From my new essay at Triple Canopy on northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum:
The tacit message is that the archetypal godly environment is a Christian arcadia, free of the violence of natural selection. This idyll’s most memorable occupants are the dinosaurs. According to wall-mounted placards, they were created on the sixth day along with the other animals and lived alongside humans until recently. A staple of the traditional natural history museum, the dinosaur has long loomed large in the American psyche, often expressing fears related to capitalism’s corporate monsters, unchecked scientific meddling, and imminent global calamity. Yet the Creation Museum’s animatronic models evoke Barney and Friends as much as Jurassic Park as they frolic with biblical characters and munch on plants. (In the museum’s account, the consumption of meat was not part of God’s design for the world and began only after the Fall).
Every natural history museum presents the terrestrial environment as its own age experiences it. The institutions of the nineteenth century defined nature in terms of romantic landscapes, endlessly branching phylogenetic trees, and fossilized remains of immense creatures from the distant past. So, too, the Creation Museum, anti-modern and postmodern at once, offers insight into contemporary America’s very different experience of the rural landscape and organic life, with their attendant collective anxieties.