Dinosaurs on Noah’s ark? A MAGA theme park clings to creationism

Creationism hasn’t generated much coverage in the mainstream media over the past decade. The days when fundamentalists challenged scientists to “debates” over evolution now seem quaint in the era of Donald Trump, whose belief is that you never need to persuade when beating your opponents into submission is an option. Under the president’s leadership, the right has shifted from arguing about dinosaur bones and carbon dating to making more blunt demands for book bans and even stripping women of the right to vote.

This is not to say that evangelicals’ attachment to creationism has gone away, even if it has faded from mainstream discourse. This week, one of the most elaborate and ridiculous bits of Christian right propaganda, Kentucky’s Ark Encounter, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Readers who might be unaware of this facility should imagine an amusement park minus the fun and whimsy.

The centerpiece of the spectacle is what purports to be a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark, complete with dinosaurs living among humans, because that’s the only way fundamentalists can justify their belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. The anniversary’s festivities include hellfire-and-damnation preachers, a play about prisoners of war in World War II and a speech by the guy who owns Hobby Lobby, a program that apparently passes for children’s entertainment in white evangelical circles.

At first blush, the continued existence of the Ark Encounter and its host institution, the Creation Museum is confusing. During George W. Bush’s presidency, there were repeated efforts to force public schools to teach Genesis in science classes, but after losing a 2005 federal trial that exposed how clownish creation “science” truly is, the Christian right mostly abandoned those efforts. Internal messaging aimed at evangelicals, though, has stayed strong in pushing the view that evolutionary biology is false and that God really did create the world in seven literal days. And so it is that the Ark Encounter, which was built at the tail end of Barack Obama’s administration, continues to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, even as its traffic has been declining.

The park’s true purpose is essentially to preach to the choir — to create propaganda for the evangelical community, feeding their narrative that they’re victims of a grand conspiracy against their religious beliefs. This became clear when the Ark Encounter’s founder Ken Ham threw a tantrum in response to what any reasonable person would see as soft-glove coverage of the anniversary. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Jolene Almendarez wrote a story that mostly highlighted how the facility draws religious tourists to northern Kentucky. But being a decent reporter, she also made sure to quote the popular educator Bill Nye the Science Guy, who correctly pointed out that creationism is “anti-science.” In response, Ham recorded a video telling Almendarez to shut up because “no one asked your opinion” and she has no “expertise in science.”

“But who decides which scientists are credible?” Ham asked. “Is a scientist no longer credible simply because he or she believes Genesis?”

Almendarez did reach out to an expert by asking Nye, who has decades of experience educating the public about what is and isn’t science. But Ham’s gambit is insulting on another level, because this is also a common sense issue. One doesn’t need advanced degrees to know that evolutionary biology is a science and “because the Bible says so” is not. As Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist explained, “there aren’t two sides” here, because one side is backed by scientists who “know what they’re talking about” and the other is “fundamentalist Christians and the people they’ve duped.”

(Luke Sharrett /For The Washington Post via Getty Images) Replica vegetables grow just blow deck inside a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark at The Ark Encounter.

This imbalance is why creationists have abandoned most efforts to force their ideology into schools. The more they put themselves up for public debate in places like courtrooms and legislatures, the more evident it became that creationism was based on nothing deeper than “because the Bible said so.”  They really didn’t want a debate that allowed people to hear from both “sides.” Because once the case was laid out — without rhetorical trickery and with plain facts, such as “dinosaurs were real, here are the fossils” — the Christian right’s arguments collapsed.

Evangelicals, though, no longer need to take their case to the public to bolster their cultural narrative of religious oppression in a hostile, humanist world. Because going to a place like the Ark Encounter is not about fun, and it’s certainly not about learning. It’s about standing around an exhibit featuring a statue of a dinosaur inside a replica of Noah’s ark and riling yourself up about a secular, godless world in which scientists promote, well, science.

In many ways, the silliness of creationism is the point. I recently discovered this firsthand, after I covered evangelical podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey in a column and on my YouTube show “Standing Room Only.” Most of my focus was on how she promotes a view of Christianity that is overtly hostile to empathy, so much so that she even wrote a book titled “Toxic Empathy.” But in her outraged response, Stuckey became most emotional over an aside in which I mocked her for denying that dinosaurs existed millions of years before humans.

(Luke Sharrett /For The Washington Post via Getty Images) Replica dinosaurs are pictured in a cage onboard a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark at The Ark Encounter.

Turns out this is an entire schtick for Stuckey. She makes videos “questioning” the existence of dinosaurs and then lashes out at the people who inevitably make fun of her for this. However sincere she is with her beliefs, it’s hard not to notice that the whole merry-go-round is profitable, drawing in views and bonding her more tightly with her evangelical audience in a shared sense of victimhood.

For white evangelicals, claims of Christian persecution are crucial to their tribal identity and to providing moral justification for their behavior toward those they perceive as different and suspect. Leaders of the Christian right understand that a sense of collective humiliation is a useful organizing tool that keeps their followers in a state of perpetual grievance and alienation from the rest of the public — and causes them to stick more tightly together. That’s why Ham is swift to insist he’s being taunted, even when he’s not. The “woe is me” act draws in plenty of followers and funds, which certainly helps soothe the hurt feelings of having smarter people dunk on you for putting dinosaur statues on a fake ark.