Religion,Cultural Politics,and Public Knowledge

Facing Cultural Politics

Battles over what count as important culture and knowledge are key elements in many educational conflicts. They also provide motivations for people to become actors in these conflicts and help create activist identities that challenge existing and supposedly settled issues of legitimate understanding of the way things “really are.” These insights into the role of intense disagreements over traditions and the identities that are attached to them are especially significant if we are to better understand the range of places where these conflicts over legitimate knowledge are waged. Too often, conflicts over memory and over what is called “cultural politics” are given less attention in policy discussions (Paulson et al., 2020). This is based on a misreading of what often drives disagreements—and at times outright anger—over dominant educational practices (Apple et al., 2018).

Taking these issues seriously also requires facing another absence. Almost all of the discussions surrounding educational policy focus their attention on particular places, especially various kinds of formal schooling. While this focus is of course crucial, it tends to ignore other significant educational sites where acts of teaching go on and where challenges to accepted understandings are waged. These include libraries (see, e.g., Weigand & Weigand, 2018) and the topic of this essay, museums. Creating the Creation Museum clearly documents why such sites are worthy of our most serious attention.

Let me situate this in its larger context. More than a decade ago, I was invited to give a lecture on the emerging politics of education to a meeting of the presidents of the major scientific organizations in the United States. I detailed the growing conservative movements that are having an increasing impact on curriculum, teaching, and schooling in general and summarized the arguments that I had been making in an entire series of books (see, e.g., Apple, 1996, 2006, 2014). One of the movements to which I paid particular attention was “authoritarian populist” religious conservatives. I argued that we needed to take these movements much more seriously. What seemed like relatively isolated residual tensions over such things as the teaching of evolution were the tip of an iceberg. Behind them were much larger issues over the role of religious understandings and Biblical authority, different visions of rationality and truth, fears about secularity, the place of state regulation, “appropriate” gender relations, the moral order of society and fears of disorder, and so much more. Taken together, these constituted some of the most significant building blocks for conservative mobilizations not only in the United States, but increasingly in an entire array of other nations.

A number of the participants were skeptical or couldn’t believe that some of my examples and the beliefs that underpin them could possibly be held by “rational people.” Surely I was incorrect or exaggerating this movement’s ideological, religious, and educational position and influence. The participants—all of whom were deeply committed to the very best of science and its social and epistemological forms of understanding as fundamental to progress—were by and large unable to understand how such conservative populist positions could be accepted as “truth.” Nor could they come close to appreciating the meanings these movements gave to people’s lives in a time when many of the important things that organize people’s daily lives feel like they are falling apart. Having now witnessed the political and ideological ascendancy of such movements during the years of the Trump presidency in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, Modi in India—and the list could go on—I have a feeling that many of the people in that audience would be more worried about the growth of acceptance of these positions now.

Inside the Museum

There are numerous insightful histories and analyses of the place of religious beliefs in the development of these movements (see, e.g., Heyrman, 1997; Kintz, 1997; McVicar, 2015; Numbers, 2006; Ruse, 2005). One of the best ways to more fully understand the current material effects of this history is to look at its embodiment in the educational sites that seek to convince people that a particular set of religious belief has the best answers not only in theological areas but in the realm of science. For a very large group of people, those answers are found in the Bible. More specifically, “the answers are found in Genesis.” Indeed, Answers in Genesis (AIG) is the conservative creationist organization that stands behind and built the Creation Museum, one of the best examples of the religion/science tensions and how they are played out. This is where Kathleen Oberlin enters. Her book is a substantive contribution in a number of ways. It offers important critical insights about the Museum, its history, its exhibitions, and its overt role in “advancing a long standing movement goal: advancing the cultural authority of creation science” (Oberlin, 2020, p. 10). It also provides us with an expanded set of methodological tools for engaging in such work.

In the process of engaging in a detailed analyses of the Creation Museum, Creating the Creation Museum differentiates it from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC both in its creative and more seemingly “scientific” basis and the more specific ideological and religious underpinnings that constitute its focus. Like the conservative religious movement as a whole, both museums have been influenced by a conservative theological and social commitment to “exercise godly dominion over every aspect and institution of human society” (Stewart, 2019, p. 187). However, the Creation Museum is meant to be a more popular museum that both challenges evolutionary science and presents the case for conservative Biblical understandings based on literalist Young Earth Creationist accounts of the history of the Earth and its people. By its tenth anniversary, the Museum had more than 3 million visitors (Oberlin, 2020, p.3).

Oberlin does a fine job of connecting the history of the development of the museum, its assumptions, and its very physicality to the cultural/political context of “fundamentalist” social and religious movements. It thus is more than “merely” a museum. It embodies a larger set of ambitions that can only be understood as part of an extensive social-pedagogic project to both challenge a number of the epistemological assumptions behind scientific authority and to better connect people who come to the museum to religiously and politically motivated social movements that are based on Biblical authority. As Oberlin clearly shows, a key element in understanding these movements and the museum itself is the group I mentioned earlier, Answers in Genesis (AiG), its leadership, and its supporters. She correctly reminds us that the Museum does not stand alone. It is part of a much larger project. “By building the Creation Museum, AiG extends a long-standing fundamentalist tradition of stoking a sense of embattlement over moral authority by building its own institution—universities, publishing houses, theme parks, non-profit clearinghouses—to counter the secular mainstream” (Oberlin, 2020, p. 12). In this regard, while particular kinds of science are present in the museum, it strives to connect with what might be called an “emotional economy,” a set of conservative populist feelings that are organized around a visceral sense of loss and marginalization. For many of the people involved, when taken together the growing secularization of society, the supposedly embattled state of fundamental Christian beliefs and traditions, and so much more has created the root causes of the multiple and deep-seated crises in our society. It has also led many of its adherents to believe that conservative Christians are “the new oppressed” (Apple, 2006).

In presenting this case, Oberlin is very clear about the reasons institutions such as the Creation Museum are crucial sites and why they are worthy of serious study not only for those who are interested—as I believe we all should be—in powerful social movements. They are also important for educators who are justifiably concerned with the growing effects of the attacks on science and with the controversies surrounding school curricula and teaching from the Right. Although she doesn’t explicitly add this, we can’t understand the growth of religiously motivated homeschooling and privatization without a better sense of the importance of religious motivations and the claims to have “the real truth” if we push such things to the background of our critical analyses (Apple, 2006; Stewart, 2019; see also Whitehead & Perry, 2020).

This larger set of ambitions is clear, for example, in former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s commitment to support educational privatization. As she put it in a talk to Christian philanthropists, educational reform is a way to “advance God’s kingdom.” In a later interview, she “lamented that public schools had ‘displaced’ churches as centers of the community.” School choice would lead to “greater kingdom gain” (Stewart, 2019, p. 193). Thus, all of this is indeed part of a considerably more extensive movement.

In Oberlin’s own words, “Why study this kind of museum? The case of the Creation Museum provides an opportunity to examine an attempt by a social movement not only to foster social change but also to investigate the places where that social change occurs and how the locations they create matter” (Oberlin, 2020, p. 4). Her account of the Museum better positions AiG and the social movement it is part of in the ongoing efforts “to secure cultural authority over time” (Oberlin, 2020, p. 4). As she goes on to say,

By linking scientific practices to religious and sociocultural political claims based on the literal interpretation of the Bible, AiG attempts to inculcate creation science to families and communities that feel as though they have been forced unnecessarily to reject mainstream science due to its secularity. Sites such as the Creation Museum seek to solidify supporters’ commitments while reaching a leery yet primed broader audience who feel that their perspectives are often marginalized. (Oberlin, 2020, p. 4)

Oberlin’s arguments throughout the book are well grounded and insightful about the role of a particular version of science—and especially creation science—in the public pedagogy of the Museum. Interestingly, her arguments rest on the claim that “the impact of the museum does not hinge on the accuracy or credibility of its scientific claims” (Oberlin, 2020, p. 5). While most criticisms of creation science and similar approaches focus on whether they are actually verifiable truths, we miss the subtlety of the effectiveness of its educational and political project by only critically examining whether its presentations are “true.” What AiG has accomplished through the building of the Creation Museum is “the ability to engage plausibility politics.” It broadens “what we, as an audience, perceive as possible if not reasonable.” By circulating and creatively presenting these ideas in a popular yet still seemingly scientific and rational way, it amplifies what is at stake as these ideas circulate ever more widely (Oberlin, 2020, p. 5).

One of the more interesting characteristics of Oberlin’s approach is her focus on the realm of the senses. That is, she illuminates the actual physical experience of going through the museum, examining the effects of sight, sound, touch, and even smell individually and together. It is worth noting that this is reminiscent of some of the early work on the hidden curriculum of classrooms, in particular Philip Jackson’s discussion of the ever-present smell of chalk in many classrooms in Life in Classrooms (Apple, 2019b; Jackson, 1968). It also reminds us that educational experiences in institutions involve the totally of the environment and not only what is there but the “absent presences,” the not there as well. Indeed, this is a grounding principle of much of curriculum theory that argues that curriculum involves not simply the choice of content but is a process of environmental design.

Oberlin’s approach to physicality has a close relationship to a number of theories that have influenced the field of cultural studies. In essence, she engages with what cultural studies theories call the “circuit of cultural production.” Such analyses have a number of steps, and there is now a long tradition of conceptual, historical, and empirical work in this area (Champ & Brooks 2010; Du Gay et al., 1997; Hall, 2016). But for the purposes of this essay, three act as guidelines: examining a text’s or site’s production, distribution, and reception (Johnson, 1986/1987).

This is exactly what Creating the Creation Museum accomplishes. It engages in an in-depth critical analyses of the museum’s development from the religious, political, and organizational ideas, tensions, and debates that created the plans: production. It then follows these plans to their physical embodiment in the visible exhibitions and their messages about evolution, science, and religion, as well as the less visible parts of the Museum behind the scenes: distribution. And then finally, Oberlin focuses on the ways Museum-goers actually make meanings out of their experiences there: reception. The combination of the entire circuit increases the book’s contribution.

Let me say something about one more thing about why we should pay attention to this entire area and site, since the Museum and the religious and ideological foundations are quite significant to more general educational concerns in another larger way. This is all grounded in a specific attempt to answer the question of “Can education change society?” This question has a very long history in education. Answers to it range from positions that see education as simply reproducing relations of dominance and subordination to more complex and somewhat more optimistic visions that argue that the institutions of education are crucial sites in the struggles over social transformation and for interrupting the power dynamics that organize the larger society (Apple, 2013). The relevance of this question is not only about the past of course. Indeed, traditions such as critical pedagogy, critical race theory in education, and culturally responsive pedagogy are significant statements about the possibilities and limits of education in such transformative efforts. Clearly AiG and the people involved in such pedagogic efforts such as the Creation Museum believe that education can play a significant role in this larger project—and they are at least partly documenting that it can.

Although I am quite positive about this book’s contributions to critical analyses of educational sites such as museums, contributions that can extend to many other sites, it does have some limitations. For example, while I found the range of the book’s methodological forms very interesting, there are times when it feels a bit “too much.” At the same time, I would have liked more detailed analyses of a wide range of minoritized people’s complex understandings and reactions, with greater emphasis on in-person conversations. Dealing with gendered specificities, understandings, and reactions and their intersections with class in greater depth would also have been useful.

Furthermore, I do largely agree with Oberlin’s position that the conservative religious, social, and epistemological arguments represented in the Museum cannot simply be dealt with by refuting their supposed facts. However, while understanding the complexities of the “plausibility politics” in which they creatively engage, it is still important to not ignore the times when they construct a “truth” that is indeed worrisome.

This said, these are relatively minor concerns when compared to what the book accomplishes. It is definitely worth taking its analyses of the Museum and of the social movements that it represents very seriously. While schools are justifiably central to our research and actions, expanding our attention to a more extensive sphere of pedagogic sites in a time of very real ideological and epistemological crises in education would provide us with important insights into some of the most basic questions we can ask about powerful social movements that have serious effects on educational policy and practice.

Some Words of Caution

Let me end this essay with some words of caution. In engaging in critical analyses of religiously motivated educational sites, we need to be both cautious and respectful. Along with authors such as Kathleen Oberlin and many others, it should be clear from what I have written here that I do not at all wish to ignore the growing power of ultra-conservative and at times repressive religious movements and ideologies in many nations such as Brazil, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Hungary, Poland, Israel/Palestine—and yes the United States. Indeed, I have written very critically about them in Educating the “Right” Way and elsewhere (see, e.g., Apple, 2006, 2013; Apple et al., 2018; Verma & Apple, 2021). However, I fear that many progressive activists and scholars who are struggling to build and defend more thickly democratic institutions and social relations may paradoxically be pushing away a considerable number of people who are religiously motivated. This is a very real limitation of a number of the positions that critical educators have taken over the years. Too often many advocates for substantively egalitarian positions have been overly dismissive of religious motivations and understandings. This is more than a little unwise tactically and also forgets the history that a number of religious movements have played in the ongoing struggles for social justice in so many societies, especially but not only with racialized and minoritized oppressed groups (see, e.g., Apple et al., 2018; McCaulley, 2020; Wallis, 2020; West, 2002). Indeed, this act of historical amnesia can be a performance of “whiteness.” It is also more than a little odd in another way. One of the guiding figures in the development of critical education internationally was Paulo Freire, someone who himself was strongly influenced by liberation theology (Apple, 2019a).

As I have argued elsewhere (Apple, 2006, 2013), we have much to learn from conservative mobilizations and their embodiments in such places like the Creation Museum. They have engaged with the realities that people face in their everyday lives and in their hopes and worries about their present and future. It is not automatic that people find such conservative positions satisfying. It takes creative and consistent efforts to connect with people and to bring them under the umbrella of conservative social movements. We would do well to listen to people and to pay more attention to why they are being pulled in particular directions. We rightly may not agree with these movements’ main assumptions. But the success of a large scale social pedagogic project such as this needs to be learned from, as well as being rigorously criticized.