When I call AiG boss Ken Ham for clarification on his use of public money, he describes his tax breaks as “performance-based.” (He’s spent a solid percentage of his summer explaining things like this to media.) “If people don’t buy a ticket, none of their taxpayer money is used. I was asked at the ribbon-cutting, ‘Could you have built this without the tax incentive?’ and I turned around and said, ‘Well, there it is.’”

The Ark is obsessed with proving the Bible true by answering mundane technical questions that even most Christians don’t bother dwelling on.

To Ham, the Ark is a 510-foot retort to the skeptics. “There’s an aggressive group of secularists that want to censor our message,” he says. “If they think the Ark is foolish, they can write that. That’s not a worry to me; I’m secure in my beliefs.” The problem, he says, is simply that AiG did something people aren’t accustomed to: “We, a Christian organization, built a major theme park comparable in quality to Disney or Universal.”

Moreover, he says he’s pouring money into a part of Kentucky that could use it. AiG estimates between 1.4 and 2.2 million people will visit in the first year, and that the two attractions will create 20,000 mostly service jobs over 10 years. “People should be thanking us,” Ham says. “That’s what they should be doing.”

Instead, certain Kentuckians—including Bob Fox, senior pastor at Faith Baptist Church in nearby Georgetown—are questioning the ark’s use of tax money. “The Baptist tradition is very leery of entanglements between church and state,” he told me. “When that happens, you end up with a cheapened religious experience.”

\ Bloomberg via Getty Images

When I get to the Ark, the first thing I see are rows of crates, like closed picnic baskets, from which recorded animal sounds emerge. There are signs that warn “Do Not Touch the Animals,” which is weird, since there aren’t any. It’s also weird that there aren’t any. An ark without animals is like a theme park without rides. (The only breathing animals on site are housed out back in what I can objectively describe as tobacco country’s saddest zoo.)

Inside, the boat is undeniably impressive. It’s built with astonishing amounts of timber (3.1 million board feet) and Amish craftsmanship. Massive Douglas firs crisscross the initial rooms containing the stuffed animal displays; warm lighting creates the feel of a rustic if exceedingly taxidermic lodge.

This is where the Ark starts throwing mud in science’s eye. There are displays about how dinosaurs could possibly have fit (Noah used adolescents), how eight people tended to thousands of beasts (superb time management) and where the poop went (according to a placard, “Solid waste could be moved to a solid waste collection area with shovels and wheelbarrows.” So eight people on a boat shoveled the poop of nearly 7,000 animals for a year.) The Ark is fanatically defensive about these sorts of minutiae. It is obsessed with proving the Bible true by answering mundane technical questions that even most Christians don’t bother dwelling on.

On the second deck, the material darkens. Something called the Pre-Flood Exhibit spotlights humanity’s moral failures, including such displays as “Man’s Rebellion Corrupts Creation,” “Descent Into Darkness” and “Cain Murders Abel,” illustrated by a graphic-novel image of Cain lifting a boulder over his brother’s brain. There’s a serpent-topped temple and a surprising number of fantasy creatures. At one point I overhear a mother ask her two boys, “Did you see the giants?”

The third deck is a more traditional museum devoted to how comfortably Noah’s family lived while everyone else scrambled to the tops of mountains to die. There are huge empty spaces at each end of the ship, with a scattering of chairs and tables strewn around like the end of a wedding. Placards explain how evolution is a lie and how fossil records can be misinterpreted. One video about drowning people employs a Wilhelm scream. By way of making its case, the Arkoffers up some astounding sabermetrics. How many mothers and children perished in God’s planet-wide car wash, you might be wondering? Ark Encounter says it could be up to 20 billion—which is roughly triple the population of Earth today.

July 05, 2016 - Williamstown, Kentucky, U.S. - A display at the press preview of the Ark Encounter, a Bible-themed tourist attraction replica of Noah's Ark. Built by Answers in Genesis, the science and evolution deniers who operate the nearby Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter will open to the public on July 7.(Credit Image: © Brian Cahn via ZUMA Wire) (Newscom TagID: zumaglobalfour402741.jpg) [Photo via Newscom] ZUMAPRESS.com/Newscom

Yet all of this pales next to the Fairy Tale Ark room, which is designed like a sweet children’s library but turns out to be a gratuitous bait-and-switch: It sucks the kiddos in with smiling cartoon characters, and then reminds everyone of reading age about the consequences of sin: “Fairy tale ark stories often focus on cute animals on a fun boat ride,” reads one of the signs, written in Sleeping Beauty font. “But the Flood account is about the righteous and holy God judging an exceedingly sinful world with a cataclysmic Flood.” In case that’s too thoughtfully subtle, a sign reading “And everyone died except the 8 people on the Ark” hangs over a Country Bear Jamboree-type fence. But I guess it prepares you for the next stop: A handful of lonely-looking placards on a wall with such headlines as “IS GOD CRUEL?” and “WHY IS DEATH THE PUNISHMENT FOR SIN?” They’re tucked in a corner, almost unlit, being read by small packs of stroller-pushing adults who aren’t talking much.

All this suffering makes for a pretty downbeat tourist experience. And some Christian scholars aren’t so sure a guilt-tripping theme park is the best way to spread the good word. At one point in reporting this story, I call University of Dayton history professor William Trollinger, who (along with his English-professor wife, Susan) has just published a book called Righting America at the Creation Museum. The Trollingers were some the first people through the Ark’s door. And like me, they left frustrated by its combative tone. The museum’s fixation on rebutting skeptics of this peculiar analysis of Genesis, and its relentless insistence that human beings are moral failures and disappointments to a vengeful Lord who at any moment could drown the world’s population, left he and his wife feeling the opposite of uplifted.

“To our mind,” Trollinger said, “it’s hard to think of a message Jesus would like less.”

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