A Literal Ark for a Figurative Storm by Martyn Smith

A Literal Ark for a Figurative Storm

Martyn Smith

Preface

At the center of this visual essay is a description of what it’s like to walk through two institutions of Young Earth Creationism. Creationists believe that the account of primeval history in the Book of Genesis should be understood as a literally true account. This renders the Earth and all its biological life as somewhat over 6000 years old. These two Creationist institutions are located in northern Kentucky. The Creation Museum opened in 2007 in Petersburg; the Ark Encounter in 2016 in Williamstown. Both institutions reflect the vision of Ken Ham, a prolific writer and president of the Christian non-profit organization Answers in Genesis.

This essay is a critique of Creationism in the form of a travel narrative, and it’s important at the outset to understand this format. This isn’t an analysis of the scientific claims made at the sites (tedious since these claims are clearly false), nor does this essay delve into the backstory or the political machinations that led to the construction of these multimillion dollar institutions (the work of a documentary with lots of talking heads). Rather, this essay is a “close reading” of these two sites and the way they construct a way of thinking about Christianity and the Earth. This means paying attention to the layout of exhibits and their signs, along with ephemera such as the t-shirts and bumper stickers available

in the gift shops. Other Kentucky sites such as Big Bone Lick State Historical Site, Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, and the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani—visited during this same trip—are allowed to briefly give voice to a counterperspective on natural history, democratic culture, and spirituality. The genre of travel writing raises the possibility of a critique arising from physical context.

It’s easy to fall into a dismissive tone when writing about Young Earth Creationism. The claims for a young Earth and a recent worldwide flood are false, and I refuse to act as if there’s any scientific argument. But because I grew up in an Evangelical family, and attended Evangelical schools at the elementary and college levels, I’m sensitive to how powerful such arguments can be for those inside. Since leaving Evangelicalism in my early 20s I’ve continued to be an observer of the movement. In the past I’ve shrugged and wondered if it’s really so worrisome if some people hold false views about the origin of life. But Creationism’s skepticism regarding science has seeped into our discussions on climate change, and so these views threaten our planet. Creationism also shapes the way a large number of people experience modern society and Democracy. This visual essay concludes with my deep hope that we will discover a green cross.

Sites in Kentucky

Cincinnati, Ohio Louisville, Kentucky Lexington, Kentucky Creation Museum Ark Encounter Big Bone Lick State Historic Site Bardstown Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park OhioRiver

In the summer of 2019 my wife and I visited the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Both are located in northern Kentucky, not far from Ohio. Both are associated with Answers in Genesis, an organization dedicated to promoting the idea that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago. The name for this set of beliefs is Young Earth Creationism, and it’s based on a literal reading of the creation account in Genesis along with some other passages in the Bible. It wasn’t a point of view that we found intellectually appealing, but since these beliefs are so widespread in America and shape views of the planet Earth, they seemed worth trying to understand. What makes this set of beliefs attractive to so many

Americans? The Creation Museum was no cheap stop on a middle class family vacation. It didn’t quite equal Disney World in Florida for outrageous prices, but a combo ticket for the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter would cost an adult $75 and children either $25 or $45. Lucky for me it was Father’s Day so I got in for free! These Creationist sites weren’t

located within a large urban population center, but in rural Kentucky. The goal was to be a day’s drive from major cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington DC. At the Creation Museum and later at the Ark Encounter we noticed a willingness to undermine the idea of ecosystems. If all the ecosystems of the Earth came into existence in just 6,000 years, then there are no deeply rooted bio-communities. The Creation Museum often presented odd juxtapositions of living things.

This bronze dinosaur near the entrance wasn’t meant to give visitors info about a creature extinct for millions of years, but to get them used to imagining that not long ago such creatures were part of everyday human experience. The

opening gambit for the Creation Museum was the suggestion that “dragon legends” from various cultures might reflect the experience or at least the historic memory of actual dinosaurs. “Are they myths or could there be some truth to these legends?” the signs asks, and we are meant to imagine the latter. That’s at the very least an irresponsible notion since zero evidence points to the coexistence of extinct dinosaurs with humans. Signs just a bit further on point visitors to descriptions of dragons (not eyewitness accounts) by medieval writers like Marco Polo or John of Damascus. And so dinosaurs are presented as a genuine human memory erased by the acid-like skepticism of modern science. If I were to

show people this image, most would plug it into a long series of quest legends where a hero confronts and slays a dragon (perhaps a fire-breathing one). Some Christians might recall the story of St. George and the Dragon. The interconnection of all these legends might be a matter of speculation for a historian, but the Creation Museum sees something else

afoot. Visitors are asked to see this image as a version of historical events: warriors once actually slayed dinosaurs. Chinese legends describe a flying dragon known as a feilong. The entrance hall to the Creation Museum featured this dragon, along with red paper lanterns hung from the ceiling. One result of literal interpretation is that one never has to think about context. Words and images can be lifted from their setting and bluntly inserted into some other time and place. This dragon and these lanterns lead to zero discussions about Chinese culture and what these things meant to people in the past and present. The stories are literalized: this must be how the ancient Chinese portrayed dinosaurs! At

the end of the entrance hall we came to this info desk and photo stop. A large pterosaur hung over the area. Since this pterosaur appears right after that traditional Chinese dragon, the point seemed to be that this was the type of dinosaur that could give rise to such dragon legends in the past. We’ll continue to see that the Creation Museum does a lot of work by means of suggestion, and this is an example. For many families a visit to the Creation Museum was such an event that they were happy to stand for a photo in front of a green screen, and later buy the souvenir portrait with dinosaurs filled into that blank background. The deepest intellectual commitment of the Creation Museum is that the

Bible is “authoritative, without error, and inspired by God.” That’s the starting point for all reasoning about the Earth and biological life. This ends up committing a group of believers to constant fabrication. That might be the intellectual substance, but we should take note of the stylistic presentation of these ideas too. The Creation Museum makes use of a jovial cartoon realism. In this image a biblical writer sits in what we easily recognize as an office. Modern furnishings like a bookshelf or desk have been cast into older materials, but there’s no imaginative work beyond this basic translation of modern stuff into older materials, nor any reach to create something imaginative or beautiful. The museum opens

into a high-ceilinged space that has at its center this wooly mammoth fossil. On its website the Creation Museum labels itself as “the Anti-Museum.” Presumably it aims to separate itself from natural history museums that teach scientific accounts of the evolution of life. But however much the Creation Museum wants to stand apart, it works to replicate popular museum exhibits of large extinct animals. The wonder of traditional natural history displays has to be captured one way or another. But without any time deep time differentiators (Ice Age, Jurassic Period) all these grand animals exist as standalone examples of one single act of creation. The most haunting display in the Creation Museum sits along

the edge of that same central museum space that holds the mammoth. Among some plastic greenery and fake rock sits a young girl with two small dinosaurs nearby. The friendliness between humans and animals must mean that this is a pre-Fall version of the world. It’s a view of “the way things were meant to be.” But the goal here is to portray humans and dinosaurs as coexisting with one another. That’s jarring because all evidence points to the extinction of dinosaurs (with the exception of birds) more than 60 million years ago. But evidence is dismissed and suggestion reigns in this visual display. I called this scene of a young girl with dinosaurs “haunting.” It wasn’t anything about the scene itself, but

the way it was being casually consumed by young visitors to the museum. The notion that humans and dinosaurs lived together isn’t argued for here, but simply presented as fact. The idea thus becomes naturalized by kids like these, whose matching t-shirts hinted that they were part of some church group or school making a summer trip to this anti-museum. The presence of so many kids made me sad, but I always remember that I grew up in a household and church that were thoroughly Creationist. It’s possible finally to break away from these falsehoods, and some of these kids will do that, just as I once did. But many of them will continue to hold onto these ideas through a false notion of loyalty to a movement

that lied to them. The main argument of the Creation Museum is easy to state: the diverse forms of life in our world didn’t arise from a common origin point and then diversify through a series of small changes driven by natural selection, rather all types of life were specially created by God about six thousand years ago. Darwin proposed a tree of life (which has become bushier as biologists fill it in), but Creationists propose an “orchard.” This orchard represents a series of special creations inaugurated by God in the days of creation. It’s hard to detect in the Creation Museum a passion for understanding nature. No one would confuse the experience of this museum with a David Attenborough nature

documentary. But if it’s hard to pick out moments of curiosity about nature, it’s exceedingly easy to feel the passion for granting “man” his rightful place. Human beings are set apart from the rest of the creation orchard, granted this unique place by virtue of being made in God’s image. A simple straight line defines man’s historical existence (nevermind all we’re

learning now about Neanderthals and other extinct hominid species). Leaving the central hall, visitors entered the exhibit space proper. The Creation Museum led off with a series of dioramas telling the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis chapters 2 and 3. The museum was crowded with people (no one could have guessed that in one year the world would be in Covid lockdown!). It’s possible there were other visitors who (like us) were undercover non-believers, but from the serious attention and Evangelical street wear it appeared that most felt like they were learning the Truth. Our challenge was not to scoff, but to try to understand what they were learning about humanity and its role on the Earth.

This is one example of the Adam and Eve dioramas. Straight ahead Adam sits in nameless plastic greenery as a diverse group of animals step toward him. The bright sign provides the verses from Genesis where we read that God brought animals to Adam, who then bestowed names on them. The purpose of a diorama in a natural history museum is to provide the absent ecological context for the animals represented. Here the form of the natural history diorama is borrowed, but its educational value is squandered. Adam is surrounded by a group of “wild” animals that wouldn’t gather in any natural setting. The plants too aren’t part of any particular ecosystem. This diorama doesn’t build

understanding, but encourages fantasy. Before long we came to Adam and Eve in their sinless perfection in Eden. It was a scene that had to be part of the story, but which fit awkwardly as a subject for the young Evangelicals brought here by the busload with their matching t-shirts. John Milton showed the potential of this scene in Paradise Lost where he criticized those who were embarrassed by the joys of sex: “Whatever hypocrites austerely talk/ Of purity and place and innocence,/ Defaming as impure what God declares/ Pure...” And Milton actually named the green plants in this divinely sanctioned bower: laurel and myrtle, acanthus, roses and jessamine. Not the wild plants of a forest, but the cultivated

plants of a tended garden. I felt pretty sure that no one connected to the Creation Museum had read Paradise Lost, or much else in the rich Christian tradition of interpreting Genesis. The museum exuded a brittle confidence that biblical words could be translated into a simple account of events. Smaller notes set up alongside the direct Genesis citations made the salient contemporary points. That diorama of pre-Fall Adam and Eve wasn’t an argument about the goodness of bodily existence, but instead a proof text for marriage as an institution between one man and one woman (no room for LGBTQ relationships!). These first two humans had no real value for the museum other than scoring points in our

ongoing bitter culture war. When we arrived at the scene of Adam and Eve sharing the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, I marvelled at the exquisitely threatening forbidden fruit. Growing up I remember being told that there’s no reason to identify the fruit as an apple, but visual artists have tended toward that simple fruit. Paintings and prints of Adam and Eve by 17th century painter Lucas Cranach the Elder show a plain apple. John Milton just calls it a “fair enticing fruit.” The creators of these museum dioramas, perhaps out of a desire to avoid following any tradition, ironically chose the route of total fiction to convince us of how rigorous they are taking the literal words of the Bible. The

Creation Museum hastens to explain that this one act of disobedience on the part of our two first parents led to horrible events like war and the Holocaust. To make this point the designers move away from Genesis into the more crabbed theological arguments of Paul in the Book of Romans. Standing now at such a far remove from this Evangelical viewpoint, I found it difficult to try on this point of view once again. In the Creation Museum we didn’t see a world that has problems, but where humans can nevertheless take small actions to improve it or contribute to society. We are here to recognize the fallenness of this world and locate our escape route to heaven. Great evil in this world raises no deep

shock, but a desire to flee. The story of Noah and the worldwide flood followed the Adam and Eve scenes. This information was conveyed in another tried and true museum format: the scale model behind a glass pane. The animals are shown miraculously approaching the Ark two by two. You see the elephants and giraffes on their way up the incline, but look closely and you’ll see two long-necked dinosaurs as well. The museum format (as opposed to cartoon images) conveys the message that this is something real, knowable. Since the model Ark comes after that discussion of sin and its damage, it symbolizes an Evangelical view of life in this world: hunker down and await the storm. I prefer to think of the biblical

flood story as an ecological fable, and I’m not the only one. In her book Rising Elizabeth Rush examines the effects of rising sea levels from climate change. Given that topic how could she not take a sidelong glance at the story of Noah?

“What interests me most is what happens when I remove it from its religious framework: Noah’s flood is one of the most fully developed accounts of environmental change in ancient history.” The Creation Museum has no use for fables, and in its drive to literalize the Bible it peeks into awful corners: like the act of God to wipe out all other human beings by this flood. The Creation Museum embraces the notion that “we alone are saved” and expresses no tears or ethical anxiety

about the loss of human life. The flood is more important than the initial act of divine creation for Young Earth Creationists since it is useful for explaining so many geological features in our world today. For example, where do “fossil fuels” come from? The scientific consensus is that most coal beds were laid down in the Carboniferous and Permian periods, about 360-250 million years ago. As vast amounts of carbon was buried and subjected to millions of years of pressure, beds of coal formed. The Creation Museum explains this and other geologic features (like the Grand Canyon) by falling back on one singular (and impossible) worldwide flood that buried stuff and carved up the Earth. Once committed to a literal

reading of Genesis, it’s hard to disentangle oneself from emerging absurdities. A lot of space in the Creation Museum is devoted to explaining away problems that most readers of the Bible would never think about. Carnivorous animals were actually created vegetarian (at least two signs explain this issue). When Noah is commanded to build the ark he is told by God to “cover it inside and out with pitch.” The easiest way to understand “pitch” would be as bitumen, a naturally occurring fossil fuel byproduct. But how could there be bitumen before the Flood had created what we know as fossil fuels? So a detail that readers skip over becomes a problem that must be discussed with a level of seriousness it doesn’t

deserve. Every Christian movement has its favorite verses from the Bible. For Evangelicals the choice would have to be John 3.16. Why the attraction to this verse in particular? It sets God up as a loving God (accentuate the positive!). Love was the motivation for sending Jesus into the world to die. The upshot is that “whosoever believes” gets eternal life. This sets the path of salvation in the hands of individuals, with no mention of an institution like the church or a nation. For Evangelicals this verse is the best foot forward. It’s the place those who are curious about the Bible are told to look first. The Creation Museum lovingly frames this verse near the end of its main exhibit. In this conclusion the Creation Museum

begins to function more like an old-time religious tract than a museum. John 3.16 might be centered on that wall, but the stakes of “perishing” are made clear nearby with this literal imagining of the “lake of fire” from the Book of Revelation. There’s something so disgusting about this image on its face that I have little to add. The Creation Museum is not about

love of this world, but about saving us from the world. In the gift store for the Creation Museum I found merchandise such as this t-shirt. The obvious implication is that the rainbow has been taken over as a symbol for LGBTQ rights, and somehow that use diminishes the “true” meaning of the rainbow as a sign that “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” God’s promise in Genesis is meant as a sign of hope: humanity can trust the seasons and cycles of life without fear. I don’t see how rainbow flags on doorsteps or at store entrances interfere with our appreciation for actual rainbows in the sky. The culture war concerns are far too up-to-the-minute to let the Creation Museum take on

eevn the appearance of a serious museum. Ken Ham is the personality behind the Creation Museum and the nearby Ark Encounter (to which we will come). He earned a bachelor’s degree in applied science in Australia in the 1970s. He realized his opposition to evolution, and proceeded to dedicate his career to getting the Young Earth Creationist message out through books and lectures that point out problems in evolutionary theory and warn of cultural decay. His two debates about evolution with Bill Nye “The Science Guy” were widely publicized—the DVDs are prominently on sale here. While Ken Ham is a successful CEO and marketer of Creationist ideas, he evinces no love for the natural world or

engagement with any of its particulars in his works. Charles Darwin acquires the role of villain in the Creation Museum.

This portrait appears in the course of the main exhibit, along with his quick 1837 sketch of a tree where he first notes his idea of species evolution by natural selection. Those words “I think” have always seemed to me a classic example of science

grappling with the facts of the world, but for the Creation Museum those words are a sign of weakness, a falling away from the all important “answers” that should characterize Christians who believe the words of the Bible. In the gift shop the struggle against Charles Darwin continued. “Was Darwin Right?” This DVD cover promised “ you choose.” We would be led to an answer by Terry Mortenson (pictured), whose bio on the Answers in Genesis website is filled with descriptions of tireless missionary work. Darwin’s memoir was filled with details about nature. He tells about his passion for collecting beetles. He once discovered in some bark two rare beetles, and grabbed them. Then he saw a third beetle and, lacking

enough hands, he put a beetle in his mouth in order to grab that third one. When the beetle in his mouth released an acrid fluid, he had to spit it out, and lost it! That was his intensity for living things. A few months after visiting the Creation Museum in Kentucky I visited Down House a little ways outside London. This is the house where Charles Darwin and his family lived from 1842 until his death in 1882. If the signal event of Darwin’s early adulthood was his five-year round-the-world voyage on the HMS Beagle, then his middle and late adulthood was marked by domestic stillness in this house. It was here at Down House that he wrote On the Origin of the Species, The Descent of Man, and many other

works. The house is now maintained by English Heritage, its rooms restored to their appearance during Darwin’s prime writing years. The best part of the interior of Down House was this study. That is the actual chair where Darwin would work when not laid up by illness. In front of the chair is a cloth-covered writing board that Darwin would set upon the arms of his chair as a convenient writing surface. The constant use of that board wore down the arms of his chair. He rested his feet on that padded stool. Wheels were added to the chair so that he could easily move to look at specimens or books laid out on the tables. The tables were composed by curators to match the photos we have of Darwin at work

and the scene as a whole evokes a pragmatic industriousness, all set within a bustling family home. The greenhouse was short walk from the main house. It was built in the 1860s so that Darwin could conduct experiments on orchids, insectivorous plants, and climbing plants. Visitors are allowed to take their time in the space, looking at the kinds of plants that spurred Darwin’s intellect. The greenhouse looked out onto an open-air garden filled with rows of plants.

Greenhouse and garden build a sympathy for this mind that flowed in and around the particulars of our entangled bank of living things. In his autobiography Darwin recalled how he gave up sport and shooting for the “pleasure of observing

and reasoning” on the world right in front of him. One peculiar pleasure of travel is the idea that one is walking in the footsteps of people you admire. At Down House I felt this keenly along the sandwalk that ran a quarter mile circuit. Darwin had this walk installed along the property border a few years after his move here in 1842. It was his “thinking path” where he could clear his mind or think through a problem. At times his children accompanied him. No doubt the pastures and trees have changed since those decades in the 19th century, but this was the exact landscape that saturated his mind as he pondered his immense theory about the origin of all living things. Darwin sketched his “I Think” tree in

1837, some five years before he moved into Down House. But since the actual writing up of this theory in On the Origin of Species took place here, tote bags, coasters, and even t-shirts decorated with this “I think” journal image are for sale in the gift shop. In his autobiography Darwin notes “I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame,”

and Down House gives no indication of a man in pursuit of wealth or fame. Darwin was no marketing genius. The message of the Creation Museum, on the other hand, reflects the content of an Evangelical sermon, right down to specific Bible verses, though it does deliver some museum-like stuff when it comes to fossils. This Allosaurus fossil (named Ebenezer) came to the Creation Museum as a gift valued at $1 million from conservative activist Michael Peroutka. This Michael Peroutka is a Neo-Confederate and former member of the League of the South, a group advocating Southern secession. With every step into this museum (and Google search about its supporters) we don’t encounter

people fascinated by the natural world, but those who have a present day political message to spread through the vehicle of Creationism. I tried to understand the purpose of this dinosaur “leg bone” display. It allowed kids to touch a real fossil, and somehow this demonstrated that the Creation Museum isn’t anti-science (“We acknowledge the existence of fossils!”). The notes around the fossil dispense with scientific inquiry. The sign asks, “Can you tell how old this fossil is?” Visitors get three clues, each one pointing toward the Bible as the best possible evidence. Clue #2 gives a straight answer: “The Bible says God created everything in 6 days. He created people and land animals on Day 6. Dinosaurs are

land animals, so they were created on Day 6.” The primary tool here for reasoning about the world is the collection of ancient texts we know as the Bible. The Creation Museum works from this “inerrant” book back to the natural world.

Since a literal reading of the Bible can’t be questioned, all intellectual effort gets poured into explaining how details of the natural world fit that account. In the case of this fossil, arguments about the age of the Earth or the time it’d take to actually create a fossil are ignored, and the biblical account delivers the answer. It’s no wonder that Ken Ham named his non-profit religious organization “Answers in Genesis,” because his methodology is literally to start with the answer and

reason back to the question. The Creation Museum is based on the idea that a literal reading of Genesis is the only way to understand the history of life on Earth. As it happens, in my course Understanding Religion I always ask students to think through the six days of creation as described in Genesis 1. The plain meaning of the text is where I start. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light... and God separated the light from the darkness.” Think for a moment: what sort of cosmos could have light without the sun? The sun isn’t created until Day 4, where it’s put in place to “rule the day.” This demotion of the sun so far down in the creation order is a hint that Genesis is offering a theological account

aimed at preventing early readers from taking the sun as a divinity. I like to teach Genesis with a plain chalkboard since the account lends itself to simple diagrams. Day 2 starts with God’s speech: “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” Careful readers will note that water isn’t created, but present with darkness from the beginning. God’s first step in fashioning the Earth is a grand separation of waters. A vast, solid dome (“firmament” in the King James Version) separates oceans of water on Earth from oceans of water above that dome. With this act of division a vast space for further creation is opened up, but this corresponds to no possible

modern way of understanding the Earth and its atmosphere. That ocean of water held up by a dome simply doesn’t exist. Day 3 brings another major division when God speaks, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear.” The dry land becomes “Earth” and the water “Seas.” A second event gets crammed into this day: the appearance of vegetation, “plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind...” We can start with the fact that it’s impossible to imagine vegetation without the sun’s light. But the presence of flowering plants before any animal is also way out of evolutionary order, as pointed out by Stephen Jay Gould in his essay “Genesis and Geology.” On

Day 3 we have a planet Earth sitting alone in the cosmos without sun, moon, and stars. But flowering plants are starting to grow on the land. Day 4 describes a single major event, the addition of “lights in the dome of the sky.” These include “the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night” (strangely the words “sun” and “moon” aren’t used at all). The smaller lights that we know as stars are included since the purpose of the lights is to serve as “signs and for seasons and for days and years.” All these lights are placed “in the dome” (remember that vast oceans still sit above the dome). The book of Genesis doesn’t imagine an impossibly vast interstellar space for the sun and far more distant

stars, but understands them to exist within that stable dome that holds up the waters. From our perspective this creation of the lights in the sky on Day 4 is the single grandest act in creation. We know now that the pinprick lights in the night sky are often stars or galaxies thousands or millions of light years distant. The sun is a massive ball of plasma produced by continuous nuclear fusion, and it’s so large that it could contain 330,000 Earths. Genesis sets all the stars, planets, even the sun itself into that dome holding up oceans of water. Their stated purpose is to serve as “signs and for seasons and for days and years.” In other words they serve as a kind of celestial timepiece for the creature that will come at the

end of Day 6, who will turn out to be quite good at processing symbols. Every creature in the sea and birds of the air are created on Day 5. The living creatures of the land, both cattle and wild animals, are created on Day 6. These last two days are used to fill out the biosphere. In a final act of creation God makes human beings “in his image.” He commands human beings to multiply and fill the earth and grants them dominion over every other living thing. Human beings are created in the image of God, and so in some non-specified way they are set apart from other forms of life on Earth. On the Day 7 God rests, and so the seven day week and Sabbath become part of the cosmic story. The upshot is that humans exist

as part of the created world but also separate (not as a branch on Darwin’s dense evolutionary tree). Human beings relate themselves to God and follow his lead in keeping the Sabbath. The Creation Museum wasn’t prepared to relax with a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis, but was intent on supplementing those words with expensive digital imagery. One conspicuous item in the gift shop was the film Genesis: Paradise Lost (2017), available here as a 4-disc set that allowed for a variety of viewing formats. At the heart of the film was a digital portrayal of God’s work of creation in six days, complete with voiceover and rousing orchestral music. This pricey animation was screened at regular intervals

for visitors to the Creation Museum, but the full version included interview snippets from Creationists mixed into the story. I was curious how a modern digital version of Genesis would account for the dome that separated the waters on Day 2. More than anything else this detail represents an archaic way of thinking about the cosmos, so how could it be translated into a visual language that would make sense to people who have seen images of the Earth from space? Day 2 begins with a grand oceanic stirring and finally columns of water rose from the roiled waters. Maybe this movie version would be suitably cosmic after all? But soon these columns of water soon resolved into mere cloud covering. Since the

upper waters of Genesis plainly lie behind the celestial lights, Day 2 can’t be simplified into the appearance of clouds. The creation account of Genesis is unquestionably geocentric. The first acts of creation begin with the Earth, and the entirety of the vast cosmos was created on Day 4. No Young Earth Creationist would claim that the sun orbits the Earth, but they are committed to the view that the whole cosmos was a conceptual afterthought to the Earth. In the digital animation of Genesis: Paradise Lost we see animations of interstellar clouds and stars popping into existence on Day 4. On Earth the sky is now filled with stars, whose light is instantaneously present. Nevermind that this light carries a reality

thousands or millions of years in the past, and so that light would constitute a grand lie. The human writer of Genesis couldn’t know the universe as we do now, but worked to make theological points by demoting competitors like the sun and moon. The writer portrayed a basic order in the biosphere by making creation move from plants to fish to birds to land animals to human beings. The seven day week is accounted for by the days of creation. The result was a cosmos in which human beings could feel at home. But Creationists must invent a past to explain creatures like dinosaurs that ancient writers couldn’t imagine, and they act like it’s plausible that the greatest carnivore that ever walked on Earth

lived on fruit and vegetables until the fall of human beings. The Creation Museum was opened in 2007 and cost about $27 million to build. Inside the museum I came across this wall with the names of donors at various levels. I saw none of the foundations or corporations that would headline a donor list at a civic institution such as a large art museum or theater.

This museum was privately funded, and donations were entirely from individuals or families. I could well imagine that no corporation would want their name attached to such a culturally divisive place. The people giving money to the Creation Museum for the most part had names difficult to trace even on the internet (John Collins, the Cook family). Other names offered better search possibilities, such as Samuel Butzbach, whose name I located on a LinkedIn profile for a military analyst: “A leader with 30-plus years of successful executive level management experience in project management, supervision, and training development...” I found an obituary for donor Kathy Anne Bishop, which noted

she had worked as a school food nutritionist and volunteered for Christian groups like Gideon’s International and the Good News Club. In the parking lot we came across this van sent by the Harmony Baptist Church of Newbern, Tennessee.

That’s a city with a population of just 3,300 people, and I see on Facebook that the church is tiny. But members of the church (perhaps a youth group?) had made this trek here to this outpost of Creationism firmly opposed to the consensus of scientists in research positions across the nation. A few years prior to our trip to the Creation Museum my wife and I had visited a megachurch in our Wisconsin city. About 3-5,000 people attend services at this church on Sundays. In its

small library we saw many books and movies connected to Ken Ham and his Answers in Genesis organization. Much of this material was squarely aimed at children and worked to build a simple and unified religious history of the Earth. We woefully underestimate the extent to which Creationist ideas flow throughout our nation and build skepticism toward

scientific research. From the Creation Museum we started out for the Ark Encounter further south in Kentucky. This would be our second Creationist site of the day. On the way we saw brown signs for Big Bone Lick State Historic Site. We had to drive a ways off our route, and as humorous as this name was, it became even funnier as we drove through the nearby town of Beaverlick. This site was called the “Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology” since Thomas Jefferson had sent William Clark here in 1807 on an official bone-gathering expedition. The bones preserved here were from great Ice Age megafauna like mastodons, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats. A trail around Big Bone Lick State

Park gave visitors a glimpse of the natural conditions that had caused the deposits of bones. Animals were drawn to these marshy springs because of the natural deposits of the salt their bodies craved. Once in the marshy area they were apt to get caught and become unable to escape. These great mammals (no dinosaurs, of course) were buried in muddy areas such as this. These are “bones” since they have been buried only for tens of thousands of years, and not for millions of years like actual fossils. This marshy landscape gained renown for the early glimpse it afforded of great mammals that no longer existed in North America or elsewhere. How they fit into the natural history of North America

was a mystery. The visitor center itself was modest, thugh no one could miss the full ground sloth skeleton in its center, and other exhibits along the walls transformed this space into a tiny museum. There was an educational event on this day, so volunteers and sellers ran booths inside and outside the visitor center. State park workers stood at the main desk to advise visitors on trails around the site. Some families had come out for this event, but there were far fewer people here than at the Creation Museum. It felt discouraging that here where there was a vivid and true story to tell about natural history there was such a deficit in resources and support for telling that story to the public. One of the first

written accounts of Big Bone Lick was the 1775 travel journal of Nicholas Cresswell. He recounted how he and others stripped off their clothes and after grabbing around in the muddy pond brought up huge teeth and bones. He even found a fragment of an ivory tusk, making it obvious that elephants had once ranged over this land. Today we know these extinct elephant relatives as mastodons. The visitor center had created a diorama with a life-sized buffalo and a background painting of the Ice Age flora and fauna of these Kentucky hills. Having just left the Creation Museum I felt keenly the structural imbalance of being required to stick with reality. I want to expand on this notion of a structural

imbalance. Creationists are free to mix and match landscapes and animals. The Creation Museum had an Ice Age wooly mammoth skeleton in its central hall, but it could add a pterodactyl flying above. Whatever creatures made for the coolest scene could be mixed together. This outdoor display at Big Bone Lick State Park illustrated how Ice Age animals got caught in the springs, but the site is careful to present only animals that inhabited one time and place. And though this counts as a quality display for a state park, it’s far less captivating and eye-grabbing than the scenes at the Creation Museum. We underfund the civic infrastructure for telling and re-telling the story of life on Earth, and so we shouldn’t

be surprised at the success of a total fiction in winning popular attention. It took just 30 minutes to drive from Big Bone Lick to the Ark Encounter, a costly Creationist theme park concentrating on the story of Noah and the worldwide flood.

Needless to say, Ark Encounter took the position that the flood story was a literal record of a true event. If anyone were to pick up a book by Charles Darwin, say Voyage of the Beagle, the chief attribute that would strike a reader is his limitless curiosity about the natural world. Something of that same curiosity comes through even at small sites devoted to natural history. But at these Creationist sites the true passion is evident even in the parking lot: contemporary politics

as diffracted through the culture wars. The main attraction at the Ark Encounter is a full-scale model of the biblical ark. Since the ark has to hold at least a pair of every species that has ever existed, it has to be huge. The Ark Encounter is also a business, and so they can’t allow non-paying travelers to just stop along the highway and get a view of their massive ark. So they built a ticket entrance away from the ark, and a small fleet of buses picks up paying visitors here and then delivers them to the park proper. As was so often the case, the Creationist genius is in the area of marketing and business strategy. With the Ark Encounter we moved a giant step away from the form of the museum and we were now in the

vicinity of roadside attraction or theme park. The buses dropped us off in front of the “Answers Center.” That name is all you need to know: this site has no wish to stir curiosity (questions!), but aims to deliver truths. The squared, windowless center was plain as could be. The font was the no-frills style favored by conservative businesses like Hobby Lobby and Five Guys. The asphalt and concrete came right up to the center’s exterior wall, leaving room only for the barest greenery.

Why build such an ostentatiously plain center? Money wasn’t the issue since the Ark Encounter cost north of $100 million. This plainness broadcasts a “not impressed” view of the creative impulses of mainstream American culture.

Turning from the Answers Center it was finally possible to take in the 510 foot long Ark in its entirety. An open paved area allowed couples or families to get a photo taken with the whole Ark behind. Landscaping along the border of the paved area and an extensive pond served as a photogenic background. Photos taken from this spot (and posted on social media) represent the best free marketing the site will ever get, and so care was taken to get this spot right. A designed photo setting such as this is standard at large amusement parks. We need only recall the images with Disney World’s “Cinderella Castle” or EPCOT’s “Spaceship Earth” dome to grasp the intent of this space. So at least in the area of

marketing the Ark Encounter fully embraces mainstream values! Early news releases about the Ark mention that it would be built according to green LEED standards. How strange to be “up-to-date” with engineering standards in service of an Ark that serves as a monument for the complete rejection of scientific expertise. The ark ended up using 3.3 million board feet of wood, which served the rhetorical purpose of demonstrating that a battleship-sized boat could be constructed out of wood by ancient men. Genesis offers no description of the Ark beyond material and size, so the design was open for guesswork. The Ark Encounter opted for a modified Greek trireme with this curved bow (used by the Greeks for ramming

enemy ships). On the walk up to the massive Ark structure we passed a series of stelae that used graphic novel style illustrations to tell the Adam and Eve story. Read from top to bottom this stela narrates the “Creation of Man.” God breathes life into Man, who is rising from the dust. Then God forbids Man—on penalty of death—from eating the fruit of

one particular tree. After Man gives names to all the types of animals, God creates Woman from the rib of Man. Finally they stand together, blessed in heterosexual perfection. Because this is Evangelical art, nothing is left to interpretation or set aside as a mystery. A sign stands beside each stela offering an interpretation of narrative points. In the bottom right we can read the Bible verses that inspired the images. These stelae have as little historical value as images of the “Wild West” as one waits in line for a ride on Disney’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. These stelae were another indication of a theme park aesthetic. I wondered how many visitors would be able to distinguish this faux version of the

past from true remains of the ancient past. The British Museum in London allows visitors to come into contact with the remains of past civilizations. This black obelisk of the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III from the 9th century BC is an example of the type of artifact that the designers of the Adam and Eve stelae are trying to evoke. But the story on this

truly ancient obelisk is about earthly power as peoples from around an empire stream toward the king with tribute. The stelae of the Ark Experience ask us to imagine abstract ideas disconnected from power. Still at the British Museum I took a deep look into a coffin from ancient Egypt (ca. 1850 BC). On the coffin floor I could see the afterlife guide known as the Book of Two Ways, detailing for the deceased obstacles that will be encountered in the afterlife. Stories and beliefs don’t get simpler as we step deeper into the past. The availability of streamlined abstractions and clear meaning is a product of modernity, and unfortunately our preference for simplicity makes us vulnerable to big lies. One antidote is an actual

encounter with the crabbed complexity of the human past. At the Ark’s entrance we came across this curious exhibit of piled stones with explanatory sign (always!). The sign pointed ahead in the biblical story to a pile of stones made by Joshua and the heads of the 12 tribes as they moved into the Promised Land. The stones were meant as a reminder of

God’s help. In 2016 the board of directors of Ark Encounter and Answers in Genesis piled up twelve local stones as a parallel reminder. Ark Encounter thus offers itself as a literal reenactment of the Bible. There is a certain attraction to imagining a pre-Flood society. The 2014 movie Noah was a thoughtful experiment, beginning with the choice to film in Iceland, a landscape that appeared new and unfamiliar. Ark Encounter showed none of this joy of locating a fresh design perspective. Instead it explained that it would take “Ark-tistic license” in recreating the biblical story. In the above sign we learn that “research of ancient history” took place, but their notion of ancient history was generic. The idea here is

that instead of inventing, the Ark Encounter would borrow freely from any ancient feature that struck their fancy. The result is an odd mixture of design elements. As we ascended the levels of the Ark we arrived at an animatronic version of Noah (with his wife). He is pictured inhabiting a comically modern study on the Ark. On one side is an organized library of scrolls and on the other a wooden writing desk. Noah wears loose fitting linen clothes and uses a pen to write on something like paper. A fine plate of olives and dates is set between them. On the wall are images patterned after the Fayyum mummy portraits from 1st century Egypt. These portraits were inset onto the face of mummies, though they

hang now in museums. Did it cross nobody’s mind that there must be actual history behind the idea that portraits of individuals would hang on walls? Another question: how were all the animals stored in the giant Ark? We know now far more than the Genesis writer about the diversity of life on Earth. From the platypus to the raccoon, all these animals had to be given a place. So Ark Encounter proposes a long series of wooden cages—small, medium, and large—all exactly like one another. Noah even invented a clay version of the pet water bottle we’d use today in a gerbil cage! Such standardization is yet another distinctly modern phenomenon and not something found in archaic societies. Ark Encounter re-creates

modern things in old materials and calls it a day, never imagining that mindsets have a history. How could all those huge dinosaurs fit onto the Ark? Long-necked dinosaurs like the Brachiosaurus were the largest land animals in the history of life on Earth, so somewhere beyond the pens for elephants and giraffes the Ark had to accommodate them. Young Earth

Creationists propose that a pair of juvenile dinosaurs could’ve boarded the Ark rather than full-sized adults. Also they argue that representation could’ve been at the genus level, thus eliminating the need for a multitude of individual varieties. Needless to say, this isn’t scientific thinking, but purely post hoc speculation about how X number of animals

could fit onto the biblical Ark. In their effort to explain all these animals on the Ark, Creationists move steadily into the realm of fiction. They need to avoid having to take every type of big cat on the Ark, so they propose an archetypal cat which would in short order radiate into the variety of cats that inhabit the Earth today (plus ones that’ve gone extinct, such as the saber-toothed cat, or smilodon). So the Ark would’ve carried an unknown cat that was a midway point between these actual cats. The cat they portray is some artist’s rendering of a combo cat that never existed, but which was ready to become all cats everywhere in just a couple of thousand years. The Ark Encounter contained rows of

sample wooden cages, but to make their point clear designers set up a scale model of the Ark inside their life-sized model. This model illustrated the interior of the Ark, with an eye toward explaining exactly how it could be transformed into an efficient machine as it floated upon the churning water of a global flood. Just eight people survived on the Ark, but they would each have tasks that represented a “sensible division of labor.” They made use of “time-saving mechanical processes” and implemented “effective ventilation and waste removal.” Someone on Noah’s team had clearly graduated with an MBA in operations management. By sending the flood God wiped out all of humanity except for eight people in

Noah’s immediate family. Ark Encounter works to build up comfort with this brutal act of God. A series of models makes clear that the pre-flood society was as evil as can be imagined. This model scene combines design elements from ancient Minoan civilization with the human sacrifice and pyramids of the Aztecs. The snake god there at the top is pure modern fantasy. The point is that this ancient society and all its people deserved to be wiped out, but the frightening corollary is that this is exactly how Creationists see our modern society, which they view as liable for a similar total judgment. With its unyielding commitment to a literal reading of the Genesis Flood, Ark Encounter is forced to take on a raft of

contemporary Christian books aimed at children. Unlike works of contemporary science, this material doesn’t at all challenge the story of Genesis, yet these writers nevertheless commit the “error” of transforming the Flood into a fable.

Such happy books and images are common in church libraries and Christian homes. To my thinking such books have it about right: the Flood story should be read for its broad outlines: God lovingly preserved both humanity and animals. Such care for the natural world in catastrophic times could serve as a decent model for us now. A casual visitor to the Ark Encounter might wonder at the need to spend more than $100 million to defend a single story from the Bible. The true

stakes became evident in signs like this one. The story of the Flood functions as a moated outer wall for the citadel of Evangelical belief. If this story of Noah and the worldwide Flood is a fable, why not say the same thing about the death and resurrection of Jesus, or the promise of heaven? So this outer wall of the faith must be defended from every possible breach, nevermind that this all out defense saddles young believers with a mind-bogglingly absurd intellectual position, one that in the long run is certain to undermine their faith as they encounter serious scientific work. The Ark Encounter shows little curiosity for the natural world beyond the measuring and counting that could help prove “It was possible!”

Its one clear passion is for the Evangelical message of salvation only through faith in Jesus Christ. Ark Encounter draws some support from the New Testament, where the author of 1 Peter connects the story of Noah to the salvation of Christians: “...when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you...” That reads like a hastily constructed parallel, but it sets up a powerful metaphor. This connection of the ark with salvation inspires a photo site on the interior of the Ark Encounter. The entire family or just kids can pose for a photo at this door, which has a cross

burned into the stained wood. On an Ark Encounter Facebook post one woman wrote “I was overwhelmed with emotion by this door when I last visited.” By standing here a family participates in the metaphor, claiming a place among the very few who will be saved from eternal destruction and turning their backs on the wider world beyond that door. The three

children of Noah were present in the ark as sculpted figures in stylish dioramas. Having begun with a defense of the worldwide Flood, the Ark Encounter could hardly draw back when it came to the biblical version of the origin of all people groups. Human variety is attributed to the differences between the three sons of Noah: Shem, Japheth, and Ham (Canaan). After an awkward story in which Noah gets drunk and naked, he pronounces on the hierarchy of his sons, beginning with this line: “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” On the ark this curse had yet to be delivered, but a discerning viewer can guess where this will lead. Ham is described by Ark Encounter signs as an

engineer and inventor, but Japheth and his wife are artists. The designers are trying, I suppose, to side-step racial stereotypes, but since the Genesis text states that the whole Earth was peopled by these three sons, it’s impossible not to attribute civilizational traits to them. Japheth becomes the father of Indo-European peoples, which means ancient Greece, and Ark Encounter can’t resist portraying this couple as consumed by beauty and the arts. The only way to escape racism is to recognize that the Genesis passage was an ancient but limited attempt to explain cultural and linguistic difference as experienced once by people in the Levant. The problem comes with the attempt to connect all

people groups of the world to this regional story of human difference. The final exhibit, on level three of this ark, was a graphic novel style series of images entitled “Searching for Truth.” The exhibit story begins on an imaginary college campus. The open bulletin board in the center of campus is filled with posts that highlight free-thinking and equality.

Even in 2019 vaccinations are presented as typical of liberal values. The Ark Encounter doesn’t in this space attack natural science museums, but singles out institutions of higher education as the primary enemy to be opposed. The graphic artist spots the collegiate popularity of ultimate frisbee and bicycles. A secular chapel looms in the background, but the critique quickly becomes clear: higher education has no place for faith. These students are taking an introductory course on religion, but they have no way to discern the truth of any tradition: “There are so many religions. How could anyone know what to believe?” Students are so dominated by self-expression and free-thinking that they have no way

to form a judgment on truth. This is the implied intellectual space for the Ark Encounter. By an “encounter” with a fullsized model of the biblical ark, young people find a shelter from uncertainty. If a college campus is characterized by openness, the ark, in contrast, is enclosed. The power of the Ark Encounter comes from its physical mapping of Evangelical notions of salvation. The secular world is dangerous and a constant threat to the soul. Salvation lies in commitment to an enclosed world of “Truth” that will land a few believers in the paradise of the afterlife. From a more earthly perspective what stands out is indifference to the world outside this ark. Nothing is needed from those outside these walls and

believers are encouraged to see drowning in a flood or burning forever in hell as the rightful penalty for abiding outside. On our way out I took another look at the books on offer at the square Answers Center. We’ve already met Ken Ham as the leader of Young Earth Creationism, and his book The Lie was getting a new 25th anniversary release. The “lie” in the title is (of course) the theory of Evolution, going back to Darwin. It’s breathtaking to characterize the work of thousands upon thousands of working scientists, engaged every day with details of the natural world, as not just wrong, but as a malicious lie. But that goes hand in hand with this physical argument: “nothing good will come from the thinking of

people outside these walls.” Never fear, my wife and I were certainly not done with our exploration of Kentucky after this marathon day moving from the Creation Museum to Big Bone Lick State Park and on to the Ark Encounter. But it was time for a palate cleanser, you might say. You wouldn’t know it from walking through Ark Encounter, but there was more to see in Kentucky than this gigantic ark outside of Williamstown. These Creationist sites functioned like UFOs that had landed bearing universal Truth. In no way did the Ark Encounter point us out to the history and context of this place. One point of interest in this part of Kentucky was the Bourbon Trail, linking historic distilleries. The following day we stopped

at Heaven Hill for a bourbon tasting. As soon as one arrives almost anywhere in the US, a story starts to become evident. Small towns and regions (with the help of marketing agencies) have worked to discover the story that will best draw visitors and give them reason to spend money. These bourbon distilleries of course have a long history, but the idea of a Bourbon Trail only became official in 1999. We spent a day in Bardstown in the heart of this region, but bourbon didn’t hold our interest for too long. Travel writing depends on the free-ranging curiosity to stop and look at something new.

I’d even say there’s an anti-fundamentalism embodied in the process of moving from place to place asking questions,

seeking to understand. The Bourbon Trail had competition from the intersecting Lincoln Heritage Trail. Most famous sites we associate with Abraham Lincoln are in Illinois or Washington DC, but since he was born in Kentucky in 1809, a brace of sites exist here, strung together into yet another tourist trail. The Lincoln Heritage Trail offered a “passport” so that kids and families could collect stamps in a dedicated booklet. The Ark Encounter was located along Interstate 75, at the top of the “I” in trail on this map. What Americans celebrate in Lincoln is his robust defense of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I wondered how the Ark Encounter related to these values. I couldn’t recall

a moment in the Ark Encounter when democratic values were lauded. The standout site along Kentucky’s Lincoln Heritage Trail is the birthplace near Hodgenville. This memorial was inaugurated in 1911 with president William Taft in attendance. The memorial’s purpose was to enshrine a rustic log cabin that had once been identified as the birth home of Abraham Lincoln. Visitors climb 56 steps (Lincoln’s age when assassinated) to reach the temple-like entrance. The memorial functions as a grandiose statement about the United States and Democracy, and the National Park Service has administered it since 1933. This temple comes down to us from an era when it was highly valued to present meaning in

a public and non-sectarian way. Inside the memorial was this log cabin. Its historicity has been questioned, but since it was once widely toured throughout the United States it remains a genuine fragment of our shared history. In the present context I was taken by how this humble structure stood as an anti-Ark Encounter. It was another wooden structure that offered itself as a key for understanding the present. The log cabin asked us to accept everyone, born into whatever environment, as equal. It represented the equality of democratic selves, exactly what Walt Whitman (a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln) celebrated in Leaves of Grass. Meanwhile Ark Encounter bound visitors within walls and asked them

to look with suspicion on those who stayed outside. The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani was another historical site in this part of Kentucky (not far from the bourbon distilleries and Lincoln’s birthplace). It’s been a functioning Trappist monastery since 1848. The monks work on a farm connected to the abbey and lead a contemplative life. Visitors have to go looking for the abbey since it doesn’t have a marketing company promoting it with billboards or conjuring up a “Trappist Trail.” The abbey and even its signage were unassuming. We knew about the abbey, and had long wanted to visit on account of its association with the writer Thomas Merton, who resided here from 1941 until his death in 1968.

After parking in a small lot, visitors walk toward the abbey church, moving through a small cemetery for locals. Everyone was welcome to attend Mass (we were here on a Sunday morning). The architectural layout directed us toward one entrance (no need for signs with bright, obvious words). It was already clear that this wasn’t exactly public space. Later, walking around the grounds, we came to a simple sign, monastic area do not enter, and of course we respected such limitations. The monastery wasn’t a democratic institution, nor did it feel like the regulated commercial space of a corporation, but a kind of expanded domestic sphere that included a need for privacy. Thomas Merton arrived at the

Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941 for a short initial visit. He described the abbey and its landscape in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. His train had stopped barely long enough for him to hop off, and he found himself in the “silence and the solitude of the Kentucky hills.” A car was waiting and took him the final mile and a half to the abbey. He remembered the rectangular blocks of the abbey coming clear in the moonlight. These fields and the curtain of woods in the distance felt like a “barrier and defence against the world.” Merton loved this isolation, and doesn’t for a moment think about how this site would soon be a day’s drive away for millions of people on the Interstate system. It wasn’t the

commercial possibilities that entranced him. According to a sign at the abbey entrance, this neo-Gothic abbey church was first dedicated in 1866 and renovated 100 years later in 1967. More than the setting, Merton was moved by the experience of Mass here with the monastic community. He saw this abbey church as the “real capital of the country...” and “the center of all the vitality that is in America.” He could somehow see this as the heart of the rowdy America then taking shape. This community of monks, living a hidden life of contemplation were winning “the friendship of God” for the nation. Again the comparison with the Ark Encounter came insistently to mind, which only saw enmity between God

and the outside world. We attended Mass and watched as the monks lined the choir stall. This was as close as we got to them. Visitors wouldn’t get a “meet and greet” with these monks since they weren’t here to become public personalities.

They were here to deny that public self in following the liturgical calendar. We left knowing that no matter where we were, this spiritual heart was beating on and on in the hills of Kentucky, the Psalms sung as St. Benedict ordered them in his Rule from the 6th century. Merton recalled pondering a young man who had entered the abbey and seemingly escaped individuality: “The waters had closed over his head, and he was submerged in the community.” Again the

comparisons come to mind. The abbey and the ark were so far apart that it’d be convenient to think of them as different religions, yet they are both expressions of American Christianity. But for sure they occupy opposite poles of the faith.

One makes an attempt at popular appeal through construction of a Christian theme park. The other pulls away from crowds and popular appeal, offering in its place textures like this rough floor in the abbey church. The ark offered itself as a physical metaphor for total retreat, while the abbey imagined a hidden but constructive engagement with American culture. One emphasized literal interpretation as the end of Christian life, while the other took contemplation as final

goal. Short pathways struck out from the abbey into surrounding fields. A small area of natural prairie was nurtured, and beyond was farmland, its crop newly visible as a carpet of green. The abbey would never have survived from its 19th century foundation without an embrace of this land and a willingness to labor on it. The abbey wasn’t a novelty that could only survive by pulling in curious travelers from the highways and byways. It represented a move toward becoming at home in this American landscape, and so a turn away from settler habits. The practice of contemplation transfers from sacred books to the physical world (and back again), and this habit of attention to landscapes is something we must work

to improve. This green cross was a short ways from the Abbey of Gethsemani, along one of the pathways. It was situated on a rise but from the road the spot looked like nothing more than a clump of trees. Up close the cross had a mossy green hue. Our nation (and the Earth) needs nothing so much as a cross that can stand unobtrusively or supportively in the midst of the green natural world. It’s not so hard to imagine since the basic story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ can be seen as an elaboration on ancient vegetation cults in which death leads to new green life. Such a green cross aptly symbolizes the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John about the seed that needed to die to produce fruit.

The Form of the Visual Essay

This is one in a series of visual essays that interprets places in the US and around the world. Except for some historical images included for comparison, the photos were all taken by me in the process of travel. My goal as a photographer isn’t to capture a site from the perfect time of day and just the right angle, but rather to see the world from the common point of view of an embodied person. The typical look of a place is my starting point for critical interpretation (not a professional image as one might see in an architectural book). No photos in this collection have been gotten by guiding a drone up in the sky or making use of a telephoto lens for a close-up. This is the world as it presents itself to every eye. For the past years

I’ve worked to discipline my mind by demanding that thought be generated by things I can see.

In his essay “Nature” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about becoming a transparent eyeball. I’ve long been drawn to that idea of becoming a pure perceiver, an interpreter. I like the feeling of arriving at a place and trying to empty my mind of expectations and becoming alert. Landscapes speak. They speak of the collective values of those who inhabit the space. They reveal more clearly than any written constitution the hierarchies of a

society. Group identities that give meaning to individual lives find external expression in landscapes. This can all be read if we become attentive. That’s not to say that landscapes speak with one voice. They are alive with competing values and identities. When I become most still in a place, most emptied of my Self, it feels like there’s a conversation that I can hear going on. The voices come from not only built structures but the natural features too. With time the voices of a place gain clarity. There are the insistent voices of the present, as well as the fragmented and fading voices of past ways of being. The camera is my tool for taking note of these conversations.

I’ve called these collections of words and images

“visual essays,” but together they become a photographic documentary. What I don’t like about film documentaries is that they are so often composed around the voices of individuals. Documentaries need talking heads to hold the interest of a mass audience. I was drawn to a different kind of documentary project: what if places were allowed to speak? That’s the project here. Landscapes are ultimately a human creation, but they speak a collective, not an individual, story.

One detail that will help to explain my approach to place is Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion: “A system

100

of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations, etc...” It’s the first phrase of that definition that I’d like to highlight— the “system of symbols.” The implication is that the study of religion isn’t about getting inside the consciousness of people, but about interpreting the external symbolic world created by each and every culture. Everything about the human landscape is part of this system of symbols, from the architecture of buildings, to the monuments, to the clothes people are wearing, to the signs and graffiti and murals. These are ways that people express a collective story about who they are. One further inspiration I’ve taken from Geertz is his view that the essay is the form that can best hold the work of interpretation.

I hasten to add that this is by no means a work of anthropology. The strong preference in academic work is to develop a single point of specialization. The goal is to burrow into a specific place and then report back to the wider community. A wealth of ethnographies and historical monographs have flowed from this system. One thing academics don’t often do is write travel narratives, which by definition means setting aside specialization and becoming a conduit for serial impressions about a place. Such writing is the opposite of focused expertise,

but it nevertheless represents a type of expertise. It requires a feel for history and change, and a willingness to look not just at the postcard vistas, but at the signs and ephemeral things that build meaning into that vista. It means looking at what other visitors take for granted. Our global world needs academics who are skillful perceivers and connecters. We often underestimate the insight of travelers. We are grateful for the descriptions of a medieval traveller like Ibn Jubayr as he passes through the Islamic world on his way to complete the Hajj, but we forget that our own places need patient describers like him.

Technology ought to bring about a shakeup in academic forms, especially in the Humanities. Experimentation has marked other fields. 20th century poets struggled to find the literary forms that best expressed their thought. A.R. Ammons typed out poems on narrow strips of paper, finding that form of limitation helpful. I claim that same range of experimentation for my own work. After a season of visual experimentation I arrived at this system of using paired photos with running commentary to present the story of places where I’ve spent time. As these essays accumulate they will become an extended study of global places in a time when landscapes and cities (all spaces!) are threatened around the world.

101