"While evangelicals may want more proselytizing, lay Baptists and Catholics have expressed concerns the museum will favor Evangelical Protestant perspectives.
“[The museum] is driven specifically by an evangelical worldview that sees the Bible as inspired by God.” – R. Marie Griffith, director of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.
Similar concerns have been voiced by religion scholars and historians, including R. Marie Griffith, who directs the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
Griffith first got a peek into the museum when one of her doctoral students visited one of the Museum of the Bible traveling exhibits, which, since 2011, have gone to Oklahoma City, Israel, Cuba, the Vatican, and many other places. These previews of the museum have since reached half a million people. If that exhibit is any guide, Griffith said, she’s troubled by the evangelical bent she’s seen.
“It’s really driven specifically by an evangelical worldview that sees the Bible as inspired by God,” she said. “And then there’s also a very strong nationalist message, where it wants to suggest that the Bible kind of foretells the creation of the United States. There are incredibly strong claims about the Bible’s relationship to the nation.”
Griffith, among other scholars, has called for a more diverse board of influencers to balance out the Greens’ evangelical worldview, including “scholars who have wrestled with how these texts were produced over time,” she said."
