Horrors of Creation Museum Christianity (August 29, 2022, the severed branch)
My own background as a fundamentalist Christian child | Relationships between Genesis and Sexuality/Gender | School libraries and the fundamentalist Christian war against "autonomous reasoning"
“The acquisition of knowledge, the exercise of our reason or fancy, and the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation may employ the leisure of a liberal mind. Such amusements, however, were rejected by the [church] fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation, and who considered all levity of discourse as a criminal abuse of speech.”
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776
“Broadly speaking, ‘man’s word’ refers to ‘autonomous reasoning’ - the idea that the human mind can determine truth independently of God’s revealed truth, the Bible. Reasoning is God’s gift to mankind, but He has instructed us to use the Bible as our ultimate starting point (Proverbs 1:7) and also to reject speculations that contradict God’s knowledge (2 Corinthians 10:5). Philosophies and world religions that use human guesses rather than God’s Word as a starting point are prone to misinterpret the facts around them because their starting point is arbitrary.”
Display at the Creation Museum, as photographed in 2014
When I was a little boy, I had a picture book showing the lives which human beings once led side-by-side with dinosaurs. In it, I learned about all the evidence that dinosaurs went extinct because they were hunted and ultimately exterminated by humans. The “behemoth” mentioned in Job 40:15 was probably a brontosaurus, grazing on the grass near people’s farmland. And the “leviathan” mentioned in the books of Psalms, Job, and Isaiah was probably something like a mosasaur, which could not have gone extinct 66 million years ago because the Earth is only 6,000 years old. The dragons mentioned in European and Chinese folklore, meanwhile, are further evidence that predatory dinosaurs lurked in the wilderness for many centuries after the birth of Christ. The children’s book even taught me that some dinosaurs could in fact breathe small amounts of fire, which explains why they are confused with dragons.
When I brought the book to my paternal grandmother’s house, she looked through it and became visibly disturbed. “This is not true,” she told me. “There were no dinosaurs 700 years ago!” She said dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago and never lived with human beings. And so whom was I to believe as a small little boy? My grandma or my parents? Perhaps the answer came when I was very young and my paternal grandmother died. Years later I would wonder: Is my grandma burning in Hell because she didn’t believe God’s Word in the Book of Genesis? How can someone truly be saved if they accept Christ’s sacrifice but reject the Scriptures?
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
It was just a few years later when Jurassic Park came out. By then I understood that the paleontologists claiming that dinosaurs had gone extinct over 60 millions of years ago could not possibly be correct; the conclusion contradicted the infallible Holy Scriptures. Feeling it through, I excitedly concluded that somewhere out there in the deepest regions of rainforest, or on the most secluded islands, there might still lurk a colony of velociraptors whom the old dragon slayers had failed to find. Since these beasts only went extinct around six hundred years ago, I was for a while obsessed with this concept that dinosaurs might still be alive somewhere. I asked the Christian adults around me if it was possible and they said perhaps it could be. And as soon as I gained access to that new thing called the Internet in late elementary school on the family desktop, I found substantial evidence that dinosaurs did indeed still roam the Earth. Later, I learned it was not only the possibility of dinosaurs eating my flesh about which I might one day need to worry. The satanic practitioners of sorcery, too, hoped to seduce me into their dark arts, and their goal was the destruction of my soul.
When I was in fifth grade in 1999, my parents sent me with some cash to the school library’s book sale. All of my friends were reading Harry Potter, so I bought it too. But when I came home, I was told that this book was dangerous because it made games out of witchcraft. So my parents gave me money to buy a different book. Witchcraft, you see, is not only real; it is demonic, and one of Satan’s greatest achievements is convincing us he does not exist. The right-wing Christian community was full of horror stories about children actually acting out the magic from the books. As Dan Brown suggests in his book Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages, it is hard to say when the “Middle Ages” really stopped given the perseverance of witch trials and executions into the late 18th century. And yet as the Harry Potter fears show, that same medieval terror of witchcraft persists into the 21st century. The right of children to read whatever they want is even now, over two centuries after the Age of Enlightenment, still restricted based on a fear that the children might become witches.
At first, I resented the precautions taken to prevent my transformation into a wizard. But my parents had the support of the church and the youth groups. These institutions dutifully trained me to reject new ideas immediately if they contradicted the Word of God. Ministers warned me that the public school would present very convincing evidence for evolution and that biology class could thus be a very trying time for a Christian. But I had to remember that my teachers were telling me lies. As the Creation Museum itself suggests in its exhibits, it is the arrogance of the godless scientist which convinces mortal men that there exists a path to truth which does not take the Holy Scriptures as its starting point. And yet the atheistic scientist’s worldview is seductive, sneakily reassuring otherwise guilt-consumed Christian adolescents that it is perfectly okay to engage in the most unbiblical sensual pleasures. It suggests that they are only animals, evolved over millions of years like any other common beasts. It removes the Lord as a necessary component in the emergence of humankind by positing a model in which he has no place. This effectively calls into question all the Abrahamic desert god’s commandments regarding gender conformity, sexual behavior, and “traditional” relationships. To resist these temptations, most of which gain substantial intensity during high school and college, ministers must fortify young people to resist the lies of science before they ever set foot in the classroom. Their souls are at stake.
There is one weakness in this scheme of indoctrination, however. Adolescents seem to inherently rebel against their parents and adult authority in general. So for this indoctrination program to have succeeded in preventing me from freely exploring new ideas, a sense of obedience to my elders and trust in their word was simply not enough. I had to be taught from an early age to believe that even the wrong thoughts could send me into the flames of Hell for all of eternity. Sin is thus not merely a kind action; sin can be Thought itself. To persistently allow “impure thoughts” into one’s brain is thus to risk one’s immortal soul. How then to protect me from the seductive intellectual pleasures of free thinking? Terror.
Terror would prevent me from reading the wrong books, listening to the wrong music, associating with the wrong friends, or interrogating the celestial mandates governing gender and sexuality. Knowing that their children will likely forsake fundamentalism and risk eternity in Hell if they are over-exposed to other influences, the adults strive to so terrify them that, in a state of mental stagnation nurtured by these small-minded elders, the children will grow up into adults who intentionally keep their minds closed as a way of protecting themselves and their families. The parents know that Evangelical extremism has little chance in a free competition for the minds of their offspring, so they frighten their defenseless children with the eternal consequences of being seduced by the wrong ideas and thoughts. Where fear is insufficient, the fundamentalist Christians teach their children to hate (“not the sinner, just the sin”).
By the end of all this, the child has been so thoroughly debilitated and traumatized, so consumed by the fear of what it might mean to actually develop their own identities and beliefs, that they are almost neurologically incapable of developing their own independent perspectives. These adults then torment their own children by teaching them from an early age that they could go to Hell forever simply for believing the wrong thing, loving the wrong person, or identifying as the wrong gender. They go to their graves having wasted much of their lives on Earth consumed by the darkest ignorance. And because of this pathetic fate, I pity rather than resent them.
Yet neither the churches, the youth groups, the fundamentalist Protestant schools, nor even the most insular home schools are sufficient to ensure that vulnerable young minds are protected from the sinful satisfactions of free thinking. The hateful and traumatized fundamentalist Christians have developed a whole infrastructure of relentless indoctrination. Perhaps the crown jewel of it all is the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which I visited several years after I was liberated. I’d heard about it once before in my Baptist youth group, where the minister recounted how much he had learned leading children on a field trip there. It had opened his eyes, he said, as well as those of the defenseless children he took with him, to the stupefying extent to which public schools were teaching lies about evolution and the age of the Earth. And it was during a service for the whole congregation shortly after that when the church’s chief pastor expressed his own anxieties about what was happening to American youth in public schools and popular culture. “That is why we need to get them early and indoctrinate them,” he said unequivocally. He might have heard what Christopher Hitchens said on the topic: “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”
When I finally visited the Creation Museum for myself nearly a decade later, I was re-submerged into the old worldview which, had I not been fortunate enough to be exposed to so many alternative ideas at my high school, might have imprisoned me even into adulthood. My friends and I approached a statue of a triceratops outfitted with a saddle to emphasize the most tranquil human-dinosaur interactions. An expensive and strangely high-tech exhibit showed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surrounded by the velociraptors who lived peacefully side by side with humans before Eve, the original sinner and of course a woman, tempted her otherwise virtuous husband to partake of the forbidden fruit. “I never heard this before in school,” exclaimed a model of a child at the entrance to one exhibit. “Come on,” said the other, “let me show you the rest.”
The Creation Museum is the ultimate manifestation of a radical and isolated religious culture which sees itself as under siege by the secular world of science and immorality around it. Public schools, by building libraries that expose children to unbiblical ideas and refusing to teach “Intelligent Design” in science class, are at the vanguard of this threat. What the museum seeks to protect its many sheltered and ignorant visitors from is then not simply the theory of evolution, but a more general societal assault on God’s Word itself. An exhibit walks the visitor through the history of attacks on the Scripture, outlining “attempts to question,” “attempts to destroy,” “attempts to discredit,” and “attempts to criticize” the Bible, declaring that “God’s Word has triumphed against” each of these. The most recent of these attacks, the museum says, involves people daring to “question biblical time.” The display showcases the slippery slope this process involves, implicitly condemning the mere act of “questioning.”
“The church believed God’s Word.
Based on the Bible, Ussher [a bishop from 1650] calculated creation at 4004 BC.
The church questioned it.
‘Is 6,000 years enough time?’
Humanity abandoned it.
‘Millions of years ago….’”
Repeatedly, the museum’s exhibits emphasized that the issue of evolution matters because society’s acceptance of it represents a rejection of God’s Word. Without God’s Word, society is lost, both morally and scientifically. Any path to truth, the museum claims, must begin with the Scriptures, and any data which contradicts these must be rejected as impossible. But as the curators explain in their detailed displays on the subject, modern humans have forsaken belief in the Holy Scriptures in favor of “arbitrary” starting points for acquiring knowledge. By this they mean the hypotheses which fuel the scientific method. As a result, humans have been seduced by scientists into believing the damning lies that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old and that humankind was not created but rather evolved. And after the godless scientists undermined Genesis, further rejections of God’s Word inevitably followed.
The Creation Museum is thus about much more than Creationism. It is about respect for God’s Word in America and the world in general. The decline in the social authority of the Scriptures is viewed in that fundamentalist Christian culture as the primary cause of American woes. Most recently, in portions of the right-wing Evangelical community across the country, this decline of the Bible’s absolute and unquestioned authority even provides an explanation for school shootings. Without God in school, children are confused and adrift, unable to grasp strong moral values.
Evolution is the Trojan horse for moral collapse. So naturally, the liberty of women in particular was an emphasized concern during my 2014 visit. The rise of feminism, the museum suggested in one display, has inspired women to engage in “backbiting behavior,” “disrespect,” and “envy,” even while they withdraw from their innate obligations to serve as the primary caregivers and homemakers in their families. Thanks to the malicious influence of a modern culture fueled by godless sciences, these rebellious women have rejected the commandments of St. Paul. His 2,000-year-old contributions to the New Testament clarify that women must submit to their husbands and stay silent in the churches. So wrote the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians: “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.” And when people take this a step further, when they begin openly rejecting their assigned genders, then human freedom suddenly seems to pose an even graver threat than ever before to the divinely mandated family structure.
What began with a scientific rejection of Genesis has thus spiraled into the destruction of the divinely designed family structure itself. This process is accelerated by the spread of open non-heterosexual sexuality and liberating forms of gender expression among increasingly autonomous and truly free individuals. A fear of uncensored libraries is accordingly catching on across the country. To the horror of the parents who seek to prevent their children from reading certain books, people are gradually winning their liberty from the gloomiest fundamentalist communities. They are increasingly free to develop into their own authentic selves, to openly identify as they see fit, to pursue the kinds of lifestyles which give them the most satisfaction in their limited time on Earth. And this is what the Creation Museum, as well as the fundamentalist Christians who fund it, view as the final threat to society posed by the original theories of Charles Darwin. As a museum image of a man walking through a graveyard of once-venerated Scripture shows, the rejection of the Creation story was only the beginning of a wider collapse in biblical morality. Which is to say more people are thinking freely (an act which the museum explicitly condemns) about the complex questions of ethics, gender, sexuality, family, and religion instead of blindly following instructions written 2,000 years ago. What one exhibit dismissively labels as the “autonomous reasoning” of the human being, liberated from the dictatorial dominion of blindly accepted Scripture, seems to be the museum’s gravest fear. At the heart of the Creation Museum is a desire to stop people from thinking for themselves, because of the threat this poses to both their souls and the Christian social order.
Accordingly, the Creation Museum’s exhibits attempt to train visitors, especially children, to think within the extremely narrow confines of Scripture. They should never even consider any idea which contradicts it. At one point, I saw a purportedly real dinosaur fossil on display. Above it was the question: “Can you tell how old this fossil is?” The display then walks the visitor through the only permitted methodology:
“Fossils don’t come with tags on them that tell us how old they are. We have to study the clues we find to try to figure out their ages. Using the Bible as your starting point, see if you can figure out how old this fossil is.
Clue #1: God was there from the beginning. He wrote down in the Bible when and how He made everything.
Clue #2: The Bible says God created everything in 6 days. He created people and animals on Day 6. Dinosaurs are land animals, so they were created on Day 6.
Clue #3: Adam was the first man. He was created on Day 6. By adding up the ages of Adam [who Genesis says lived for 930 years], his sons, their sons, and so son, we see that the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
A flood might explain why we find billions of dead things. Can you think of an event in the Bible where tons and tons of water flooded the whole earth? Noah’s Flood [double underline], when God judged the world.”
By teaching children to think of the Bible as both always literal and always infallible, rather than as the great and complicated work of literature which it is, the Creation Museum intentionally paves the way for children to self-oppress. Because when people say “don’t take Genesis literally,” it opens the floodgates to reject all sorts of other aspects of God’s Word, including the Apostle Paul’s condemnations of sexual and gender immorality in the New Testament. The woman who might otherwise rebel against the Lord and her husband in the spirit of Eve is thus primed to internalize her oppression by refusing to think for herself. When she encounters the writings of the Apostle Paul explicitly dictating her subordinate role, she will accept these on her own, having been trained from early girlhood to follow every word in the Bible without interrogation. “Women should remain silent in the churches,” he wrote in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. “They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.” She neither questions nor scrutinizes this man-given command; she wouldn’t dare. It is no surprise that I personally encountered exactly this mentality among so many of the girls I met in my fundamentalist teenage days. They wanted a husband to be their lord and master, their spiritual counselor, the absolute head of their family. They believed that their brains were simply not as capable of untangling scriptural truth. Shepherding one of them was my destiny. All other options I immediately rejected as sinful, unbiblical.
One of the biggest “What If” questions in my life is the matter of fundamentalist Christianity. I was trained from an early age to think exactly the way the Creation Museum teaches children to calculate the age of a dinosaur fossil. I learned that to reject these methodologies was to risk my eternal soul by positioning myself in open intellectual and moral rebellion against Christ. So when I finally read the New Testament for myself as a sixteen-year-old, I immediately accepted without question or criticism everything St. Paul wrote in the first century AD. Those engaged in non-heterosexual practices were committing a vile sin for which they deserve to burn in Hell. My own role as a man was to exercise spiritual and temporal dominion over my wife one day. And there was something inherently dirty about most sensual pleasure.
All the while, I clung literally to the passages in the New Testament which promised the eternal flames of Hell for those who are not genuine followers of Jesus, and I deliberately shielded my mind from all influences that might jeopardize my soul. A combination of terror, indoctrination, and silliness had succeeded in programming me to be that way. So it is very easy for me to envision a terrible parallel world where I am an extremist Christian who condemns people on the basis of their sexual or gender identities. “Oh, yes,” I would be currently saying about the trans community, “I love the people, I just hate the sin.” I would join the current movement to purge school libraries of anything which might interrogate traditional ideas about sexuality and gender. I would not want the children to be “confused,” since confusion is the fundamental starting point for “autonomous reasoning.” But thankfully, it is not Hell which frightens me now. It is the memory that this once was me, and the idea that it could still be me. I suppose in this sense, my fear has given way to a deep relief that I am not wasting my life like so many fundamentalist Christians are.
What about children today? I see Republican legislatures passing laws restricting what books children can read in their schools, and I remember a time when I was a brainwashed child who was afraid to freely read. When parents across the country try to prevent their children from reading certain books in their classes or accessing certain readings in their school libraries, I think about how grateful I am that I am not still consumed by that awful fear. A fear of thought. A fear of ideas, a fear of books, a fear of difference, a fear of what might happen if “gender roles” collapse.
Any parent who teaches their children to avoid what the Creation Museum calls “autonomous reasoning” commits a despicable crime against the child’s humanity. These sad and stunted people have been given one precious life on this Earth, and they spend it afraid of the wrath of a supposedly all-powerful being who is apparently deeply concerned with every aspect of their sexuality, gender, and beliefs. He judgmentally scrutinizes every “impure” thought they have, and they will die having never allowed their brains or bodies to break free of the narrow confines into which they are ruthlessly confined. What is to be done? Are we to allow this to continue?
As an adult who personally escaped from the horrors of fundamentalism thanks to repeated exposure to alternative ideas, I cannot possibly respect the desire of parents to prevent their children from enjoying the same liberties which I was eventually able to attain. Parents cannot be conceded any right to stop their own children from developing into autonomous thinkers. It is inhumane to allow any child to be trapped inside the confines of the elaborate infrastructure of indoctrination which the fundamentalists maintain in their churches, homes, and museums. It is the absolute right of the child to read books which call into question the religious, moral, and political values taught in their households, regardless of parental consent. Otherwise, the child is denied the basic human right to develop into their own independent adult with their own world views and identities. When a child sets foot into a library, they should be granted unfettered access to books which sow confusion where their parents seek to force certainty. They should be able to read stories and perspectives that call into question even the most sacred and cherished teachings of their religions and families.
And in the provision of education, it is the duty of the State to ensure that any child who is being deliberately restricted by their parents from freely reading and thinking be given every possible aid in defying the wishes of their oppressive domestic authorities. By granting children access to free reading and free thinking against the wishes of their parents, we can liberate them from the sinister, fearful, and traumatizing designs of their bigoted families. We can free them from the fear of Hell, unchain them from the mandates of hatred, and allow them to autonomously develop into their own genders, sexualities, religions, politics, and perspectives without the slightest regard to parental wishes. The parents will have a say in the home, of course. And if, despite alternative exposures, the child decides to follow the teachings of her parents into adulthood, then that is her right. But it is at least partly in schools where children who would otherwise grow up fearful, hateful, and closed-minded might find a different path. In the uncensored and unrestricted library, they might enjoy the sweetest liberty to develop not into mere ideological replications of their parents, but rather into their own self-actualized and fully independent adults. Through books, they can be empowered to lead authentic, self-defined, and personally fulfilling lives.