The Museum of the Bible: A Site of Memory and Imagined Future

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., through its association with the Christian Right and its apologetic approach to American Protestant history, not only recapitulates past historiographical conversations regarding the relationship between Christianity and the United States, but also asserts a particular future, a “Christian Right” utopia, wherein Christianity and “civilization” are discursively intertwined with each other. The narrative pushed forward by the Museum of the Bible — a narrative that legitimizes a specific memory of the early United States and the nation’s relationship with evangelical Protestantism — mirrors older, nineteenth-century accounts of American religious history, mainly those of Robert Baird and Daniel Dorchester. Through the narratives of “labor,” of “civilization,” of “differentiation,” and of “information,” the Museum of the Bible depicts the Protestant missional spirit as inextricable from Christianity, celebrates the resulting connections between Christianity and “civilization,” and proclaims a new (and old) future for the Christian Right.