This story reports on the arrival in Washington, D.C. of a new museum, the “Museum of the Bible,” whose collection will include “pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Gilgamesh tablet, Elvis Presley’s Bible and about 850 manuscripts, 12 of which are in Hebrew and come from China’s Jewish population. A third of the material may be considered Judaica, related to Judaism and the Old Testament, including torahs that survived the Spanish inquisition and the Nazis.”

Notwithstanding this scattershot miscellany, the story seems determined to find a controversial church-state angle. It reports that the museum is the creature of Hobby Lobby President Steve Green and that its proposed location near the Mall might well overshadow a downtown skyline that is “dominated by monuments to men.” Objections to the museum appear to combine the aesthetic, the religious, and the ideological: e.g., “To many in the scholarly community, the museum seems like an oversize piece of evangelical claptrap”; “The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism — yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics.”

But perhaps all of this is too much fuss over a development that secular critics of

the museum might welcome. Artifacts that get their own museums are probably on their way out culturally. Museums generally involve subjects and events that are in some way closed affairs–affairs to be studied and reflected on retrospectively. Proust recognized as much when he spoke of the movement to turn French cathedrals into museums in the early 20th century, which he pronounced “the death of the Cathedral.”

As for the American religion that needs defending against the assault of the museum, that’s nearly perfectly summarized in the first paragraph of the story (though the final word “instead” seems entirely out of place):

In Washington, separation of church and state isn’t just a principle of governance, it’s an architectural and geographic rule as well. Pierre L’Enfant envisioned a national church on Eighth Street. A patent office was built on the site instead.