A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

The sixty-thousand-square-foot museum mimics the language, layout, and technical effects of state-of-the-art science museums: mastodon fossils and mineral crystals, soaring dioramas of life-size animatronic dinosaurs, several movie theatres, conference rooms, cafés, even a planetarium, and an echoing soundtrack of bird calls. But, as you pay your $19.95 and walk through the entry hall, there are clues that this is all a sophisticated sham.

(Thanks to Porter Jarrard for the photographs.)

The simulation serves a primitive ideology known as “young-earth creationism,” which promotes the idea that the earth is just over six thousand years old and that the fossil record appeared after the Flood, around 4300 B.C. The first rooms ease you into this mental scenery with a soft sell: the Grand Canyon is discussed in pseudo-scientific terms as possible evidence of the Flood. But as you get into the farther chambers of the museum—which, like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, forces you along a single channel, so that one overwhelming narrative is imposed on every visitor—the message is didactic and clear: Voltaire was “an infidel philosopher.” The Scopes trial was the beginning of the end. “Scripture abandoned in the culture” has led to porn addiction, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, divorce, religious relativism, child neglect, and genocide. “Human reason” has replaced “God’s Word,” with horrific consequences. Just when the displays are depicting total despair in the modern world, you come out into the Garden of Eden and a soothing diorama of an attractive and prelapsarian Adam and Eve lounging in a waterfall pool surrounded by lilies.

The Creation Museum takes the usual trajectory of science education and turns it upside down: the Enlightenment initiated the dark ages, and only the discovery of Biblical truth can lead us out of it. There’s very little attempt to persuade visitors with even spurious scientific argument. The truth is asserted within a hermetically closed system of belief. For example, the explanation of the fossil record:

Views about fossils have come and gone. But fossils themselves do not tell us where these creatures come from or how they died. Fortunately we have another source of factual data—the first book of the Bible, Genesis. This book makes it obvious that carnivory, disease, and death, as seen in the fossil record, came after sin. So the fossil record had to be formed after sin entered the world.

It hardly matters that the Creation Museum is bound to appall secular visitors. They are not its audience. It exists to tell Christianist families that they are right and the future is theirs. I spoke with a family from Columbus, Ohio, who had driven two and a half hours to the museum “out of sheer curiosity.” The mother, a chemist, told me that she was disappointed in the museum’s closed-mindedness, as when an introductory film spoke of “atheistic evolution.” She believed in evolution, she said, but she also had “a religious background,” and wanted to hear “other points of view.” Her teen-age son found the film’s portrayal of an autocratic high-school science teacher ridiculous.

As far as I could tell, the family from Columbus was in the minority. Most of the families—overwhelmingly white, mainly blond, and about the most pleasant, cheerful collection of tourists imaginable—seemed to accept what they heard and read as they were coaxed along the explanatory trail, with the children delighted by the cleverly designed animal displays. This expensive frolic through a sinister fairy tale was made for the young.

Many of the quarter of a million people expected to visit the Creation Museum by the end of the year will be children. They will be indoctrinated into an ideology that systematically warps their understanding of the physical world and fills them with hostility toward the facts and concepts of modernity. As we have learned over the past few years, this doesn’t mean that they’ll be outcasts and failures. A great political party has largely abased itself before their world view and offered them unprecedented access to government power. The Creation Museum, a combination of a natural-history museum and a Communist Party propaganda center, will help to arm and arouse the next generation of Christianists in the ongoing war against secular and scientific America.

It’s tempting to treat the museum as an interesting cultural diversion, rather like a guided tour through Colonial Williamsburg, which is how Rothstein, at the the Times, took it. But the museum’s creators are more serious than that, and in a sense they have it right: the family from Columbus came looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Either you accept the claims of science, or you might as well believe that dinosaurs made it onto Noah’s Ark. This disagreement is the size of the Grand Canyon. The mass of ordinary visitors were every bit as alien to me as the few Mennonite families in their nineteenth-century bonnets and long beards. We might speak the same contemporary American dialect, wear the same T-shirts, and eat the same fatty foods, but our basic beliefs are so incompatible that it’s hard to know what political arrangement could ever satisfy us both. Rothstein ended one of his reviews by saying that a visitor “leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.” My experience was different: I had the sense of being a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state, and I kept my reactions to myself. As I was driving away, I realized what the barrage of falsehoods written on slick signboards reminded me of. It was the telescreens in “1984.”