State religion: Why it pays to be Christian in Kentucky

Just how much religion can the government promote? My home state aims to find out.

This June, a group of twenty students in Northern Kentucky took a field trip that included entry to two sprawling religious facilities. Inside both, students learned a number of surprising facts: that dinosaurs, trilobites, and humans coexisted, that climate change is a myth, that the planets in our solar system are only a few dozen centuries old, and that geology and paleontology are properly understood through the lens of a recent global flood caused by a disappointed God. They learned that racial prejudice persists only because schools teach evolutionary biology. On at least two occasions, they were instructed that belief in Jesus, through Protestant evangelical Christianity, is their only chance at escaping an eternity in hell.

It might seem reasonable to assume such a clearly religious excursion originated from one of Kentucky’s many private religious schools. But the students came from public schools in three counties, and the trip was organized as a “college preparation” event by a public community college using taxpayer funds.

Kentucky is not known for strict adherence to separation of church and state. In early 2004, I watched from the state senate floor as the Kentucky became one of the first states to pass a constitutional amendment preemptively blocking marriage equality. I was there with the conservative lobbyists who drafted the final language. As a boisterously evangelical home-schooled teenager, I was ecstatic when the measure passed with a whopping 75% of Kentucky’s vote that November.

Three years later, the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky opened its doors. Answers in Genesis told the state that the museum would be a job-creating tourist attraction while simultaneously promising its evangelical supporters that it would serve as a tool for conversion to Christianity. Though built with private funds (including $1,000 I raised in the summer of 2005 by mowing lawns), the museum’s land had been rezoned immediately after conservatives gained control of the county government in 1999. The Kentucky Department of Transportation allowed the Creation Museum to place four billboards on the nearby interstate directing tourists to the “attraction”. All four were emblazoned with the official Kentucky state logo.

The $150 million Ark Encounter, Answers In Genesis’s next evangelistic project, was far more ambitious. Unlike the Creation Museum, which was promoted as a potential tourist attraction but funded privately, the 800-acre Ark Encounter complex was publicly advertised as an “amusement park experience” to obtain a tax rebate package used to secure bonds for its construction. Answers In Genesis built a Manafort-worthy chain of shell companies so that the Ark Encounter could claim incentives from the state as a for-profit entertainment entity but escape local taxes as a religious nonprofit, openly diverting a portion of their own employees’ income taxes back to themselves. Even the land to build the Ark was donated by the city of Williamstown.

Of course, the Ark Encounter is not really an amusement park designed as a business. Ken Ham, president of Answers In Genesis, openly admits that the Ark Encounter serves a primarily religious end. “The whole purpose of building these attractions was evangelistic,” Ham wrote on June 6, just days before tax dollars were used to send public schooled students to his facilities. “The gospel is plainly and powerfully presented at both locations and in numerous places.”

“The whole purpose of building these attractions was evangelistic.”

Ham has not been coy about his intentions, making similar comments from the very start of the project. When the Kentucky state government realized they had been duped, they sued to deny participation in the tax rebate program, arguing it was intended only for economic development by legitimately for-profit entities. However, after Republican Matt Bevin took the governor’s mansion in 2015, the lawsuit was quietly dropped. Bevin, a right-wing darling who has vetoed discrimination protections for LGBT students and made it his personal vendetta to shut down every women’s health clinic in Kentucky, regularly endorses and promotes Answers In Genesis and their projects:

Over and over, the Kentucky government has expressly endorsed, lauded, or subsidized efforts to promote Protestant fundamentalist Christianity. With this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that a public community college would see no problem with taking public school students to a sectarian “museum” that rejects the scientific method, blames “secularism” and “atheistic science” for society’s ills, and overtly calls for religious conversion. Either those in charge of these college recruitment programs actually believe that rejecting the findings of science will make students better prepared for college, or they care more about promoting religious observance (using taxpayer dollars) than about teaching students real science. Neither possibility is acceptable.

Imagine the height of outrage if the destination selected for this “college preparation” field trip had been anything other than Christian. If the college had taken the students to a mosque, to palmistry classes, or to a medical “school” teaching transcendental meditation and therapeutic touch, conservative leaders in Kentucky and across the country would have erupted in indignant protests. It would have sparked cries for new laws to stop that particular religion from ever again “invading” our government. Politicians from every corner of the right would call for the resignation of the college’s board members.

Social conservatives don’t care about whether the government promotes religion, as long as it’s their religion being promoted. To shamelessly pilfer Orwell: evangelicals want all religions treated equally, as long as their religion is treated more equally than anyone else’s. Anything less than clear preference for the full platform of conservative religious values is an “assault on religious freedoms” by whatever political bogeyman they have elected to pillory at the time.

Evangelicals want all religions treated equally, as long as their religion is treated more equally than anyone else’s.

To be fair, evangelical conservatives don’t want open theocracy. The dire picture painted by The Handmaid’s Tale, as familiar as it sometimes feels, is not their end game. The religious right wants a society which maintains the respectable trappings of representative democracy but is governed and structured at every level on socially theocratic values. That’s what we were trying to accomplish in 2004, and it continues to be the unspoken goal of the conservatives I left behind.

Evangelicals want a world where everyone pays lip service to religious freedom, but follows white evangelical protestant laws because “that’s how it’s always been.” They believe their way of life is objectively better, both for the individual and for society as a whole, and so everyone should follow it regardless of individual religious practice. Believe whatever you like, but conform.

David MacMillan is a freelance writer, paralegal, and law student in Washington, DC and features in the 2019 independent documentary We Believe In Dinosaurs, now streaming on demand. His upcoming book explores the impact of science denial in America and what it took for him to leave it behind.