Page - 54 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

54 | Larissa Carneiro www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 53–64 to encourage the experience of religious conversion to fundamentalist Chris- tianity.1 He argues that the rhetorical capacities of the museum offer to take the individual on a path of discovery and truth. as in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the Creation Museum’s many sections and displays bid visitors to walk toward evangelical rebirth. But Lynch’s claim has a couple of problems. first, in religious studies, “con- version” is a concept that has been discussed extensively. one leading author- ity regards conversion as “a process of religious change that takes place in a dy- namic force field of people, events, ideologies, institutions, expectations, and orientations”.2 Conversion, in other words, is not the result of a single event or experience, but a development that unfolds over time within a complex social setting. secondly, if “conversion” is an appropriate word for describing the ma- jor objective of the Creation Museum, the creationist enterprise would not be alone in this business. if the museum acts as a space for religious conversion, it is because it emulates the rhetorical strategies employed by secular museums around the world. Whether secular or Christian, science museums are not only places for education or demonstration of scientific evidence. They also work as rhetorical places for affirming truth and inculcating beliefs. However, for the sake of clarity, instead of “conversion”, i employ in this article the tradi- tional concept of rhetorical studies: persuasion. secular museums also aim to persuade visitors by affirming their own version of reality.3 and this task of per- suasion links the two kinds of museums in a history of rivalry that has its origin in the scopes Monkey trial of 1925, when the two sides of a nascent culture war began to take shape – when the disciples of evolution first engaged the disciples of creationism, and lost. But in the decades that followed, fueled by the nation’s involvement in the second World War, the technological militariza- tion of the Cold War, and the race to the moon, the value of science rose in the public ethos of the United states. as a result, evolution became the overarching paradigm to explain the formation of new life forms. Natural history museums have worked as rhetorical tools to corroborate and reinforce the veracity of the evolutionary premise: all existing living things were not suddenly created in their present forms but have randomly evolved from earlier specimens over millions and millions of years. the similarity between the two kinds of museums should not be a surprise. Present-day Creationism would not have existed without the scientific strate- gies deployed by its secular counterpart. on the one hand, the more the appara- tus of secular science progressed (museums, laboratories, books, and articles), the more fundamentalist Christians felt compelled to mimic textual, visual, and 1 Lynch 2013, 1–27. 2 rambo 1993, 5. see also rambo/farhadian 2014. 3 On the scientific production of versions of reality, see Law 2014, 337–342.