Righting America

by Karen Elizabeth Park

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Ex Voto, Karen’s Substack. We are grateful for her permission to re-post the article here.

Karen Elizabeth Park is a writer and historian who examines religion as a lived and public force. She writes about sacred space, authority, gender, and belief in American life. For any inquiries please contact karenparkwriting@gmail.com.

At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the underlying question is: Do you trust God’s Word in the Bible or the flawed scientific theories of fallen humanity?

At Freedom250 the underlying question is strikingly similar: Do you trust patriotic institutions like PragerU, Hillsdale College, and Freedom250—or the historians, teachers, and scholars who have spent decades complicating America’s founding story?

For nearly twenty years, I taught religious studies, American religious history, and historical theology to college students. On the first day of class, I often told them that my goal was not for them to finish the semester with a set of answers. My goal was for them to leave my classroom able to ask more questions and better ones about history, the church, and even the nature of God, than they could have asked before taking the course. Good books, good art, good science, good theology, and good history ought to raise questions—not insist on settled answers.

Earlier this month, I toured one of the PragerU Freedom Trucks. It was parked outside of a Catholic Freedom 250 rally in LaCrosse, WI that I wrote about for both Religion News Service and National Catholic Reporter. The trucks are billed as “mobile museums” and include lots of screens where, for example, an AI George Washington talks about how this country was founded on Christian principles. PragerU’s website describes its trucks this way:

The New York Times recently did its own in-depth examination of the Freedom Truck exhibit, focusing carefully on the “Wall of Heroes” section in order to notice who is included (lots of white male Christians and baby boomer entertainers) and who is left out (anyone whose achievements might challenge the conservative political imagination). Throughout the Freedom Truck exhibit and the history section of the Freedom 250 website, visitors, both in-person and virtual, are presented with a providential narrative consisting of “answers” about this country without inviting a single question that might encourage authentic historical curiosity.

After touring the Freedom Truck, and exploring the AI online “Founders Museum”, I realized that they were familiar and that I had seen this type of “museum” before—a place which used the trappings of high tech exhibits and the imprimatur of a small cadre of “experts” in the service of the reinforcing pre-determined conclusions, not forming new questions. What the Freedom250 history exhibits reminded me of are the Kentucky Creation Museum and its sister site the Ark Encounter—expensive pseudo-museums designed to reinforce the “truths” held by those who designed and created them. 

I have visited these religious attractions multiple times over the years as part of my research into lived American religion. Like PragerU and Hillsdale College, they are less interested in investigating questions than in affirming answers that are already known. At the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter the subject is evolution; at Freedom250 it is the American founding.

James’ Bielo’s 2018 book Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park describes the goals of the creative team who designed this extraordinarily ambitious destination hoping to “create an immersive experience so successfully that visitors say to themselves: ‘Wow! Maybe that was possible. Maybe that did happen.’”¹ Bielo describes the Ark Encounter design teams imagining the various audiences who would visit Ark Encounter, then voic(ing) the ideological stances they imagined these audiences would take when experiencing particular exhibits.”² In a similar way, the PragerU Freedom Trucks have created an immersive experience shaped for imagined audiences of Americans who are there to hear a particular providential version of America’s founding. George Washington’s actual words are readily available in countless archives—but in the Freedom Truck, his AI avatar and script are wholly imagined.

The Creation Museum’s slogan is “Prepare to Believe,” and while the Ark Encounter is more of an imaginative “Disney-esque” experience (although one where the literal truth of Noah’s Flood is the organizing principle), the Creation Museum, opened in 2007, takes the form of a traditional natural history museum, while simultaneously inverting the purpose of such spaces. There is only one goal at the Creation Museum, to believe the creation story of Genesis as a literal description—and as the slogan makes clear, all the exhibits prepare visitors to believe this.

At the Creation Museum dioramas and displays about the natural world, from insects to dinosaurs to the formation of the Grand Canyon, are presented as superficially interactive museum exhibits. Questions are often posed, but never as open-ended prompts for discovery. For example, here is the question. “Did humans live with dinosaurs?” and the answer provided is: “Yes.” Why? Because “God made Adam and Eve on the same day as land animals (Day 6.) so that means dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.” 

It looks like a museum, but the answers to every prompt have already been answered by a literal reading of Genesis.³

Creation museum question and answer.

In an exhibit about insects, visitors to the Creation Museum are exhorted to “Think Critically!” in this case about how it could be possible that male crickets and female crickets evolved to both make musical sounds and respond to them as part of their mating communication. But here, “thinking critically” turns out to mean its opposite—rejecting the possibility of these traits evolving or trying to understand how, and turning instead to the book of Leviticus 11:22 where God “gave the Hebrews grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids as food.” 

The pseudo-history presented at the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, like that of the Freedom Trucks, is interactive entertainment with an agenda. In one case the story is that God created the world in six days, then flooded it, killing everyone except one family and two of every kind of animal. In the other case, the story is that God specially chose the United States as the greatest nation on earth and then we proceeded to live up to it—always. In both cases, challenges to these narratives are unwelcome and the work of either the ungodly who are not true Christians or “woke leftists” who are not true Patriots. 

In the end, the Freedom Trucks and Freedom250 online Founders museum are no more “historical” than the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. They all present a predetermined understanding of truth under the guise of authentic learning. 

Like the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, the Freedom Trucks are designed to attract families. Many of the visitors I encountered in La Crosse were parents and children experiencing the exhibit together. Outside the truck, I spoke with one such family—a father, mother, and teenage daughter. I asked them each what they thought of the exhibit and then asked the girl if she had learned anything new inside that she hadn’t learned in school. She told me that she hadn’t learned any “real” American history in her public school, but since she and her family watched PragerU history documentaries regularly, she had already learned these truths there. 

Yes, their family “knew the answers already” her mother told me, but it was “good to see them being reinforced.”

Children “learning” at the Creation Museum (left) and PragerU Freedom Truck (right)

Footnotes

1 James S. Bielo, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 26.

2 Bielo, Ark Encounter, 81

3 For a compelling scholarly treatment of the Creation Museum as a form of religious and political storytelling, see Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)