In 2010, as part of a seminar on evolution, creationism, and intelligent design, I took a group of graduate students on a field trip to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Developed by the group Answers in Genesis (AiG), the museum is devoted to the promotion of a literal reading of Genesis. While our visit engendered a lively discussion about the history and goals of the creationist movement, I believe the conversation would have been richer had we had Kathleen C. Oberlin’s fascinating new study, Creating the Creation Museum. Oberlin documents the history of the museum’s origins, AiG’s relationship with the larger creationist movement, and the strategies behind the museum’s architecture and exhibit design. She analyzes the Creation Museum in terms of social movement theory as an example of what she calls “plausibility politics” (14)—that is, the use of the rhetoric of pluralism and inclusion to undermine the cultural authority of a dominant ideology, in this case, secular science.In chapter 1, Oberlin takes readers on a “Walk through the Creation Museum” (21), describing the carefully structured sequence of state-of-the-art exhibits that seek to convince visitors of the reasonableness of the biblical worldview. Exhibits challenge the findings of secular science by asserting that dinosaurs and human beings once coexisted. The ubiquitous presence of dinosaurs throughout the museum serves as a prime plausibility strategy: accept that humans and dinosaurs might have been coeval, then what else might be true? The next exhibits are devoted to the idea biblical inerrancy. They display arguments for a young earth and the historicity of the Flood, all couched in the language of scientific creationism. Finally, visitors are ushered through a kind of “chamber of horrors” depiction of modern secular society, which, it is asserted, can only be saved through a recommitment to Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection are reverently depicted in the last room before the gift shop and the food court.Subsequent chapters investigate the history of the creationist movement in the United States and delve into the specific design choices behind the museum. In a chapter on “Enacting the Museum,” Oberlin illuminates the ways in which the AiG “leverages and mobilizes” (89) traditional museum “aesthetics and conventions” (89) in order to establish the Creation Museum’s legitimacy. Drawing on lessons learned from such places as Chicago’s Field Museum, the Creation Museum employs a wide range of multisensory and interactive “technologies of display” (89). Oberlin argues that these are so familiar from other museums that it is “difficult, possibly even counterintuitive, for the casual visitor to doubt that the [Creation Museum’s] artifacts are authentic and [its] assertions are true” (89). What’s more, the Creation Museum alternates between colorful audiovisual displays that appeal to children and text-heavy “scientific” presentations aimed at adults. With access to the AiG’s archives, Oberlin traced the museum’s evolution over many years of planning, thus underscoring the care, professionalism, and expense that went into its production. This is epitomized in chapter 4, which analyzes one of the museum’s most sophisticated series of exhibits—those focusing on current paleontological understandings of human origins. Using holograms and forensic reconstructions, the exhibits are designed not only to undermine the scientific consensus that the Australopithecus skeleton known as Lucy represents our first bipedal ancestor, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to question the logic of the inferential reasoning that led to this consensus.The big question about the Creation Museum is whether, as the flagship institution of AiG, it has brought sustained public attention to the cause of the Young Earth Creationism Movement. This is the subject of chapter 5, “What Audiences Think of the Creation Museum.” Here, Oberlin mines data from journalistic sources and social media, finding that the Creation Museum since its opening in 2007 has indeed continued to feature in stories from mainstream news and science media outlets. In addition, the museum has generated a steady stream of blog posts on social media. While the majority of these posts are negative, many still rate certain aspects of the museum as highly effective and potentially influential, a vindication of the Creation Museum’s strategic design. In the end, Oberlin concludes that “media attention trends suggest that AiG has succeeded” (192), especially in light of the fact that most social movements in the United States never receive any media coverage. Oberlin reiterates this conclusion in the final chapter, “The Future of Plausibility Politics,” and ends with a discussion of how the Creation Museum’s success influenced the establishment of another expensive evangelical museum, the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.Through its mix of history, ethnography, and social scientific theory, Creating the Creation Museum, is an excellent introduction to an important site on the American religious landscape. The book will be of great interest to anyone working on the history, sociology, and material culture of American religions, as well as those engaged in Public History and Museum Studies. Given its lucid prose and clear methodology, the book will also be extremely useful in graduate seminars on these subjects.