New Museum of Bible in Washington opened.

When plans for the Museum of the Bible, which opens to the public in Washington, DC on November 18th, were first unveiled many predicted it would be a big, glossy advertisement for fundamentalist Christianity.

Christian fundamentalism began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among British and American Protestants as a reaction to theological liberalism and cultural modernism. Fundamentalists argued that 19th century modernists theologians had misinterpreted or rejected certain doctrines, especially biblical inerrancy (If a person or thing is infallible, they are never wrong), that they viewed as the fundamentalists of the Christian faith. Fundamentalists are almost described as having a literal (the literal meaning of a word or phrase is its real or original meaning) interpretation of the Bible.

The museum was founded and part-funded by Steve Green, a prominent evangelical (Evangelical Christians emphasize the importance of the Bible and the need for personal belief in Christ) and president of Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft shops (a shop that sells decorative objects made by hand or the materials and toolsused for making such objects) that in 2014 persuaded the Supreme Court that it deserved a religious exemption from a requirement in Obamacare that employers provide their workers with certain contraceptives.

Later that year Mr. Green, who has said that the Bible is “a reliable historical document” tried, unsuccessfully, to insert a Bible course into public schools in Oklahoma City, where his company is head-quartered (the place from where an organization is controlled).

That did nothing to reassure those who worried that a privately-funded $500m Bible museum only three blocks from Capitol Hill would seek to press conservative evangelicals’ already-huge influence unduly. Nor did the institution’s original mission statement, which was to “inspire confidence in the absolute authority of the Bible.”