapter traces potential sites Answers in Genesis might have built instead to reach and influence a broader public such as a college or a research center among other strategies. In light of these available alternatives, it shows how the museum emerged over time when Young Earth Creationists shifted the focus of the social movement away from Old Earth Creationism, advanced effective leaders who reassessed previous movement actions, and adapted to the sociocultural as well as political environment of the 1970s and 1980s. It argues the rise of Answers in Genesis as an organization and its tactical decision to build a museum only came as a surprise because scholars were previously limited to examining political opportunities and legislation advanced by the movement.

“Lucy” Up Close

How did Answers in Genesis make particular decisions about what to display in its exhibits at the Creation Museum? This chapter hones in on the ‘Lucy’ exhibit, the Australopithecus used to depict human evolution and our common ancestor, to examine how Answers in Genesis constructs a plausible counterclaim and compellingly depicts this to visitors. Unpacking the materiality of objects in a contested exhibit affords a close up understanding of how a group attempts to make ideas and objects credible—what techniques do they use and how do they accomplish a plausible ‘look and feel.’ The Creation Museum is compared to three natural history museums across the US that feature Lucy in its human origins exhibits: the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. Throughout this comparative work, this chapter underscores how mainstream institutions vary in their approach and anticipation of challengers like AiG.

Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the cultural, historical, rand sociopolitical context of creationism in the US throughout the twentieth century. It introduces plausibility politics as a key concept for understanding why Answers in Genesis built the Creation Museum. Plausibility politics is the process of disentangling accuracy from reasonableness and the opening is leveraged by a group to advance its point of view. For many, this feels new. For seasoned political pundits and historians, it does not. It is a dynamic as old as the institutions and representatives entrusted to govern society. Yet it is not just media outlets, politicians, or scientists who attempt to persuade the public of their claims. Social movements, like creationists, seek to carve out a sense of plausibility for their own arguments as well. Being able to closely examine how this unfolds in a particular location, at the Creation Museum, affords a better understanding of how groups fight to stretch and expand what we, as a public, find plausible and later credible.

What Audiences Think of the Creation Museum

Preceding chapters largely draw upon data collected on-site to examine internally why the Creation Museum emerged and how it operates. But what does it do for the movement? Who pays attention to the Creation Museum? Tracing perspectives of various audiences outside of the movement provides an external vantage point necessary for determining the extent to which AiG’s efforts have an impact. Analyzing news media coverage of and social media attention to the Creation Museum, this chapter shows the museum attracted attention because of its ability to draw together temporarily bombastic mobilization efforts with its non-disruptive character. It is a building, open every day, hosting large numbers of people and events. Conflict occurs on-site, like counter-demonstrators, rather than in the streets and additional movement efforts are grounded in the place itself. Media attention suggests that AiG and its Creation Museum have already succeeded: so many other social movement organization’s tactics never receive coverage let alone sustain it.