Fossilized Jews and Witnessing Dinosaurs at the Creation Museum: Public Remembering and Forgetting at a Young Earth Creationist “Memory Place”

Dustin Nash

doi:10.6017/scjr.v14i1.11027

Abstract

The Creation Museum (Petersburg, KY) embraces dinosaurs and their bones as witnesses to the historicity of the biblical creation narrative. While many have critiqued the institution’s presentation of the past, approaching this space as a memory place reveals previously unrecognized implications that its historical claims entail. In particular, expanding the place of dinosaurs within the Young Earth creationist memory of the past has compelled a parallel diminution in the representation of ancient and modern Jews in exhibits and related literature. In other words, having incorporated paleontology into its theological worldview, the Creation Museum is compelled to present Jews as quixotic fossils with no particular function in the divine plan for history. As the museum’s profile as a memory place for American evangelicals grows, this could undercut the theological foundations that have encouraged robust relations between that group and Jews over the past half-century.

Highlights

Since opening in May 2007 in Petersburg, Kentucky, the Creation Museum has defined itself as a “$27 million, high-tech masterpiece.”[2]. The facility is the brainchild of Ken Ham, co-founder and president of the Christian apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis
This claim stands at the heart of Young Earth Creationism: a particular religio-scientific ideology and counter-cultural movement that claims God created the Earth and all life upon it a little less than 6,000 years ago.[4]
A 2014 Gallop Poll found that more than four in ten Americans affirmed the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”[36]. These findings reveal the potentially broad appeal of an institution that legitimates a Young Earth memory of the past

Summary

The Creation Museum as Memory Place

The subject of public memory offers a productive lens for examining the Creation Museum, due to its outward form and rhetorical goals. It is important to note that the way in which the Creation Museum links its particular scientific and historical arguments to contemporary social issues suggests that its functional horizon as a memory place may extend well beyond those who actively assert such a position on the planet’s age It frames its antievolutionist claims within a much broader framework of the “persistent moral disputes, commonly referred to as culture wars.”[37] As Trollinger and Trollinger summarize, the museum’s displays and associated AiG media “speak on any and all topics of the day: the status of the United States as a Christian nation, gay marriage, the role of women, racism, climate change, public education,” and more.[38]. Consideration of what the museum chooses to forget or remember reveals a connection between the representation of Jews and dinosaurs

Forgetting Jews as Part of the Christian Past

Catastrophe Confusion Christ Cross Consummation

Remembering Dinosaurs as Part of the Christian Past

Conclusion