Gods and Rollercoasters by Crispin Paine

Author:Crispin Paine [Paine, Crispin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology of Religion, Popular Culture, Religion, Religion; Politics & State, General, Sports & Recreation, Cultural & Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781350046283
Google: ShB-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-01-10T05:18:29+00:00

8

Some Theme Park Themes

Some themes regularly appear in religion parks, including the Holy Land, Heaven and Hell, and Bible heroes. Much rarer are Islam and the multifaith theme.

Religion park themes: Holy Land

Certain religious themes seem to recur in all sorts of parks across the world, even across religions; we shall examine a few of these in this chapter. One of the most common themes in religion parks, and often in culture and even amusement parks, is the ‘Holy Land’. HLE (Chapter 2) is certainly the best known and probably the biggest Christian park based on the Holy Land. It is, though, very far from unique: replicas and re-imaginings of the Holy Land have been found throughout the Christian world for well over a thousand years (Wharton 2006; Griffith-Jones and Fernie 2018). Holy Land and Jerusalem sites in the nineteenth century not only saved American and other pilgrims the expense and trouble of journeying to the Middle East, it also allowed Protestants to develop a relationship with the Holy Places purged of their muddled corruption by other faiths and other Christian denominations. Protestants could discover Holy Places that were ‘genuine’, but very much more like the illustrations in their Bibles than the real ones. Today, most continue to be found in the United States: some modest back-garden sites, some multi-million-dollar visitor attractions.

Typical of the little sites is the Garden of Hope, a two-acre rather scruffy garden on the edge of working-class Covington, across the river from downtown Cincinnati. In 1938 a Southern Baptist minister, Rev. Morris Coers, visited the Holy Land, and was so moved by the Garden Tomb that he determined to build a replica back home. His garden opened in 1958; it is now maintained by a local church and used for occasional services and weddings, as well as for informal visits. Besides the replica tomb, the garden has a ‘Carpenter’s Shop’, which contains chairs for meetings or services, a mural of a nineteenth-century-looking Palestinian carpenter, old carpentry tools given by Ben Gurion (Nasser visited too) and an Israeli flag. It contains, too, a small chapel used for weddings, with ‘a stone from the Horns of Hatton’1 on which the happy couple stand while exchanging vows. Oddly, this building is vaguely based on a 1620 Spanish Mission church. Other Garden attractions include stones from the River Jordan, from Solomon’s Temple and from the Good Samaritan Inn. The Garden offers a splendid view over downtown Cincinnati; beside the viewpoint sits a statue of Christ giving the Sermon on the Mount, and behind is (a notice informs us) a ‘30 foot cross put up by angels during the night’.

At the opposite end of the scale is the $500 million Museum of the Bible in Washington, opened in November 2017, which, though a very big building rather than a park, includes most of the other features of a theme park as well as of a museum, and contains many displays that seek to re-materialize the Holy Land. There are six floors. The

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