Abstract
In northern Kentucky a cross-denominational, “fundamental” Christian apologetics ministry known as Answers in Genesis (AiG) operates the Creation Museum, an interactive public attraction dedicated to the defense of a young-earth creationist worldview. Using a combination of religious and scientific discourse, this organization variously shifts its stance with respect to visitors from a conveyer of religious authority to an exemplar of scientific knowledge. In combating evolutionist ideas, they explicate an epistemological scheme that sets religio-philosophical ways of knowing at a different discursive level than the scientific process. At the former level, two different axiomatic ways of approaching the world are differentiated—referred to by AiG as “God’s Word,” the witness testimony of God as collected in the Bible, and “Man’s Word,” a hubristic set of human-made starting points. Both sets are acknowledged to be assumptions—tinted lenses through which physical evidence of human and cosmic origins is interpreted—and, consequently, biblical creation comes to occupy an equal level as secular evolution. This metapragmatic regimentation aims to effect a change in interlocutors’ beliefs and stances toward creationism. At the same time, AiG enacts a soteriological narrative centered on sin, death, and redemption through the emplotment of visitors’ everyday lives onto a religious teleology. Synthesizing these two functions, I argue that the Creation Museum can be read as a mechanism for reinforcing a particular religious framework—glossed as “God’s Word” and embedded within this larger epistemological scheme. I examine the operations of this discourse in two interrelated settings: AiG and an independent Baptist congregation in the vicinity of the Creation Museum. In both places a single cultural system reinforces the epistemology and religious narrative unique to this brand of creationism, and in the process a well-defined notion of the creationist self is developed in opposition to the secular “other” outside the community.