Righting America

The Trollingers…explore the religious, scientific and political dimensions of the Creation Museum and the beliefs it represents…

The book is not a defense of evolution but a comprehensive critique of the museum and the movement behind it. The writing is measured, devoid of bombast and bile, which makes the book effective as the authors rely on facts and cogent arguments. They describe exhibits that don’t adhere to stated principles, opportunistic applications of Scripture and dubiously employed uses of theology, history and science — all in a facility that douses visitors with a flood of information in a fast-paced environment that obscures the shortcomings. The Trollingers “slow it all down” so readers can more fully understand the Creation Museum.

As the Trollingers observe, one is tempted to dismiss the Creation Museum as a surreal oddity, as something freakish, preposterous, irrelevant, and even wacky.  As a political force, however, the Creation Museum matters, because it “seeks to shape, prepare, and arm millions of American Christians as uncompromising and fearless warriors for what it understand to be the ongoing culture war in America….and all Americans ought to understand what is going on there…The combination of fear, ignorance, large numbers, and high stakes, as the Trollingers itimate, is too explosive to be dismissed.

More than a tour, Righting America is about as thorough and detailed a text-based analysis of the Creation Museum as anyone could want. The book is a perceptive critical analysis of the museum’s purpose, methods, and potential impact.

“Righting America” – the Trollingers’ assessment of the museum’s raison d’être – involves both “correcting” America’s drift away from absolute faith in biblical inerrancy and also championing the right-wing faction of the interminable culture wars. One might have thought that sustained exposure to this worldview would raise the hackles (and blood pressure) of an academic readership, but in fact the material unfolds engagingly because the Trollingers…challenge these ideologies by maximally understanding, dissecting and exposing them, so readers emerge from our deep exposure to this culture feeling triumphant…

Righting America is right, America: we need to figure out – and quickly! – what is going on here.

This is a thorough book, a measured book, a calm and reasonable book. It examines the young Earth Creationism of Answers in Genesis from both a social and a historical perspective, pointing out the gaping flaws in its own internal logic (for instance, placards warning that the physical process of the Flood was unlike anything else in history and placards comparing it to rain washing out a gully are about ten feet away from each other in the same room) and rounding things off with a mild admonition about how far such lunacy strays from the true essence of contemporary Christianity…a comprehensive, you-are-there overview of the center of what Ken Ham clearly hopes to be a network of such faux museums.

The Trollingers might have remembered the days, not too distant historically speaking, when people exactly like Ken Ham would have cut their writing hands off in the public square for writing such a book.

…who would possibly create an entire facility, much less something they would call a museum, dedicated to the idea that not only was the creation story (well, stories, actually) recounted in the Book of Genesis literally correct but that most of the more popular aspects of paleontology, geology, and anthropology could be reconciled with it – or, as needed, refuted by it. And even if someone did actually establish such a thing, who in their right mind would visit it?

…Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. brings the curious and fascinating story of this unique institution to light.