The Daily Beast
The Christian tourism industry is having a difficult year
Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe Great Passion piece in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, has several attractions on your property, including tours of a replica of the Holy Land, a 67-foot-high Christ statue on top of a hill and several museums. But the main attraction is the play based on the last days of Christ, which features more than a hundred artists, live animals and pyrotechnics. The show culminates with (mild spoiler alert) Jesus ascending to heaven with the help of a hidden wire platform. When I saw a performance of the show last September, the crowd was sparse. My approximate number of employees was about 250 people in the amphitheater with a capacity of 4,000 people. Kent Butler, the attraction’s Operations Director (who also plays Jesus on the show), told me that they dropped about 33 percent in attendance from 2019 to 2020. “I think the worst show we had was 150 people and the biggest it was probably somewhere around 750-800, ”he said, adding that, in a typical year, they host at least 600 people for each performance. (L) The gift shop at Great Passion Play, (R) Actor behind the scenes of Great Passion Play Jamie Lee Curtis Taete Ticket sales are also on the decline at BibleWalk, a Christian wax museum in Ohio that you may already be familiar with , thanks to his viral turn a few years ago, when it was revealed that several of his scenes feature wax figures of recycled celebrities, including a Tom Cruise Jesus and Prince Charles Abel. Julia Mott-Hardin, the museum’s director, told me that she had not yet totaled the number of visitors from last year increased, but there was a significant drop from the previous year. “The automotive bus industry has really suffered a major blow from the pandemic,” she said. “That’s why we lost all of our motorized coaches. And that was a great achievement for us. ”(L) A door behind the scenes of the Great Piece of the Passion, (R) A sign language interpreter narrating the crucifixion of Christ in the Great Piece of the Passion Jamie Lee Curtis Taete Mott-Hardin, however, made a point of noting that it he still saw last year as a success for his museum. “We have suffered a financial blow,” she said. “But finance is not our main objective. Our main goal is to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people. ”Another Christian wax museum, the Christ in the Smokies Museum and Gardens, which has been operating in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for more than 50 years, has not been so lucky. He closed his doors permanently in December, after his rent was bought by a secular attraction nearby. (It is not clear whether the closure was directly related to the loss of business due to the pandemic, and an email requesting comments was not returned.) Even before the pandemic, many of these attractions were struggling. well below when it was most popular. According to Butler, the attraction received more than 250,000 visitors in 1992. “When we were in our biggest audience, we were selling more than 4,000 tickets to the show,” he said. Now, the show attracts between 45,000 and 50,000 people in a typical year, according to Butler. The night I attended, the man who presented the presentation told the crowd that the attraction was a $ 2 million debt and asked us to consider a donation to help them get out of the hole. The Holy Land Experience is probably the closest thing America has to a Christian Disney World. Located in Orlando, about 20 minutes from the real Disney World, the 15-acre theme park offers replicas of Jerusalem’s historic landmarks, biblical-themed miniature golf and a variety of live shows and performances. Or at least until January of last year, when the owners of the attraction announced that they would fire most of their team and permanently cancel all live entertainment. The announcement came at the end of a long period of financial hardship. According to Orlando Sentinel, the deficit of the attraction went from US $ 1.37 million to US $ 10.1 million between the years 2012 and 2016, before dropping to US $ 5.2 million the following year. Between 2013 and 2018, ticket sales fell from $ 9.4 million to $ 5.5 million. The park is currently closed due to the pandemic, and owners are considering selling it to developers who would transform the site into a shopping center and apartment complex. The Chapel of Precious Moments – a giant house of worship in the style of the Sistine Chapel decorated with angels and biblical figures painted in the style of the ornaments of the Precious Moments Jamie Lee Curtis Taete If the Holy Land Experience definitely closes, it certainly won’t be the first big attraction Christian to have done it. Heritage USA, a theme park in South Carolina that featured toys, a skating rink and what was apparently the largest wave pool in the world closed in 1989. Dinosaur Adventureland, a small creationist theme park in Pensacola, Florida, closed in 2006. Just like Bible Land in Yucaipa, California, in 1994, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network visitor center in Costa Mesa, California, in 2017. Christian theme parks announced in Tennessee, California and South Carolina South failed to materialize. “Unfortunately, I saw Christian attractions fail because of a lack of interest, and my heart breaks with that,” said Mott-Hardin of BibleWalk. “Just a few years ago, we were really one of the top three [Christian wax museums.] There was BibleWalk, Christ in the Smokies, and [the Life of Christ Museum] in Portugal. Now Portugal has closed, and [Christ in the Smokies] just had to close. So, we have left. ”Dennis L. Speigel, a theme park consultant who was part of the team that handled the closure of the Heritage USA theme park, thinks that many Christian attractions are difficult to sell in this country because they are simply not as exciting as non-religious ones. “Some of the greatest stories in the world are in the Bible,” he said. “And if you could leverage the stories through the technologies that are available today, compared to what it was 30 or 40 years ago, I really think you could have a very, very interesting attraction. The rolling mass of the stone, the walk on water – I don’t think technology has ever corresponded to history. In fact, while many of these attractions are called theme parks, they tend to lack the features that make regular theme parks so popular. None of the Christian attractions in this country have toys, other than the kind of things you can find in some malls or casinos (ice skating rinks, zip lines, RV or 3D movies, etc.). There is no roller coaster ride in the sky. There is no tour with the theme of Hell. No ride with Jonas and the whale trunks. Peigel thinks that this was an especially important problem for the Holy Land Experience, due to its proximity to so many other attractions. “When people are [in Orlando] who have little time, will dedicate half a day of their schedule to visit an attraction of this nature? Or will they go to Universal or Disney properties? ” he said. Hemant Mehta, a writer who runs the Friendly Atheist blog, believes that this lack of emotion means that Christian attractions tend not to have the kind of call-back required to be truly successful. He cites the Ark Encounter, a $ 100 million Noah’s Ark – Kentucky theme park that is mainly occupied by exhibitions on creationism, for example. “There is no update for creationism,” said Mehta. “Even if you believe everything [that’s on display at the park,] there is no reason to go back, why are you going back? […] It is not as if they are going to present new evidence next month. ”Backstage actors at the Great Passion Play Jamie Lee Curtis Taete While Ark Encounter, in non-COVID years, certainly sold a lot of tickets – 827,591 in 2018, 897,189 in 2019, according to tax records reported by Mehta’s blog – those numbers are fine below the 1.4 – 2.2 million annual visitors that Ark operators predicted they would attract before opening. (A representative from Ark Encounter told me that the figures reported by Mehta are not representative of the total number of people who visited the Ark, as the tax numbers do not include annual pass holders and children under 10 who can visit the Ark. Ark They refused to provide actual service numbers, they also noted that they recently expanded with a new RV attraction.) It should be noted that there are some Christian attractions that seem to be doing well. Although COVID has forced them to reduce their audience capacity, the owners of Sight & Sound, a Christian theater with locations in Pennsylvania and Missouri, say they are attracting 1.5 million visitors annually and selling out the shows. The Bible Museum, opened in Washington, DC, has welcomed nearly one million visitors in each of the two non-pandemic years it has had since its opening in 2017 (although, as with the Ark Encounter, it is substantially less than the 3 million visitors) visitors the museum predicted they would receive in their first year of operation). (L) A giant crucifix and a visitor center that is currently under construction in Walnut Shade, Missouri, (R) A billboard advertising the Sight & Sound Theater in Branson, Missouri Jamie Lee Curtis Taete An obstacle that Christian attractions can continue to face in the future is that your potential customer base is shrinking. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that 65 percent of American adults described themselves as Christians, 12 percentage points less than a decade earlier. During the same period, the number of American adults who identify themselves as agnostics, atheists or “nothing in particular” increased from 17% to 26%, a trend that is expected to continue. However, Mott-Hardin, from the Christian wax museum in Ohio, thinks there will always be a market for attractions like hers. “The culture is changing,” she said. “But the power of the word of God – is immutable. And when people come in contact with that word, that power will pass through them more than if you took an electric wire. ”Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top news in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper into the stories that matter to you. To know more.