As the museum gears up to mark Darwin’s bicentennial with a fresh volley of anti-evolutionist programs, such as a screening of the biographical documentary 200 Lost Years, much of the increasingly acerbic criticism from scientists, secular liberals, and religious moderates has treated the Creation Museum with a disdain for Christianist red-state nescience. The group Campaign to Defend the Constitution offered a petition denouncing the museum’s “nefarious campaign to institutionalize a lie.” Architecture critic Martin Filler called it a theme-park-style “loony bin.” Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges invoked Hannah Arendt and accused Answers in Genesis of being “Christo-fascists” promoting a “totalitarian belief system.” But such criticisms have only fueled the museum’s succès de scandale; to many believers, the charge that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis are flouting science strengthens their appeal. How can one make a rational critique of an institution that makes human reason itself an object of opprobrium?
Perhaps all we can do is note the strange correspondence between the world of fabricated nature the museum occupies and the one its exhibits portray. Its imagery is an allegory of the American megalopolis, its commercial success a symptom of national unease about the destruction of the landscape—and, to venture a step further, about humanity’s capacity to influence natural life on all scales, from genetic research to biotechnology. Unmoored from the city, the Creation Museum strives to atone for the nation’s original sin, an ever more voracious “urban” capitalism whose sphere of influence has expanded to include the conditions of organic life itself. Co-opting tactics from this very regime, the museum projects an image of nature as incorrupt and divinely willed. Outside its walls, meanwhile, the spreading and formless landscape is inhabited by dinosaurs of the most evolved variety.