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Zion on Display: Biblical Theme Parks and the Evangelical Imagination
Abstract
This paper explores the presentation of the “Holy Land” in Evangelical theme parks and exhibitions through a comparison between the Holy Land Experience (HLE) theme park that opened in Orlando in 2001 and the “Palestine in London” (PiL) exhibition that opened in England in 1907. From its opening until its demise last year, the HLE was billed as Christian competition for Walt Disney World and its rise and fall has been understood as a quintessentially American tale of the crass commercialization of religion. This paper offers a different perspective by arguing that while its spectacles were bigger, the HLE built on long-standing Protestant tropes about the Holy Land and its people. I show this through a comparison of the exhibits on display, the biblical episodes highlighted, and the entertainments served up at the HLE and the PiL held nearly a century earlier, which indicates that the glitzy theme park served up much the same materials and messaging as the much lower-budget British exhibition. Those messages were not purely religious but also political with both spectacles linking the story of Jesus to the story of Judaism and promoting the idea of Jews being essential to the Holy Land’s redemption. As such, I read these sites as Christian Zionist texts that promoted a feeling of support for Israel (or for the Yishuv in the case of the 1907 exhibition) by appealing to visitors’ faith in prophecy. The paper shows how Zionism was fundamental to the religious message of the two impresarios behind these exhibits: the HLE’s Reverend Marvin Rosenthal, a Jewish convert to the Baptist tradition who had previously directed the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, and the PiL’s director Samuel Schor, who was born to Jewish parents in Jerusalem and wrote numerous books about the coming end of days and the importance of the Jewish people in Israel’s redemption. The paper also considers the place of Arabs in both spaces and more particularly their conspicuous absence in the HLE as compared to the PiL in which actors portraying Arabs were used to provide local color. The paper is based upon extensive research into primary sources (newspaper articles, speeches and books by the founders, planning documents, etc.) and secondary sources on the theme park and the exhibition. It is part of a larger project about the promotion of Zionism at Christian Evangelical sites.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Israel
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries