Gods and Rollercoasters

Religion in Theme Parks Worldwide

Crispin Paine

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350176669
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350046290
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State
• Index: Social Sciences

This worldwide study examines how religion gets into theme parks – as mission, as an aspect of culture, as fable, and by chance. Gods and Rollercoasters analyses religion in theme parks, looking at how it relates to modernism, popular culture, right-wing politics, nationalism, and the rise of the global middle class.

Crispin Paine argues that religion has discovered a major new means of expression through theme parks. From the reconstruction of Biblical Jerusalem at the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, through the world of Chinese mythology at Haw Par Villa in Singapore, to the great temple/theme park Akshardham in New Delhi, this book shows how people are encountering and experiencing religion in the context of fun, thrills and leisure time.

Drawing on examples from six of the seven continents, and exploring religious traditions including Christianity, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, Gods and Rollercoasters provides a significant contribution to the study of religion, sociology, anthropology, and popular culture.

1

Introduction

Theme parks are a huge worldwide industry; the top ten parks alone attract over 400 million visitors a year, and Disney’s parks earn sixteen billion dollars. Today religion in theme parks mostly sits at the ‘cultural’ end of a spectrum that runs from purely amusement parks to cultural and educational parks. This introduction sets the scene by briefly outlining the story of theme parks, and religion’s relationship with popular culture and modernity.

Introduction

To most people the term ‘theme park’ brings thoughts of waterslides, rollercoasters and happily screaming children; the idea of a religious theme park can prompt both hilarity and puzzlement. But the term ‘theme park’ in fact describes themed attractions that range from amusement parks bordering on funfairs at one end of the spectrum, to culture parks shading into open-air museums and science parks at the other end. I shall argue in this book that though religion appears in all sorts of different ways in all sorts of different parks, the reasons for its appearance, and many of their themes and roles, are shared by parks throughout the world. The background includes the growth of a more leisured middle class, the growth of religious practice as a response to feelings of insecurity, the movement of that practice beyond the walls of traditional places of worship and the use of religious theme parks to promote tourism, national unity and their founders’ faith.

In this introductory chapter I shall take a preliminary and all-too-brief look at the world in which modern theme parks have grown up, and at the ways religion has grown up with them: the age-old association between religion, leisure and fun; the boom in leisure attractions brought about by prosperity (for some) and a global economy; the (admittedly disputed) explosion of religion in much of the world, and how theme parks offer (or in the case of Disney don’t offer) a new public an opportunity to do religion in a new way.

There are probably dozens of religious theme parks in the world. Some are set up by particular religious groups to promote their faith. Some are attractions aimed to introduce a local or a distant culture, which include religion as an important part of that culture. Others double as temples. A very few are ‘multifaith’ – aimed at promoting public understanding of other people’s religion, and of religion as a phenomenon. Moreover, religion creeps into parks that are more purely ‘amusement parks’. Surprise at the idea of religion appearing in theme parks is a very Western response, coming from the association of religion, in the Western mind, with the heart and the head, and scarcely at all with the body and with things. In reality there can be no such thing as immaterial religion.

A few years ago I published an examination of religion in museums, looking in particular at what happens to religious objects when they find themselves in a museum (Paine 2013), and more recently I helped to edit a collection of essays on the topic (Buggeln, Plate and Paine 2017). In this book I want to examine what happens to religion when it finds itself in a popular leisure context like a theme park, and what happens to the theme park.

For any type of magic to be effective there needs to be three things: an efficient magician, a believing patient and a stage on which the drama between magician and patient can be performed. So suggested Claude Lévi-Strauss.¹ In theme parks the magician is the theme park designer, the patient the visitor and the stage the theme park itself. Through their magic, theme parks offer escape. In the past they have offered escape into a never-was past, sometimes into a wish-it-could-be future, often into a world of fairy tales, often into a world of as-imagined foreign countries. As Universal Studios’ marketing department put it: ‘We all wonder what it would be like to fly, to have power, to journey to another world. We wish, hope, dream … then we come to realize wonder can be real after all.’ Religion too can offer wishes, hopes and dreams – escape from the present, painful, mundane world. It is scarcely surprising that religion can be found in alliance with theme parks.

Not defining ‘theme park’ and not defining ‘religion’

Theme parks are serious. Scott Lukas, an anthropologist and leading specialist in theme parks and themed spaces more widely, confirms this:

Theme parks have wrongly been seen by many as superficial forms of culture – as places where people go to do things that don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things and thus which amount to inconsequential spaces. In fact theme parks represent extraordinary spatial and social forms, they offer some of the most basic needs, reflect deep and powerful emotions and cognitive modes, and present some of the most telling and controversial representations of the world. (Lukas 2008, 7)

The literature is full of attempts to define ‘theme park’, and even to distinguish between theme parks, ‘themed parks’ and other kinds of visitor attraction. In Japan what in the UK we might call open-air museums are very often tēma pāku – theme park – while at the other end of the spectrum an amusement park is merely a funfair with such elaborate rides that it cannot tour. One can perhaps identify six kinds of theme park into which religion is welcomed, or into which it can creep:

• religion parks themselves are deliberately set up to fulfil a ‘religious’ role, to inspire and educate the faithful, and to spread the Word among others;

• mythology parks have as their theme ancient myths, told more or less accurately or imaginatively. Here religion and mythology merge and re-emerge constantly;

• history parks are a variety of cultural park, built on local (usually the nation’s) history, which everywhere must involve religion. History parks can be scholarly and educational, or purely exercises in nostalgia;

• foreign culture parks celebrate the culture of others, and offer their visitors escape into the exotic ‘abroad’. Almost always religion is one of the principal markers of those cultures;

• fantasy parks create an imaginary world for visitors to escape into; fantasy plays a very large role in Disney’s parks. Religion appears rather seldom, but it certainly does appear;

• amusement parks surprisingly often include something ‘religious’. Often these are places of worship, there perhaps to offer relief to excited visitors.

Later I shall boil these six down to three: religion parks, culture parks and amusement parks.

But to define a ‘religious theme park’ or ‘religion park’ becomes even more difficult; when does a pilgrimage centre with a range of entertainments for pilgrims become a theme park? Dan Hayden, former Executive Director of Holy Land Experience (HLE), insisted that ‘we are not a theme park’, and that the park should rather be called a ‘themed ministry’, ‘biblical attraction’ or ‘living biblical attraction’ (Radosh 2010, 28).² Sara Callahan (2010, 53), in the best account of a visit to a theme park that I’ve read, describes how one of the presenters at HLE began his spiel:

‘Okay, well, I’m going to tell you something you probably didn‘t know’, Mabry [a park lecturer] leans toward us as if to share a secret. ‘And that is’, dramatic pause, that in Orlando there are a lot of amusement parks’.

We laugh at his feigned seriousness.

Mabry holds up his hand, cuing us to wait a minute. There’s more. He raises his eyebrows, looking truly conspiratorial. ‘What is an amusement park?’

The crowd quiets. He gleams at us with skepticism. He knows he’s got us. Mabry, now fully embodying his professor character, begins his lesson. ‘If we have to look at the word “muse”, it’s actually a Greek word. The Greek word “muse” means to think, to reflect, to meditate, okay?’ …

‘So “muse” means to think.’ Mabry is on a roll now. Excitement saturates each word and quickens his pace. ‘Well, when you put the letter “a” before it, it negates the word, so that the word “amusement” means non-thinking, non-thinking, okay?’

The crowd collectively ‘Oh’s’.

‘Now, let me say this, The Holy Land Experience is not an amusement park, a non-thinking park. It’s a “musement” park where you are required to think, okay? So, I want you to think.’ Mabry pauses and points to us. ‘I want you to think.’ (Italics in original)

If the definition of ‘theme park’ is slippery and contentious, that’s nothing to the definition of ‘religion’. What should we include? ‘Religion’ is of course a Western invention to describe a range of human activities and understandings, and it becomes an increasingly contentious term when we apply it in other parts of the world. Efteling theme park in the Netherlands is themed on fairy tales and fantasy, in which the Fairy Tale Forest tells such stories as Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood. Few people would think of these as in any sense ‘religious’; they are simply enjoyable folk tales, largely aimed at children, some of which also teach moral lessons. Yet these are perhaps the European equivalent of the Chinese tales of ghosts, demons, gods and dragons which are also entertaining and also teach morality, and appear in parks often seen – by Western observers at least – as ‘religious’ (Barker 2011).

So desperate have some students of religion become over the impossibility of defining their subject, that they are recommending that ‘scholars of religion and nonreligion should … all but abandon the terms “religion” and “nonreligion”, and with them the clichéd definitional handwringing that typically comes with attempts at defining these terms’ (Jong 2015; and see de Vries 2008).³ In this book I shall avoid the handwringing by the simple expedient of not attempting to define ‘religion’ at all; I shall use the term in the various ways that seem most useful at the time.⁴ What I can’t do, though, is ignore what religion is doing in the world, and above all how it is interacting with modernity. That interaction, I shall be arguing, is what lies behind the whole religion-in-theme-parks phenomenon. I am writing this in England where, as in most of Europe, ‘modernity’ is still widely assumed to be secular⁵ – perhaps that is why religion parks are so scarce here. In the rest of the world there is no such assumption; indeed, modernity is closely and in many complicated ways bound up with religion (Davie 2013). This book looks at just one of those ways.

Religion, popular culture and fun

David Chidester (2005, 1) devotes his ‘Authentic Fakes’ to addressing the question ‘How does the serious work of religion, which engages the transcendent, the sacred, and the ultimate meaning of human life in the face of death, relate to the comparatively frivolous play of popular culture?’ The present book looks at just one small corner of this big question.

In most cultures religion is close to leisure. Pilgrimage centres have always offered their visitors a range of attractions and entertainments, some clearly ‘religious’, other much less obviously so. The same is true of the local temple in many countries. In Protestant Christianity, too, the ‘camp meeting’ tradition has been strong from at least the middle of the nineteenth century, and the seaside preacher worked the same stretch of beach as the Punch-and-Judy man (Messenger 1999). This was always the way. A fifteenth-century sequel to The Canterbury Tales, ‘The Tale of Beryn’, describes the pilgrims arriving at Canterbury and having a jolly time:

Every man in his wise made hertly chere,

Talyng his felowe of sportes and of chere,

And of other myrthes that fyllen by the wey,

As custom is of pilgryms – and hath been many a day.

After visiting the shrine the pilgrims get changed so they can go out and enjoy the sights:

The Knyght arose therwithal and cast on a f ressher gown,

And his sone another, to walk in the town.

And so did al the remnaunt that were of that aray

That had hir chaunges with hem; they made hem fressh and gay,

Sorted hem togider righte as hir lustes lay.

The Knight and the Squire inspect the city walls; the Monk, Parson, and Friar meet a friend for a drink; the Prioress and Wife of Bath go to drink wine in the gardens; the Pardoner spends his time attempting to seduce the barmaid and gets badly beaten for his trouble. The next day at dawn they all set off for home, singing merrily (albeit some rather hung-over) ‘ever synging to make al thing good’.⁶

One aspect of all this is the relationship of religion to ‘fun’. This has attracted some scholarly interest of late, while ‘playfulness’ is indeed sometimes seen as a characteristic of postmodernism. Most attention has been on computer gaming (Heidbrink and Knoll 2014)⁷ but there has also been discussion of dolls, board games and other old-fashioned toys, as well as the related area of sport. Bado-Fralick and Norris, in their splendidly titled Toying with God, see religious toys and games as examples of contemporary lived religion, and suggest that they reflect a response to the ‘deregulated market’ that is religion in the United States (2010, 103) as well as to a wider cultural preoccupation with ‘fun’. ‘Fun and play have become cultural imperatives; religious practices follow suit. … The study of religious toys is the study of embodied, lived religion’ (184–5). It’s just the same with theme parks. As Justin McDaniel (2017, 16) put it, speaking of attractions in Asia: ‘These are not places of didactic sermons, forced spirituality, or ethical directives. They are fun.’

Religion and modernism/postmodernism

Over the past two generations or so, the enormous increase in the world’s middle class has coincided with the waning of the power of the word and the rise of the image and the simulacrum. ‘Images and the desire for multisensory experience have found their way from Western mass culture into the heart of Protestant worship’ (Ron 2010, 120). One result is a big increase in the theming of the Bible. In other religions parallel developments are leading to the same result: the temple is extending what it offers, cleaning itself up and ensuring its message suits a new congregation of better-educated and better-dressed people.

Eric Mazur and Kate McCarthy (2011, 9) point out how in America the ‘public monopoly once enjoyed by a segment of Protestant Christianity is now a veritable smörgåsbord of religious groups, each relatively free to “advertise” to anyone willing to listen’. Much more than that, though, people can now choose elements of meaning-making from all sorts of parts of life that once were not seen as religious at all. Taking examples offered by contributors to their edited volume God in the Details, they point (12) to myth and symbol as a lens for looking at the commercial use of the Buddha image and the end-time visions of Hollywood films; to ritual in sport and in festivals; to spirituality and morality in television cop dramas and social media; to hip-ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Seven Religion Parks
• 3 Nostalgia, Religion and Politics
• 4 The Motive for Religion in Theme Parks
• 5 Religion and Escape to the Exotic
• 6 Theme Parks as Sacred Places
• 7 Authenticity, Heritage and Religion
• 8 Some Theme Park Themes
• 9 Religion and the Imagineers’ Pallet
• 10 The Religion Park Business
• Conclusion: The Visitors
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright