Religious Tourism

We visited three different religious tourism sites over the past two days.  The first we happened upon by chance, while taking a strange detour towards Mansfield, Ohio, home of Biblewalk, the largest Bible-themed wax museum in the country.  While driving through lush, flat Ohio farmland, where the Monsanto corn will be "knee high by the fourth of July," we saw a sign pointing us towards the "Sorrowful Mother Shrine."  This was a small shrine built by a Swiss priest, Father Brunner, at the beginning of the 20th century.  Sadly, the little Mary statue that he had brought with him from Germany was destroyed in a fire in 1912, but the chapel was rebuilt and since then about a zillion little grottoes to different saints have been put up, really randomly, by various families mourning the deaths of various loved ones.  The Sorrowful Mother is one of the many avatars of the Virgin Mary, as she mourns the death of her Son.  People love to honor her because they feel she can understand their own feelings of loss.  Only visit this site if you want to traipse across swampy ground full of poison oak and poison ivy, with tons of wasps trying to make their nests in the eaves of the shrines, and feel completely depressed and sad.

Our second religious tourism site was the exact opposite of depressing and sad.  It was kitschy, fun and strangely moving.  Biblewalk, in Mansfield Ohio, is an obscure museum filled with a combination of department store mannequins and used wax figures, arranged in pleasing scenes from the Hebrew Bible, the life of Christ, and various historical events.  It takes hours to see it all, and sadly we had to leave before we visited "Martyrs of the Reformation."  However, we did see the amazing scenes from the Life of Christ; my favorite was Jesus ascending into a cloud made of probably two hundred silvery wigs, glued together in a fabulous mass.  The finale of Handel's "Messiah" played as the Son of God floated into a giant cushion made of artificial hair.  Our entire experience was made more powerful because we were accompanied by two enthusiastic church ladies who joined me in raising our hands and shouting "Amen!" and "Yes, Lord!" as we heard the familiar words of various scriptures - the passages and scenes they had chosen reflected Jesus' ministry to the poor.  One important scene from Luke's Gospel showed him reading from Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners  and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free."  The emphasis on service, on grace and forgiveness even in the midst of the recycled mannequins, was charming.  We tried to find wax figures which had been "repurposed" from other wax museums (which is how the church makes all these scenes), and I swear I saw Gandhi listening to the Sermon on the Mount - very appropriate!  I highly recommend you visit this place.

I highly recommend Biblewalk!

Great vanity plate!  

Of course, the culminating stop on our religious tourism journey was Ken Ham's Creation Museum, a 27 million dollar complex paid for completely with donations.  Ken placed the museum in northern Kentucky because it is within a day's journey of about 70 percent of the United States.  I also think he placed it here because of the high concentration of rubes.  We had the dubious privilege of hearing a talk by Ken, live, while we were there, and a oilier snake oil salesman I never saw.  I know his salary from "Answers in Genesis," his non-profit organization, is only around 160,000 dollars, but the gift shop makes millions more, and most of that is through selling Ken's "7 Cs" curriculum on books and DVDs, which the credulous take back to their churches so that they can learn what Ken called "Christian apologetics."  

There were hundreds of people there listening to him.  He spent a few minutes telling us about the Ark Encounter project, which will open next year.  This is a theme park, a for profit tourist venture, attached to the nonprofit Creation Museum.  Clever, huh?  He did a lot of market research and predicted that he could expect up to 2.2 million visitors.  They even told him that the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage could potentially increase the number of visitors by 400,000!  

For my liberal friends who can't imagine how someone could vote for Ted Cruz, I can tell you that every single one of these people will vote for Ted Cruz.  Or someone like him.  There were NO black people at this museum, despite the demographics of the surrounding area.  NONE.  I know you see that guy with brownish skin in the photo, but he is the adopted child of missionaries, and he did NOT come here of his own accord.  I asked him.  The exhibits themselves were pretty cheap and unimpressive.  The video we saw, "Men in White," made light of angels, the most fearsome creatures in the universe.  I don't think Ken Ham understands angels.  I don't think Ken Ham really believes in God at all.  I do think all these people do, and he is completely taking advantage of them and their credulity.  It is a true Vision of America, because no place else could an Australian huckster come in and do this - Australians would laugh in his face and send him on his way.  People in this epicenter of ignorance pay 30 bucks a head (plus lots of extra add-ons) to be herded through a building where they show you a diorama of dinosaurs and children playing together.  

As PT Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute."  Even Pat Robertson thinks this museum is ridiculous, that there is no way the earth is 6000 years old, but that doesn't stop the 250,000 plus visitors every year from coming and then buying  at least one of Ken Ham's DVDs for 70 more dollars, and also paying another 25 dollars for the fun photos.  Okay, so I paid for those, too.  Ken Ham got my money as well.  How could I resist a picture in front of Noah's Ark?

I want to come out here and tell you that I identify as Christian.  Ken Ham's museum makes me sad because he so misrepresents my faith. At one point during his presentation, he held up his hands to form a "V" and said, "You are either with us or against us.  There is no compromise.  No straddling the line."  In other words, if you don't take the book of Genesis literally, and believe that God created the world in six days, you will also not believe that marriage is between one man and one woman (as in Adam and Eve).  In eroding literalism, you will be eroding Christian doctrine.  Now, I'm not even going to point out that the book of Genesis also contains polygamy, incest, and all sorts of other things to make my argument against Ken.  Because I don't care about that.  What I care about is the "V" he made with his hands, because to me, that represents duality in thinking.  Either/or. And to me, that dualistic thinking gets in the way of the Christian message, which is constantly presenting me with paradoxes, almost like koans: "The last shall be first." "If you want to be great, you must be a servant."  "He emptied himself and took the form of a slave."

My religion students freak out when they would read Jesus' words on the cross: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"  They ask, if Jesus is God, how can he cry out to God?  The audience laughed disgustedly when Ken showed them a video clip of Neil DeGrasse Tyson (the coolest) saying "forget Jesus; the stars died so that we might live," and saying we are all made from different parts of stars.  I felt sad because it seemed the God of these people was so small that he couldn't make a universe so many billions of years old, make them from stardust, or cry out on the cross in fear and loneliness, fully God and fully Human.  Ken Ham's god is clearly Mammon, and his stooges believe in a God so beautifully parodied by  Ricky Gervais' retelling of Noah's Ark.    We had to watch it again to lighten our spirits after we got back from the Creation Museum.

This is a uniquely American religion, as so many critics have pointed out: anti-intellectual, fiercely populist, and so insular.  It doesn't resemble my beliefs at all.  My biggest challenge was not to be snobby and judgmental myself.  As Ken pointed out, so many people who write on his Facebook wall telling him he intolerant and judgmental are exactly that.  Yes, I know the dangers of the Church of Ken.  I know that homosexuals are being tortured and executed by religious fundamentalists in many countries.  I also know that despite his best efforts, Ken Ham is losing followers.  He himself told the audience that over 75% of 20-somethings raised in these kinds of churches leave and don't come back.  He said it was because they weren't taught properly.  I say it's because they don't find the spiritual nourishment they are seeking.   As I sat in the audience, the story of Zacchaeus came into my mind.  He was a money-grubbing, swindling cheating tax-collector, sort of the Ken Ham of ancient Judea.  Yet, when Jesus came to his town, he said, "I'm coming to your house for dinner today!"  When Zacchaeus saw the real Christ, he gave back all the money he had swindled.  He couldn't resist the awful, inexorable grace of God.  And neither, in the end, can any of us.