Any museum tour through Europe reveals that there is often little distinction between a church and a museum; many are both simultaneously. Yet without the traditional blending of art and religion of that continent, the United States has had a more definitive approach to churches and museums as separate entities. However, many religious-based museums emerging across the United States are challenging this distinction in a way that is both provocative and discomfiting. Their overriding premise is based on Creationism, Young Earth theory or theistic evolution - the origins of the universe based on the story of Creation in the biblical book of Genesis. As a conceptual museum, I felt I could give the Creation Museum a balanced assessment. I was wrong.

GENESIS

Although initiated in 1994, the Creation Museum only opened its doors in May 2007 to throngs of visitors and protestors. It has received press coverage from as far away as Australia, whence the museum’s founder and CEO Ken Ham originates. His organisation, Answers in Genesis Ministry, is the progenitor of the project.

According to their brochure, the message is clear - and I dare not paraphrase:

The purpose of the museum is three-fold. First, it acts as a rallying place, calling people back to the absolute truth of the Bible. It is a place of revival, a starting point for a new reformation. Second, it is a witnessing tool. There will be those who sneer, but some will be challenged to think, and still others may come to believe. And finally, it is a valuable, unprecedented resource for information and education, enabling us to always be ready to give an answer (a reasoned, logical defense) for the hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15). KEN HAM

This is evidently not a museum mission, but one for a church. Thus began my fundamental problem with this place: firstly the usurpation of terminology. Ham has used the credibility of the museum institution to further his proselytising. My sense of professional self was offended by what seemed defi lement of the very definition of what museums are meant to be, namely, places of learning based on the exhibition of collections of objects.

 However, there are no artefacts in this museum; it is a theme park constructed to illustrate beliefs rather than evidence. The inconsistencies and outright contradictions put forth by both the book of Genesis and the museum are explained away in this manner: because God made it. This convenient catch-all essentially argues that divine acts need not be provable by science and those that are scientifi cally provable can be so proven because God made Science.

OVERVIEW

The exhibitions use a strange mix of styles; from the natural history diorama to high-end Disney-style animatronics (figure 1). Multimedia also plays a huge role in getting the message of Creationism across.

The opening film, which was strongly suggested as a “must see” before experiencing the rest of the museum, is called Men in White. After the indoctrinating total blackout, a series of bizarre questions are posed by a girl alone at a camp fi re in what appeared to be the Southwestern USA, “Why are we here?” “Is there meaning to the universe?” “Did God create the Earth or was it a series of atomic accidents?” The white men, angels of course, arrive from heaven to answer her questions and take the audience on a fun-fi lled ride through the themes of the museum. The film contains much mockery and parodying of Charles Darwin and his evolutionary ideas, which lead to a direct address to the audience to go out and spread the word of God through the saviour Jesus Christ.

The galleries are organized around the easily consumed ‘seven C’s’: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation, which are described as critical events through which the world can be understood. As I moved through the rooms, there was one phrase that was often repeated, “God is Truth.” While this was a bold enough statement, I felt they were really preaching to the converted. There are more dioramas and animatronic tableaux than artefacts and even more rooms with no objects at all. Some merely had television monitors displaying everyday people reading Biblical quotations.  The substance was clearly left out in favour of design, especially in the Garden of Eden.

TESTAMENTS OLD AND NEW

There were many highlights in this section, most notably the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the galleries reflecting the fourth C, Confusion (figure 2). Beyond the gathering of animals that made me laugh out loud, including dinosaurs that moved and roared, the pinnacle of the Garden of Eden sequence had to be the naked Adam and Eve half submerged in a pond, complete with tropical flowers and waterfalls, all the while being watched from above by the serpent (figures 3 & 4). Not surprisingly, in front of this Biblical soft-core porn there were at least half a dozen teenage boys and adult men taking photographs. Moving into the next section, the sins of the world were portrayed in a dark black and white room with large format photographic prints. The overt sexism, racism and prejudice began to emerge. The sins of the world were represented by, among others, the atomic bomb mushroom cloud, children with horrible disfiguring diseases, a woman in excruciating labour, a man shooting up heroin and the Holocaust - as if these are equivalent phenomena.

As a result then of man’s rejection of the Word of God, humanity is plunged into Confusion. This was represented in a gallery made to look like a dirty urban back alley covered in graffiti with newspaper and magazine headlines that again equated such events as the shooting at Columbine High School with AIDS, stem cell research, evolution and gay marriage. This section was followed by an indictment of the American family home that has abandoned God. What struck me the most about this room was the voice over which read out statistics about unwed teenage pregnancy and sex before marriage. To echo the sexism of the Original Sin message, not one of the statistics quoted implicated men or boys in this sinning, as if teenage girls get pregnant all by themselves… which brings me to the story of Jesus.

Like a good art history student, I had learned about the life and passion cycles of Christ through the gold leaf of Giotto and the pathos of Caravaggio. So, as I approached the final gallery, I was preparing myself for an animatronic Golgotha. But I need not to have worried - it was only a film. Not surprisingly, I did not see Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ film. But Ham must have had this solely in mind, because this film was so graphic and bloody that I had to avert my eyes several times. I was sitting next to a small child who said at the end that this was his new favourite movie.

But the best of all were the several rooms dedicated to Noah and his ark, each more unbelievable than the next. In an Old World setting, a 5 metre ark is in the process of being built by several groups of mechanised workers engaged in conversations about why they are spending so many years building this ark for a religious fanatic (figure 5). This room also includes a small-scale wooden model of the ark with a cross-section so you can see precisely how all the animals fi t inside. Once you leave this otherworldly scenario, you re-enter the 21st century in all its plastic and metal glory. Designed to look like a control room, there were several monitors with computer-generated models showing how the ark would have looked floating in the ocean and how the great tidal wave could have fl ooded the earth in one day.

By using technology they were clearly trying to make it all seem more believable. I was disappointed that they included no images of animals or an explanation of how they would have all fi t inside the ark. Again there is an obsessive amount of attention paid to some details while others are curiously ignored.

CONCERNS

According to the American Association of Museums (AAM), the definition of a museum is fairly loose provided that an institution makes a “unique contribution to the public by collecting, preserving, and interpreting the things of this world.” (AAM Code of Ethics for Museums). However, clearly the Creation Museum has no interest in being accredited as a museum. As an extension of the ministry, the museum is registered as a non-profi t entity, but as a religious institution, not a museum. They have a replica of a Biblical era chapel, which, in a frightening challenge to concepts of museum simulacra, also serves for and encourages people to pray. The catchphrase of this museum is “Prepare to Believe”, yet I did not find that they tried to convince non-believers at all; we were pretty much made to feel excluded and unsaved. Yet for someone who believes in the overall mission of museums in general, this left a bad taste in my mouth. It is not so much that the interpretation of creation is taken literally; it is that Creationism actively ignores and distorts science to justify its ends. It is possible that I was never going to be psychologically able to open my mind wide enough to embrace this idea. As I walked through the ‘museum’ gift shop, I kept thinking of Mies van der Rohe saying, “God is in the details.” However, it was the details in the Creation Museum that, for me, proved the science.

PDF

Te Ara - journal of Museums Aotearoa; Volume 32; Issue 1 & 2; December 2007

Figure 1. Cain standing over the body of his brother Abel, whom he has just killed. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: ANSWERS IN GENESIS

Figure 2. A wall display depicting how the Tower of Babel resulted in peoples’ dispersal throughout the Earth and development of the variety of languages, cultures and skin tones. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: ANSWERS IN GENESIS

Figure 3. Visitors enjoying the Garden of Eden exhibit. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: ANSWERS IN GENESIS

Figure 4. Visitors enjoying the Garden of Eden exhibit complete with dinosaurs. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: ANSWERS IN GENESIS

Figure 5. A display depicting construction of the ark, showing a cross section of the hull. The Creation Museum’s display is 1/100th of the scale of the ark. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: ANSWERS IN GENESIS