Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation 9781350006232, 9781350006201, 9781350006218

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Myth, Our Bloodless Battleground
1 The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America
2 The Materiality of Myth: Authorizing Fundamentalism at Ark Encounter
3 Rival Epistemologies and Constructed Confusion at the Creation.Museum
4 “It is what it.is”:
5 “...that their heart might throb with love for Israel!”: Celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles with Charismatics and Messian
6 Anachronism as a Constituent Feature of Mythmaking at the BibleWalk.Museum
7 Embodied Mythic Formation at the Holy Land Experience
8 On the Myth of Religion’s Uniqueness
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation

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Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power Series editor: Craig Martin Critiquing Religion:  Discourse, Culture, Power publishes works that historicize both religions and modern discourses on “religion” that treat it as a unique object of study. Using diverse methodologies and social theories, volumes in this series view religions and discourses on religion as commonplace rhetorics, authenticity narratives, or legitimating myths that function in the creation, maintenance, and contestation of social formations. Works in the series are on the cutting edge of critical scholarship, regarding “religion” as just another cultural tool used to gerrymander social space and distribute power relations in the modern world. Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power provides a unique home for reflexive, critical work in the field of religious studies. Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capital, James Dennis LoRusso Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés, edited by Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin

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Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation Edited by Erin Roberts and Jennifer Eyl

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Erin Roberts, Jennifer Eyl and Contributors 2019 Erin Roberts and Jennifer Eyl have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Dani Leigh Cover image © Yi Lu / EyeEm/Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roberts, Erin (Assistant Professor in Religious Studies), editor. | Eyl, Jennifer, editor. Title: Christian tourist attractions, mythmaking, and identity formation / edited by Erin Roberts and Jennifer Eyl. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Critiquing religion: discourse, culture, power | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018009330 | ISBN 9781350006232 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350006218 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Tourism–Religious aspects–Christianity–Case studies. Classification: LCC G156.5.R44 C58 2018 | DDC 338.4/7263041–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009330 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0623-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0621-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-0622-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction: Myth, Our Bloodless Battleground  Erin Roberts 1 2 3 4 5

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The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America  Stephen L. Young

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The Materiality of Myth: Authorizing Fundamentalism at Ark Encounter  James S. Bielo

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Rival Epistemologies and Constructed Confusion at the Creation Museum  Steven Watkins

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“It is what it is”: Mythmaking and Identity Formation on a Christian Zionist Tour of Israel  Sean Durbin

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“. . . that their heart might throb with love for Israel!”: Celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles with Charismatics and Messianic Jews in Jerusalem  Katja Vehlow

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Anachronism as a Constituent Feature of Mythmaking at the BibleWalk Museum  Jennifer Eyl

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Embodied Mythic Formation at the Holy Land Experience  Erin Roberts

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On the Myth of Religion’s Uniqueness  Craig Martin

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Notes Bibliography Index

165 193 207

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Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1

Answers in Genesis “missing link” webpage. Screen shot J. S. Bielo

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Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. Photo J. S. Bielo

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Entrance to Fairy Tale Ark exhibit. Photo J. S. Bielo

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Pre-Flood World exhibit display. Photo J. S. Bielo

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Large mural art in the Pre-Flood World exhibit. Photo J. S. Bielo

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Map of first floor of Creation Museum. Reprinted with permission

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Map of second floor of Creation Museum. Reprinted with permission

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A placard in the Starting Points room. Photo S. Watkins

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Mock scene of the Scopes Monkey Trial in the Biblical Authority exhibit. Photo S. Watkins

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The entrance to Graffiti Alley. Photo S. Watkins

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The Cave of Sorrows. Photo S. Watkins

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The Cave of Sorrows. Photo S. Watkins

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Cover page of our travel itinerary depicting Israeli persimmons as the fulfillment of prophecy. Photo S. Durbin

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5.1 Jewish-affinity and Jewish menorahs for sale at the Pais Arena. Photo K. Vehlow

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5.2 “Nachamu, nachamu ami” (“Comfort, comfort my people”). Banner 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3

carried during the Jerusalem March. Photo K. Vehlow

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The Roll Call of Nations. Photo K. Vehlow

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Jonah emerges from the waters, covered in seaweed. Photo J. Eyl

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Jesus appears behind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Photo J. Eyl

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The high priest stands next to the ark of the covenant in the temple’s holy of holies. Photo J. Eyl

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6.4 The crucified Christ appears behind the high priest in the holy of holies. Photo J. Eyl

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8.1 Canada 150 Logo

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Acknowledgments This book represents our ongoing efforts as scholars of ancient Christianity to contribute to the academic study of religion more broadly. Working with the ancient data from our primary fields of study, we have become acutely aware of how the techniques and strategies of mythmaking take shape with relation to the figure of Jesus and how competing claims about his persona, his activities, and his teachings serve not merely as different perspectives on a historical life but also as self-authorizing claims about the nature of the cosmos and the normative role of humans therein. The book’s premise is grounded in this awareness and applies it to analysis of contemporary religiosity. We have been able to apply insights and skills developed through work on ancient texts and practices to explain the real-time experimentation and innovation operative at Christian museums and theme parks. Many of the techniques and strategies used in the production of ancient myth are in operation at the sites analyzed here. The concept for this book began after an impromptu trip to the Creation Museum in January 2014. We were fascinated and perplexed by the emphatic repurposing of ancient texts in the service of contemporary interests. Prior to that trip, Erin had traveled to the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, and Jennifer had visited the BibleWalk Museum in Mansfield, Ohio. These visits resulted in a special conference panel on strategies of mythmaking at the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) in late 2014. The response to the panel was so engaged and invigorating that we realized we had touched on a topic of significant interest both to scholars who focus on the ancient world and to those who work on contemporary issues. We thank NAASR for its support of this volume and for its support of interdisciplinary scholarship as a whole. We would like to thank our authors for their contributions and for their willingness to accept the many revisions that we requested of them. We owe gratitude to Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for their patience. Additionally, we are indebted to the series editor, Craig Martin, for his guidance, expertise, and encouragement on this volume. We also thank our anonymous reviewers who found the project compelling. Jennifer would like to thank Tufts University for the Faculty Research Award that made parts of this book possible, and to the kind faces at BibleWalk for allowing her to photograph and to ask questions. Thanks also are due to the Religion Department at Tufts University for support. Many thanks to her colleagues whose interests lie in ancient Christianity and in contemporary theory of religion, for the insightful and inspiring conversations that have fostered such a project. Finally, Jennifer owes gratitude to Jessica Kim for her swift technological support. Erin would like to thank the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina for contributing to her travel for the NAASR meeting in San Diego in

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2014. She thanks her friends, parents, and former students who traveled with her to the Creation Museum in May 2012, the Holy Land Experience in April 2014, and Ark Encounter in January 2017:  Amy Baldwin, Ebru Çayir, Del Maticic, Chia Hua Lin, Kitra Monnier, and Mary Jane and Carroll Roberts. Finally, she thanks Oleg Uvarov for his enthusiastic support and for his assistance with data collection during a second trip to the Holy Land Experience in October 2014.

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Contributors James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). He is the author of four books—most recently, Ark Encounter:  The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (2018)—and founder of the digital scholarship project, Materializing the Bible. Sean Durbin received his PhD from the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His work has appeared in journals like the Journal of Contemporary Religion; Culture and Religion, an interdisciplinary journal; Political Theology; and Relegere:  Studies in Religion and Reception. Jennifer Eyl is Assistant Professor of Religion at Tufts University. She specializes in early Christianity and religions of the ancient Mediterranean. She has published in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, and in numerous edited volumes. Her forthcoming book, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the divinatory and wonderworking practices of the apostle Paul vis-à-vis relations of reciprocity with gods. Craig Martin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. His research interests include method and theory in the study of religion, particularly discourse analysis and ideology critique. His latest books include Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, Second Edition (Routledge, 2017). Erin Roberts is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in early Christian history and literature, Hellenistic moral philosophy, as well as theory and method for the study of religion. Her forthcoming book, Emotion, Morality, and Matthew’s Mythic Jesus (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines emotion and moral psychology in the Gospel of Matthew. Katja Vehlow was, until December 2017, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina where she taught religious and Jewish studies. She has written about Jewish medieval historiography and identity formation, and her first book was an edition of the historical writings of Abraham Ibn Daud (d. c. 1180), published by Brill in 2013. She recently moved to New York to live with her family and to explore new opportunities. Steven Watkins is Lecturer in the Department of Global Humanities at the University of Louisville where he teaches religious studies and classics. His areas of research

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include religious fundamentalist cultures and utopian/communal cultures. He is the author of Kentucky’s Creation Museum as Folk Science (McFarland Press, 2019). Stephen L. Young teaches biblical literature, religion and politics, and Christianity in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State University. He has a PhD in religious studies from Brown University, and researches the ways that ancient Jews, early Christians, and contemporary Evangelical Christians produce religious knowledge and texts.

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Introduction: Myth, Our Bloodless Battleground Erin Roberts

While the number of Christian tourist attractions in the United States has grown in the early years of the twenty-first century, interest in such attractions is neither novel nor recent. Enthusiasm for travel has played a role in Christian piety since at least the fourth century, when Constantine’s building campaign and his mother Helena’s alleged discovery of the cross of Christ transformed Palestine into the homeland of Christianity.1 The region of Palestine, and of Jerusalem in particular, thus became a desirable destination for spiritual enrichment and for the gathering of plenary indulgences.2 By the Middle Ages, Christians who lacked funding for travel could engage in the mental practice of virtual pilgrimage aided by text and image, or could visit an alternative pilgrimage site, such as an architectural replica or model, without leaving their home country.3 Today, increasingly sophisticated forms of technology have enabled the production of elaborately immersive attractions to satisfy curiosity about the erstwhile haunts of Christianity’s founding figures.4 The present volume examines a sampling of these immersive attractions. We approach them not only as evidence of continued interest in the geography, people, and artifacts deemed important to Christian history, but also as active sites of cultural production that address contemporary social issues by telling stories about the distant past. As will be seen, the attractions contextualize their respective landscapes, figures, and objects within narratives that are claimed to be accurate accounts of history as well as credible representations of God’s ongoing interaction with humanity. Due to the immersive nature of the sites, visitors are positioned as active participants in a divinely ordered cosmic trajectory that, in turn, both authorizes and conceals specific social and material interests. Using an approach that understands this phenomenon as a discursive practice known as mythmaking, the essays collected here treat the sites as valuable data for examining how contemporary iterations of past events function within active, real-time negotiations of Christian identity. Our aim is neither to cover every Christian tourist attraction in existence nor to provide a comprehensive analysis of any one site. We focus our efforts, instead, upon the discursive practice of mythmaking because we think it provides a model from which one may gain powerful explanatory leverage regarding the sites’ functions within complex and changing social landscapes. By viewing the sites as active, experimental moments of social innovation, we aim not only to show that the sites are

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fully integrated within the fabric of overlapping social domains, but also to explain how they are integrated and through what means they invite visitors to construct specific social identities. Before proceeding, it is worth noting that our general approach to mythmaking reflects neither a colloquial understanding of myth nor the traditional approach to myth within the field of religious studies. As I discuss further, in the second section of this introduction, we view myth as a form of social argumentation and we treat mythmaking as a social practice with incredibly high stakes. In the third section, I  discuss three recurrent aspects of mythmaking—authority, social interest, and concealment—and provide a preview of chapters. I begin, though, by illustrating the interplay between mythmaking and identity formation through an analysis of a recent social media campaign: Ken Ham’s contestation of same-sex marriage.

Mythmaking and the negotiation of identity The president and founder of Answers in Genesis (AiG), Ken Ham, addressed his nearly 60,000 Twitter followers on July 18, 2017: The @ArkEncounter is lit permanently at night with a rainbow to remind the world that God owns the rainbow & is a sign of His covenant The rainbow is a reminder God will never again judge the wickedness of man with a global Flood—next time the world will be judged by fire Christians need to take back the rainbow as we do @ArkEncounter—God owns it— He decreed it’s a sign of His Covenant with man after the Flood We now have the new permanent rainbow lights @ArkEncounter so all can see it’s God’s rainbow & He determines its meaning in Genesis 6.5

Along with the tweets was a photograph of the gigantic seafaring vessel featured at AiG’s Ark Encounter theme park, glowing beautifully in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The colors on the boat were vivid against the darkened sky and the boat’s reflection sparkled on the surrounding waters. Ham’s call for Christians to “take back the rainbow” harkens back to a blog post from December 2016, in which he lamented that, “people ignore what God intended the rainbow to represent and proudly wave rainbow-colored flags in defiance of God’s command and design for marriage.”6 He claimed that the rainbow spoken of by God to Noah and his sons after the flood was not only older but would also outlive the nowpopular flags:  “the rainbow was a symbol of God’s promises before the LGBTQ movement—and will continue to be after that movement has ended. As Christians we need to take the rainbow back and teach our young people its true meaning.”7 The connection between Ham’s rainbow campaign and his opposition to samesex marriage was not lost on anyone, it seemed, for Twitter was soon flooded with responses to Ham’s announcements and to the colorful photograph that accompanied them. Some tweets congratulated or thanked Ham for transforming Noah’s ark into a gay-friendly party boat, while others pledged earnestly to take

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up Ham’s cause; #gayboat and #takebacktherainbow were trending, and the story quickly became national news. There is much to be gained by looking more closely at the ways that Ham’s campaign aimed to reify the rainbow as a Christian signifier and also to evoke two rival groupings—people who rebel against God, on the one hand, and authentic Christians, on the other—by carving a boundary between them that separates those who practice and/or promote same-sex marriage as legitimate and those who reject it outright. As Sarah Moczygemba has noted, Ham’s tweets and the subsequent discourse may be usefully viewed within the “larger histories and debates about the public use of symbols as well as the acquisition and maintenance of political power,” and serves as an apt occasion to apply an approach that “allows for a more complex understanding of why negative reactions may actually reinforce both groups’ [those supporting same-sex marriage and those opposing it] worldviews.”8 In other words, it is a good example of contemporary mythmaking and identity formation. As Moczygemba explained, the origins of the rainbow flag’s association with LGBTQ identity or support are usually traced to Gilbert Baker. According to Baker’s own account in an excerpted 2015 interview, he had gotten into vexillography because he wanted to create a symbol to aid the visibility of LGBTQ individuals by making a recognizable sign of identity and solidarity9: We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag—it’s from the sky! And even though the rainbow has been used in other ways in vexillography, this use has now far eclipsed any other use that it had.10

Ham and his supporters are well aware that the rainbow flag’s association with LBGTQ identity has far eclipsed any other associations that it may have had in the past, and have thus gone to great lengths to try to establish, instead, a widespread association of the rainbow with Christ. Ham’s campaign to “take back the rainbow” has existed since at least 2007 and others have issued similar exhortations, running parallel with or possibly even predating Ham. Moczygemba notes, though, that the issue “entered mainstream conversation thanks to Ham’s ability to generate mainstream media coverage.”11 A similar controversy had arisen earlier in 2017, when Facebook issued a limited edition rainbow reaction that users could acquire by liking the official Facebook LGBTQ page. Some Christians petitioned Facebook to add a cross reaction (a petition that Facebook ultimately declined to act upon) but the controversy did not generate the amount of public interest achieved by Ham. One reason for this could be that while the Facebook protesters sought only to add a reaction that they could use as an identity marker, Ham desired something more:  “For Ham and others, it’s not enough to have equal access to both LGBT (rainbow) and Christian (cross) symbols; it’s necessary to publicly reclaim symbols like the rainbow.”12 In other words, Ham was attempting to control the way meaning is discursively imbued and thereby associated with the rainbow, and the

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manner of his attempt aimed to ward off any ambiguity about the kind of identification that could be asserted through rainbow imagery. The exclusionary nature of his claims represents a form of policing that is known to operate both formally and informally within systems of signification. Ham’s announcements created an opportunity for his detractors to “revisit their historical claims over the rainbow,” and functioned at social, political, and policyrelated levels; LGBTQ supporters were reminded that conservative Christians were protesting same-sex marriage, lobbying for bathroom bills, and asking for further limits on transgender civil rights, and they responded by critiquing these aspects of Ham’s campaign.13 Far from being a debate solely about the history of a symbol, what came in the wake of Ham’s tweets was a collection of competing claims that sought to stake out positions from which social status could be indexed. Moczygemba’s commentary provides an excellent starting point for analysis by highlighting the “power of the symbol” and by approaching the controversy as an activity that reaffirms “continued involvement in disputes over public symbols like the rainbow.”14 There is more to be said, though, about how stories about the past are invoked to manipulate a symbol’s representative potential. For Ham, the explicit fusion of the ancient story of Noah’s ark with the rainbow imagery aimed to lend gravitas to the symbol’s alleged power, a power that for some holds a far greater impact than the more recent developments of the LGBTQ community. In itself, a rainbow or a particular configuration of colored fabric does not exert self-evident meaning; intellectual and discursive labor therefore must be carried out before an object even becomes recognizable as a symbol—and it might be at the level of that labor that contests, such as Ham’s and Baker’s, take place. For as Baker explained, thought and planning went into the design and implementation of the rainbow flag.15 He noted that it was the pervasive presence of American flags at the 1976 bicentennial year celebrations that prompted him to think that the medium of a flag would be effective in the efforts to enable LBGT visibility, as it could function as a symbol by which one might recognize allies. Baker was keenly aware that whatever he produced would need to be recognized first as a flag, an object well known to be a vehicle for communication, most especially for assertions of collective identity collective. In order to accomplish this and mark out his object as something more than a decorative piece of fabric, Baker designed his symbol as a rectangular cloth with horizontal stripes, a blue square in the upper left corner, and white stars visible on the blue area, clearly reminiscent of the US flag. Baker selected eight colors—hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet—as the horizontal stripes and had a friend craft white tie-dyed stars in circles of eight to feature in the blue square at the upper left corner. As Baker recounted, the finished product that was debuted at the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, California, during the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade, resembled the American flag just enough so that Americans could recognize it as a flag and thus were prepared to see it as a marker of identity. Baker recounted that he and his crew had in fact produced two flags for the debut, one with horizontal stripes only and the other with the blue area with white stars in the upper left corner. The two flags were displayed on nearby flagpoles and worked together to help people understand how to imbue them with meaning. Due to Baker’s understanding of the kinds of

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circumstances and material conditions needed for people to attribute meaning to an object, his project was successful. Baker’s account claims that the flag he produced stood out on its own accord as a symbol for the LGBT community, even while the group itself was still in a formative phase. As with the earlier reference to Ham, we may here consider how Baker invoked stories about the past to manipulate his symbol’s representative potential. Whereas Ham fused rainbow imagery with the ancient, allegedly God-given story of Noah’s ark to lend gravitas to the rainbow symbol’s alleged power, Baker fused rainbow imagery with a naturally occurring phenomenon: multiple forms of human diversity. Recall, for example, what he said in his account of the origins of the flag: “We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag—it’s from the sky!”16 While it may be clear in retrospect that a rainbow flag can be a signifier for multiple forms of diversity present among a collection of LGBT individuals, the kinds of human diversity named by Baker could easily be present in any number of other collections of people. The connection between a rainbow and human diversity situated within a particular collection of individuals is neither exclusive nor selfevident. Further, that rainbows are naturally occurring phenomena, as are the different forms of human diversity, is simply not enough, on its own, to account for the flag’s intelligibility as a signifier for a preexisting LGBT identity. As with the case of Ham, Baker’s production may be seen not so much as an expression of an already defined social grouping but more as a product designed to evoke, forge, and manufacture groupness; Baker, too, engaged in mythmaking. Although he described the rainbow flag as having originated within the LGBTQ movement—“we needed something from us”—it cannot be overlooked that the use of rainbow colors on a flag gained at least some measure of intelligibility due to already existing connections between rainbow flags, diversity, and peace, connections that had been constructed over time and upon which Baker’s account of his own innovation depended, whether he knew it or not.17 Baker justified the use of a blue square with stars in the upper left corner of the rainbow flag by saying that his flag needed to be seen as a flag and not just a decoration: “In this flag, Fairy and I put in some tie-dyed stars. I wasn’t sure that people were going to get that this was a flag, that it wasn’t just some decoration up there in the air. So to make sure, we thought, ‘well, the American flag has stars, we’ll put stars in one of our flags so that everyone understands.’ ”18 Is it not a bit odd that people would need stars in order to recognize a large piece of cloth on a flagpole as a flag? Is it not possible that, given the already existing associations of the rainbow flag with diversity and peace, that the blue square and stars could have just as easily functioned to distinguish this rainbow flag from any other one? Rather than discussing how Baker’s flag benefitted from preexisting connections between the flag and the principles promoted in the LGBT movement, the standard origin story connects it exclusively with the American flag. Any connection with other rainbow flags is further obscured by Baker’s oft-cited line, “it’s a natural flag—it’s from the sky!” Another aspect of the origin story that invites an approach involving mythmaking is Baker’s mention of the iconic Harvey Milk, to whom he connected his own goal of

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raising visibility for LGBT identity: “Harvey Milk was a friend of mine, an important gay leader in San Francisco in the ’70s, and he carried a really important message about how important it was to be visible . . . a flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, ‘This is who I am!’ ”19 Associating his flag project with the proclaimed mission of an authority figure like Milk provides a measure of authority and importance to Baker’s account. Finally, Baker imbued the flag with a measure of agency and transcendence. Reflecting on the flag, he said: It’s sort of a language, and it’s also proclaiming power. That’s the phenomenal [aspect] of it. I  made it in 1978 and I  hoped it would be a great symbol but it has transcended all of that—and within short order—because it became so much bigger than me, there when I  was producing it, much bigger even that the U.S. Now it’s made all over the world. The beauty of it is the way it has connected us.20

These comments function to further mystify the mundane details of human labor and the requisite cognitive overlap required for people to recognize the flag as a sign that joined rainbow colors with LGBT identity. Further, though, they attribute the rainbow flag’s global presence to its origin in the LGBT movement. Both Ham and Baker, each in his own way, produced origin stories that asserted the meaning they designated to be signified as universally applicable, self-evident, and transcendent, and that also concealed the extent of the preexisting conditions that made the desired effect possible. Perhaps because he is the one contesting the currently dominant associations with the rainbow flag, Ham’s mythmaking is far more elaborate. Consider how he opens his 2007 article, “Taking Back the Rainbow”: From my childhood days as a lad in Australia to my travels today as a speaker with Answers in Genesis, I’ve seen scores—probably hundreds—of these amazing multicolored arches [rainbows]. Whether seen from the back seat of the family station wagon as it bounced down a dirt road in rural Queensland, or the window seat of a jetliner flying over a storm below, these beautiful bows remind me of my parents’ teaching of what the Bible says about God’s purpose in giving us the rainbow.21

Ham uses, albeit in supremely compressed form, a set of nested narratives to introduce the topic:  seeing rainbows in any geographical locale, from any venue, at any time in his life (narrative 1) reminds Ham about times in his childhood when his parents taught him from the Bible (narrative 2), most especially when they instructed him about the Bible story about the flood (narrative 3), which reports what God said to Noah and his sons about his past actions, his future promises, and the purpose of the rainbow (narratives 4–6). Not only does he use nested narratives, though, he uses wellknown narratives:  in harkening back to his childhood, he invokes primitivist ideas about a “golden age,” the “good old days,” and “simpler times”; for some, the mention of childhood would also resonate with a “Sunday school” narrative; in referring to his parents he invokes a “nuclear family” narrative (which is clearly a heterosexual

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family narrative, as evidenced by his multiple uses of “mother and father” several times throughout the article). To understand what Ham means when he mentions “God’s purpose in giving us the rainbow,” we can look to the biblical text. Having just killed off all life except for Noah and others with him on the ark in a global flood, God’s attention was caught by Noah’s sacrificial cooking: And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Gen. 8:21-22, NRSV)

After blessing Noah and his sons, instructing them to multiply, and providing other guidance (Gen. 9:1-7), God spoke to them again: “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.” (Gen. 9:8-17, NRSV)

Thus, Ham tells a story in which he is told a story from a holy book that reports that God told a story about the past (he destroyed all flesh with a flood), about the future (no more of these floods), and about the rainbow in the clouds that will remind him not to kill off everyone with a flood ever again. The story recounts that the stories that God told Noah and his sons: (1) state a past state of affairs in which he had treated all flesh except for Noah and his family as having a very low status, low enough that it needed to be expunged; (2) envision a different kind of future with regard to the status of all flesh, meaning that even though humans have evil intentions he will nevertheless refrain from blotting them and everything else out via flood waters ever again: (3) associate the envisioned future status with a visible reminder that will function to remind God to hold back the rainfall no matter what. But why invoke such elaborate storytelling to assert a position on civil rights? Why not simply tweet your position and be done with it? I would argue that Ham is using a specific type of argumentation, one that consists in the strategic use of narrative to lend

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authority to his claims about the meaning of the rainbow, which, in turn, establishes his position with relation to other issues about social formation, status, identity, and behavior. Perhaps one man’s opinion does not carry much rhetorical force, but it is another matter entirely when that opinion is connected, even obliquely, with something to which other people already attribute authority and thus legitimacy. As we have seen, Ham uses an assortment of authoritative narratives, images, and entities in his argumentation: the Christian Bible; the well-known narratives about childhood, the golden age, and family; and perhaps most explicitly, a claim that he is communicating the desires of a supremely powerful God. The process of bolstering the authority of one’s own claims by connecting them with stories, people, entities, objects, and so forth, that are already recognized as conveying authority is known by some as a kind of mythmaking. As a “class of social argumentation,” mythmaking is especially helpful in stabilizing behavioral expectations, asserting identity, and defining group boundaries.22 Consider again the quotation from the 2016 blog post: “Sadly,” Ham wrote, “people ignore what God intended the rainbow to represent and proudly wave rainbow-colored flags in defiance of God’s command and design for marriage.”23 With this statement, Ham designates LGBTQ individuals and their supporters as existing outside the moral boundary not only of what he deems to be acceptable Christian practice but also of what God has demanded. With this added layer of superhuman authorization, then, Ham claims that in addition to comprising a separate social grouping defined by human sexuality, LGBTQ individuals and supporters are preparing themselves for eternal damnation. God’s promise not to blot out all flesh again via global flood does not preclude global destruction of another sort. To drive this point home, Ham invokes 2 Pet. 3:10 to claim that the rainbow has an ominous undertone, for while its “watery” colors—green, blue, indigo, violet—may very well represent the promise to never again flood the world to kill all flesh, the “hot” colors—red, orange, yellow—indicate that a fiery destruction lies ahead.24 He moves invisibly from the observation that the promise of never again using a flood for global destruction does not rule out using something else to the assertion that the world will in fact be destroyed in a future judgment through fire.25 He then moves directly into the claim that the grace articulated through the symbol of the rainbow is in fact the grace of Christ: “the rainbow is a covenant of grace. It is actually a symbol of Christ Himself.”26 This is because, as Ham suggests, the “Bible reveals to us that the rainbow is a symbol of Christ in Ezek. 1:26-28. In Rev. 4:2-3, John saw Christ clothed with a cloud and a rainbow on his head.”27 While Genesis reports that Noah built the ark as a vehicle to save people from demise at the hand of God in ancient times, the fact of the matter is that it is Christ who will save people from the future fiery judgment: God told Noah to build an Ark to save representative land animal kinds and Noah’s family. However, this Ark was much larger than needed for just these animals and this family. Just as Noah and his family had to go through the door to be saved, so others could have gone through that door to be saved. In fact, after the Ark was loaded, it stood for seven more days before God Himself shut the door—seven more

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days of grace. And I have no doubt that Noah preached from the doorway, imploring people to come in and be saved. Noah’s Ark is actually a picture of salvation in Christ, as He is the door through which we need to go to be saved for eternity (Jn 10:9).28

Ham’s gloss on the Noah story legitimizes the “take back the rainbow” campaign by making it analogous to Noah’s preaching in the days leading up to the deadly flood. The campaign, then, aims to summon those who are sinful into the ark (i.e., Christianity) before the fires of judgment arrive. It is in this way that Ham is able to frame his campaign as one of love rather than hatred. He, like Noah, has been chosen to save the lost before it is too late. What began with a series of tweets appearing in the early hours of the morning (for those on Eastern time, at least) turns out to be a complex discursive event that utilizes mythmaking as a way to assert identity. Ham’s narrative is both backward and forward looking, a past story about divine punishment for sin, a future story about pending punishment for sin, and as for the present time, identification of the kinds of behaviors that God counts as sin. His use of narrative demonstrates the power not so much of the symbols but of the judicious leveraging of the past as a way to lend credibility and authority to ways in which individuals and groups make assertions about their real-time and desired social location and status. Baker took advantage of the recognizability of the flag as a host vehicle for symbols of identity to aid visibility and rights, while Ham used a story from a holy book in which God declared a meaning for the rainbow. Ham draws upon the idea of timelessness and essentialism, the idea that the rainbow has one true “meaning” waiting to be revealed, that this meaning has been covered up, ignored by popular culture, and he sees himself engaged in a battle that is at once social and spiritual, temporal and eternal, local and universal, and he envisions that the battle has two sides, one allied with God and the other against him. Baker and Ham have effectively taken something that in itself contains no inherent meaning (a rainbow) and have used already authorized narratives, imagery, and entities to transform it into a sign. Baker associated his use of the rainbow with the social vision of Harvey Milk and thought that it would create a better future for everyone who embraced that vision; he asserted that the rainbow’s meaning was not just any meaning, but one that comes from nature and corresponds to naturally occurring human diversity; he spoke of the meaning associated with the rainbow as universal and self-evident. Ham, for his part, connected his use of the rainbow with the words of an eternal God, as recorded in various parts of the Christian Bible; he asserted that the rainbow’s meaning was eternal, universal, and divinely sanctioned, a meaning that he claims to have grave impact not only upon people’s distant, eternal futures, but also upon their present-day ability to pursue certain social, material, political, economic interests through the institution of marriage.

Myth as bloodless battleground The term myth is used in everyda y speech to designate falsity. In more technical speech, though, a self-evident connection between myth and falsehood is not to be assumed.

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Among scholars of religion, for example, myth refers to a category that, more often than not, is associated with deep truths about humanity. It is important to note, though, that the association of myth with either truth or falsity, and even within a more broadly conceived evaluative taxonomy, is neither natural nor necessary. That a definition of myth has anything at all to do with the veracity of its contents is a result achieved over time, through various forms of intellectual labor and cultural production. The approach to myth taken in this volume aims to sidestep questions of truth and falsity, and in fact aims to move beyond a content-based classification altogether. Rather than viewing myth as a type of narrative whose contents may be judged to be true or false, we take myth to be a type of speech defined primarily by how it functions within discourse about social structure, status, and power. To situate this approach within a broader scope, I outline other approaches before describing ours in more detail. As can be seen in the way ancient Greek intellectuals used the term mythos—the term from which we get our English word myth—the back-and-forth concerning its definition points more toward a struggle for social dominance than toward any inherent meaning in the word itself. In the early epic poems, we find the word mythos designating a type of speech that was authoritative and true, and was consistently attributed to courageous, heroic men, and especially those who needed to use their authority to encourage their comrades on the battlefield: “[In Homer] mythos is always a speech of power, performed at length, in public, by one in a position of authority . . . [as] in Hesiod: mythos is an assertive discourse of power and authority that represents itself as something to be believed and obeyed.”29 Another way that mythos was understood to be authoritative was that it was thought to have the power to evoke moral transformation. Consider the scene in the Odyssey, where Odysseus, having concealed his identity, sits at a banquet with the Phaeacian king.30 The king praises the blind poet Demodocus, saying that, “Among all peoples of the earth, poets/Are apportioned honor and respect, since to them/The Muse taught song-ways and she loves the race of poets.”31 With these words, the king praised both Demodocus and the class of poets more generally, stating that they deserve the highest of respect among humans because they are beloved to the divine. The poem uses an authoritative figure (the king) to praise poets and poetry, with the result that the story is self-authorizing; nothing beyond the poem is needed for one to notice that it ought to hold weight, if only by virtue of its genre. As it turns out, though, the authorizing function of that section has only just begun. Upon hearing Demodocus recount with incredible accuracy the episode of the sack of Troy, including Odysseus’s own heroic role, Odysseus weeps and speaks truth (mythos): he reveals his identity and praises the poets above all others. A poet has the best and most godlike profession, for through their craft they convey truth, transform humans, and build character, as evidenced by the response of the hero in the poem to the poet in the poem’s poem. Not only does the section explicitly state its own authority as a divinely given one, it also, through the narration of Odysseus’s response, vividly illustrates the power of poetry, which further adds credence to the claims about the extraordinary status of the poets. Something happened, though, to the association of mythos, truth, authority, and power, for as one can see beginning in Xenophanes, the prestige and authority of the poets was intentionally chipped away until Plato tightened the rhetorical screws that

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would finally dissolve the poets’ discursive power.32 In the Phaedrus, the text commonly seen to be the decisive (or at least the most eloquent) assertion of dominance over the poets, Plato accepted the premise that the poets were inspired by the muses but, rather than also accepting their association with the gods as a self-evidently good thing, he turned the tables by recasting it as something negative (a reading of the term that is influential to this day, of course).33 By characterizing poetic inspiration as divine possession, Plato issued a sustained and scathing critique that claimed that poetry came not from the rational human mind but rather from a state of madness (mania).34 As such, the poets operated from a condition of ignorance and thus produced manipulative, morally degenerate, and impious works. By constructing the poets and their usage of the terminology of mythos as a foil, Plato conjured the origins of philosophy as an event wherein one regime of truth (philosophy and its logos) superseded and displaced another (poetry and its mythos).35 Through carefully crafted discourse promoted at the right time, the social status of the poets was displaced and the group that we come to know as the philosophers came to power. The so-called Greek miracle, then, was not an historical process wherein the philosophers pulled humanity toward reason (logos) from a world of make-believe (mythos). It was, instead, a powerful set of strategies, a “rhetoric of legitimation”— which includes that very tale of triumphant rationality—marking a victory in a “semantic skirmish” in which the kind of speech (mythos) formerly known to be true became a lie, and in which the truth tellers became deceivers.36 The effective connection of mythos with falsity may be seen in later scholarly work on the topic. Using a concept of “the primitive” to stand in for “divine madness,” scholars in the intellectualist tradition could make claims about the inferiority of mythic narrative.37 Some stories about the gods, they said, were the attempts of prescientific, “primitive” peoples to explain natural phenomena, while others were embellished memories of ancient heroes.38 Rather than connecting myth’s irrationality with the displacement of the human mind via divine possession, these scholars followed a Darwinian model that approached myth as representative of “the childhood of human thought.”39 The idea of the primitive was not viewed negatively by everyone, though, as evidenced by Johann Gottfried Herder and the Romantic tradition.40 From this perspective, myth was an expression of truths from the primordial past, a kind of “golden age” that enabled nations to feel unified and to remember their values. In this way, it was viewed as a more authentic manner of expression than the poetry and art of the aristocrats. Myth, it was thought, was the public articulation of emotion that resulted from brushes with the numinous, the holy, or the otherwise transcendent. These ideas developed eventually into an understanding of religion as experience expressed through myth.41 From a psychological perspective, myth was also viewed as an expression, but one that served individual and social purposes. Sigmund Freud, for example, viewed myth as the disguised expression of natural and yet antisocial desires. People must repress certain desires for the sake of maintaining social order but because the repression will eventually cause harm, the desires will leak out anyway. Like the dream or the so-called Freudian slip, myth provides a way for people to express the antisocial urges

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in a socially acceptable way. In this way, myth functions as a collective therapy for the human neurosis.42 From a Jungian perspective, myth is a symbolic message both from and to ourselves. Hidden aspects of personality are expressed via archetypes and help show a person’s full potential and true self. Joseph Campbell saw in myth a threepart quest motif and a popular archetype: departure; confrontation and change; then return. People continue to tell and retell stories like this because they identify with the motif and find that it helps organize and manage their personalities.43 Another approach has been to study myth as a kind of language, as structured public evidence of the order of human cognition.44 A popular approach to myth within the study of religion comes from the “history of religions” school and sees myth as conveying a social group’s deepest personal and social values, but in veiled, encoded, symbolic ways. The truths expressed are primordial and the idea is that by studying myth one can study the earliest humans.45 This approach hearkens back to the view of the Romantics, who saw something inherently true and uniquely human about myth, something that, if studied properly, could yield deep insight about humanity in the broadest sense of the term. While it still remains the most common approach to myth within the study of religion, the history of religions approach has its fair share of critics. Consider the comments of Jonathan Z. Smith, in his 1992 book, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual: [The usual histories of the study of religion] speak as if the correlation of myth and ritual was commonplace, as if the major task of rectification was to disabuse the notion that myths were false or that they were lies. Not so! The history of the imagination of the categories myth and ritual was sharply divergent. To say myth was false was to recognize it as having content; to declare ritual to be “empty” was to deny the same.46

Smith points out that while scholars felt the need to restore myth as a respectable category of analysis, they did so not by divesting it of any inherent meaning but, rather, by affirming it as a meaning-laden vessel and simply switching their evaluation of its contents’ truth-value from “False” to “True.” From this perspective, the study of myth turns out to be “a reconstructive and hermeneutic labor bent on ferreting out the truth or falsity of myth, on decoding and then recovering obscured meanings.”47 The practice of scouring “exotic” myths for symbolic or encoded traces of truth is described by Smith as “an enterprise of a ‘hermeneutic of recovery’ in that the study welcomes the foreign if only to show by some allegorizing or rationalizing procedure, that it is, in fact, the ‘same.’ ”48 Smith concludes that, “[f]‌or the most part, the study of myth was an exercise in cultural appropriation,”49 which, if I understand him correctly, is to say that the study of myth from the history of religions perspective was less about explaining cross-cultural data (i.e., myths) in human terms and more about using (appropriating) these data as evidence for the truth and universality of the scholars’ own beliefs. The perspective of this volume is that Smith’s observation ought to be taken to heart and, thus, we resist treating myth as fundamentally conservative (i.e., a carrier of primordial and primitive content) to free ourselves from adjudicating between the

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truth or falsity of myth’s content. Instead, we treat myth as primarily constructive, meaning simply that it is both product and productive of specific forms of human sociality; product because myth addresses contemporary interests, and productive because it recodes and conceals those interests as a self-authorizing discourse by connecting localized claims with eternal, supernatural, or otherwise transcendent truths. Although we classify myth as authoritative and persuasive discourse, it often persuades by jumping the gap: myth’s persuasive power comes not so much through argument (although it can), as it does through the careful arrangement of things that lend authority where it is needed.50 Myth’s capacity to distribute authority thusly does not entail that myths must be stories about the gods or that mythmakers need be “religious.” The gods are there merely to authorize, conceal, and place local, temporal, and contingent social interests beyond reach or reproach; this being the case, myth need not invoke the gods at all, but rather only needs to deploy a functional equivalent such as a founder figure, a shared ancestor, or a revered object. In taking this approach, we build upon the work of Roland Barthes, Bruce Lincoln, Burton Mack, Russell McCutcheon, Jonathan Z. Smith, and others who take mythmaking to be an intentional human practice, a specific type of discourse that does things, and the things that it does and the situations in which it does them are neither trivial nor without consequence. In times of social stability, mythmaking operates silently to maintain the status quo, often in the guise of “official history”; when groups are pushing for social change or revolution, mythmaking becomes more experimental, innovative, and intensive, often under the cover of “critical history,” and especially the type of critical history known as “revisionist.”51 In this latter capacity, mythmaking aims to contest and destabilize the hegemonic, officially sanctioned discourse, and it does so “by telling persuasive stories that depict the world the way they think it should be, [and] groups can fight and defeat other groups without raising a fist or shooting a gun. Myths and rituals are often best understood as bloodless battlegrounds for social power.”52 This is not to say, though, that myth and discourse cannot or do not function alongside violence and force. Indeed, quite the opposite. As Lincoln explains, force, defined as the threat or enactment of physical violence, “remains something of a stopgap measure: effective in the short run, unworkable over the long haul.”53 He elaborates with reference to cases of imperial conquest, noting that “successful integration of the [conquered] population within those territories depends upon—better yet, amounts to—the transformation of those peoples’ consciousness,” and that “[s]‌uch a radical recasting of collective identity . . . can hardly be accomplished by force alone . . . Discourse supplements force in several important ways, among the most important of which is ideological persuasion.”54 I  quote now at some length because here Lincoln gets to the heart of the point I am making about the high stakes of the discursive practice of mythmaking: In the hands of elites and of those professionals who serve them (either in mediated fashion or directly), discourse of all forms—not only verbal, but also the symbolic discourses of spectacle, gesture, costume, edifice, icon, musical performance, and the like—may be strategically employed to mystify the inevitable inequities of any social order and to win the consent of those over whom power is exercised,

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Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation thereby obviating the need for the direct coercive use of force and transforming simple power into “legitimate” authority. Yet discourse can also serve members of subordinate classes . . . in their attempts to demystify, delegitimate, and deconstruct the established norms, institutions, and discourses that play a role in constructing their subordination.55

It is the dialogic use of discourse between officially sanctioned institutions and those who contest them that I aim to highlight by discussing one further example, which coincidentally involves another flag. It serves as a stark reminder that mythmaking is an active, experimental, innovative, and intentional form of augmentation that intensifies in times of social change and instability. In many ways, the field of mythic production is a battleground, a place where the deepest of social wounds are opened. On June 17, 2015, a white assailant shot and killed nine black parishioners in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The church is one of the country’s oldest black churches and its congregants have suffered a long history of violent abuse by whites. At a time when churches were required to have a majority of white congregants to be considered licit, when black congregants could only worship during daylight hours, and when black literacy was prohibited, whites repeatedly raided the church. On one occasion, when local whites discovered that black congregants were learning to read and write, they arrested 140 congregants and fined and lashed 8 church leaders.56 A few years later, when white slave owners learned of plans for a June 17, 1822 slave revolt and escape to Haiti, the city court held secret trials; they hanged 35 congregants in the city gallows, sold another 35 to Spanish Cuba, exiled the ministers to Philadelphia, and demolished Mother Emanuel.57 The church was rebuilt after the Civil War only to have its minister, also a state senator, assassinated in 1868. Violent white harassment continued through the time of the civil rights movement. The massacre of June 17, 2015, then, occurring as it did in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, appeared to many as but the most recent in the history of the white violence that has been employed as a “stopgap measure” to assert and retain hegemonic power in the United States. The day following the shooting, people in Columbia, South Carolina, noticed that while the American flag and the South Carolina state flag located atop the State House were flying at half-mast to memorialize the tragedy, the Confederate battle flag, also located on the State House grounds, remained at the top of its flagpole. The presence of this flag had been discussed over prior years but its presence on this day was particularly hurtful to many people. As State House staff tried to explain, the Confederate flag could not be moved to half-mast due to the way the rope was affixed to the pole. Not being satisfied with this explanation, people began to gather on the State House grounds to protest the flag’s continued presence, which for them was intimately connected with the repeated incidents of white aggression waged at the congregants of Mother Emmanuel since before the Civil War, aggression that aimed more broadly to maintain the power that comes along with a racialized hegemony. Although some suggested that the massacre may not have been about race and that the flag had nothing to do with white aggression, that position became untenable when the shooter, upon his arrest on June 18, 2015, said that he had hoped to start a race war,

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and when it was discovered two days later that his personal website contained a racist manifesto and photographs of him posing not only with symbols showing neo-Nazi and white supremacist loyalties, but also with the Confederate battle flag. Living less than a mile from the State House grounds, I  was able to observe the activities that materialized between the time of the shooting on June 17 and the flag’s final removal on July 10. Individuals and groups converged on the grounds and waged around-the-clock campaigns and vigils, either for or against the flag’s tenure on the State House lawn. It quickly became apparent that the spontaneous campaigns were not designed to persuade by argumentation but, rather, were experiments in jumping the gap through innovative combinations and manipulations of symbols, figures, concepts, slogans, images, and bodies that were already recognizably authoritative. In other words, people were staking out positions on the issue of the location of the Confederate flag via the discourse of myth and thereby constructed a collection of ideological points with which people could identify themselves and by which they could identify others, at least on this issue concerning this flag. Understood as the mutual contestations that accompany any manner of social change, the campaigns and vigils emerged precisely as Burton Mack has theorized: “when the stretch between the [empirical-social and mythic] worlds is at a breaking point because of changes in a social history, the people may experience dis-ease and want to do some rethinking about, if not make some revisions of, their myths and social practices.”58 The “rethinking” that occurred on the State House grounds took place through makeshift exhibits, posters, displays, chants, and performances. While some organized groups were present, it became clear to me that the exhibits on display had been put together rather quickly and that the manner of presentation depended neither upon a systematic set of beliefs nor upon the existence of a cohesive group. What was taking place, by contrast, were attempts to forge, construct, and conjure groupness, in many cases through the language of “heritage.” Among those who argued for the flag to stay on the State House grounds, some set up tables and displays that featured old photographs of Confederate States Army veterans. Some of these tables were staffed by people claiming biological descent from those veterans and thus also displayed family trees, lineage charts, and old family photographs. There was information available about different lineage-based societies and for the first time I noticed the intricate metalwork on the Monument of the South Carolina Women of the Confederacy, also located on the State House grounds. The people who had produced these assemblage of images and information aimed to make the case that the Confederate flag should remain at the State House as a way to memorialize the deaths of their ancestors, and that the flag’s removal would be an erasure of history and an unforgivable act of dishonor to the dead. Unlike the white nationalist groups that held preplanned, scheduled protests during this time, the spontaneous and makeshift displays that I have described here did not say outright that their claims about the flag were racially driven. In fact, there was a level of discourse present that aimed to conceal the racialized aspect. Some of the exhibits representing ancestral ties to Confederate veterans, for example, recoded the race-based lineages they used in their argumentation as an interest in southern cultural practices. One of these tables was staffed by a small group of white men

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and women in period clothing, who offered demonstrations of artisanal techniques popular during the time of the war and pamphlets with information about day-today life during that time. Whether the participants recognized it or not, the artisanal demonstrations and information about a southern cultural heritage functioned not only to mask the racialized aspects of that heritage but also served to humanize the Confederate ancestors being maligned by those who lobbied for the flag’s removal. Those who argued for the flag’s removal emphasized a different narrative, one very much like the one just described that recounted the history of white violence against Mother Emanuel and its parishioners. When set within the broader narratives of the history of Mother Emanuel, of the willing participation of the United States in the enslavement of African people, and of the murderer’s support of white nationalism, those who opposed the flag’s continued presence on the lawn pointed toward its use in a long history of racism. Thus, they were able to emphasize a narrative in which the hoisting of the flag in 1961 served to oppose the burgeoning civil rights movement, and connected it back to the time of the civil war in a way that associated the flag with support for the continued enslavement of African people. As with the example of the rainbow flag discussed previously, the controversy over the Confederate flag may be framed not only as an interpretive dispute over the meaning of the textile displayed on the lawn of the State House but also as a collection of competing claims that functioned to construct the ideological starting points around which people might understand themselves to converge, and which also inspired more explicit acts of identification asserted in relation to the positioning of the flag. In the days and weeks following the Charleston massacre, the social boundaries between African Americans, people of color, and their white allies, on the one hand, and white supporters of the Confederate flag, on the other, were starkly defined and concretized. Both sides moved quickly to make clear their political allegiances. Given that the flag’s positioning on the State House grounds was seen by many as an indication of the loyalties of those in power, loyalties that fit into a history of violence and oppression against African Americans at the hands of white people, those who desired the flag’s removal saw themselves to be standing up against structural racism. Those desiring that it remains in place claimed that it stood not for oppression but rather as a memorial to those who had died in the war, a symbol of southern cultural heritage, or—in the case of the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist groups that converged on the scene—white supremacy. Both sides drew upon narratives about the past to make their case and they disagreed, not only about the relative levels of credibility of these narratives but also about the extent to which those narratives ought to impinge upon human lives. The State House grounds became the material staging area for an active, aggressive, passionate, and at times violent and heartbreaking controversy. Another staging area was the site of contestation known as myth, that bloodless battleground upon which rival sides took positions, staked their claims, and brandished weapons called “the past” or “heritage” or “history” that were understood, even without a theoretical apparatus, to lend authority to present claims and future hopes. As D. Travers Scott has observed, “The Charleston shooting did not absolutely and permanently change the meaning of the [Rebel] Flag, but it was an act of violence that, as an ideological

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practice, brought one of several competing ideologies to greater prominence, to such a degree that it could no longer be ignored, and the Flag was removed.”59 As with Ham’s contestation of LGBTQ civil rights and as with the sites to be discussed throughout this book, the example of the mythmaking that accompanied the 2015 controversy about the Confederate flag was no mere pastime, no quaint curiosity.

Recurring themes and preview of chapters Taken together, the examples of mythmaking covered in this book could lead one to believe that mythmaking emerges from an already cohesive group, community, or institution, and possibly one that has an agreed-upon set of doctrinal ideas or canonical narratives. I want to emphasize, though, that this is not always the case and that the process of mythmaking often works in reverse. As Stanley K.  Stowers has argued with respect to Pauline mythmaking, for example, we ought not mistake a rhetoric of community for evidence of an historical one but ought, rather, approach it as a strategy for conjuring groupness.60 This manner of conjuring takes place at a cognitive level, for as sociologists Benedict Anderson and Rogers Brubaker have emphasized in their studies on nationalism and ethnicity, certain types of communal identification depend upon a type of thinking that allows a person to assert connections with others based solely upon some (presumably) shared ideology, commitment, or trait.61 When considered from this perspective, myth operates not only at the level of social formation (i.e., summoning together a group of humans) but also at the level of mental formation (i.e., producing a set of ideological starting points that individuals may use as unifying points of identification). This is one way, then, that mythmaking and the formation of identity can converge. Rather than depending upon the efficacy of simple assertions (e.g., “you belong to group A!”), though, myth accomplishes its task through a particular kind of narrative storytelling. The coming chapters investigate the features and strategies present in myth that make it an effective instrument for the cultural work of identity formation. Although multiple strategies are operational at the collection of sites analyzed throughout the volume, I discuss them here in terms of three interrelated and overlapping concepts: authority, interest, and concealment.

Authority Bruce Lincoln distinguishes four categories of narrative about the past: fable, legend, history, and myth.62 The distinctions turn not upon the narratives’ content but, rather, upon “the claims that are made by their narrators and the way in which those claims are received by their audience(s).”63 Narratives that “make no truth-claims at all, but rather present themselves and are accepted as fictions pure and simple,” are fables.64 Others, though, do “purport to offer accurate accounts of past events” and while Lincoln designates those that lack the persuasive power to convince the audience(s) of their credibility as legends, he marks out those that do have such power as histories.65 Finally, he defines myth as narrative that, in addition to meeting the criteria of history, claims and is received as having authority:

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Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation A narrative possessed of authority is one for which successful claims are made not only to the status of truth, but what is more, to the status of paradigmatic truth. In this sense the authority of myth is somewhat akin to that of charters, models, templates, and blueprints, but one can go beyond this formulation and recognize that it is also (and perhaps more important) akin to that of revolutionary slogans and ancestral invocations, in that through the recitation of myth one may effectively mobilize a social grouping. Thus, myth is not just a coding device in which important information is conveyed, on the basis of which actors can then construct society. It is also a discursive act through which actors evoke the sentiments out of which society is actively constructed.66

By this account, it is authority that separates mythic from historical narrative, and thus myth operates both to map a social landscape that is recognized as correct in the normative sense (i.e., myth shows how society ought to look) and to align people within that landscape based upon the desires and aversions that it instills within them (i.e., myth makes people want to inhabit their assigned places and to avoid those places marked out for others). Each of the sites investigated in the book promotes itself in one way or another to provide a disinterested, accurate, and credible account of “history.” Further, though, each site uses strategies that construe their stories about the past as authoritative, which, when applying the Lincolnian classification schema, places the narratives on display squarely within the territory of myth. Claims about historical accuracy are often easy enough to identify at the tourist attractions covered here but assertions about authority may be, at least at first, more difficult to detect. As the chapters by Stephen L.  Young, James S.  Bielo, and Steven Watkins show, however, narrative authority can be manufactured through what turn out to be a collection of readily observable tactics. In Chapter 1, Stephen L. Young explores the ways that the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) in Washington, DC, utilizes the authority commonly attributed to history museums. His chapter, “The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America,” provides a theoretical look at how museums function as arenas of cultural production that curate the past in ways that people tend to recognize as both trustworthy and normative. Museums thus are not mere repositories or containers for historical facts, but rather are carefully constructed spaces that intentionally connect visitors with particular pasts in order to draw attention to or away from certain issues of present concern. Young shows that the issue of concern at MOTB is the status of Evangelicals within the contemporary landscape of the United States, and he argues that the recurring emphasis upon the exceptionalism of the Bible is a cipher for the exceptionalism of the United States. Using the recognized authority of museum displays, exhibits, and artefacts, MOTB narrates the origins of the United States as having been driven by the impact of the Christian Bible and, thus, constructs a myth of a Christian nation that emboldens modern-day Evangelicals by giving them a heritage that stretches back to the country’s founders. Having thus produced a form of Evangelical authority that hinges both upon national origins and upon the Bible, MOTB gives warrant for Evangelical hegemony.

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Chapter 2 explores the authorizing strategies in operation at Ark Encounter, the theme park operated by AiG in Williamstown, Kentucky. In “The Materiality of Myth: Authorizing Fundamentalism at Ark Encounter,” James S. Bielo argues that if one is to understand why Ark Encounter can successfully advance the mythmaking potency of creationism, then one must understand the dialogic interchange between creationist visitors and the interpretive gaps opened by the theme park’s choreographed environment. Bielo, an anthropologist who has recently published an ethnography on Ark Encounter,67 conceptualizes the park as a case of narrative in materialized form. He shows that the park authorizes the biblical story of Noah’s ark by transforming the written words of scripture into an embodied place and by providing a multisensory and affective experience that immerses visitors within the materialized past; the park thus provides visitors with material evidence attesting to the possibility of the Noah narrative and situates them within an emotional drama attesting to its plausibility. Being satisfied that the park has met what Bielo terms the “plausibility imperative,” visitors reproduce their trust in a literalist biblical past and, in turn, renew their commitment to the broader creationist movement. Chapter 3, “Rival Epistemologies and Constructed Confusion at the Creation Museum,” analyzes AiG’s other tourist destination, the Creation Museum (CM) in Petersburg, Kentucky. As Steven Watkins shows, the materialization and affective immersion observed at Ark Encounter do not exhaust AiG’s arsenal of authorizing strategies. CM narrates history as a series of attacks waged by Satan in order to make the case that his attacks will continue until the return of Christ and his victory in the final battle. Using an apocalyptic motif, CM calls on all good Christians to fight against Satan’s most recent attack, which appears in the guise of evolutionary science and those who support it. Watkins shows how CM draws battle lines in terms of two rival, irreconcilable epistemologies, one that is grounded in God’s word and another that is grounded in flawed human reason; those who follow God’s word are depicted as having a clear, unified set of answers about the physical universe, while those who follow human reason are shown to embody a multiplicity of conflicting opinions. By associating unity and clarity with truth, and multiplicity with confusion, CM not only casts doubt upon evolutionary science and authorizes its own streamlined interpretation in its stead; it also constructs two kinds of people—Young Earth Creationists and everybody else—and authorizes one as in league with God and the other as minions of Satan.

Interest By virtue of its authorizing component, mythmaking constitutes the strongest and most potent form of social discourse. In claiming that a particular retelling of certain past events is accurate (i.e., that it is history in the Lincolnian sense) and, further, by imbuing it with authority (i.e., making it into myth in the same sense), narrators are able to map and remap the historical landscape according to their own interests. For Burton Mack, myth necessarily involves “events and agents that deal with the social interests that a people have found to be of importance for living together as a collective.”68 As he developed the concept in Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social

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Theory of Religion, social interests are “the collective investments humans make in the construction of their societies.”69 Mack identifies the most basic human interests as territory, the people, social structures, rites of passage, food production, and ancestors.70 These interests, located in what Mack refers to as the “empirical-social world,” take center stage in what he calls the “mythic worlds” that locate the human within a broad cosmic context and enable people to “look at themselves from afar and celebrate or think about their current practices.”71 Mythmaking, then, is a way to talk about, negotiate, and authorize interests about the empirical-social world and matters of everyday exchange.72 Mack shows that these interests, these concerns about the mundane moments of the everyday, tend to show up in myth not only in exaggerated, fantastic, and grotesque form, but also in ways that imbue the envisioned arrangement of the social world with purpose or agency. Locating national boundaries at certain points along a natural landscape, for instance, could be fruitfully justified through recourse to a creation myth in which a deity or agential designer demarcates certain territories as belonging to certain peoples; securing a particular spot for one’s own people in the social hierarchy might be usefully effected with a myth of origins “in which precedence is established by patriarchs, powers, and authorities not accessible for questioning.”73 Myth manipulates the past to authorize a particular social vision and demands, implicitly and/or explicitly, that the audience turn back to the world of the everyday and transform the vision into reality. Some of the sites have been criticized or mocked for no other reason than for their entanglement in a range of social domains, including the political and economic domains. Consider, for example, Ark Encounter’s alleged attempt to secure lower tax rates or MOTB’s purchase of antiquities without knowledge of their provenance.74 Journalists continue to be surprised (and sometimes dismayed) that some of the sites have such extensive gift shops or that they imitate other “non-religious” venues. I would submit that one reason people tend to see these and other similar sites as so utterly strange is because they assume that religion is a domain that is—or, rather, that it ought to be—fundamentally dis- or un- entangled with certain other domains. When approached as a purely human phenomenon, though, it should not be surprising that religion would be thoroughly and inseparably enmeshed within culture. Thus, the very act of identifying a uniquely religious domain is, in itself, an intentionally constructive practice. In their chapters covering Christian tours of Israel, Sean Durbin and Katja Vehlow demonstrate the deep entanglement of Christian mythmaking. Both chapters show multiple interests interwoven within overlapping social domains, and they demonstrate Mack’s claims about the ways that social-empirical interests show up in the mythic world as assertions of social boundaries (i.e., as the formation of group identities). In Chapter 4, “ ‘It is what it is’: Mythmaking and Identity Formation on a Christian Zionist Tour of Israel,” Sean Durbin explores how a Christian Zionist tour of Israel addresses material, political, and social interests. He examines the rhetoric of the evangelical pastors and the (non-evangelical) Israeli tour guide to show that the classification of particular tourist sites as “religious” is itself a political act. Durbin argues that the narrative discourse of the tour guide and pastors transformed positions on contestable political realities into religious claims and biblical truths. In this way,

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the discourse functioned not only to further the interests of the group but also to disguise them. The tour guides addressed political disputes over territory and national boundaries as issues that have been settled long ago by God, as attested in the Christian Bible, and handled disputes over ancestors and pilgrimage practices in ways that distinguished Protestants from Catholics. In Chapter 5, “ ‘. . . that their heart might throb with love for Israel!’: Celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles with Charismatics and Messianic Jews in Jerusalem,” Katja Vehlow analyzes the multiple interests that are served at a Christian celebration of Sukkot in Jerusalem. While Sukkot is widely celebrated historical Jewish holiday, participants and leaders of the Feast celebrate it as a holiday about Jesus. Simultaneously, they view Zionist support for Jews and Israel as their God-given duty and endeavor to provide comfort and apology for the events of the Shoah. Vehlow argues that such a celebration hinges on paradoxical ignorance—that is, a willful not-knowing that fully disregards and erases mainstream Jewish practices, as well as the ongoing plight of Palestinians. This is not to say that participants are insincere in their aims or intentions, but rather that, for them, the geography of Israel and its inhabitants are modern day manifestations of a mythic narrative that began in the distant past and is headed for a preordained telos, a spiritual battle that will culminate at the Second Coming; present day material, social, political, and economic conflicts are recast as moments in this larger cosmic narrative and thus can go unaddressed.

Concealment This recasting of social interests as religious interests, what Mack would call the positioning of the empirical social world within the mythic world, points toward a third component of myth and mythmaking: concealment. Myth conceals the fact that the point of contact between the mythic and the empirical-social worlds is the product of human labor. Myth disguises localized, time-bound, social agreements as universal, timeless, primordial truths. Myth does this through narrative and direct speech that removes people from the “tug-and-pull of the contingent, historical world and places them in an abstract, ahistorical realm where such things as truths are obvious, enduring and self-evident.”75 Concealment functions not only to lend authority to myth but also to protect it from critical analysis. Displacing truth claims about social interests away from identifiable individuals or groups onto inaccessible figures or entities (inclusive of “the past” or “tradition” or “nature”), effectively wipes away the fingerprints that would belie the interests of the mythmaker. The final three chapters of the book address concealment. In Chapter 6, “Anachronism as a Constituent Feature of Mythmaking at the BibleWalk Museum,” Jennifer Eyl takes us to Mansfield, Ohio, the home of one of the country’s largest Bible-themed wax museums, which offers five tours. Focusing on the anachronistic insertion of Christ into Israelite narratives in the “Miracles of the Old Testament” tour, the chapter examines the work that such anachronism accomplishes, and considers by whom and for whom this work is accomplished. Eyl shows that on a rudimentary level, the Jesus figures that are inserted into early Israelite narratives stitch those narratives into the next tour, the “Life of Christ.” This “stitching in” recycles

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longstanding Christian claims that Jesus is prefigured (in various instances) in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing especially on the display of Christ in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from Dan. 3, as well as an exhibit that locates Christ within the holy of holies along with the ark of the covenant, Eyl shows that the reordering of events allows for the development of a particular ideology in which Christianity prefigures and is coterminous with Israelite religion. Visitors would not notice that the anachronism functions to infuse the ancient narrative with ideology because it has been seamlessly folded into the ancient narratives and is presented merely as chronological history. In Chapter 7, “Embodied Mythic Formation at the Holy Land Experience,” Erin Roberts considers how myth exploits the physicality of materialized pasts to render ancient characters and events intelligible, attractive, and useful for thinking about present-day concerns. Using examples from the materialized, mythic discourse at the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s theme park, the Holy Land Experience (HLE) in Orlando, Florida, Roberts argues that myth closes the gap between past and present by eliciting a process of inquiry that she calls embodied mythic formation. Like other forms of practice-based inquiry, embodied mythic formation involves reflection upon self, others, and the world more generally. In a manner unlike other forms, though, it is engendered through interaction with a specific type of materialized, mythic discourse: self-authorizing narratives about the past that construct groupings of people and map them onto a hierarchical socio-cosmic landscape in a way that accounts for some feature of the contemporary world. Roberts discusses the kinds of inquiry prompted by the discourse at HLE and further suggests that visitors’ recognition of how the constructed past could impinge upon present-day life depends upon their misrecognition the material interests at stake. Finally, in Chapter 8, Craig Martin shows that so-called secular sites and discourses similarly mystify and conceal through a strategic referral to a transcendent, mystifying thing, thereby addressing questions about the extent to which the mythmaking operative at the various tourist attractions may be classified as “religious.” His chapter, “On the Myth of Religion’s Uniqueness,” puts to rest the assumption that “religion” is a unique form of culture that is fundamentally or essentially different from other forms of culture. Such an assumption persists on the grounds that religion is sui generis insofar as it concerns “sacred” or “supernatural” matters, “the transcendent,” or “the mysterium tremendum.” Against this view, Martin demonstrates—through an analysis of mythmaking strategies deployed at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Ontario, and comparison to the strategies analyzed in the previous chapters of this volume— that the means of crafting identities through material sites are similar across the board, whether in operation through forms of culture colloquially considered “religious” or “nationalist.” Mythmaking functions similarly across social domains, whether the myths at hand appeal to mundane or supramundane realms. By conceiving of religion as a thoroughly human practice governed by mundane, material interests and informed by normal cognitive processes, one can resist the tendency to view religion as a sui generis phenomenon, pure unto itself, and distinctly separate from mundane areas of human interest such as the political or economic aspects of social life. As has been clear for some time now, this rhetorical portioning

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off of the matters of the gods nicely illustrates the practice of making a social fact into a natural one, and itself is conditioned by its historical location and material interests. By resisting this attempt, we are more open to see how the sites examined in this volume use forms of religious authorization (gods, ancestors, spirits, language of the sacred, etc.) to simultaneously bolster and mask their seemingly nonreligious claims about social order and power, and we are not surprised or abhorred to see these connections. As will be seen, though, there are many ways of lending credence to a claim, and not all of those ways depend upon imbuing it with divine authority.

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The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America Stephen L. Young

On November 17, 2017, the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) in Washington, DC, opened its doors to the public. It was built by the conservative Evangelical Christian Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby and chairman of the board for MOTB. He and spokespeople for the museum portray it as a non-sectarian educational service to the public. It reports facts about the Bible and its impact on the world. Thus “the intent of the Museum of the Bible . . . is to show how the Bible has had an impact on every area of life . . . we show the Bible’s influence on everything from the most powerful nation on earth down to an individual life.”1 Indeed, “in the museum, we tell the narrative of the Bible . . . we can’t emphasize enough that we want the museum to be a place where we all come together to look at the Bible with open minds, without agendas.”2 Others have explored the conservative Evangelical interests that shape MOTB’s presentation of the Bible and interrogated how its rhetoric of non-sectarianism serves to legitimate it as a space for Christian cultural production.3 While this chapter coordinates with such assessments, my interests reside more with analyzing the museum as a site of Evangelical Christian mythmaking. Exploring how MOTB’s mythmaking works entails thinking about how museums function as spaces that curate knowledge in order to construct new memories or pasts for visitors. This requires attention not only to the museums themselves, but to how visitors engage or perceive them. I refer to the interaction between a museum’s space and the embodied imaginations of visitors—that is to say, their cognitive landscapes— as material mythmaking. I argue that we may productively approach MOTB as a place of Evangelical material mythmaking. It promotes the exceptionalism of the Bible in a way that makes normative influence of Evangelical culture in the United State seem natural and desirable. In other words, it naturalizes a vision of Evangelical hegemony in American society. Deploying the rhetoric of the Impact of the Bible, the museum promotes the idea of the Bible as a catalyzing force for values, institutions, and societal changes encoded as positive—or progress—in the imaginations of visitors. But this biblical exceptionalism blends into a Christian iteration of American exceptionalism. Language about biblical impact is ultimately a cipher for MOTB’s construction of the

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foundational, positive role of the Bible and Christianity in the nation’s exceptional history of progress. In the material mythmaking of the museum, the effect is to identify Evangelical visitors as Americans with this Bible-impacted heritage. This is a normative heritage with implied consequences. The MOTB thus fashions a narrative about national origins that gives Evangelical visitors a past that orients their posture toward the present. In the following section, I  analyze a small exhibit about George Washington’s religion on MOTB’s Impact of the Bible floor to preview how its mythmaking works and to introduce what I  mean by an Evangelical cognitive landscape and biblical exceptionalism. The next section theorizes the material mythmaking of museums. Then I return to interrogating aspects of MOTB’s Impact floor, illustrating the mythmaking that occurs via the interaction of Evangelical visitors with the museum’s strategically built space.

George Washington, Evangelical cognitive landscapes, and biblical exceptionalism After rounding a corner on the second floor of the museum, visitors may notice a large painting of George Washington kneeling in prayer. An adjacent wall plaque announces in bold, capitalized, and underlined font, George Washington’s Religion. The first, crisp paragraph explains: GEORGE WASHINGTON’S religious beliefs are a subject of debate among historians. It is known that he was a member of the Anglican Church, read the Bible often, and used many biblical references in his letters and speeches. Washington especially referred to the biblical vision of every man sitting safely “under his vine and under his fig tree.” (Micah. 4:4)

If decontextualized, modern historians would likely assent to this paragraph, and perhaps even say something similar in an undergraduate lecture if they only had a moment to comment on George Washington and religion. But this is not a freefloating painting and set of sentences. The exhibit appears in the carefully curated and complex physical space of MOTB’s Impact floor. The meaning or significance of an exhibit is animated by the interaction between the museum’s physical space and the cognitive landscapes of visitors—the backgrounds or discourses or memories they bring. These backgrounds can take the form of already known, tacitly accepted narratives about society. The physical space of a museum both becomes meaningful to visitors in relation to such narratives and seeks to reshape or reauthorize them. This interactive facet of how exhibits wield significance for visitors is what Greg Dickinson, Brian Ott, and Eric Aoki refer to as the “experiential landscape” of a museum.4 The dynamics of a museum’s experiential landscape are the substance of what I call the material mythmaking of a museum. Regarding physical space, this plaque about Washington’s religion, which promotes the Protestant religiosity of a prominent figure in lore about the origins of the United

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States, appears in a large area of exhibits framed as the Impact of the Bible in the World. Given the curation of the space, the most natural path to this area first travels through a long hallway with exhibits about the Impact of The Bible in America, all of which is situated on a floor dedicated, as a whole, to the Impact of the Bible. What about the cognitive landscape of an Evangelical visitor? The book Green released to coincide with the opening of MOTB can offer a snapshot of the narratives or discourses or memories such a visitor may bring to the museum.5 For Green, “America has been the most successful nation in history,” and that success comes from the founders having agreed “to build the society according to principles found in the Bible.” The principles include religious freedom, equality, and especially private property and free-market capitalism—the “biblical principle” of “transferring property rights from the state to the individual.” The Christianity or “Judeo-Christian ethic” exhibited by founding figures represent originary moments that clarify an animating essence of the United States and explain its impact for good on the rest of the world.6 For Green, when prominent figures in established narratives of the nation’s formative past allude to biblical passages or urge the Bible’s value for society, this reveals a deeper truth.7 Biblical accouterments in national origins represent “the wisdom of our forefathers” and “society’s indispensable foundation.”8 So woven into the country’s essence is the Bible that without it there would be no America.9 In Green’s imagination, this biblically impacted story of US origins is not just a matter of historical curiosity. It represents a profound truth about the animation of history. He maintains that the United States faces dangers that could unravel civilization. Such a position reflects the recognizable and stable, but productively malleable, discourse of moral decline that suffuses Evangelical culture. According to this map of history, in the past the nation flourished under the norms of “Family Values” or “Judeo-Christian values”; a time when the Bible or religion (read: Protestant Christianity) was enshrined at society’s center. But due to the marginalizing of the Bible or religion “from the public square,” a catastrophic decline in morality has occurred and catalyzed a crisis whose casualties are (or will be) the family, liberty, the country, and thus the world itself.10 Such narrative mapping of US history is not static. It dynamically identifies what Green sees as the true essence of the United States, articulated through narratives about the nation’s origins, and, accordingly, identifies him as an American with that history. So while Green may disclaim, “We’re not saying, ‘We are a Christian nation,’ ” in his cognitive landscape the Bible, Judeo-Christian values, and religion are the foundations or glue that hold America together.11 This gives Green a past that normatively organizes his present. It is a call for societal return to biblical roots; a mandate for the renewed societal dominance of his understanding of religious freedom, civic virtue, and capitalism.12 The normative, mandating dynamics of the past in Green’s cognitive landscape align with the ideological contours of Evangelical decline rhetoric. By promoting the Bible or religion as the foundation supporting American society, the purveyors of mythmaking about decline naturalize a heritage for their audiences that summons them to action. The options for such action to stem national decay traditionally entail opposing threats to the continued societal hegemony of white, heteronormative, American-exceptional, and capitalist regimes of authority. For example, evangelicals have wielded decline

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rhetoric for mobilizing opposition to women’s rights, African American civil rights, abortion, LGBTQ rights, the teaching of Evolution, and the perceived secularization of education, society, and government—all configured as rejections of a proper biblical or Christian heritage.13 Evangelical sketches of national history as a story of biblical foundations followed by decline function as a technology for neutralizing threats to capitalist and Christian hegemony. Opposing these threats then becomes a stand against decline or a stand for America’s biblical heritage, Religious Freedom, or Family Values.14 Green’s book allows us to access the Evangelical cognitive landscape in relation to MOTB. It further illustrates how we can use the category of Evangelical to think about overlapping institutional and discursive situations. Rather than attending to self-identification (i.e., does a person or institution identify as Evangelical) or a list of theological commitments that supposedly distinguish Evangelicals from other Christians (e.g., belief in the necessity of conversion, some kind of high regard for the Bible as authoritative, belief in the importance of living out faith in the world, and stress on Jesus’s atoning death), we can follow Timothy Gloege’s focus on “common senses” or “grammars,” as opposed to “formal creeds,” that cut across Evangelical social formations.15 The category Evangelical can thus focalize a fluid cognitive landscape terraformed by American exceptionalism, pro-capitalism, individual over structural ontologies for society, and white heteronormative discourses. Such features may go more or less unremarked within Evangelical institutions. Not all Evangelicals need consciously subscribe to them; they may even appear extraneous from the perspective of insider theological criteria. Nevertheless, these discourses shape Evangelical assumptions about reality. And this situation clarifies the alignment between Evangelical culture, corporate interests, and typical Evangelical discourses about the biblical or Christian foundations of an exceptional America.16 So what might the painting of George Washington and its accompanying wall plaque do for a visitor with an Evangelical cognitive landscape? While opening with a nod to academic “debate” about Washington’s religion in the first two lines, the next six, framed with the rhetoric of “it is known,” list his Protestant church membership, frequent reading of the Bible, and use of “biblical references in his letters and speeches.” The paragraph then culminates with a biblical quotation, glossed as one that Washington “especially” deployed. The tablet amplifies a founding hero’s biblical and religious accouterments. But the plaque does not end there. A second paragraph continues: The Prayer at Valley Forge portrays an imagined moment of prayer, depicting George Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge, at a time when the American cause looked especially bleak. The painting has become one of the most popular representations of the American Revolutionary War and a symbol of faith in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

Washington’s “religion” and “kneeling” for a “moment of prayer” fuse with “the American cause.” “Faith” leaps over any lingering culturally constructed boundaries between religion and nation for a visitor because it is “a symbol of faith in the face

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of overwhelming obstacles”—a classic way to signal ideals of self-responsibility, hard work, and success in capitalistic narratives of American “identity.” Associating Washington with Anglican Church membership also amplifies the elision of his religion with that which Green recognizes. Washington, his kneeling prayer, and his Bible reading become ciphers for Evangelical Protestant valences of US origins. And the plaque’s glossing of religion in terms of “religious beliefs” and “faith” rhetorically aligns with a Protestant grammar of reality.17 The uncertain debate of academics about Washington’s religion thus vanishes above the certain “it is known” facts of his biblical Protestantism, concretely certified by the adjacent painting of an imaginary biblical and Christian moment that the plaque transforms into US reality for the visitor.18 To refocus on Green as an access point to the cognitive landscape of an Evangelical visitor—the interaction of museum space and embodied imagination would invisibly refashion a heritage for him. It identifies him as a citizen whose true nature derives from the nation’s biblical-Protestant origins, exemplified by Washington, the founding hero par excellence. The effect is not just invoking, but naturalizing, the entire complex of biblical foundations for the nation in Green’s cognitive landscape, a complex that inherently includes the freedoms, religion, and capitalism that render the United States exceptional and also summons evangelicals like Green to seek their societal dominance. Green explicates these dynamics of self-identification. In his telling, “the” story of the Bible and America merge into his own and that of MOTB.19 To say that biblical exceptionalism is a prominent feature of Evangelical terrain would likely surprise no one. After all, standard histories stress how evangelicals emphasize a “high” view of the Bible or a posture toward it as “God’s Word” that is authoritative for present life and not to be critically pushed back against.20 My interest in biblical exceptionalism for interrogating MOTB resides with a notable, parallel phenomenon—namely, the pervasive idea of the Bible as a decisive agent for societal changes and values regarded as good, as progress. This phenomenon intersects with the usual, but not universal, Evangelical commitment to the Bible’s inerrancy. According to this exceptionalist fashioning of the Bible, its inerrancy stems from its divine nature, which distinguishes it from all other, merely human, literature.21 In typical apologetics discourse, treatments of the Bible’s inerrancy drift into defenses of its moral authority and role as a force for good in history.22 Within this rhetoric of biblical exceptionalism, the Bible, in its capacity as a reservoir fueling progress, becomes a cipher for Christianity. In some iterations of this rhetoric, the United States then emerges as Christianity’s signature or even culminating contribution for good in the world. Evangelical biblical exceptionalism manifests paths of discursive drift between the Bible’s exceptional nature, Christianity, and even America. As I  demonstrate later, in the experiential landscape of MOTB, the rhetoric of biblical impact serves to reinscribe this discursive formation of biblical exceptionalism.

The material mythmaking of museums Museums often function as arenas of cultural production by fashioning particular memories or pasts for managing the present. Curators arrange the space, objects,

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manner of display, and texts or voices that frame exhibits in order to present a specific understanding of the past and make a new public consensus about it.23 This is a form of material mythmaking that cultivates normative orientations through giving visitors a strategically curated heritage.24 As described in the introduction to this volume and seen throughout other chapters, the category of mythmaking signals a varied set of theoretical resources through which scholars can attend to ideology that “myth” puts into narrative form. These resources configure myth as an action in which people engage for the purposes of authorization, legitimation, and normative social formation.25 Russell McCutcheon, for example, advocates approaching myth as “a technique or strategy”; “as a class of social argumentation found in all human cultures. Let us entertain the possibility that myths are not things akin to nouns, but active processes akin to verbs.”26 Myth or mythmaking—this class of social argumentation—is characterized by a limited selection of discursive strategies that transform “a contingent set of human preferences advanced by interested actors” into “the product of nature and necessity.”27 Common strategies include portraying the institutions, arrangements of power, classifications, values, and hierarchies that one prefers as universal or foundational. The effect is to render them necessary and ideal, which can then authorize the people or institutions that purport to represent them. This is a form of naturalization often achieved with stories of cosmic or national origins that “represent and simultaneously reproduce specific social values as if they were inevitable and universal . . . By means of a disguised or undetected ideological slippage, ‘is’ becomes ‘ought.’ ”28 Bruce Lincoln has furthermore argued that the ideological potential of mythmaking is not only at the disposal of those seeking to validate the existing political order of a society. People can also mythmake to challenge, subvert, reorganize, or destabilize dominant structures of power.29 The MOTB provides a concrete example of material mythmaking where we can analyze the mutually reinforcing processes of naturalization and authority. The very act of building and classifying MOTB as a museum serves as an argumentative strategy through adopting the form and expectations of a culturally authoritative space.30 As Bruce Ferguson writes concerning art museums, they “are some of the legitimized social characters who speak the language called exhibitions. They are an authorized institutional WHO—one of the cultural bodies, like libraries and universities—who are designated to speak about identity and history through productive material subjects in performance.”31 Museums thus constitute material speech, and we should accordingly analyze “Who speaks TO and FOR WHOM and UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS as well as WHERE and WHEN the particular utterance occurs.”32 Exhibitions are not just objects and plaques that communicate facts, but curated “strategic systems of representations” that have “a plan . . . a will, or teleological hierarchy of significances, which is [their] dynamic undercurrent.”33 Or, as Sharon Macdonald argues while discussing science displays, they too “are never, and have never been, just representations of uncontestable facts. They always involve the culturally, socially, and politically saturated business of negotiation and value-judgment; and they always have cultural, social and political implications.”34 As with MOTB’s exhibit about Washington’s religion, one must thus interrogate the possible intersections of exhibits with “wider historically located cultural logics

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and political rationalities.”35 Doing so brings one face-to-face with the reality that “exhibitions are publicly sanctioned representations of identity, principally, but not exclusively, of the institutions that present them.”36 Attending to MOTB’s associations with Green, his story of the museum, and Evangelical interests does not necessitate reducing analysis to the intentions of Green or curators. It can instead “clarify the ideological and economic forces that shaped the construction and function of the museum.”37 As discussed earlier, such associations prime us to probe not for MOTB’s naturalizing an abstract status quo, but strategically reorganizing one by promoting a Christian iteration of American capitalistic exceptionalism that derives from biblical exceptionalism; an exceptionalist complex that Green represents as currently lacking “in the public square.”38 When museums fashion particular kinds of memories or pasts for managing the present, such material mythmaking often encodes the past as a legitimizing history of progress.39 In so doing, museums often nurture nationalist mythologies of progress for contesting or organizing the present.40 European museums of the nineteenth century facilitated competitive nationalist mythmaking to legitimize the imperialism of their own states.41 Or as Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki analyze the Plains Indian Museum in Wyoming, its experiential landscape interpellates visitors through a carefully crafted way of viewing. What shapes their view (e.g., often idyllic, primitive lives of Native Americans that evoke respect) versus what remains unprominent (e.g., the violent conquest of Native Americans) renders them citizens further down the road of civilization or national progress who can look back with reverence on more primitive phases without having to consider the implications of genocidal conquest. The intersection of museum space—and thus the interplay of what it both does and does not feature, and how—with visitors’ cognitive landscape gives them a national history, and thus current identification, that acknowledges while also crucially denying a vicious colonizing past.42 The MOTB’s promotion of biblical-American exceptionalism likewise hinges on the practice of fashioning an identifying past through strategic curation of what is present versus absent (or muted). The museum makes key conspicuous absences meaningful, especially since “what goes unseen nearly always serves hegemony—either by denying alternative views and voices or by affirming the status quo.”43 Material mythmaking within museums also involves processes that remain largely invisible or unremarked.44 As Jennifer Tyburczy parses sex museums and their traditional naturalizing of heterosexism, “In museums, hierarchical structures of race, gender, sex, and class are so intricately enmeshed in the architecture and layout of the space that the always ongoing process of constructing sexual normalcy becomes invisible, background, or seemingly ‘natural.’ ”45 Museums position visitors for the production of strategically curated meanings as they circulate through the space. These physical, embodied dynamics remain, importantly, hidden, especially since the objective-seeming form of most exhibits render invisible the processes and contexts that led to them.46 Similarly, the notion of history, rhetoric of facts, and permeation of space with artefacts facilitate these invisible dynamics of mythmaking. The “ ‘rhetoric of history’ . . . serves to ‘naturalize’ the museum’s version of ‘the past’ with a powerful idiom of factuality. The material ‘remains’ that make up the museum display are

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clearly congruent with this overall idiom.”47 Thus the “dramas about identity” that visitors enact in museums remain unacknowledged in their programs. Indeed, the mythmaking depends upon non-acknowledgement or hiddenness or operation apart from explicitly stated intention.48 Similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s social theorizing about the rhetoric of disinterest, the ideological transactions of museum experience are premised on the appearance of the exhibits’ separation from the realm of power and politics. While MOTB promotes an Evangelical biblical exceptionalism, it is not surprising that representatives vigorously market it as a nonsectarian space presenting “just the facts” apart from agendas. This coordinates with its material form as a history museum with exhibits, glass-encased objects that signal the idea of unmediated reality, and plaques whose framing text has the trappings of scholarly objectivity rather than sectarian apologetics.49 To adapt Terry Eagleton’s illustration about ideology: Ideology, in other words, [is] not just a matter of what I think about a situation; it is somehow inscribed in the situation itself. It is no good my reminding myself that I am opposed to racism as I sit down on a park bench marked “Whites Only”; by the act of sitting on it, I have supported and perpetuated racist ideology. The ideology, so to speak, is in the bench, not in my head.50

In the case of MOTB, the ideology of biblical and American exceptionalism does not operate through explicit claims in the museum, but through the interaction between its complex space and the cognitive landscapes of Evangelical visitors—it is in this experiential landscape of the museum, not the museum’s stated aims.

The tale of two wall mounts: A national heritage of biblical progress The MOTB dedicates its second floor to the Impact of the Bible. It immerses visitors within glass-encased and open exhibits containing artefacts, large wall paintings, rotating projections, reproductions of sites or events, repeating videos, and electronically interactive opportunities. As with the exhibit about Washington’s religion, modern academics would likely assent to much of the displayed information and find the artefacts pedagogically valuable—if one thinks about them in a decontextualized manner. But again, these are not acontextual exhibits. As is the case with any museum, they do not simply present facts, as MOTB spokespeople often claim. The significance of exhibits for a visitor is created through the intersection of the MOTB’s curated physical space and visitors’ cognitive landscapes. Two doorways allow entrance to the Impact exhibits. When the visitor arrives on the second floor either by elevator or stairs, the most apparent entry takes one to the Impact of the Bible in America hallway. Two wall mounts frame the visitor’s engagement with this hallway, one at the beginning, the other at the end. The first large mount protrudes into the space of the entry doorway, positioned such that visitors would have trouble not seeing it. In capitalized, underlined, and bold font it classifies

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the space: Impact of the Bible in America. The opening sentence on the mount, in bold and demarcated from the rest of the text, declares the Bible’s “profound impact on American history, culture, and politics.” Then a brief paragraph expounds: Over time, the Bible helped inspire the country’s ideas about democracy and the belief that religious liberty was essential to its success. It influenced many national debates, including the abolition of slavery and campaigns for civil rights. Frequently, people on opposing sides of an issue appealed to the Bible to support their cause. The impact of the Bible still resonates throughout American culture. Its influence is deeply rooted in our society as well as in the quiet habits of everyday life for many Americans.

Another prominent wall mount frames the end of the hallway. It commences with large capitalized, bold, and underlined font, “Bible In America Now,” and beckons the visitor with a subheading, “Questions and Thoughts.” It then includes a quotation from F. D. Roosevelt in bold with its own separate space: “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a Nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.” The mount concludes with a short paragraph: THE BIBLE TODAY remains the world’s most widely published book. It has shaped history, touched every age and circumstance, and fueled discussions of equal rights and religious liberty. For many generations of Americans, it has been a source of moral and spiritual guidance in their daily lives. What role do you think the Bible plays in American life today?

Let us think about the material effect of these wall mounts, the space they create, and the cognitive landscapes of Evangelical visitors. Together the mounts frame the Impact of the Bible in America specifically as a space of US “success,” “rise,” “development,” and “advances.” This is a nationalist rhetoric of progress, which heritage or history museums often facilitate. The significant contours of that history are the positive march of “democracy” and “religious liberty” as played out in the abolition of slavery and civil rights. The Bible is the decisive agent that had a “profound impact,” “helped inspire,” “influenced,” “shaped,” “touched,” and “fueled” American success not only at the historical level of “national debates” and policy changes, but “in the quiet habits of everyday life for many Americans” as the “source of moral and spiritual guidance in their daily lives.” Without invoking overt forms of classic American exceptionalism— such as Manifest Destiny or the legitimacy of white Anglo-Saxons benevolently spreading their liberty, democracy, and civilization over uncivilized areas in need of governing—the mounts activate recognizable elements of nationalist American creeds, but with the Bible as animating agent.51 The partial linearity of the hallway’s exhibits amplifies its material mythmaking.52 The visitor moves through a roughly chronological set of exhibits. They commence with European arrival, signaled upon entry by a large piece hanging from the ceiling that reproduces part of the Mayflower Compact, and advance through the colonial period, American Revolution, Civil War era, mid-twentieth century, and culminate

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with The Bible Today in America. The curation of chronology in particular emphasizes the developments of religious liberty, Protestantism in the United States, the abolition of slavery, basic gains in women’s rights, and the African American civil rights movement. A basic theoretical insight about narrative, mythmaking, or museums is that the choice of what to include or not include, how to organize or periodize, or even what categories to deploy crucially shapes the production of meaning for an audience. Because the discursive space of narrative, the physical space of museums, and their associated notions of history or factuality tend to hide that these are decisions (e.g., one experiences them as natural), the mythmaking effect functions that much more powerfully.53 Since I discuss exhibits about abolition as well as the dynamics of strategic presence and absence further below, here I simply offer a few brief observations. The curators of MOTB did not have to feature abolition and civil rights so prominently. Neither was it incumbent upon them to categorize many of these exhibits as examples of Bible-catalyzed Religious Freedom. Thus the large standing plaque introducing a Religious Freedom section of exhibits features a quote from Angelina Grimké about the Bible as her “ultimate appeal” against the “national sin” of slavery, and concludes with a paragraph informing visitors that “a surge of evangelical revivals led to increased church membership and renewed devotion to the Bible. This religious vitality also opened the door to social change and ignited a campaign to abolish slavery in the United States.” The heading of a plaque introducing a selection of glass-encased exhibits about The Bible and Slavery is Religious Freedom. Rather than providing information about biblical writings and slavery, it emphasizes the Bible’s role in “the national controversy over slavery” in the context of exhibits about abolitionists who cited the Bible and, less prominently, people who used the Bible to defend slavery. The large plaque introducing Civil Rights and Beyond likewise immediately includes the  subheading Equality and Religious Freedom before a quote from Rosa Parks about  the Bible’s formative role for her “stand[ing] up for rights” and a paragraph concluding that it was “religious activists who were seeking a just society, [and for them] the Bible was a source of strength.” The two wall mounts bookending the Impact of the Bible in America hallway combine with its linearity to give the space an ordering. In museums, such ordering “creates a certain epistemology of the site, providing visitors with reading strategies to help decode the meanings as they move through the space.”54 With these wall mounts, the curators of MOTB ring the bells of national progress and biblical agency. They then create a spatial history of the United States whose notable moments include the defining images of equality, freedom, and progress in the nationalist imagination. In other words, the MOTB fashions a legitimizing embodied narrative past for Evangelical visitors. As they progress through the Impact of the Bible in America hallway, they experience American history precisely as one of national progress animated by the Bible and defined by that other ubiquitous element in the Evangelical cognitive landscape of America, religious freedom.55 This history becomes their heritage. It “acts as a constitutive rhetoric” that cultivates them not only as learners, but as citizens, giving them a way to “perceive not only the museum exhibits but also the larger world outside the museum.”56 The hallway’s material narration of US history as progress recreates the visitors as Bible-impacted citizens who live in the period of The Bible

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Today. It locates them “at the very pinnacle of the exhibitionary order of things . . . installed at the threshold of greater things to come.”57 To reactivate Green as an access point to the imaginative environment of Evangelical visitors, the Impact of the Bible in America reauthorizes its story of American exceptionalism that features the Bible as protagonist and (implicitly) summons them to seek its continued impact. Each exhibit metonymically reinforces the hallway’s master narrative of biblically animated nationalist progress. Indeed, the individual exhibits need not reproduce the full narrative since it already structures the cognitive landscapes of Evangelical visitors.58

The world as arena for biblical and American Evangelical exceptionalism At the end of the Impact of the Bible in America hallway, the visitor rounds a corner and enters a large room of nonlinear exhibits. A  standing mount marks the space as the Impact of the Bible in the World, an area where the exhibits “illuminate the Bible’s role in the world and explore how knowledge of the Bible can provide a deeper appreciation of human nature and experience.” Curiously, given the worldwide focus, exhibits about the United States proportionally dominate. As discussed earlier, George Washington’s Religion resides at a section of the Art exhibit prominently visible to a visitor progressing from the Impact of the Bible in America hallway. The semi-enclosed Government exhibit, occupying the corner ahead of an entering visitor, discusses different types of governments, but devotes most of its space to the origins of the United States, Presidents’ Bibles, and materials about resistance to tyrannies such as “struggle against a communist regime.” While the large and interactive collection of Education exhibits feature some non-American schools, its narration overwhelmingly focuses on the United States. In some cases education in the non-Western world appears as a chapter in the benefacting history of American and European Christianity: During the 1800s and early 1900s, missionaries from the United States and Europe went to India, China, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. Wherever they went they set up schools, taught people to read the Bible, and provided a Western education. Their efforts helped raise literacy rates, though sometimes at a cost to indigenous cultures and languages.

The wall mount for the Justice exhibit focalizes “Western Concepts” (capitalized, bold) of justice, emphasizing their strong “roots in the Bible” and its “profound story of divine mercy in which God continually forgives and redeems humankind.” Its paragraph concludes, “Today, prison ministries, Bible study, and reconciliation programs seek to instill this ideal of mercy into justice systems, making them more humane and kind.” The mount is prolegomena for an adjacent, life-sized replica of a prison cell. It is populated with exhibits about Identity Transformation and the Bible (capitalized, underlined, bold) that feature the Evangelical seminary operating inside Angola State Prison whose “success has inspired other prison Bible colleges.”59 Adapting the trappings of reports about academic findings, one plaque explains, “Researchers

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at Angola have found that attending both Bible college and religious services helps inmates experience a profound identity transformation. The new identity is reflected in a sense of responsibility and a desire to serve others.” In addition to making America the substance of a space ostensibly about justice in the world, the exhibit also illustrates the slippage between Impact of the Bible and Evangelical Christianity in the terrain of MOTB. The curators materially represent compassionate justice as an Evangelical seminary in a prison that reflects the “profound story of divine mercy in which God continually forgives and redeems humankind” that the Bible “conveys”—a classic configuration of the Bible and its supposed single, central, and deepest “story” in Evangelical imagination.60 And this aligns with how the museum’s entire third floor materially presents the Bible as having one story.61 A MOTB staff member who guided a private tour likewise exemplified the homology between the museum’s Impact space and the significance of the Bible for Evangelical visitors. He brought them to the Banned and Burned exhibit. Its plaques emphasize the Bible’s shaping of different “worldviews throughout history,” the public expression of which sometimes “created tensions between competing religious and secular viewpoints” that could result in the censorship or destruction of Bibles. Narrative performances of tour guides amplify the material mythmaking of museums, aligning their spaces with the overall packaging of the past.62 Reflecting this phenomenon, the MOTB guide merged the Banned and Burned exhibit’s language with discourses about battling worldviews and secular humanism’s attack on Christianity that structure Evangelical visitors’ imaginations.63 The guide concluded with, “Ideas are dangerous, and people burn Bibles because they can’t handle the truth.” The foreword Green wrote for Jeremiah Johnston’s Unimaginable:  What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity, an apologetics book featured at the center of a bookshelf in MOTB’s gift shop, illustrates this slippage between the Bible and Christianity. The language of the impact of the Bible slides into a discussion of Christianity’s decisive hand in moving the world away from “poverty, slavery, prostitution, and the abuse of women and children . . . a world of suffering and a world of fear. Racism and gross inequalities were widespread and human life was cheap.”64 Indeed, Jesus and his movement set the world in a new direction that led to an enormous improvement in the quality of life . . . The Roman world simply couldn’t resist the life-changing message of Jesus, and within three centuries, this nonviolent movement had swept the Roman Empire. Doctrines of racism were laid aside . . . the dignity of life was taken to new levels, the seeds of the emancipation of slaves were planted, and the groundwork of modern technology was laid. It was the beginning of countless blessings bestowed on the world by the Christian church. Why would anyone want to see that end?65

This is the discourse activated when an Evangelical visitor entering the Impact of the Bible in the World can immediately choose an encircling cluster of exhibits about Human Rights that features standing, interactive mounts about Freedom from Want, Freedom from Injustice, Freedom from Slavery, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of Religion.

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In this material mythmaking the Bible, as exceptional catalyzing agent, has the moral capital of human rights. Its history is a legitimizing heritage for Evangelical visitors. Just as the human rights affected by the Bible conspicuously include the signature freedoms of speech and especially religion that pervade Evangelical imagination as loci of authorization for their wider ideologies, the Work exhibit elsewhere associates the Bible, rhetoric about the “dignity” and “value” and “honor” of work, and “the market economy.” The floor’s material speech thus naturalizes the paths between the Bible, Evangelical Christianity, pro-business capitalism, and American exceptionalism that structure an Evangelical visitor’s cognitive landscape.66

Concluding analysis: Presence, absence, and biblicalnationalist narratives of progress Building a biblical-nationalist narrative that can seem natural, that can appear as “just the facts” apart from “agendas,” requires strategic curation of space and knowledge. For example, it is not obvious that featuring abolition and the civil rights movement paints morally legitimizing hues into US history. Could they not also mobilize an irrevocable guilt while signaling the brutal, racist foundations in the country’s history plus its continuing systemic inequalities? In other words, attention to abolition and civil rights could also fatally disrupt nationalist narratives of progress and thus problematize a biblical-American exceptionalism. In the material mythmaking of MOTB, however, these potential signals of national shame become signposts in the biblically directed march of nationalist progress. Similar to other museums, MOTB curates the memory of potential shame into progress through how it locates and textually frames exhibits, via relative emphasis or de-emphasis, and by modulation of what is present or absent.67 The initial exhibits of the Impact of the Bible in America section illustrate these material strategies. The Encounter Between Natives and Settlers floor plaque just inside the entry refers to Europeans arriving in “regions already occupied” by “Wampanoag Indians” (note the rhetoric of occupation—not that it was Wampanoag homeland) and has a single word about “conflict” alongside “trade.” This culminates with two sentences about “colonists” evangelizing “the Natives” and translating the Bible into Wôpanâak, all portrayed as collaborative colonist-native endeavors. A  later Impact on Native Americans floor plaque mentions the “catastrophic” results for “Native Americans, whose populations were decimated by disease and conflict,” but subordinates these results to its opening emphasis on “Most foreign expeditions included missionaries who came to preach the Bible and win converts for Christianity.” A large wall plaque indicates the “violence [that] soon followed as Europeans encroached on Native territory . . . Europeans’ desire for land and disregard for Native rights led to conflicts and warfare, which included the enslavement of many Native Americans.” Yet the plaque’s narrative emphasizes a story about the Bible and spread of Christianity in America: Native Americans were “initially intrigued by European arrivals,” “European missionaries and people of faith” introduced the Bible and Christianity to them, and “most Indians” refused “to embrace the religion of the settlers.”

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Each indication of disaster for Native Americans is further de-emphasized spatially. The relevant plaques appear among other exhibits that command greater attention by displaying artefacts related to the Bible and European missionaries or by appearing with greater prominence (e.g., a massive ceiling-hanging of the Mayflower Compact that literally hovers over the initial floor plaque with one word about conflict). Textual and spatial subordination invites a relative forgetting of these potential invocations of invader and destructive Euro-American civilization origins. The space activates memory of Native Americans in order to present the earliest period of European colonization as the first chapter in MOTB’s narrative. It is a strategically shaped memory that acknowledges civilization-destruction in order to suppress it, in order to fashion past or memory about Native Americans that aligns with a narrative of biblical, Christian, and ultimately nationalist progress.68 Potential shame in origins becomes a prelude to progress. And that progress involves the Bible, Bible translation, and the spread of Christianity. Exhibits about the Bible and abolition of slavery dominate much of the Impact of the Bible in America hallway. Many of the associated plaques inform visitors that advocates of slavery justified their positions “by pointing to certain verses in the Bible.” Still, the rhetoric of texts and space overwhelmingly associate the impact of the Bible, Christianity, and America with abolition. On one large mount (interestingly entitled “Religious Freedom”), while “Southern slaveholders . . . interpreted the Bible as affirming slavery,” the text emphasizes that “a surge of evangelical revivals led to increased church membership and renewed devotion to the Bible. This religious vitality also opened the door to social change and ignited a campaign to abolish slavery in the United States.” The dominant association for the Bible is with Christianity and the “religious vitality” that led to the positively encoded “social change” of abolition in the United States. Plaques about the Bible and Voices Against Slavery, The Liberator: Radical Abolition, and The Fight to End Slavery populate the floor space around the mount. Another plaque, The Bible and Slavery, acknowledges that people in the South “used the Bible” to justify slavery, but—and this is critical for an Evangelical cognitive landscape in which biblical normativity flows primarily through the New Testament—relegates biblical “condon[ing of] the practice” to “ancient Israel” while the New Testament only “seemed” to sanction it. A  Liberty, Equality, and the Bible plaque that introduces a series of glass-encased exhibits briefly acknowledges that “the Founders’ view of rights applied only to white male property holders.” But it devotes most of its text to the Bible as the republic’s “spiritual framework” from which “ministers preached a message of freedom” and “even deists, who did not believe the Bible was the revealed word of God, cited familiar passages to express the American values of equality and liberty.” It concludes by figuring the Bible as the agent that “opened a path for other groups who would fight for their own rights in future generations.” Spatial arrangement further mutes associations of the Bible and America with slavery. Text on plaques may mention, while usually subordinating, “use” of the Bible to justify slavery. Yet the entire wall behind the Religious Freedom mount features large pictures of abolitionists with identifying names (capitalized, bold) projected via light: Angelina Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown,

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and then as the largest by far, Frederick Douglass. The center of the wall features the masthead of Garrison’s abolitionist paper, The Liberator—an encircled depiction of Jesus declaring, “I come to break the bonds of the oppressor” to a shackled slave, with the biblical quotation, “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself,” running across as a ribbon. The large, glass-encased objects in the center of the floor pertain to The Abolitionist Movement. The orienting plaque states that “many of the abolitionists drew their moral strength from the teachings of the Bible” whereas the “anti-abolitionists” opposed emancipation as “impractical and undesirable.” This collection of exhibits dominating the center of the hallway thus associates the Bible with abolition, whereas anti-abolitionists are associated with expediency and desire. To offer another example of spatially creating relative emphasis, a large reproduction of the Liberty Bell occupies the center of the hallway elsewhere. Its plaque that faces visitors as they walk from the entrance announces that it “would become an emblem of American independence, and, nearly a century later, of the anti-slavery movement.” The plaque on the other side of the bell explicitly connects its Lev. 25:10 inscription (“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ”) with abolitionists and “Fighting to End Slavery” in the United States. There are many other facets of the hallway’s modulation of presence and absence. While a great deal of space attends to the American Civil War, a lone floor-plaque allows the Confederate States of America (CSA) to be present: “The Confederate Cause and the Bible.” It indicates that Jefferson Davis swore his CSA presidential oath on the Bible. The immediately adjacent floor plaque, Battle Hymn of the Republic, then neutralizes the Bible’s association with the Confederacy. It plants the iconic hymn that “evokes biblical themes of justice, sacrifice, and redemption” in the minds of visitors and concretizes the association of antislavery with the Bible by listing specific content, “Lyrics draw on imagery from Isaiah 63 and Revelation 19.” We can linger over this muted presence for a moment as analysts. This is an ostensibly nonsectarian museum’s hallway dedicated to the Impact of the Bible in America. It features entire exhibits constructed around faint allusions to biblical passages by figures or writings from America’s history. One might thus expect the Confederacy to have a prominent presence. After all, we have copious evidence of Confederate leaders configuring their national origins as the creation of a more-Christian nation that precisely improved upon the United States.69 For example, in his famous “Cornerstone” speech, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, is explicit about these points and the Confederacy’s continuation of “the great principle of religious liberty” and equality. And he devotes the center of the speech to how the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition” and that “this was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” For Stephens, the Confederacy’s “new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” that accords with “the ordination of Providence” and “the ordinance of the Creator.” Buttressing these points with biblical allusions, he further explains that “our Confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity to [the Creator’s and biblical] laws,” which are “the eternal principles of truth.”70

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The Impact of the Bible in America hallway does not exhibit Stephens’s famous speech or any other evidence of Confederate leaders deliberately building the CSA on their understanding of—to invoke terminology pervading the Evangelical cognitive landscape—a “biblical worldview.”71 Such presence would disrupt the biblical and American exceptionalism cultivated by the space. It would invite interrupting questions and introduce potential counter-narratives about the Bible’s impact in America that cut against the spatial presentation of Christian and nationalist progress.72 It could fracture the progressive march from the Bible’s impact to ideals of freedom and equality that align with contemporary notions—including those of Evangelical imaginations—in which slavery, racial inferiority, or segregation are (at least officially) unthinkable.73 These types of absences in MOTB are thus conspicuous absences that the museum’s space makes meaningful. As with the case of absence in other museums, “what goes unseen nearly always serves hegemony—either by denying alternate views and voices or affirming the status quo.”74 To think across the entire floor, portrayals of the Bible’s impact consistently render it as an exceptional force for societal changes, values, and a nation (the United States) encoded as positive. The floor fashions the Bible as an exceptional agent, with the capital of positive impact, that drifts into the idea of the United States as an exceptional nation with a history of progress—thus the Impact of the Bible in America’s overwhelming attention to abolition and, though I  did not discuss it here, civil rights. Indications that could militate against this master narrative are conspicuously absent. When not fully absent, they are suppressed, particularly in ways that align with a distinction in Evangelical cognitive landscapes between the Bible itself versus humanity’s misuses of it, wherein only the latter can have the delegitimizing association with non-progress. Thus Green classifies questioning the Bible’s accuracy, truth, or especially goodness for society as “attacks” on the Bible. When attackers cite how “nations” use it “to justify bad behavior,” or when people deploy it “against science and leverage[it] for political gain,” or commit “atrocities” in the name of the Bible, or bring up “the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and slavery”—they fail to distinguish between the Bible and “man’s misuse of it.”75 The Bible remains an exceptional force for societal progress, pure from “man’s” contamination. The MOTB’s experiential landscape reauthorizes this self-legitimizing distinction. The Impact floor thus replaces colonial invasion and destruction of Native American civilization, slavery, and the Confederacy with the Bible’s agency or impact for (American) progress and the spreading of Christianity. These potential counternarratives are written out of the MOTB’s master-narrative. Such material mythmaking does not operate at the level of explicit statement. Instead the curators fashion the museum as a space where only discourses about biblical-American exceptionalism can flourish.76 This dynamic of MOTB’s discursive space potentially operates for all kinds of visitors. Regardless of whether one comes with an Evangelical cognitive landscape, the Impact floor only facilitates exceptionalist ideas about the Bible. But especially if a visitor brings the characteristic features of Evangelical cognitive terrain, the museum becomes a place of mythmaking that naturalizes a biblical exceptionalism that promotes a Christian iteration of American exceptionalism. The Impact floor thus

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fashions a Bible-impacted, nationalistic past for visitors that renders them citizens shaped to seek its continued impact. It seems fitting to conclude with how MOTB’s curators conclude their Impact floor. It has a teleological spatial organization. As visitors complete their circulation of the floor, they encounter a circular room that surrounds them with electronic interactivity—whether live projections of social media about the Bible, an encircling display of Jerusalem with biblically related sites marked and that takes the visitors through day and night, or interactive tables. In the center of the room resides “the Joshua Machine Recording Booth.” There visitors can “share how the Bible has impacted you,” leaving a “memorial” just as did the biblical Joshua. In step with how this volume theorizes material mythmaking, Davi Johnson has richly articulated how museums shape visitors particularly by circulating specific vocabularies that seem to have nonpolitical tones, but that carry the institution’s interests.77 Interactive exhibits, furthermore, habituate visitors into experiencing and adopting these vocabularies.78 The MOTB’s Impact floor thus concludes with an interactive that turns the museum’s apparently nonpolitical impact language into a participatory venture. The Joshua Machine quite literally facilitates embodied mythic formation. The Impact floor has given Evangelical visitors a biblical-American exceptionalist past. The machine invites them to articulate it for themselves.

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The Materiality of Myth: Authorizing Fundamentalism at Ark Encounter James S. Bielo

The creationist movement in the United States has developed a center of gravity in northern Kentucky. Answers in Genesis (AiG), a ministry founded in 1994, directs the gravitational pull. AiG functions as an empire of cultural production,1 organized by two imperatives:  a fundamentalist reading of scripture; and a vehement critique of evolutionary science as a moral/spiritual danger to the world. They publish books and periodicals, coordinate a research journal, produce films and radio programs, curate an extensive online library of resources, maintain a very active social media presence, design Christian homeschooling curricula, host summer Bible camp retreats for kids, and organize creation science teaching tours on Alaskan cruises and Grand Canyon hiking/rafting expeditions. However, AiG’s cultural production orbits around two attractions that integrate religious tourism, pedagogy, fun, and devotional piety. The Creation Museum, a fundamentalist Christian riff on the natural history museum, opened in 2007 and Ark Encounter, a biblical theme park, opened nine years later. During a 43-month period prior to Ark Encounter’s opening I conducted fieldwork with the creative team who led the park’s conceptualization and design. That fieldwork is the primary basis for this chapter, but my introduction to the ministry occurred through a visit to the museum in July 2009. I was one year into a new teaching position in southwestern Ohio, and the onehour-drive proximity to the museum was a nice perk for an anthropologist who specializes in the ethnography of American Christianity. My primary memory from this first experience at the museum is exhaustion. I walked through and examined each exhibit carefully, observing as much detail as possible, reading every sign, engaging with every interactive activity, watching every video display. It took several hours, and I left feeling physically depleted. Alongside this, another memory lingers quite vividly. In one of the Noah’s ark exhibits there was an empty cabinet that included only a small display sign, which read: This Space Is Still Evolving. I was surprised and amused. “Still evolving”: funny. But, wait: Was this an intentional moment of linguistic play? Were they enjoying a tongue-in-cheek jab at their primary cultural Other of evolutionary science? I  asked a museum employee, who laughed and said he had never read the sign with that meaning. But, he conceded, that was

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funny. I never discovered for certain whether the author(s) of that sign knew what they were up to, though I suspect they did. The ministry at large is full of playful moments that remind audiences of the movement’s ideological boundaries. For example, while searching on the AiG website in August 2016, I landed on a webpage that had been removed. Never seeming to miss an opportunity to call forth these ideological boundaries, I received an onscreen message, “Sorry, that link is missing,” accompanied by a mock evolutionary image (see Figure 2.1). The is-it-playful-is-it-not moment I experienced at Kentucky’s Creation Museum recalls anthropologist Susan Harding’s analysis of a creation museum at Liberty University in the late 1980s. As she initially explored the space, Harding encountered very much what she expected: the basics of creationism performed in the register of a natural history museum. However, she was caught off guard by an exhibit detailing the historicity of Noah’s flood. “The museum winked at me,” she writes about a panel on “evidence” for the historicity of Noah’s flood, because the exhibit playfully presented false evidence as a subtle creationist parody on the workings of modern science.2 She wondered if it was serious or, perhaps, a self-reflexive moment of humor, a creation science spoof of creation science. She continues, riffing on the potential layers of Geertzian interpretive play: “Or did it blink? Or, God forbid, was it a parody of a wink? Or an imitation of a parody of a wink?”3 A  few years later she discovered that the exhibit was indeed a joke, designed to amuse discerning creationists as they seriously consumed the museum. But, with no signage explaining the joke, not even small print off to the side, how many committed creationists had seen the exhibit and missed the joke? How many in search of creationist answers or skeptics in search of mockery had treated the self-parody as sincere self-representation?

Figure 2.1  Answers in Genesis “missing link” webpage. Screen shot J. S. Bielo.

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For Harding, this small exhibit marked a moment of ambiguity in the interpretive labor required when consuming fundamentalist creations. This process of interpretive labor dominates Harding’s influential monograph, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. She analyzed written and spoken texts from Jerry Falwell, his church in Virginia, and his national ministry to understand how the Religious Right movement and modern fundamentalism are constructed and performed. I quote at length from what I consider to be the book’s core argument: Fundamental Baptist interpretation rests on a poetics of faith—absolute faith— not a hermeneutics of suspicion. The Bible is entirely true in the ordinary sense of accurately depicting historical events. The rule of inerrancy extends, not explicitly and by no means irrevocably (as it does to the Bible), to the preachers and other “men of God.” Specifically, everything Jerry Falwell authors is true. But truth is not automatic, transparent, unmediated. It is the outcome of continuous exegetical exchanges between the Bible and its readers, a preacher and his people. A preacher’s God-given authority, like the absolute truth of the Bible, is produced by a community of believers through its interpretive practices. It is as if Falwell, in his varied storied manifestations, were telling his followers, “Read me as you read the Bible. I appear in many versions. There are differences between the versions, and there are awkward silences and anomalies within them. My tales are troubled and they are troubling. Harmonize my discrepancies. Close my gaps. Overcome my troubles. Make me whole. Make me true.”4

Consistent with a Weberian understanding of charisma, Harding argues that the authority accrued and displayed by religious leaders like Falwell is not merely a product of individual magnetism, the power of the role being occupied, or something listeners simply grant to them. Authority, trust, and commitment are actively produced in an ongoing dialogic exchange between public figures and their audiences. This chapter illustrates how this dialogic process of interpretive labor extends from the political motions of Falwell and the Religious Right in the 1980s to creationists in the 2010s. I argue that if we are to grasp why a $170 million theme park can successfully advance the mythmaking potency of creationism, then we must understand how creationist visitors fill the interpretive gaps opened by the park’s choreographed religious environment. If we understand myth as “ideology in narrative form,”5 then Ark Encounter presents us with a case of narrative in materialized form, narrative grounded in multisensory experience. A creationist theme park advances creationism by materializing the Bible, transforming the written words of scripture into an embodied place, and asking visitors to accept its legitimacy. Just as Falwell relied on listening, viewing, and reading audiences to “close [his] gaps,” Ark Encounter relies on a walking poetics of faith.6 Visitors, keen to see their faith materialized, reproduce their trust in the authority of a literalist biblical past and, in turn, renew their commitment to the broader creationist movement. Of course, a skeptical hermeneutic of suspicion and a walking poetics of faith afford sharply divergent experiential paths through Ark Encounter. As they move through the park, creationist visitors are asked to reconcile what secular skeptics would label

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(and, likely, dismiss) as discrepancies, gaps, contradictions, and other problems. To illustrate, I consider my own anthropological observations at the park alongside those of a secular skeptic. Drawing from my fieldwork with the creative team that designed Ark Encounter, as well as interviews with creationists who visited, I  demonstrate how, at the park, creationists close gaps deemed irrevocable by skeptics.7 To begin, I establish the context with a cultural portrait of Ark Encounter.

Ark Encounter AiG was founded by three former employees of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Founded in San Diego, California, in 1972, ICR was one of the first organizations dedicated to promoting “creation science” and continues today, though relocated to Dallas, Texas. Its late founder, Henry Morris, helped launch the modern creationist movement with his 1961 coauthored book The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications.8 Since its founding, AiG has fashioned itself as a “popular” complement to ICR, advancing the same mission of teaching creationism grounded in biblical literalism, but aiming to reach a much broader audience.9 Every day, AiG performs the work of religious publicity. I adopt this term from anthropologist Matthew Engelke, who presents it as a critical reassessment of how to study the presence of religion in public life. “When we talk about ‘public religion’ today we are often actually talking about ‘religious publicity.’ ”10 By this he means that the status of religion being public should not be taken for granted. Instead, “public” should be understood as a status that is actively pursued, achieved, promoted, and managed by socially positioned religious actors who are possessed by particular strategic aims. The religious publicity of AiG is defined by several interlaced ambitions. First, they seek to educate the public about creationism. This is essentially about circulating distinctive creationist claims grounded in a strict fundamentalist literalism, such as a 6,000-year old earth, the reality of a global flood that killed all humans except Noah and his family, and the historical coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. This basic ambition props up two further aims: to generate and foster doubt about the authority of evolutionary science, and to simultaneously bolster the legitimacy of creationism. This double-edged strategy of undermining and producing authority supports other creationist efforts, such as maneuvering to influence public school science curricula. AiG also hopes to create alternative digital and brick-and-mortar spaces of pedagogy, devotion, and religious entertainment. The museum and Ark Encounter are safe havens for committed creationists, who are wary and suspicious of evolution-infused science and natural history museums. Finally, the religious publicity of the ministry is evangelistic. They seek to proclaim a fundamentalist Protestant theology, hoping that non-fundamentalists will, immediately or eventually, experience spiritual conviction and a born-again conversion or rededication. When Ark Encounter opened in July 2016, it became the largest, most expensive expression of these ambitions. It capitalized on the ministry’s work and success since 1994, which emerged from ICR and other institutions that comprised the early

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infrastructure of the modern creationist movement. Set on 800 acres (324 hectares) of Kentucky rolling hills—40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Cincinnati—the park’s centerpiece is a timber-framed re-creation of Noah’s ark, built to creationist specification from the text of Gen. 6–9 (see Figure 2.2). If the park is profitable, subsequent stages will be added to feature other materialized biblical replicas, such as the Tower of Babel. Altogether, the park is projected to cost more than $170 million. The completed ark required more than 3 million board feet of timber, stands 51 feet (15 meters) tall, 85 feet (26 meters) wide, 510 feet (155 meters) long, and contains more than 100,000 square feet (9290 square meters) of themed exhibit space. Visitors to the park progress through three decks onboard the ark filled with a mix of sculpted animals, Noah and his family in animatronic and static form, mural art, signage, interactive displays, multimedia exhibits, food vendors, restrooms, and children’s play areas. Each deck is organized by a particular affective experience. Deck One highlights the emotional drama of Noah and his family following the closing of the ark door. They are relieved to have escaped a terrifying storm, they have just witnessed mass death, and are anxious about the weeks ahead. The team always talked about Deck One as the “darkest” of the decks, indexed sensorially by low levels of lighting. The storm is audible, visitors hear sounds of wind, rain, thunder, and debris banging against the ark’s sides. The first exhibit of Noah and family portrays them in the middle of praise and thanksgiving for their deliverance, with the auditory annotation of the raging storm and rattled animals in the background.

Figure 2.2  Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. Photo J. S. Bielo.

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Deck Two begins the re-creation of everyday life onboard the ark. Noah and his family are settled, going about their liminal living. Exhibits include the library and workshops demonstrating woodworking and blacksmithing, and feeding animals. The team envisioned Deck Two as the primary “how-to” deck, addressing numerous “practical” issues about the Noah story. How did they care for all the animals? What did they do with all the animal waste? How were air, water, and sunlight distributed? What did Noah’s workshop and library look like? By addressing these questions, Deck Two materializes the pivotal creationist claim that “ancient man” was “brilliant and capable.” Deck Three continues themes from the first two decks and introduces several new experiences. More exhibits teach about animal kinds. More exhibits address everyday matters, such as what the passengers’ living quarters might have been like. Deck Three also captures the salvific realization that God’s wrath has been expended, the storm is over, the waters receded, the eight passengers spared, and the whole world is now theirs. This affect encompasses further creationist teaching points about post-flood life, such as the Tower of Babel dispersal of languages and people groups. Deck Three culminates with creationist typological theology, which presents Noah as a pre-figuration of Jesus. As visitors move through these three decks, 132 exhibit bays (44 per deck) combine to tell an immersive story about the plausibility of a literal ark, the steadfast faithfulness of Noah and his family, their deliverance, and, ultimately, the evangelical gospel of salvation. The iconicity of moving from darkness to light, from judgment to salvation, is an experience the team hopes to invoke for visitors. Through this story of Noah and his family, Ark Encounter teaches creationist history, theology, and the creationist critique of evolutionary claims about the past. Ark Encounter is, among other things, a $170  million testimony. It is missionization, massively materialized, performed in the key of biblical literalism. But, the creative team understood their task as much more complicated than merely a presentation of the creationist message. First, they must address the historical plausibility of this biblical story and demonstrate that Noah could have built the ark described in Genesis. Using the exact dimensions detailed in Genesis and using only building materials that would have been available to Noah (timber, iron) are vital. Exhibits at the park illustrate building tools and techniques likely used by Noah, but the project’s publicity materials repeatedly explain that contemporary construction technology (e.g., cranes) was unavoidable (e.g., to complete construction within the timeframe required by building permits, to be compliant with American Disability Act codes, etc.). This plausibility imperative captures a key cultural fact about creationists: they affirm and practice a literalist scriptural hermeneutic, which they must defend in light of historical challenges from both Darwinian science and biblical textual criticism. However, plausibility alone is not enough. Noah’s story cannot merely be told; it must be felt. Affective response plays a vital role in this model of conversion. For them, success is not simply figured as effectively articulating the details of creationist doctrine, it is about effectively engineering an experience that compels non-creationist visitors towards conversion to creationism. What was the pre-flood world like, the one so wicked that God decided death was the only adequate judgment? What was it

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like to be surrounded by mass extinction? What was Noah’s experience in building the ark and preparing for the weeks onboard? How did it feel to be inside the ark when the door closed; to hear the fierce storm outside and the cacophony of animals? What was the experience of living on the ark day after day? And, what was it like when the dove did not return, to see the rainbow and be the center of God’s saving grace? An immersive experience promises to bridge the gap between plausibility and believability, and the logic of immersive entertainment is the engine that propels the team’s creative labor.11 To be immersed in the creationist past is to be immersed in a past where a universal flood killed everyone on Earth except eight people. Six of these eight people, Noah’s three sons and their wives, are the genetic ancestors for all modern humans. All the world’s animals are the result of microevolution from the limited number of animal kinds brought onboard the ark. In this past, the age of the earth is roughly 6,000 years old, not roughly 4.5 billion years. Human beings are a special creation of God, not the result of evolutionary processes. All animal kinds, including dinosaurs, coexisted with humans. Pre-flood human life spans were dramatically longer, Noah building the ark when he was 600  years old and living to be 950. The play of this experience is about being immersed into a history, biology, and anthropology that works in contrast to that of modern science. At its core this immersive play is dialogic and ideological, presented as a direct alternative to the scientific past of evolution.

Walking poetics In its first four months, Ark Encounter received over 400,000 visitors. While many were committed creationists, the spectacle of the project also attracts skeptics who engage the experience with a hermeneutic of suspicion. This section argues that such a hermeneutic obscures the poetics of faith practiced by fundamentalists. I concentrate on an extensive review of the park published in October 2016 by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a leading public institution devoted to advancing science literacy and challenging antiscience beliefs, practices, and organizations.12 The author of the review, Dan Phelps, serves as the president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society. Phelps has a long history of public activism against AiG, beginning in the late 1990s as a science advocate who contributed to blocking AiG’s attempt to secure land adjacent to Big Bone Lick State Park for the Creation Museum. Since that time, Phelps has written regularly to protest against AiG, the museum, and Ark Encounter in regional news outlets (e.g., Lexington Herald, Cincinnati Enquirer, Louisville Courier Journal).13 Soon after the Creation Museum opened, Phelps published a review of the attraction, “The Anti-Museum,” on the NCSE website.14 He re-created this onsite critical review with the opening of Ark Encounter for NCSE readers who might be curious about the park, but “don’t want to fork $40 over to Ken Ham.” The review is a detailed walk-through from Phelps’s visit on opening day in July 2016. Many of the exhibits are explained in detail, accompanied by forty-eight photographs (mostly high quality close-up images of exhibit signage and displays).

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The review makes no pretensions of being nonpartisan. It is full of smiling jabs at creationists, for example, when Phelps describes the look of the ark itself: “The AiG version does look more attractive, if not as seaworthy, than a rectangular barge, and since the entire thing is an invention based on an ancient myth [read: false historical account], it probably doesn’t matter.”15 The most in-depth discussions target creationist pseudoscience and antievolutionism performed by exhibits, particularly the ways in which “flood geology” contradicts the established facts of modern geology. Apart from the science, which is Phelps’s expertise, he does make some insightful observations. For example, when comparing a cutaway model of the ark on Deck One with the work of Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century, he notes: “creationism really hasn’t changed much in recent centuries.”16 Despite these observant moments, Phelps’s review is dominated by a skeptic’s hermeneutic of suspicion. Of course, this is precisely not how committed creationists make their way through Ark Encounter. In what follows, I highlight three examples where the skeptic’s hermeneutic misses or obscures the interpretive labor favored by the fundamentalist walking poetics of faith. Outlining the disjuncture between these two modes of engaging Ark Encounter helps reveal how this creationist theme park operates as ideology in narrative form, that is as materialized myth.

Secular conspiracy To progress from the viewing area outside the ark to being onboard, visitors walk through a snaking queue line. Practically, the line helps control traffic flow, though the creative team always talked about how imperative it was that the themed experience (i.e., entry into the “pre-flood world”) begin here, while guests are waiting. Part of the queue line experience is The Noah Interview, a short video that is a dramatized, imaginative re-creation of Noah being interviewed by “a snide, snarky, contemptuous woman who lacks any journalistic integrity.”17 Phelps includes this interpretation as part of his description of the queue line: “I suspect the video is Ken Ham’s swipe at reporters who have asked him uncomfortable questions about the Ark and tax rebate incentives.” Perhaps. But, it is also much more than this. The semiotic reach of this dramatization exceeds Ham as an individual and Ark Encounter as a project. Whatever aesthetic evaluations they might conclude about the filming, characterization, storyline, and script, creationist visitors are poised to view the “snide” reporter as a moral-symbolic token of a cultural Other type: skeptics who mock “Bible-believing Christians” and who are complicit (if not responsible) in a secular conspiracy to undermine fundamentalist legitimacy.18 Creationist visitors will close a similar interpretive gap at the Fairy Tale Ark exhibit on Deck Two. Approaching the exhibit, one’s visual gaze is immediately drawn upward to the series of animals lining the top of the entrance (see Figure 2.3). They are certainly cartoonish, but they somehow exceed that description. In initial field notes I described them as “zany, even slightly imbalanced or crazed,” signified by the design of their eyes, facial expressions, and jumbled arrangement. The longer I stared at them, the more an unsettled, suspicious affect became possible.

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Figure 2.3  Entrance to Fairy Tale Ark exhibit. Photo J. S. Bielo.

Unlike some other exhibits, where a wooden rail bars visitors from entering the space, you must step into the Fairy Tale Ark exhibit. When you enter the space, the upbeat baseline soundtrack from the hallway shifts to a very different tune (playing on a 2-minute loop). It reminded me of a dream sequence in a film, perhaps an animated film, where something terrible is about to happen. Interspersed throughout the dreamy instrumental is the sporadic sound of children laughing. The volume of their voices steadily increases and they transform from young children playfully giggling to teenagers laughing in mockery. The exhibit’s ominous message of a secular conspiracy is enhanced by this eerily disturbing auditory annotation. Once inside the small room, there are two dominating features. The smaller of the two, positioned on the wall to the left, is a sign encircled by a bright red snake with a dragon-like head. It reads ominously, dialogically voiced as Satan himself: “If I can convince you that the Flood was not real then I can convince you that Heaven and Hell are not real.” The primary display is positioned directly ahead, covering the entire wall. It is a collection of nearly 100 Noah’s ark themed books written for children. Most are in English, though others are written in Spanish and French. They are arranged neatly on six rows, interspersed with other ark-themed kids’ toys and games, housed directly behind panes of glass. Two textual annotations frame visitors’ reading of the collection. First, three rows up from the bottom, a series of small books are lined side by side across. The features of their book form suggest an antique collection of fables, and they present the “7 D’s of Deception.” For example, “Destructive for All Ages” explains:

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Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation The cute fairy tale arks are not only marketed to children, thousands of items featuring whimsical arks have been made for adults too. The abundance of these fanciful objects attacks the truthfulness of Scripture.

This strategy innovates on and alludes to the ministry’s trademarked “7 C’s of History,” which is the organizing pedagogical theme of the Creation Museum and numerous ministry publications. At the center of the display is a larger, again fable-looking book, that is voiced in a rhyming, fairy tale register. It begins: Once Upon a Time, there was an old man of God. His name was Noah and his task was quite odd. One day, the Lord said to build a little boat, “Make it nice and cute, but who cares if it will float.”

The cartoonish, fable-ish, and simultaneously playful-ominous aesthetic teaches a singular lesson. A literalist reading of Genesis—complete with an actual flood, actual ark, and actual Noah and family—is lampooned every day by the ubiquitous circulation of “fairy tale” arks. This lampooning is no accident, but who is to blame? The snake-encircled sign suggests devilish agency. The bounds of responsibility widen in the text of “Discrediting the Truth,” which identifies “many atheists and other skeptics” as directly culpable. The “abundance” of unrealistic ark representations targets children, affects everyone, and is an orchestrated effort to undermine the authority and historical plausibility of literalist scripture. It is, in short, a conspiracy. Here, a familiar fundamentalist refrain appears as a materialized effort to expose and make obvious a taken-for-granted creationist social fact: the Bible is “under attack.” The assembly of childhood artifacts performs a creationist critical discourse analysis, coaching visitors how to decode the secular antagonism to fundamentalism that circulates in secret throughout public life.

Biblical relevance A particularly revealing moment in Phelps’s review comes in his discussion of the “Pre-Flood world” exhibit on Deck Two. A  winding walkway moves through five spaces: creation, Garden of Eden, the Fall, Descent into Darkness (i.e., the extravagant sinfulness of the generations preceding Noah), and the flood. These spaces and themes are displayed through a series of highly colorful murals, some with minimal textual framing and scriptural verses, as well as elaborate dioramas. Part of the Descent into Darkness portion of the exhibit includes this display placard, “Senseless Slaughter: Abuse of Creation” (see Figure 2.4). How does Phelps respond to the placard? “My favorite cheesy sign in the entire Ark is in this section. Apparently, the sinful antediluvian people abused nature and senselessly slaughtered certain animals just for their horns.” Thinking with the creative team and creationist visitors, I read this display differently. It calls forth a foundational strategy in the fundamentalist repertoire of interpretive poetics, one that constantly seeks to build coherence between the scriptural past and the human present.19 Fundamentalists and evangelicals alike understand the Bible’s message to be eternal, just as true tomorrow as it is today, as it always has been. Part of this conception is that

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Figure 2.4  Pre-Flood World exhibit display. Photo J. S. Bielo.

scripture reveals the spiritual and moral nature of humanity. People are born into this world as sinful beings, separated from the righteousness of God. This human nature has remained unchanged through time, and is therefore always available in the pages of scripture. In turn, there is a certainty that the Bible has the unique capacity to always be relevant and appropriate, and in ways that keep pace with the uncertainty of life. Fundamentalists expect the experience of reading the Bible to never be the same as the previous reading, nor the consequences of doing so. Readers are assured of receiving something new to consider or apply. Because scripture is “alive” it can never be old, antiquated, or exhausted. No matter one’s age, maturity in faith, or scriptural expertise he or she can always count on (re)discovery. Not only is the Bible new with each reading, it is precise in its application. Readers expect biblical texts to be relevant to their own, particular circumstances. The application is not vague, but specific; not general, but amazingly exact in how it aligns with readers’ lives. There is no contradiction here for believers because the same process is at work: the Holy Spirit reveals what is needed when it is needed from the absolute truth that is the word of God. Creationist visitors are poised not to see a “cheesy” display, but to close the interpretive gap by calling on this textual ideology of biblical relevance. In a creationist reading of this exhibit, sinful people today exploit exotic and endangered animals for materials, and so it is distinctly plausible to imagine a pre-flood past plagued by similar troubles. Here, Ark Encounter is asking committed fundamentalists to read its content as they do their Bible, always seeking relevance, connecting past to present on a never-ending loop.

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Missing this poetic feature may also reflect an underestimating of the moral imagination at work. Like all social movements, fundamentalism cultivates adherents as ethical subjects with a defined sense for what is wrong with the world and how to address those troubles. While conservative Christians continue to be mobilized by the Religious Right heteronormative politics of family, gender, and sexuality, they are not limited to the issues that were made to galvanize that movement. Fundamentalists and evangelicals have a wide-reaching global activist agenda, one that includes protection of endangered species from exploitative killing.20 Ark Encounter joins this broadened moral imagination, performing it through their materialized literalist biblical past.

Biblical play The hermeneutics of suspicion that dominates Phelps’s review extends beyond specific critiques of how creationists engage science and history. Phelps’s evaluation of the experience created by Ark Encounter is unequivocal:  it’s “boring.” For example, the first sentence in the Deck Two description reads: “Deck Two had far more displays and slightly better lighting than the rather boring Deck One.” When describing a break out area for kids on Deck Two he writes: “Children seemed to be having a good time here after the excruciatingly boring content of the Ark so far.” A bit further in the review, when describing the lack of signage to explain the sculpted extinct animal species perched in cages: “Some of these animal models appeared well-done; others looked a bit on the cheap side. Leave it to AiG to make exciting prehistoric animals boring.” And, lastly, when describing back-to-back exhibits of technology: “The woodworking and blacksmith shops were nicely made, but once again, boring.” Phelps’s experience of boredom is understandable. While there are some interactive elements, most of the exhibits are still life displays. There are no live animals on board, only sculpted models. And, despite its self-identification as a “theme park,” visitors will find no roller coasters or other mobile rides. However, the hermeneutic of suspicion dismissal of the experience as simply boring obscures one of the foundational aspects of Ark Encounter’s design. As described earlier, Ark Encounter promises visitors an immersive experience, an opportunity to play in a creationist past. It is entirely plausible, and perhaps even likely, that some creationists visitors may also find the park boring. But, the park is designed so that committed creationists will have fun playing in the biblical past. Central to the walking poetics of faith at Ark Encounter is visitors giving themselves over to the ‘as if ’ experience onboard. A good example of the divergence between suspicion and faith is the opening experience on Deck One. Phelps describes Deck One as “poorly lit,” and filled with “sound effects [of animal noises] being played to indicate quite a racket.” The team would undoubtedly say that the visuality of Deck One is not “poorly lit,” but intentionally “dark” to evoke the experience of being in the midst of a terrible storm and the difficult affect attached to evading the mass death Noah and his family were surrounded by. What Phelps describes as “racket” is, in fact, part of the audible choreography that is integral to the park’s immersive coherence.

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Figure 2.5  Large mural art in the Pre-Flood World exhibit. Photo J. S. Bielo.

Throughout Ark Encounter, the baseline instrumental soundtrack—composed uniquely for the park and written to connote a “Middle Eastern” style—first becomes audible as you approach the outside queue line. Running on a constant loop, it plays on all three decks. However, as you walk through selected exhibits, this baseline soundtrack is complemented or replaced by audible annotations to the visual and sometimes tactile exhibit elements. Entering Deck One, you are surrounded by animal cages stacked one on top another, and the narrow walkway turns sharply to wind among the cages. One soundtrack, playing at a lower volume but directed nearer to visitors, features an indiscernible mix of animal sounds. They are lively, even a bit unhinged by the raging storm. This is the second soundtrack, playing louder but projecting from a further distance: a loud, unnerving mix of booming thunder, cracking lightning, and pouring rain. The creative team spent significant time discussing how to immerse visitors into the pre-flood world of Noah. After all, how do you re-create the most sinful period of human history in a way that is fun for the whole family? While the “wicked” nature of the world God judged is referenced throughout the decks, it is most concentrated in Deck Two’s first exhibit, Pre-Flood World. The striking visuality of the murals (e.g., Figure 2.4) is annotated aurally. The baseline soundtrack shifts to peaceful sounds of nature (e.g., birds chirping) as you approach the creation murals, and shifts again with each new space. One of the three largest murals depicts a dramatic scene of “pagan” ritual (see Figure 2.5). To annotate this image, a cacophonous loop plays overhead: raging fires, raucously cheering crowds, a duel of sharp colliding and sliding swords, and human screams. There is little interpretive space to imagine anything but death-by-combat in view of a bloodthirsty public. It is unmistakably violent, but nothing more than many G-rated films.

Quality and kitsch: A conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that Ark Encounter is not merely ideology in narrative form, but ideological narrative in materialized form. This creationist theme park

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advances creationism by materializing the Bible, transforming the written words of scripture into an embodied place, and asking visitors to accept its legitimacy. In contrast to the skeptics’ hermeneutic of suspicion, Ark Encounter works by engaging creationist visitors in a walking poetics of faith. To conclude, I reflect on one aspect of the contingency of this poetics. Committed creationists are more likely and more willing to close interpretive gaps when the religious production meets a culturally determined measure of quality. Matters of quality are not ignored within the hermeneutic of suspicion. Readers may have noted earlier that Phelps observes a certain sophistication to Ark Encounter’s exhibit designs. For example, when boarding Deck One he describes an intricate wood carving as “interesting” (with no hint of sardonic bite). Select sculpted animals are portrayed as “well-done”; imagined re-creations of Noah’s technology “were nicely made”; the Living Quarters exhibit “showed a great attention to detail and were obviously carefully constructed”; on Deck Three there are “a series of beautiful backlit displays”; and, the ark building itself “is impressive.” Ultimately, though, these concessions to quality are an inconsequential side note for his skeptical reading of the place. For committed creationists, quality amounts to something else altogether. Quality is an imperative for the public legitimacy of the park and a successful performance of the walking poetics of faith. The creative team regularly discussed a need to surprise nonChristian audiences because those audiences fully expect Ark Encounter to be a kind of popular religious kitsch.21 Their desire was always to generate impressive professional work, “Hollywood quality,” defeating judgments of poor taste and making even the most skeptical of audiences, like Phelps, take note of the unexpected sophistication. One of the artists gave voice to this hope during an interview. We were discussing her sources of creative inspiration and she invoked a metaphor: “Stuff that inspires me is stuff that has all the right pieces in the right level that are just blended together like an orchestra or a great football or basketball team. Do you know what I mean?” I asked if she could elaborate on what Ark Encounter’s orchestra pieces are: Well, on this project one of my main goals is to, and I’ve expressed this to our team, is that I don’t want it to be a stereotype that’s been created of like biblical themed environments . . . It’s in breaking those stereotypes, not just in the architecture, but also in how we portray the figures, the characters, Noah and his family, how we tell the stories, how we do the preshow for example, or, I mean even to the aging of the wood and the textures, because that can go really bad. We want to make sure and keep a firm eye on that, and that goes back to art direction. So, at the end of the day that’ll be our fault. If we hire a scenic company to do any texturing or aging, if it comes off like plastic or cheap looking, that’s our fault that we didn’t do a better job at directing that . . . Making sure the ark isn’t hokey or just weird and too stereotypical of what a lot of the church tries to do. Out of just, because they, not saying what they do is wrong, they do it with good hearts, they do it to try and portray something visually, but maybe it’s not their talent or something. It’s kind of hokey. That’s sort of our goal. We’re always trying to do something better. Do you know what I mean? The

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Creation Museum is successful and it looks awesome and people love it, but we see all the stuff we want to do better. It can be better. Only God knows.

Another artist voiced the same critique, though not quite as gently. Toward the end of a fieldwork day at the studio in January 2014, I told him that in a few weeks I would visit the Holy Land Experience (HLE) in Orlando, Florida. The HLE is one of America’s best-known Christian theme parks and is frequently derided by religious and secular critics for being the epitome of kitschy religious entertainment.22 Sitting at his cubicle desk working from his computer, he glanced at me and said wryly, “I’m sorry.” I asked what he meant and he added, in an unambiguous tone, “It’s so cheesy.” As we talked a little more, it was clear that materializing the biblical sites like the HLE were an explicit creative Other for the team, an example of what they must avoid if Ark Encounter is to be successful as a form of fundamentalist public culture. This same fear of kitsch was voiced by a committed creationist visitor to the park: a young Pentecostal pastor who planned to visit with his wife and three kids. My early interviews with visitors were divided into three portions:  a spiritual life history; personal history with creationism; and response to video publicity materials for Ark Encounter. As we concluded his history with creationism, he stopped me to express a concern he harbored that committed creationists would support the park even if the quality is mediocre: “A lot of Christians eat bad cake just because it has Jesus sprinkles. Do you know what I mean?” For Ark Encounter’s cultural producers and creationist visitors, quality is a paramount concern. On the one hand, this makes sense in the context of capitalist consumerism. Customers want their money’s worth, and as a for-profit entity, the park wants visitors to want to return (and perhaps even want to invite others). But, perhaps there is another layer. Perhaps the commitment to quality also reflects a structural, pervasive, and historically constituted fundamentalist anxiety about social marginalization. Susan Harding argues that the invention of fundamentalism rested heavily on “an escalating string of oppositions between Fundamentalist and Modern—between supernaturalist and reasoning, backward and progressive, ignorant and educated, rural and cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual and intellectual, superstitious and scientific, duped and skeptical, bigoted and tolerant, dogmatic and thinking, absolutist and questioning, authoritarian and democratic.”23 From H. L. Mencken’s unrelenting editorials during the Tennessee Scopes Trial in 1925 to Inherit the Wind representations of Dayton locals, the archetypical fundamentalist in the American imagination is a rural, white, working-class Southerner.24 This cultural symbol resonates with other marginalizing discourses for non-mainstream whites who either do not fit or refuse to accommodate middle-class aesthetics and dispositions, namely, the figure of “poor white trash.”25 With this social-ideological backdrop, Ark Encounter becomes a way of speaking back to a history of marginalization. And, whether thoroughly serious or winking or performing a parody of a wink, it is clear that religious leisure is something more than merely escapist fun or theological pedagogy (though it may certainly encompass both). Religious leisure, like its secular counterparts, is “always and already, political.”26

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Rival Epistemologies and Constructed Confusion at the Creation Museum Steven Watkins

Since its opening in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007, the Creation Museum (CM) has gained worldwide attention by waging a campaign against evolutionary science. In this chapter, I examine the way CM establishes its own interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis and asserts that this interpretation is uniquely correct and divinely ordained. If accepted as authoritative by enough people, CM’s interpretation of Genesis will correct what the museum views as the social ills plaguing modern life. I  argue that the museum conveys this message through a kind of sleight of hand:  though the museum purports to tell one story about the creation of the world, it does so by telling two stories that are cast as different interpretive approaches to the “evidence.” CM’s discursive and aesthetic practices cast these two approaches as being grounded in irreconcilable epistemologies that result, on the one hand, in confusion, evil, and immorality and on the other, in clarity, eternal truth, and moral goodness. CM conveys its message so successfully because it subtly—in fact almost invisibly— convinces visitors that multiplicity is synonymous with confusion and that singularity equals truth. Through the judicious use of a practice called screening, the museum presents the claims of evolutionary scientists as multiple and varied, and thereby confused, flawed, and unreliable. Additionally, this confusion is purported to be grounded in the sinful reliance on human reason without the corrective lens of the Bible. Using this constructed confusion as an opportunity to cast doubt upon the entire enterprise of evolutionary science, the museum again uses screening to present its own interpretation of Genesis as a simpler, clearer, and therefore the uniquely reliable account of the origins of the world.1 As a subset of information theory (IT), screening is the means by which creationism is shown to be superior to evolution, thus serving as the authoritative model. By setting two epistemological strategies side by side, CM foregrounds evolutionary science and young earth creationism (YEC).2 However, the two positions are presented as far from equivalent sources of knowledge. For this reason, I view the narrative at the museum as a kind of mythmaking, which Bruce Lincoln and others have defined according to its authorizing function.3 I  begin this chapter with a general introduction to the museum. Following that, I introduce IT and screening more thoroughly. I then turn

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to the ways that screening is used at the museum to shape its presentation of the rival epistemologies, first attending to the way the museum connects evolutionary science with confusion, doubt, and sinfulness, and second to the way to museum connects its own interpretation of Genesis 1 as the true and perspicuous interpretation of the Bible.

The Creation Museum and campus CM is not merely a museum; it is an immersive experience with a wide variety of activities including a petting zoo, zip lines, cafes, a planetarium, movie theaters, a botanical garden, a bookstore and souvenir shop, and special seasonal attractions such as a mock Bethlehem nativity scene at Christmas. Dinosaur reconstructions stand tall throughout the campus, serving doubly as a marketing strategy especially for children. The small town of Petersburg, roughly thirty minutes outside of Cincinnati, has gradually become accustomed to the regular stream of tourists, church buses, news crews, and family stopovers. The campus itself consists of nearly fifty acres surrounding the main museum facility—a 75,000 square foot building set in a contemporary style. Adopting the curatorial aesthetics of a natural history museum,4 CM boasts a full mastodon skeleton in the middle of the main entrance hall.5 The presence of the skeleton conditions the visitor to comprehend the museum as a place

Figure 3.1  Map of first floor of Creation Museum. Reprinted with permission.

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of public education and learning, yet the CM stands squarely at odds with how the skeleton of a mastodon would ever be excavated, classified, studied, or interpreted in scientific terms. Following the main hallway, there is Noah’s Café, a special effects theater, the Dragon Hall bookstore and gift shop, and the museum’s main feature:  a one-way walk-through tour that includes fourteen exhibit rooms, each containing multiple displays, videos, narrations, background audio, and other innovative multimedia installations (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). By design, visitors encounter each exhibit room in a predetermined order that organizes the history of the world in a particular way. Space does not allow for an analysis of all fourteen rooms, so I will limit my attention to four: Starting Points, Biblical Authority, Graffiti Alley, and Culture in Crisis. The ideology and strategies of interpretation which I examine in these four exhibit halls, however, are consistent throughout the entire facility. The museum takes visitors on an epic journey from the origin of the universe to the modern world. This journey produces an ominous understanding of world history as a dualistic struggle of darkness besieging the light, lost souls misguiding the saved, the material conquering the spiritual, and evil reigning over all that is good. Visitors learn that the most recent attack by Satan and the forces of evil is the theory of evolution, which is described as the enemy of God because, as the museum purports,

Figure 3.2  Map of second floor of Creation Museum. Reprinted with permission.

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it so clearly denies the literal reading of Genesis. The fight against evolution, then, is but a microcosm of the larger, millennia-long war over God’s word. In cofounder Ken Ham’s words: The first attack was on the Word of God. Satan’s method was to cause Eve and Adam to doubt the Word of God, so that doubt would lead to unbelief. And that is exactly what happened. . . . This attack has continued unabated since Genesis 3. The Genesis 3 attacks have continued down through the ages. However, these attacks have manifested in different ways in different eras of history. . . . We need to be asking ourselves a question: What is the Genesis 3 attack in our era of history? . . . I believe the teaching of evolution and millions of years is that attack.6

The museum and its proponents are actors in a mythic struggle that began in a literal garden of Eden. The museum exhorts visitors to do their part in this battle by accepting what the museum asserts to be the proper literal interpretation of Genesis as the source of ultimate authority. To understand how the museum conveys this message, I draw on the theoretical inroads of IT.

Information theory and screening IT is an emerging domain of study in both the sciences and social sciences. Mark C. Taylor has been exploring IT and how it applies to religious culture for over two decades.7 Also referred to as complex adaptive networks and complexity theory, IT studies the interactive processes of information exchange and the coemerging and coevolving data that are constantly revised through interactive feedback loops between communicants.8 IT was born with Claude Shannon’s 1948 MIT paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”9 The framework set out by Shannon10 has been incorporated into numerous scientific fields, such as biology and physics. Of interest to the present study is how religious individuals and groups interact discursively and what, if anything, IT can lend in an effort to analyze these interactions. As noted by Neil Johnson, scientists do not have one unique definition for complexity theory. Johnson does describe IT/complexity theory as “the study of phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects.”11 A main strength of IT is its lack of reductionism. IT seeks to study the emergent qualities of a given dynamic situation rather than to impose a methodology that tends to discard evidence that does not fit a particular methodology. Second, IT looks at the interconnected influences of all kinds of overlapping fields such as biology, psychology, religion, and politics. Increasingly it appears that crossing the boundaries of established domains adds a major boost in creativity for researchers. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observes, “a chemist who adopts quantum mechanics from physics and applies it to molecular bonds can make a more substantive contribution to chemistry than one who stays exclusively within the bounds of chemistry.”12 IT also takes seriously the implications of increasing interconnectedness of societies, from the local to the global—including the rise of network society.

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From this perspective, CM is a good example of what can happen when increased interconnectedness exposes a population or small group to new information, and especially when that information conflicts with information already held to be authoritative by the group. Complex adaptive network theory helps us explain why CM responds to new information—in this case, evolutionary science—as a threat. The theory also provides a wider context for understanding how the response to that threat often plays out when new information challenges an existing schema. When new information challenges an existing paradigm, a tendency toward insularity and preservation can occur. As Taylor notes, a heightened sense of threat and disruption to the already established ideas can lead people to “absolutize, reify, or fetishize their beliefs and practices.”13 These observations and others from IT can be applied to help show that CM attempts its own absolutizing, reification, and fetishizing by insisting upon a young earth. Within IT, the process of “screening” emerges to help explain and register information as it arises. Screening is the process of discarding certain data, consciously and unconsciously, while focusing attention on other data that serves to uphold, refine and support a particular pattern.14 Screening pertains to both conceptual and sensory data: At the conceptual level, ideas, categories, names, models, and paradigms pattern data mediated by the senses. Sensual perception, however, is never raw; it is always cooked according to recipes that bubble up in the stew of experience. Sensory filters can be both visual and auditory; images, pictures, representations, even logos and brands, as well as sounds, rhymes, jingles, tunes, and melodies structure awareness and direct attention.15

Both conceptual and sensory screening can help to “structure awareness and direct attention,” and I have found it helpful to think in terms of unintentional/unconscious screening versus intentional/conscious screening. Unintentional screening is an unconscious competence that comes with everyday tasks because we simply lack the time or ability to process all incoming data simultaneously. A  helpful way to think of unintentional screening involves the numerous stimuli that must be minimized while driving a vehicle at 70 mph in heavy traffic. Sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts must all be prioritized based on a set goal, such as the safe arrival at a destination. The information that is “screened” is that which would impede the goal of safe arrival. This process is dynamic and changes from moment to moment. Typically, we screen out data in order of most to least relevant, with the given goal determining the relevance of any data. Intentional screening differs from unintentional insofar as it is an active, selfconscious effort to sift through the relevant content and to present what seems helpful for a particular situation while omitting what seems to be distracting or unhelpful. Deciding which materials to leave out of a class lecture or writing the condensed abstract for a long article require intentional screening. Museum curators must decide which objects to display and which ones to leave in storage, as well as what information to include/exclude about displayed objects.

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CM uses intentional screening to structure visitors’ awareness and to direct their attention toward two mutually exclusive interpretations of natural data. The first interpretation is that of evolutionary scientists who trust (flawed) human reason and thus find themselves confused and at odds with one another. The second interpretation is that of YECs who trust that God’s word provides a single explanation and are therefore united by virtue of their shared knowledge. Because God’s word is perceived to be singular and unequivocal (a singularity manufactured in their interpretations), the “word” is understood as correct. At the conceptual level, the museum limits the availability of differing interpretive and historical options. As for biblical interpretation and history, the bookstore sells books that are predominantly self-published by CM’s own press, Master Books. Biblical accounts themselves are intentionally screened. For example, the storyline presented in the main walk-through exhibit follows Genesis 1 without acknowledging that the Genesis 1 version is contradicted by the creation account of Genesis 2. Competing biblical passages and parallels to ancient other Near Eastern literature are entirely absent.16 The screening strategies are similar with scientific interpretation and history. The scientific research that is presented as “accurate” has been published by YEC scientists, while the research by evolutionary scientists—and scientists more generally who are not creationists—is presented as inaccurate. In addition, scientific advancements that have been helpful for humanity have been screened out altogether.

Constructing confusion CM asserts that to rely on human reason is to oppose God’s word, and thus the results of trusting human reason are consistently negative. Some areas of the museum are devoted exclusively to showcasing such results, particularly the horrors of modern life: crime, disease, and even the Holocaust. In these exhibits, with names like Graffiti Alley, Culture in Crisis, and the Cave of Sorrows, no mention is made of modern advances that have contributed to medicine, humanitarian relief, or the increase in food production and the availability of clean water. The first room in the main tour is called Starting Points, and here the museum goer is challenged to decide on one of two starting points that serve as epistemological frameworks for interpreting the basic facts of the physical universe: God’s word (i.e., the Bible) or human reason (i.e., any source other than the Bible). The museum asserts that the facts of the physical universe are the same for all people, but that different conclusions about that data are drawn depending on which of the two epistemological paths one chooses to follow. Starting Points thus sets the tone for the rest of the main tour by positioning visitors as judges who are provided with information about the two approaches and must decide which is more credible. Exhibits lead the visitor toward stated problems with evolutionary science based on this dualist interrogative structure. Implicating the visitor as a powerful actor in this elaborate storyline of competing epistemologies is an especially effective strategy for CM. Casting the visitor as equal to, or even superior, to the expert allows the museum to appeal to a populist rejection of expertise, which is particularly persuasive in the United States. It does not matter

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whether visitors lack a background in geology, biology, or biblical scholarship, because the museum places these guests into a ready-made discourse that depends upon their participation in an ongoing battle between good and evil. Close attention to the displays shows that the presentation of the competing approaches is far from neutral; while the approach grounded in God’s word is shown to contain tight, clear argumentation, the approach grounded in human reason and evolutionary science is presented as a cacophony of disparate and changing voices represented as unreliable because of ever changing human opinions. Figure 3.3, for example, asserts a sharp division between these rival epistemologies: information is separated into the categories of “Human Reason” and “God’s Word.” A rigid distinction is made to convince the visitor that the museum’s position is one and the same with God’s word. In the second category, scientific consensus is shown to be full of inconsistencies and confusion due to the flawed reliability of the human mind. In a detail at the bottom center, the following statement is made: Philosophies and world religions that use human guesses rather than God’s word as a starting point are prone to misinterpret the facts around them because their starting point is arbitrary. Every person must make a choice. Individuals must choose God’s word as the starting point for all their reasoning (Figure 3.3, detail).

The display thus directly associates “philosophies and world religions” with “human reason,” which is “prone to misinterpret” the data of the natural world. Other displays in this room use visual and textual detail to show how each side, evolutionary science and creationist “science,” draw radically different conclusions with the same evidence. The result depends on one’s starting point—human reason or God’s word. Emphasis on the reliability of God’s word further underscores the unreliability of scientists. For example, the small print in Figure  3.3 claims:  “Reasoning is God’s gift to humankind, but He has instructed us to use the Bible as our ultimate starting point (Prov. 1:7) and also to reject speculations that contradict God’s knowledge (2 Cor. 10:5).” The “starting point” is that correct knowledge must be based on CM’s interpretation of Genesis 1. According to the museum, starting points are the premises from which all interpretive moves proceed. This rigid dichotomy between the world’s flawed opinions and God’s perfect words is used repeatedly throughout the fourteen rooms of the main exhibit. The Starting Points room also includes an exhibit dedicated to the famous Lucy fossils, which serves to illustrate how the opposing starting points, when applied to a specific set of physical evidence, allegedly lead to divergent and incompatible conclusions.17 Located in the center of the room, a large glass display case contains a replica set of the fossilized bones commonly understood to account for roughly forty  percent of a hominid skeleton representing the zoological family Hominidae, whose most conspicuous trait is upright bipedal locomotion. There are various species within the hominid family, including Australopithecus and Homo, and thus there exists a wide range of scientific illustrations and models that aim to show what Lucy might have looked like. At least forty color photographs of different scientific illustrations of Lucy lie on the floor of the display case and standing atop the photographs is the

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Figure 3.3  A placard in the Starting Points room. Photo S. Watkins.

museum’s own rendition of Lucy: a model of a large great ape covered in black hair and walking on all fours. Thus, the display offers visitors two interpretations of the fossils: the first, “man’s word,” represented by a multiplicity of illustrations of Lucy as a bipedal hominid, and the second, “God’s word,” represented by the singular model of Lucy as a black-haired, quadrupedal great ape. The placards in the display case make

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this juxtaposition explicit and the arrangement of the display itself illustrates the basic features of the two options. The museum’s interpretive model of Lucy is positioned in a posture of dominance, walking on all fours directly on top of the numerous illustrations produced by the inconsistent and fallible realm of science. Either Lucy was a bipedal hominid related to modern-day humans as understood by evolutionary scientists (thus the many photographs strewn upon the floor of the glass case), or Lucy was some species of ape that has gone extinct within the last 6,000 years (represented by the museum’s model that treads across those photographs). The latter interpretation removes Lucy entirely from an evolutionary lineage that would connect her with humans. Such an interpretation is said to be in accordance with God’s word, for written across the top of display case is the claim: “Man’s word says humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor, but God’s word says THERE’S NO APE IN YOUR ANCESTRY!” The variety of scientific illustrations conveys disagreement among evolutionary paleontologists, and because disagreement has been cast as confusion stemming from flawed human reason, doubt is cast on the entire evolutionary perspective. A  multiplicity of scientific interpretations is said to constitute proof of confusion and unreliability. CM’s website makes this case explicitly: “Museum exhibit designers found well over a hundred different evolutionist interpretations of Lucy—everything from perfectly ape-looking to almost human. Several were created following the very best methods of forensic reconstruction, but even they looked nothing like each other.”18 Casting doubt opens a cognitive space for the museum to insert its own interpretation. That the museum’s promoted interpretation is in fact an interpretation, though, is hidden by the claims that it is simply and unequivocally “God’s word.” Nearby the Lucy display case, a sign concludes:  “Biblical creationists who believe in the literal, historical account of Genesis, believe that the earth is very young and that humans were created on the sixth day of a literal, seven-day week, the same day as apes. So when we look at a fossil like Lucy, our starting point leads us to the conclusion that she is an extinct ape.” Not only is the biblical account cast as singular (“the literal, historical account of Genesis”) and true, it is also connected with the museum’s reconstruction of Lucy as a knuckle-walking ape similar to other nonextinct great apes. The Lucy exhibit thus aims not merely to reveal the diversity of scientific opinion, but to show that such diversity points toward a type of unresolvable conflict within the scientific community. Multiple and divergent opinions or scientific results are not in themselves cause for concern, but CM skillfully denigrates multiplicity of opinion by rendering it synonymous with confusion. It is this nearly invisible conflation of multiplicity with falsity, on the one hand, and singularity with truth, on the other, that I take to be one of the crucial mythmaking strategies used throughout the museum. It is neither wrong nor surprising that the scientific community has produced a variety of illustrations of what Lucy may have looked like, based on the fossilized bones; it is only when these multiple artistic renderings are placed within the museum’s sustained narrative that they come to represent flawed scientific results. Similarly, it is only when the singular depiction of Lucy as an ape is lodged within the narrative of the museum that it comes to represent truth. Throughout the museum, visitors are taught

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that competing viewpoints ought to signal errancy and that the unity of a singular viewpoint signals accuracy and truth. Prior to the Starting Points room, visitors have the option of viewing a film called Men in White (indeed, they are encouraged to do so).19 This film, too, imbues the entire scientific enterprise with an aura of confusion and fallibility. The film begins with an animatronic woman named Wendy, seated by campfire under a starlit sky. In the midst of an existential crisis, Wendy queries, “Does anybody even know I’m here? Is there any meaning? Did God create all this? Or did we just invent God?” As she questions evolutionary science, nihilism, and the purpose or meaning of life, two male angels—fittingly named Mike and Gabe—suddenly appear, wearing white jumpsuits and sunglasses. They seek to guide Wendy through the answers to her complicated questions, but in accordance with God’s word. When Wendy tells Gabe, “I believe in science,” Mike immediately interjects: “See she thinks that believing in God and creation means that you have to reject science.” Gabe agrees, hinting that she has adopted the mistaken voices of her culture rather than following God and the Bible. The film continues with a barrage of short scenes purporting to reflect real life, and the tone and content of the scenes are best exemplified by those at the fictional “Enlightenment High School.” In these scenes, teachers bearing double entendre names such as Mr. P. Snodgrass, Miss E. Certainty, and Dr. J. Plumsure, are shown in black and white. The scenes in which they speak shift back and forth in a dizzying and off-putting fashion. They are shown spewing the theory of evolution with shrill voices and flashes of “billions of years” on the screen. Gabe and Mike assert that today the fallible ideas of humans (i.e., evolutionary scientists) are held up to be ultimate truth. The angels explain that if you believe the Bible, everything makes sense. But if you believe in “molecules-to-man evolution,” or as Gabe puts it “goo-to-you,” then you must use billions of years as your foundational approach. Then the proposition by Mike is that “Evolution makes absolutely no sense without billions of years.” Both angels say “billions of years” with a mocking, nasal twang. Wendy says, “They have proved that the earth is billions of years old.” In a demeaning and incredulous tone, Gabe interjects, “Oh come on.” He then proceeds to enumerate what he sees to be the many problems with science, including radio isotope dating issues. Because different radioisotopes decay at differing rates, and no two rates are exactly the same, CM’s Men in White film argues that more disparity equals more shaky scientific assumptions. Once again, multiplicity of any data is offered as evidence of its unreliability. By equating multiplicity with confusion, the museum opens a space for visitors to doubt the entire scientific practice, and thus we observe that doubt and confusion on the side of evolutionary science are juxtaposed to the competing knowledge of the Bible, which gives a much simpler and clearer narrative of how all things came to be. On the side of YEC, one only needs faith in the authority of the Bible in order to see the vast complexity and confusion that the scientific community puts forth. Men in White presents creationists as bright, witty, critical thinkers who have a solid foundational structure of belief in God’s infallible word. On the other hand, evolutionary scientists and mainstream educators are shown as bumbling dogmatists who uncritically drone on in aphorisms that they blindly accept as fact. Susan and William Trollinger have noted that, “At its most basic level, Men in White serves as a

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quintessentially fundamentalist fantasy of plain folks who—armed with only common sense and God’s word—unmask pretentious and godless academics and educators.”20 Evolutionary science is presented as confused, flawed, and unreliable where creation is tight, clear, and above all, absolutely true. Jill Stevenson notes this same construct, “The museum uses different tactics to reinforce a distinction between the seemingly openminded, inquisitive creationist and the rash, illogical evolutionist.”21 While elements of the film include the fantastic—of flying angels and their magically produced images—my assertion is that it is better understood in terms of myth over fantasy. Using Lincoln’s framework for classifying myth,22 the film provides the following steps in the mythmaking process: (1) “They contest the authority or credibility of a given myth,”23 for YECs the given myth is evolutionary science. (2) “They . . . attempt to invest a history, legend, or even a fable with authority and credibility, thus elevating it to the status of myth.”24 And this occurs throughout the film as the creationist story is shown to be clear, rational and obviously superior to the evolutionary myth. (3) “They . . . advance novel lines of interpretation for an established myth.”25 Novelty emerges with the idea that the Bible is a much better guide to understanding the origins of the universe than any scientific pursuit. Authority is the salient ingredient in the efforts of the film to establish biblical creation as the true and accurate account of origins over evolutionary science. Men in White serves as a microcosm of the same authoritative argument throughout CM’s many exhibits.

Constructing clarity Science is often counterintuitive, which is why so many ancient yet highly intelligent people thought the sun revolved around the earth—it surely appears that way from our perspective.26 It requires years of study at the doctoral, postdoctoral and research phases of practice to specialize in one scientific field alone, and the production of new scientific knowledge is prolific and constant. Thousands of technical scientific monographs, journal articles, and academic papers are produced annually just on the topic of cell biology, for example, and this sheer volume expands dramatically when one surveys the many fields of scientific study: geology, biology, astronomy, physics, and so on. Science is complex and truly confusing to a lay person—an observation I will return to in the conclusion. Because of the complexity and utter volume of scientific advancements, the creationist assertion of clarity and simplicity can be appealing to visitors. Starting Points offers a clean and singular explanation for how everything came to be in a just few chapters from Genesis. In order to understand the origins of the universe, one simply needs the faith of a child. The parent organization of CM, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is appropriately named insofar as it claims that all of the answers to origins questions are supplied in Genesis. In fact, Ham asserts that Genesis is foundational to the major doctrines of Christianity. He writes, “Every single biblical doctrine of [Christian] theology, directly or indirectly, ultimately has its basis in the book of Genesis.”27 In contrast to the changing opinions of science, the word of God is metaphorically set in stone and can never change. Anyone who doubts the word

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of God, like Wendy, stands on shaky, shifting ground. To doubt God’s word, as Eve did, is to find oneself on the fast track to darkness. The simplicity and clarity of YEC is unmistakable. As presented in the museum, Genesis 1 and 2 consist of only a few pages of text and a literal reading requires simple faith in God’s creation of the cosmos in six consecutive 24-hour days. If one wants to know where land animals came from, it is right there in Genesis 1—as simple as that. If someone wants to know how old the earth is, they can simply add up the genealogies in the Hebrew scriptures and arrive, as Archbishop James Ussher28 did, at a date around 4,000 BCE. The complexity of evolution is a nonstarter if one accepts the age of the earth as only 6,000 years old. If a person doubts this information, she just needs to exercise more faith in God’s word. Doubting God’s word is exactly what got the literal Eve cast out from Eden, and the dangers of doubt are recalled throughout the museum. In the Biblical Authority exhibit, Adam and Eve are placed as the first example of doubting God’s word. A placard in that room titled Question states the following: “The questioning of God’s word began with the first humans. God warned Adam and Eve that they would die, and they died.” In Ham’s publications the attack on the first couple’s doubt is even more direct: “The first attack was on the Word of God. Satan’s method was to cause Eve and Adam to doubt the Word of God, so that doubt would lead to unbelief.”29 Even complex biblical narratives are simplified and streamlined among YEC. For example, biblical scholars have long recognized that there are two conflicting accounts of creation in Genesis. Gen. 1:1–2:4a details the creation in six days with the following order of created entities linked to days one to six: (1) light/dark, (2) a dome (firmament) separating primordial waters, (3) dry land and plants, (4) sun, moon and stars, (5) birds and fish, (6) land animals including humans. Gen. 2:4b-25, the more ancient of the two, provides a different account of the created order and one that is not connected to an order of specific days. The created entities described in order are: (1) heaven and earth, (2) man, (3) a garden and trees, (4) land animals and birds, and (5) woman. While these divergent accounts are obvious to even a lay reading of the first two chapters of Genesis, CM says very little about their contradictions. The main exhibit ignores the discrepancies between the two chapters in favor of a single harmonized account, stitched together with fragments of Genesis 2 sprinkled into the Genesis 1 narrative. The bare minimum exposure of Genesis 2 and its competing creation account is an example of screening information by the creationists. The museum’s official position is that Genesis 2 is completely harmonious with Genesis 1. To produce harmony between the two accounts, they insist that Gen. 2:4b-25 is an expansion on the creation of humans all said to have taken place on day six. The word of God is purported to be totally consistent and harmonious.

Screening with lightness, darkness, and headlines As we have seen, Starting Points introduced the dualistic logic of CM’s proposed epistemology. After pitting science against the Bible, conceptual data is screened to present science as confusing and the Bible as clear and perspicuous. We also find the screening of sensory data into the moral categories of good/right and evil/

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wrong. Evolution falls on the side of evil, Satan, darkness, and confusion. Bible believing YEC, by contrast, is associated with goodness, God, light, and clarity. The museum’s strategic use of lighting and color further constructs the moral divide. More clearly, the museum’s aesthetic choices belie the moral register of YEC biblical interpretation. God’s word is set as the sole reliable source of authority in Starting Points, and next the visitor is led into a room called Biblical Authority. Here, visitors are taken through biblical history in order to learn that all people have fallen into one of two categories: those who “attack” the Bible and those who defend it. Indeed, on the way into Biblical Authority, the tone changes and emerging themes point to the sinister struggle between the two camps of people. Existential questions appear below black and white photos of people in various stages of despair such as an elderly man in a wheelchair, young people with their hands covering their faces in deep distress. Written questions correspond to the photos: “Am I alone?” “Is there any hope?” and “Why do we have to die?” Those who attack the Bible are aligned with darkness and evil, and their corresponding displays are cast in low-level lighting and/or in grayscale. These include Eve, Satan, the medieval Catholic Church, and those at the Scopes trial who supported evolution, and those who have undermined the doctrine of inerrancy. Defenders of the Bible are aligned with light and goodness, benefit from well-lit displays, and are accompanied by vivid and colorful photos. These include Noah, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Martin Luther, and all those who oppose evolution, and those who support biblical inerrancy. The use of black-and-white imagery and dim lighting versus colorful imagery and bright lighting are carefully couched within a metanarrative of a dualistic struggle between the forces of good and evil throughout world history. Early in Biblical Authority, mannequins of Moses, Isaiah, and Paul are showcased as the mediators of God’s revelation as they stand holding scrolls, tablets, and writing utensils. The written text of the Bible is in fact the ultimate true artifact in the museum.30 As transmitters of this special text, the prophets and the apostles are elevated to a semidivine status because God communicated directly through their writings. Those who attack or question God’s word, wittingly or not, fall into a league with the devil. While the dualistic structure has already been established, Biblical Authority further develops a connection between the forces of evil as those who doubt, deny or attack the truthfulness of the Bible. The premises are clearly stated on a placard located midway through Biblical Authority: Adam believed God’s Word—God said, “Eat of the fruit and you shall surely die.” Satan questioned it—"Did God really say…?” “You shall not surely die!” Humanity abandoned it—Adam ate the fruit and died.

This set of premises gives the way in which a person can identify the good and evil sides of the struggle. Those who doubt or attack God’s word are clearly participating in evil. Biblical Authority narrates all of human history as a Manichean struggle between believers and followers of God’s word and those others, led by Satan, who attack, question, or abandon the divine precepts. Those on the path of good will always stick

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with the literal account of the Bible, no matter how much contrary evidence is brought to bear. Thus, Biblical Authority is a sweeping tour through a history demonstrating the struggle between the people of God and the enemies of God. Next to a mock copy of the Gutenberg press, an exhibit shows Martin Luther nailing a document to the Wittenberg Castle door. This highlights the triumph of sola scriptura (scripture alone) as the Reformation victory over the Catholic Church and its suppression of the Bible during the so-called Dark Ages. The assertion is that the corrupt, villainous Catholic Church and its hierarchy suppressed God’s word through insistence upon the Latin Vulgate which was not understood by the many peoples of Europe who knew only their local, vernacular languages. For YECs, the vast majority of whom are Protestant, this is why the era was “dark.” Thus, the sensory image of darkness begins to emerge in the museum, matching the darkness of the era as YECs imagine it. But a heroic Martin Luther stood up to Catholicism through insisting that the word of God be translated into vernacular languages. The subsequent Protestant Reformation was the victory of that age over the forces of darkness which sought to suppress the word of God.31 But that struggle came and went. In the 1920’s Satan developed an entirely new strategy best exemplified by the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. This time period in North America brought the rise of fundamentalism, a Protestant American phenomenon, which views aspects of modernism, especially biblical criticism and evolutionary science, as enemies of God’s word. The CM views evolutionary science as standing at the helm of these nefarious developments. Satan and the forces of darkness are perpetually working to undermine the Bible and the current generation is said to have lost faith in the Bible because science has offered a competing theory of origins.32 The last large exhibit, before one leaves Biblical Authority, consists of a mock courtroom portrayal of the famous Scopes trial of 1925 (Figure 3.4).33 The trial involved the legality of teaching evolution in publicly funded schools. In what was more of a media event than a serious legal dispute, the trial became a symbolic foreshadowing of future trials over creationism and intelligent design versus evolutionary science in public schools in the United States.34 CM interprets the Scopes trial as a victory for creationists—an odd interpretation given that John T. Scopes was initially convicted of teaching evolution against old statutes prohibiting the topic in Tennessee in the 1920’s, but that conviction was overturned. Regardless, the event of that trial is understood by CM as symbolic of the latest Satanic attack on God’s word. As the name of the museum indicates, creationism must be ardently upheld if society stands any chance of being redeemed from the evils lurking in the modern world. Until the Scopes trial scene, the décor of CM exhibits is neutral and tidy. But that aesthetic abruptly changes to a dark and sinister world of visible and audible pain and suffering as one passes from Biblical Authority to the next exhibit, Graffiti Alley. One of the most visually and textually dark exhibits in the CM, Graffiti Alley is covered in spray paint and warns the visitor of what happens when biblical authority is lost.35 As seen in Figure 3.5, the modern world is represented as the dank alley of an inner city. Torn newspaper clippings to the left of the spray-painted text boast the headlines of tragedies and other negative trends in modern society. Such headlines include: “The

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Figure 3.4  Mock scene of the Scopes Monkey Trial in the Biblical Authority exhibit. Photo S. Watkins.

Figure 3.5  The entrance to Graffiti Alley. Photo S. Watkins.

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Atlanta Bombing,” “Rampages Toll: 15 Dead, Innocence Lost,” “No Heaven, No Hell,” “The Terrorists Next Door,” “Is America Going to Pot?” (pictured with marijuana cigarettes), and “The Columbine Effect.” In this short walk through a simulated inner-city alley, the lighting is dim and one gets the feeling of being vulnerable in a crime-ridden, anonymous American city. Litter, gum, spray paint, a rat, and broken bricks are strewn about, eliciting what the CM proposes to have happened when America abandoned the Bible as its source of authority. The connection is clear—the Scopes trial marked a new era of teaching evolution in public schools. The logic is fairly coherent as well. Evolution leads to loss of faith in God because a literal Genesis account of creation some 6,000  years ago becomes unbelievable. Without faith in God, most all morality is abandoned and thus crime, nihilism, and anarchy thrive. The sociopolitical message continues just after Graffiti Alley as the visitor enters the next dark place, Culture in Crisis. Larger in floor space than Graffiti Alley, the message here coheres with the preceding room. On the right, a large wrecking ball labeled Millions of Years is shown knocking down a traditional looking church building (hence, evolution is not only destroying society, it is destroying the Christian church as well). Just a little further into Culture in Crisis, a video loop plays a scene in church in which a boring mainstream preacher drones on about, of all things, evolution. Portrayed as a theological liberal, the message doesn’t even reach the distracted high schoolers in the congregation who roll their eyes and scroll through their smartphones. As I understand it, the implied message is that without true vibrant belief in a young earth and creationism, the Bible is just an archaic document emptied of relevant meaning for the modern world. The theory of evolution destroys moral inhibition and Christianity. On the other side of this church scene are several additional videos which loop scenes of political controversy. One teenage girl is crying over whether or not to get an abortion. Teenage boys are surfing the internet for porn sites. One boy is rolling a joint. Culture is indeed in a crisis. In Graffiti Alley and Culture in Crisis, the modern world is directly connected with problems that CM, and a larger sector of conservative Evangelical Christians, believe to be sinful and immoral. The culprit for this moral erosion is the teaching of evolution as it undermines belief in the Bible. Hearkening back to the lessons of Satan’s attacks on God’s word throughout history (in Biblical Authority), evolution is the latest such attack and it is shown to be the ideology that destroys the Christian church. Additionally, because the church is thought to be the source of all morality, society is also in its moral death throes. Low lighting and a sense of physical and moral darkness pervade both rooms. The museum’s exhibits belie a deep anxiety over sociopolitical change. The vision of the modern world is one of darkness, peril, crime and moral depravity. As mentioned in Graffiti Alley and Culture in Crisis, the worst features of modern society are highlighted— crime, drugs, poverty, suicide, and so on. Another exhibit follows this pattern in one of the most dark and disturbing rooms in CM. Called The Cave of Sorrows, (see Figures 3.6 and 3.7) this room comes just after a scene in the Garden of Eden where Eve and Adam have eaten the forbidden fruit and the world is thrown into turmoil. The room is cast entirely in black and white with large photos of natural and man-made disasters. Here too the lighting is very low, enhancing the grayscale scenes of chaos and suffering.

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Figure 3.6  The Cave of Sorrows. Photo S. Watkins.

In the background, audio sounds of machine gun fire and video scenes of Hitler’s troops on the march add to the theme of the room. The world is in horrible shape because Eve and Adam ate the fruit. Photos of rather sterile cemetery markers, piles of skulls from Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide, and other scenes of war and genocide adorn the walls of the Cave. Having spoken to over twenty visitors to this room— scholars and laity alike—the feeling elicited in this room is nervous unease. After taking a class of students to CM, Bernadette Barton has called attention to the heavy sense of dread in these spaces. “Most of the students expressed that they felt disturbed in it [i.e., the Cave of Sorrows].”36 One of Barton’s students replied: “Mostly I HATED the room of shame [referring to the Cave of Sorrows] . . . I couldn’t wait to get away from it quick enough and was more than ready to go home. It is an extremely hatefilled place.”37 As with Graffiti Alley and Culture in Crisis, the Cave of Sorrows presents a strategically screened slice of the modern world. The world is literally and figuratively divided into black and white—evil and good. Visible are scenes, headlines, and photos of the worst possible natural and man-made tragedies. Conspicuously absent are images of beauty and hope in the modern world— a purposeful oversight, given that a solid case could be made that we are living in the best of possible times on planet earth.38 Screened out from these dark exhibits are research children’s hospitals, vaccines, clean water initiatives, and countless of other positive developments characteristic of modernity.

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Figure 3.7  The Cave of Sorrows. Photo S. Watkins.

Conclusion CM effectively constructs two mutually exclusive, radically opposing choices for the visitor. On one side, humanity is lost in a world of darkness, evil, confusion, and moral chaos. The other world is one of light, goodness, simplicity, clarity, and moral order. Evolutionary science is debunked as it is placed on the wrong side of the moral divide. Proof of its errancy is primarily accomplished by highlighting the past failures and competing theories by the scientific community. CM, thus, obscures the fact that very strength of the scientific method is its openness to testing various well-informed hypotheses. A multiplicity of hypotheses that sometimes results from this methodology can only signal one thing at CM: confusion. On the other hand, the foundational truth of the Bible is presented as the sole source of a singular and correct narrative—one that not only provides accurate human history, but also one that guarantees moral goodness and a better society. Once again, CM screens biblical passages carefully, avoiding internal inconsistencies and competing interpretations. This basic twofold taxonomy of confusion versus clarity is undergirded in nearly every exhibit in the museum. The facility functions as a tour through a dualistic world of good and evil, which is reflected in choices of color, shade, and carefully selected news headlines. CM has successfully screened information in such a way that a visitor must choose one of two paths—confusion and darkness or clarity and light. To trust in human reason over against CM’s interpretation of Genesis, like Eve and Wendy,

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places one into the jumbles world of collapsing morals and disparate, unmoored opinions. By screening in this manner, the complexity of science renders it an easy target39(wrapping one’s head around the actual distance of one-billion light years is dizzying, not to mention the fact that all “solid” objects consist of tiny, fast-spinning particles). As the late theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, observes, “I think I  can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”40 In the mythmaking of CM, Feynman’s claim would be summoned as evidence of his incompetence and unreliability. According to Ken Ham, CM seeks to return to an imagined time when: “Years ago, our Western society was based largely on Christian absolutes, built on the Bible . . . In recent times, however, more and more people have rejected the Bible as the absolute authority on which to build one’s worldview.”41 The degree to which the museum “invests a history, legend, or even a fable with authority and credibility,”42 depends on the presuppositions of canonicity and inerrancy in those to whom it seeks to persuade. The institution’s persuasiveness will depend almost exclusively upon the degree to which visitors have accepted these two categories as authoritative in the first place.

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“It is what it is”: Mythmaking and Identity Formation on a Christian Zionist Tour of Israel Sean Durbin

In 2015, Jared and Jerusha Hess, the brothers who struck a bit of cult-comedy gold with Napoleon Dynamite, released a new film, Don Verdean.1 The film is a satirical portrayal of Don Verdean, a “biblical archaeologist” who rose to fame for excavating artifacts he claimed provided material proof of the Bible’s infallibility, but who has since fallen on tough times. A chance meeting with an up-and-coming celebrity pastor named Tony Lazarus presents an opportunity for Verdean to reverse his dwindling fortune. At their meeting, Lazarus trots out a version of a well-worn jeremiad that permeates large swaths of American religious rhetoric,2 lamenting to Verdean that “Church attendance in America has been in a massive decline for years, and I’ve been feeling the effects of that right here in my congregation. Slowly but surely, this nation is becoming godless, and it’s frightening.” As a remedy for his prognosis of America’s descent into godlessness, Lazarus tells Verdean that despite the importance of faith, materiality is what matters: “These younger generations, they need proof,” he explains. “They need hard evidence in these dark, dark times.” Given Verdean’s history, Lazarus believes that he has the potential to provide this material proof, offering to finance Verdean’s work so long as he brings his archaeological finds back to the Lazarus Fellowship Center. But, demonstrating the Hess brothers’ understanding of the rhetorics that permeate these modes of Christianity, Lazarus does not simply ask Verdean to participate; he explains that it is part of God’s plan: “I believe that the Lord has been preparing you. The Lord wants you to be his instrument in this great work.” Accepting Lazarus’s invitation, and thus taking on the role of God’s instrument, Verdean embarks on a trip to Israel to uncover the skull of Goliath—complete with a fracture from David’s slingshot—to further “prove” the Bible’s accuracy and ongoing validity in the contemporary world. Despite being satire, the film shares a number of traits with subsets of conservative evangelicals, insofar as they employ “biblical archaeology” material artifacts, and observable “evidence” in the service of truth claims about Christianity, the reliability of the Bible, and making God “really real.” The Hess brothers are well-versed in the insider rhetorics of this subculture, which is demonstrated in subtle ways through the

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characters’ dialogue. While watching the film, I was reminded of my own research with an American church on their tour of Israel and the way the pastors and tour guides used similar rhetorical strategies to demonstrate the authenticity of their own truth claims about Israel, the Bible, and their version of Christianity. In March 2012, I  participated as an academic researcher on a 13-day tour of Israel with Faith Bible Chapel, a nondenominational church from the outer suburbs of Denver, Colorado. I  chose this church due to its intensely pro-Israel theological disposition and its leadership ties to the Christian Zionist lobby group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which I  was also researching at the time, and which was holding its “Jerusalem Summit”3 with many other churches at the same time as our tour in Israel. This chapter focuses specifically on the rhetoric and guiding practices of the evangelical pastors and our (non-evangelical) Israeli tour guide4 over the duration of the tour. I argue that such practices constitute forms of contemporary mythmaking. In particular, the language, classifications, and other descriptive choices used in the tour brochures, guiding practices, and narratives surrounding specific sites in Israel all work to naturalize contestable political realities by reframing them as “religious.” Furthermore, such contestable political realities are framed as biblical truth, thereby making Christian Zionists’ theological claims appear self-evident. Second, I  demonstrate how contrasting narratives around Catholic and Protestant sites of interest provided this tour group with the opportunity to rhetorically construct their own identity as authentic Christians. Overall, I  suggest that the construction of the touring group’s identities as authentically Christian, in light of the prior emphasis on the divine nature of Israel’s political project, reinforces Christian Zionist theological claims about Israel, as well as their assertions that (hawkish) Christian support for Israel is an essential component of biblical Christianity. My use of the term mythmaking is primarily derived from the work of Bruce Lincoln, who discusses and elaborates on myth at various junctures in his scholarship. In Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Lincoln famously argues that “myth is ideology in narrative form.”5 Elsewhere, he describes myth as a “discourse that consistently denies originality and obscures the identity of its producers and reproducers, thereby concealing their positionality and the interests (material and other) that influence the modifications they introduce in the stories they tell.”6 To paraphrase Lincoln, myth is a mode of discourse that attempts to naturalize contingent or historical interests and events in order to make those interests appear as nothing more than the way things simply are, always have been, or ought to be. Lincoln’s work, and by proxy my own, is also informed by Roland Barthes’s theory of myth. While Barthes describes myth as “depoliticized speech,” he does not mean that it is not political. Rather, mythical speech denies its political nature by asserting its “naturalness,” by “passing from history to nature” myth “abolishes the complexity of human acts . . . gives them the simplicity of essences,” and “organizes a world which is without contradictions.”7 Due to their focus on the political nature of mythical discourse and the way it functions to obscure and naturalize material and other interests, thereby denying and masking its political functions, the approaches of Lincoln and Barthes are particularly

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well suited for my data. The Christian Zionist pastors and our Israeli tour guide, as I  will explain later, all have material and ideological interests in maintaining Israeli control and sovereignty over contested territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Additionally, the pastors and their congregants have symbolic interests in asserting their identities as “authentically” Christian, as well as in demonstrating their truth claims about the reliability and accuracy of the Bible. In addition to the shadow that Bruce Lincoln’s conception of myth casts over this chapter, I  also make use of William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon’s elaboration of “economies of signification.”8 By that, I  mean choices are made by social actors in determining which events or things get to count as significant, such that seemingly arbitrary observations are classified in ways that legitimize and naturalize social and political interests. As I demonstrate, in Christian Zionists’ symbolic economy of Israel, classificatory choices are made so as to render some things authentically religious and thus significant and worthy of attention on the one hand, and other things inauthentically religious or worthy of ignoring, on the other. Following from these observations, my data act as a useful heuristic that contributes to broader discussions within the academic study of religion around issues of classification, the role that discourse plays in constructing individuals’ “experiences” and, finally, the politics of the category “religion.”9 One final note relates to my approach to Christian tourism or pilgrimage to Israel: I consider these trips in rather ordinary terms. Following Russell McCutcheon, I  see pilgrimage as one of a variety of “strategies human beings use to accomplish, reinforce, and at times contest social identities that span time and place.”10 Anthropologist Jackie Feldman pushes this thinking even further: “pilgrimage is a form of political power that partitions space in ways that make it possible for non-critical thought to accept the resultant reality at face value—at least for the faithful of a particular religious group.”11 These approaches to pilgrimage are useful because, as I demonstrate, the sites imbued with transcendence and sacredness are places that many outsiders would consider extremely ordinary, while at the same time, classifying such seemingly ordinary sites as “religious” is a political act.

Christian Zionism and Christian tourism to Israel Tourism is big business in Israel, and tourists contribute around NIS 41 billion to the Israeli economy each year.12 Christian tourism is a particularly lucrative source of revenue. According to official statistics compiled by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs there were 3.3 million visitors to Israel in 2014. Christians made up 56 percent of that total, of whom 41 percent identified as Catholic, 26 percent Protestant and 22 percent Russian Orthodox.13 As these statistics (limited as they are) help demonstrate, there is a broad spectrum of Christian tour groups that visit Israel. However, since the 1977 rise of the right-wing Likud Party, many Israeli governments have focused disproportionately on encouraging American Evangelical groups to visit Israel as part of a strategy to engender their political support. Successive governments have sponsored subsidized orientation tours for pastors and contributed to the production of an emotionally

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charged platform to advance their political agendas.14 In times of crisis, such as the second intifada that began toward the end of 2000 when tourism revenue suffered considerably, evangelicals remained loyal visitors to the Jewish state.15 This fact was also frequently highlighted on the tour by the pastors leading us, as a badge of their unwavering support for Israel even in the face of danger. Two types of tours account for polar ends of the broad spectrum of Western Christian visitors to Israel:  Living Stones tours and Biblical Israel/Christian Zionist tours.16 According to their founder Stephen Sizer, Living Stones tours “seek to counter the ignorance of many Evangelicals and the harm caused by Fundamentalists, by engaging in acts of solidarity with the Palestinian church. These pilgrimages include opportunities to meet, worship with, listen to and learn from the spirituality and experience of the indigenous Christians.”17 In this sense, then, Living Stones tours are equally political in their aims. Among other things, they comprise an oppositional voice in what might be termed a “social contest” over the “true” nature of Christianity, and a proper disposition toward Israel, designed to counter Christian Zionists’ (or as Sizer puts it, “Fundamentalists’ ”) sets of truth claims with their own. Faith Bible Chapel and the other churches touring Israel at the time as part of CUFI’s Jerusalem Summit fall squarely into the Biblical Israel/Christian Zionist category. Christian Zionist is a term typically used to describe a type of evangelical for whom the modern state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants maintain important theological and eschatological significance.18 For these Christians, including Faith Bible Chapel, Israel and its Jewish citizens represent a sign that God remains active in the world. For such Christians, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and expansion in 1967 are the fulfillment of prophecy, signaling the imminent return of Jesus.19 Although Christian Zionist travel to Israel is described as a celebration of the biblical past and, as Hillary Kaell puts it, “Walking where Jesus walked,”20 it is also very much about the present and future, and asserting solidarity for Jews and the modern State of Israel. From an insider perspective, this solidarity is then represented as something altogether different from worldly politics; it is instead reclassified as a form religious devotion—a celebration of the God of Israel, and participating in what Christian Zionists claim is God’s ongoing presence and activity in the world. Although Christian Zionist visitors to Israel express interest in the past and in historical sites, they are equally if not more interested in modern political Israel, insofar as its existence as a Jewish state demonstrates the ongoing validity of the Bible and as the site where Jesus will return to establish the millennial kingdom.21 As I  demonstrate later, Christian sites typically considered religious by certain denominations are dismissed as ordinary by our Zionist pastors and tour guide, while seemingly mundane sites or locations were reconstituted and represented in ways demonstrative of the “timeless” religious or prophetic truths they purportedly conveyed.

Mythical primers on the road to Israel The mythmaking process began prior to our arrival in Israel. Weeks before our departure, all participants received a welcome pack that included a detailed itinerary, a

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suggested reading/viewing list to prepare us for the journey (including numerous titles outlining Israel’s prophetic significance), and a 135-page booklet entitled Watchmen on the Wall: A Practical Guide to Prayer for Jerusalem and Her People.22 These materials provide a glimpse into the ways a Christian Zionist theological orientation was used to map out our itinerary and establish a vantage point from which participants were primed to understand their trip. On the cover of our itinerary was a pixelated photo taken in an American supermarket of a tray of Israeli persimmons, selling for $2.29 a pound (Figure 4.1). Above the photo, there is quote from Isa. 27:6: “The time is coming when my people will take root. Israel will bud and blossom and fill the whole earth with her fruit!” Here, the ordinary becomes extraordinary: a tray of Israeli grown persimmons found in an American supermarket is material proof that Christian Zionists’ claims about what the Bible says about Israel (and thus the authority of the Bible more broadly) is not theological speculation, but a verifiable fact. This tray of persimmons is one of many examples that enable Christian Zionists to materially demonstrate that the Bible is “true.” Israel’s prophetic significance is then repeated more explicitly in various ways throughout the itinerary. For example, the entry for March 17 reads: Jerusalem is “God’s City for All Time”. This is the city that King David declared the capital of Israel and the city where Messiah was offered as a sacrifice for the sin of mankind. Jerusalem is also a city where Messiah will return to begin His thousand-year reign on this earth. Keep these truths in your mind as you tour Jerusalem.

Similarly, toward the end of the itinerary, a map of contemporary Israel is depicted with a set of considerably larger borders laid over it, in areas that encompass contemporary Syria and Jordan, with the title “Possible Borders of Israel Based on Scripture.” To illustrate this claim further, a list of Bible passages is provided under the headings “Title Deeds of Israel” and “The Holy Scriptures Define ‘Prophetic Israel’s Future Border.’ ” Whether or not visitors actually read the scriptures cited to corroborate these claims is irrelevant. If, as Lincoln claims, “Scholarship is myth with footnotes,”23 then we can view the cited Bible verses as culturally accepted sources of authority that work to naturalize, and further reinforce, the notion that Israel and the “Holy Land” is not just about past events depicted in the Bible, but is part of God’s unfolding plan that continues today—a plan in which tour participants are encouraged to see themselves as actively taking part. Active participation, too, is represented not as a one-sided or passive choice, but a form of obedience. Much like Lazarus’s assertion that God was preparing Don Verdean to be “his instrument,” so too are tour participants encouraged to embrace their identity as divine agents acting on behalf of God. Watchmen on the Wall, the booklet provided to us by the church, states this explicitly: “In closing, we bless you for choosing to obey the divine trumpet call of The Church in this hour, to be ‘co-laborers with God’ for His purposes and plans to manifest in this strategic place and people.”24 All of this material constitutes what Dean MacCannell describes as an “off-site marker” that helps shape visual and other expectations of the visitors, and directs them in ways that mean they tend to

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Figure 4.1  Cover page of our travel itinerary depicting Israeli persimmons as the fulfillment of prophecy. Photo S. Durbin.

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experience a site as real when it resembles images and expectations such markers produce.25

The rhetoric of “blessing” Israel One way in which Christian Zionists operationalize their identities as authentic Christians and God’s obedient subjects is by demonstrating their solidarity with Israel and Jews through what I  call the “rhetoric of blessing.”26 This rhetoric of blessing underpins much contemporary Christian Zionist discourse on Israel, which is authorized by appealing to scriptural sources. The most frequently cited source, Gen. 12:3, states “I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you, I will curse.” Christian Zionist speakers understand this verse as an eternal “truth” which means that those who “bless” Jews and Israel today are blessed in return and, conversely, those who curse Israel are cursed by God in return.27 Again, this was made explicit in the itinerary provided to participants before they embarked on their journey: March 18: Does God Bless Those Who Bless Israel? The cornerstone scripture for Faith Bible Chapel’s outreach to Israel is Genesis 12:3 . . . This verse speaks of all time not just during Abraham’s life. When God speaks not only now but also into the future, it is prophecy.

Framed in this way, tour participants’ demonstrations of solidarity with Israel are reconstituted as active participation in prophecy as it unfolds. It becomes imbued with a timeless quality, made more meaningful through its attachment to a particular reading of the Bible, and hence symbolically removed from the political project to which it is bound. Although what constitutes “blessing” for Christian Zionists is not uniform, it is typically associated with material support for Israel. Frequently it takes the form of financial donations and political lobbying in the United States; supporting Israeli settlements; and simply traveling to Israel—spending money there and thus contributing to the Israeli economy. Faith Bible Chapel took financial blessing very seriously. For example, the packet sent out to participants encouraged them to avoid using credit cards in Israel because the vendors would incur a fee from the credit card companies for each transaction, thus reducing the participants’ “blessing.” Other instances of material blessing the church had undertaken in previous years were highlighted by the pastors at various junctures throughout the tour. These acts included volunteering to plant grapevines in West Bank settlements, providing air conditioning units for Israeli Defense Force (IDF) sleeping quarters based in remote locations, and providing modern firefighting equipment for the West Bank community of Ariel, among others. Participants on the tour also tried to “bless” Israel where they could. At the end of each tour stop, we were often escorted to a gift shop where many purchases were made and spending was justified as a form of devotional necessity. At the same time, participants sought to actively avoid contributing any money to Palestinians. Although this was relatively easily achieved since minimal contact with Arabs was a built-in

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feature of our tour, it became trickier when we reached the demographically diverse portions of the Old City in Jerusalem. To ensure that participants did not contribute in any way to Arab vendors, one participant explained that because Arabic has no “P” sound, we could identify Arabs that way: “So, when we’re in Jerusalem,” she explained, “check to see if they can say their P’s before you buy from them. But you can also tell because the Jews usually have shops, and the Arabs only have stalls on the street.”28 Cursing Israel, on the other hand, is often construed as either overt hostility to the Zionist project, or more simply the absence of the forms of blessing just mentioned. For Christian Zionists, support for a two-state solution is a particularly potent form of cursing, especially one that would require Israel to cede control over East Jerusalem and the areas of the West Bank.29 Thus, as I’ve written elsewhere, just as notions of America’s flourishing and its role as a superpower after the Second World War are often connected to its historic support for Israel, any setbacks that America might face, whether economically or militarily, are often causally linked to some real or imagined shift in its relationship with Israel.30 What, then, does this rhetoric of blessing have to do with a Christian Zionist tour of Israel? The rhetoric of blessing Israel, in conjunction with the Christian Zionist readings of the Bible that emphasize Israel’s prophetic significance and the ongoing promise of Gen. 12:3, contribute to the naturalization of the Arab-Israeli conflict by emptying it of political or historical context. Instead, such maneuverings represent the origins and resolution of the conflict as entirely theological. That is, rather than viewing it as a complex political conflict over competing material and symbolic interests that have historical origins, it is presented as the continuation of a conflict between God and Satan. If, as Christian Zionists claim, the establishment of the modern State of Israel is part of God’s plan pointing toward the return of Jesus, then supporting Israel is no longer classified as merely political. Instead, it becomes active support for a divine plan. The corollary of this representation alongside the dualistic lens through which Christian Zionists tend to view the world, however, means that Palestinian resistance and other opposition to Israel’s political project is understood as the work of Satan. While Christian Zionists lament violence in Israel it is also often explained as the earthly manifestation of the competing wills of God and Satan. The resolution of the conflict, then, is taken out of human hands and instead placed in an indeterminate future when Jesus returns. An emphasis on Gen. 12:3 distils some of these theological ideas even further. Palestinians are not suffering because they have been displaced from their land or live under military occupation. Rather, they are suffering because they reject Israel and hence “curse” it; God, in turn, curses them. As I elaborate later, this rhetoric renders Israeli occupation as not only an inherently good thing, but a natural one that manifests the ongoing reality of God’s work in the world.31 Although this process began with books, brochures, DVDs, and other “offsite markers,” the expectations these markers helped to engender were then made that much more “real” through the on-site markers provided once the group reached Israel itself. This was accomplished both through the guiding practices of the pastor and tour guide leading the group, and the way in which mundane visual elements of the land were classified.

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“It is what it is”: The Green Line, the land, and the “natural” distribution of God’s blessings Due to the Christian Zionist disposition to view contemporary Israel as prophecy fulfilled and hence an affirmation of the Bible’s accuracy, the land and other features of modern Israel are at times invested with cosmic or divine significance. By seizing upon natural aspects of the land, ideological positions are transformed into naturalized observations (as opposed to assertions) about God’s interventions in the world, reaffirming the claims and expectations produced by the off-site markers discussed above. Aspects of the landscape are classified and highlighted in ways that extrapolate from the physical geography and the outward appearance of development a representation of good and evil, darkness and light, blessings and curses—binaries which are common mythmaking techniques. One instance of this occurred during a stop in Jericho for an afternoon of sightseeing. After walking around old sites and excavations, we had lunch in a large cafeteria before hopping back on the bus to make our way to Jerusalem. We returned along the same route, our pastor claimed, that Jesus took after he was baptized in the Jordan river—the same ritual plunge tour participants took the previous day. Our tour bus lurched up the hill toward Jerusalem and our ears popped as we rose above sea level until we reached Mount Scopus, where we stopped to take in our first glimpse of Jerusalem. Stepping off the bus briefly to a dramatically cooler temperature than we had just experienced in Jericho, our tour guide usefully juxtaposed the Palestinian territory of Jericho with Israeli controlled Jerusalem and its surrounds. Jonathan Z. Smith’s deceptively simple reminder that nothing itself is sacred, but only sacred in relation,32 is a useful prompt to consider the subtle effects of our guide’s classifications. The description of the topography of Jerusalem and its presence in a valley surrounded by green hills enabled our guide to subtly reclassify the area we had just left in terms of the spiritual presence we were invited to “feel” in Jerusalem (and thus the spiritual absence in Jericho). After describing Jerusalem’s historical and contemporary landmarks as “the place where it [the unfolding plan of redemption] all began,” our guide invited us to direct our gaze eastward toward Jericho, the barren land we had just left: You see the contrast? One side of Jerusalem the same mountain, Mount Scopus, Mount of Olives, these western slope[s]‌of the hill gets 25 inches of rain a year, which make[s] it lush and green. The other side of the same mountain, the eastern side, gets only 8 inches of rain a year, which makes it desert. Desert comes from less than 8 inches of rain a year. It’s barren. Desert is a function of rainfall, it’s not a function of topography; what makes a desert [is] when there is not much rainfall. And in a few minutes you will see the desert that we came through—it’s like day and night what we came through. The same hill, one is, see the Dead Sea over there, you see the barren desert, and you see how green and lush is the other side of Jerusalem. Look how much rain was in Jerusalem; when you came over to Jericho there was only drops.33

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Our guide’s description of the topography, the rainfall, the lush and green western part, which he contrasted with the “backward” eastern part we had just come from in Jericho, invoked Orientalist stereotypes of East and West.34 Modern Israel, then, is visibly “blessed” not only with rainfall and a beautiful landscape, but large modern buildings, universities, hospitals, as well as cranes and other markers of construction and modern development. In contrast, the eastern, predominantly Palestinian, territories remained barren, dry, and underdeveloped. The invocation of these distinctions began the process of rhetorically elevating these arbitrary differences to an altogether higher cosmic register.35 That is, economic development, agricultural ingenuity, and a visibly “advanced” culture are all attributed to God’s will, and God’s blessings on Israel—a further visible affirmation that God keeps his word that he would not only bless Israel, but also those who bless it in return (Gen. 12:3). The attribution of divine favor made visible through the landscape itself was prevalent at various junctures throughout the tour. On another occasion, after our tour guide discussed the recent history of Israel and the “Green Line,” one of the pastors took the microphone at the front of the bus to explain what she asserted was the Green Line’s true etymology: What [our guide] didn’t talk about, but what I want to explain to you, is why they call it the Green Line. And this—it is what it is. Prior to Israel’s influence in Judea and Samaria, literally the Green Line meant, and it was physical, you could see it: west of the Green Line it was green. East of the Green Line, it wasn’t so green. And that’s just a fact. After the Jews . . . began to . . . come back to Judea and Samaria, one of the wonderful things that began to happen is that they began to share with their Arab neighbors agricultural breakthroughs and drip irrigation, and all the kinds of things that Israel had learned, and it really improved their life a lot. In fact if you look . . . into Jordan, you literally can see across the Jordan [River] patches of green and then it’s not so green, because Israeli farmers [are] talking to their Jordanian neighbors about how to farm and it’s really improved their lives. You know, that’s a truth . . . that the world media misses, in a great way, doesn’t talk about, but, it is a fact. So I think it is important for you to know why it was called a Green Line.36

This pastor’s innovative explanation of the Green Line is another example of reclassification, a hallmark strategy of mythmaking. The Green Line derives its name from the green ink used to draw up the boundaries of the 1949 armistice lines. But the pastor redescribes this as a much more extraordinary geographical marker of God’s beneficence to those who accept his will, and thus accept the presence of an expanded Israel. Israeli ingenuity is then transformed into a further visible manifestation of the reliability of biblical truth claims—claims that extended and reinforced previous assertions about the benevolence of Israeli occupation. As the same pastor suggested to us earlier in the trip, support for an expanded Israel was not about being “against anyone”: God desperately loves all people. He doesn’t prefer one group of people over another. But, he’s chosen the Jews to be a light to the world, and that . . . has made

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them, throughout history, the target of the evil one. And so you just have to keep, spiritually, the truth going in your head, or this part of the world just gets crazy in your thinking. I mean, this gets crazy. But when you look at the will of God, versus the counter will of Satan, it comes pretty simple to you.37

This “simplicity,” then, is made tangible through the descriptions of the land: Jericho and the other territories east of Jerusalem in the West Bank were visibly dry, dusty, and (from our vantage point) barren, whereas Jerusalem and areas of Jordan near Israel were “lush and green.” While one might think that this was a function of topography, and thus simply a natural aspect of different kinds of land, our guide was quick to point out that it was, in fact, a function of rainfall. This classificatory distinction, I think, has particular implications for the way this information is presented to the group. As Russell McCutcheon points out, “Classification . . . is hardly mere jargon. Neither is it simply the passive recognition of already existing values and identities. Instead, it is evidence of both prior interests and upcoming events.”38 Put more simply, classifying something as this and not that has political implications, whether or not it is consciously understood in such a way by those who make these distinctions. The prior interests of the guide and pastor are represented as natural through their acts of classification. While topography is more stable, and therefore stands as a nearly insurmountable hurdle in transforming a desert, rainfall—despite being closely related to topography—appears to be more arbitrary. Thus, when thinking about the absence of Israeli jurisdiction in the area we had just left, contrasted with “God’s City” of Jerusalem, the blessings purported to stem from Israeli presence are transformed into a kind of commonsense, visible fact. Such a crafting of ideology as natural reality is especially evident in the pastor’s description of the Green Line and her casual preface—“It is what it is.” In all these instances, Israeli presence is recast as bringing God’s blessing. Those who accept that presence, such as the Jordanians immediately east of the Jordan river, are said to be blessed in return. Although this assertion was cast as the result of Israeli know-how, ultimately, as many Christian Zionists would have it, it also indicates the presence of a God who keeps his word, remains active in the affairs of humanity, and uses Jews to demonstrate this by “blessing” others through them. From this perspective, Israeli presence can transform the desert into a fertile land. The infertility of the barren areas we had come through was attributed to the fact that Israeli presence—and by extension God’s blessings—had not been transferred to that area, instead of to a simple function of rainfall. The group’s pastor summed up all of these observations for us on our last day in Israel. After having our last meal together in the Arab-Israeli town of Abu Ghosh, a town known for its friendly relationship with Jewish Israelis, she explained to the group again that Christian support for Israel is not being against anybody; it’s being for what God is for. Because the Word of God is clear—when Israel is in a rightful place, the entire world is blessed. That’s the piece that people don’t get. When Israel is in her land, and [has] a right to be in it and to prosper, prosperity will flow to the entire world. You just saw Abu Ghosh, and if you could just spiritually sense what’s there is so different than other places,

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Through a logic that can be characterized as divine trickle-down economics, this claim is another example of the way Israel and its Jewish inhabitants are ascribed the ability to provide the conditions for all peoples to receive the blessings that flow through them. At the same time, although the pastor emphasized that Christian Zionism and support for Israel was not about being “against anybody,” but rather “being for what God is for,” her speech had another effect: it helpfully reinforced prior assertions about who was against God; namely, those who felt that Israel should relinquish some of its expanded territory and provide Palestinians with their own state or, more severely, divide Jerusalem.40 Such a description of the ostensible “blessings” that the Arabs of Abu Ghosh had received by accepting their incorporation into the State of Israel is thus construed as a microcosm of the blessings and prosperity that she claimed would flow to the entire world through Israel’s presence in the land. Both of the examples just mentioned highlight myth as a narrative form of ideology. These seemingly innocuous descriptions of the landscape and of our Arab hosts conceals not only the producers of these myths, but also the material and ideological interests at the core of their claims, namely, that Israeli colonialism in all its complexity is both divinely sanctioned and inherently good. Moreover, by wrapping these descriptions in theological language they are elevated to a place above the fray of worldly politics, arguably making them that much more politically effective. The speakers’ conclusions insulate their claims from overt criticism or skepticism: to reach a different conclusion than the ones we were presented with, it would seem, would deny the visible reality that was rhetorically constructed for tour participants and, more severely, deny the will of God they claim it represents.

Constructing an authentic Christian identity at “traditional” Christian pilgrimage sites in Israel The examples just discussed demonstrate how descriptions of the land simultaneously worked to reinforce aspects of a Christian Zionist reading of the Bible and naturalize Israel’s political project as a visible and accurate manifestation of that reading, while confirming the pastor and tour guides’ assertions about God’s will. The truth claims advanced in these settings, however, are by no means held by all self-identified Christian visitors to Israel. As a result, the guiding practices that surrounded the more traditional Christian sites became opportunities for pastors and participants to contest those identities and authorize Christian Zionists’ identities as more “authentically” Christian. Jean-Francois Bayert’s argument that “there is no such thing as identity, only operational acts of identification”41 is a useful starting point to examine the way the Christian Zionist tourists and pastors—with the help of our Israeli tour guide— continuously enacted and claimed an authentic Christian identity for themselves. For example, when we walked the Via Dolorosa—the street many Christians traditionally believe Jesus walked with the cross en route to his Crucifixion—we passed the site that

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Orthodox Christians claim as the birthplace of the Virgin Mary. Upon passing this site, members of our group audibly chortled at the proposition that anyone could know her birthplace, let alone consider it significant. Aside from being a somewhat amusing anecdote about the willingness of participants to accept plenty of other things equally problematic as determining the birthplace of an individual over 2,000 years ago—just not this particular one—it also provides useful data for the type of identity claims that Bayert describes. Their noted amusement that anyone would believe that Mary’s birthplace could be identified, or was even important, provided a clear signal that they were not those kinds of people; rather, they were moved by other, purportedly more authentic, commitments. Similarly, although we were walking along the Via Dolorosa, the group’s pastor often rendered insignificant the sites we passed, on one occasion claiming that “We’re not gonna stop at stations and do a lot of explanations because, in general, we’re not Catholic, and so we’re not gonna do that. So you gotta stay up. Ok?” Anecdotes aside, a more notable elaboration and construction of the tour group’s identity as authentically Christian over and above others was prevalent in the discourse that surrounded our visits to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Garden Tomb. In Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian traditions, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is traditionally identified as the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial, and is thus considered a sacred site. Protestants contest this. So when our group visited, it became a useful place where identities could be both contested and constructed. Prefacing our visit, the Israeli tour guide repeatedly remarked that although “Catholics believe” that Jesus was crucified there, there is no evidence for it. Whenever the church was discussed, it was in relation to the other, purportedly more authentic site of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial. Our tour guide’s explanation of the day’s itinerary collaborated in the construction of the participants’ identity as “authentically” Christian: We are going to end the tour of Israel in one of most peaceful and nicest places in Jerusalem—the Garden Tomb. And you will feel the presence of God; you’ll feel something there when you are in that important place.42

When we reached the church, our guide again emphasized its ordinariness as we walked in: “we are going to see that, from an engineering point of view, it’s an amazing structure.” The church may have been structurally sound but, according to our guide, it was nothing when compared to the extraordinariness of the Garden Tomb: At the end of the 19th century . . . [they] found the Garden Tomb. And when you will be there, you will have the feeling that the tomb is not here [at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre], the tomb is there. And the place where Jesus was crucified is not here, it was there. We are coming to see the [Church of the Holy Sepulchre] just to let you know, and you [will] see the difference . . . over there, what you see there, you feel much stronger feelings there . . ..”43

The contrasting ways in which both the pastor and tour guide discussed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre versus the Garden Tomb further demonstrate the significance and interested nature of classification. The rhetorical distinctions made between the two

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highlight that there is nothing inherently special about any of these places, but rather that their “specialness” is always rhetorically constructed in comparison to some other place that is said to be mundane. Just as off-site markers such as brochures, reading guides, and other material can shape visitors’ expectations of the land that enabled them to “see” and accept the prophetic and religious significance attributed to the land, so too did the pastors’ and guides’ directives help shape participants’ expectations and experiences of these sites. The frequent appeals to the feelings participants would have at the Garden Tomb and the claims that we would feel the presence of God there are significant, not because those places actually radiate any kind of unique or special quality. Instead, the appeals were significant because they primed participants to have or expect those feelings when they got there, and enabled them to reproduce these feelings rhetorically when comparing their experiences at the two sites. The production of the “religious” significance of the Garden Tomb in contrast to its mundane counterpart found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was compounded when, upon arrival at the latter, our pastor loudly refused to even go inside—further conveying the message to our group that this place was entirely unimportant. Moreover, she only reluctantly entered in order to hurry us out because as she put it “we were wasting too much time there.”44 After our hasty retreat from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we made our way to the Garden Tomb where we were met by a South American Christian guide named César. “As in Caesar Salad,” he said, “Because the other Caesar didn’t have a good reputation here in Israel, but I know everyone likes Caesar the salad.”45 Our arrival coincided with the afternoon’s Islamic call to prayer, which provided another impromptu moment to assert the ascendance of Christian truth:  “Welcome to Jerusalem,” César said, “whenever they [Muslims] pray, we pray for their salvation.” When the call to prayer ended César, who had seemingly been holding his breath the entire time, exhaled by loudly proclaiming “Praise the lord!” before seamlessly continuing the narrative of the Garden Tomb’s authenticity that our guide and pastors had previously initiated. After briefly introducing us to the history of the place and its discovery, we parted from him, and were led by our pastors to a secluded spot in the garden for quiet reflection. As we sat, the pastors passed out small wooden goblets and crosses with the inscription “He is Risen” across them for all the participants, undertaking a ritual that punctuated the symbolic end of our nearly two-week tour to remind us of why we were ostensibly there: to acknowledge the truth of Christianity, as they had presented it to us. Yet as we sat in the Garden Tomb, our pastor once again used the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as a common Protestant notion that Catholics worship “things” rather than God, as a way to further constitute our group as authentically Christian: And Jesus Christ came, as the perfect lamb of God, fulfilling over 360 prophecies, and on that cross, he gave his life for you and for me. . . . And that’s what we’re all about here; not to worship the place, but to honor the savior.46

Unlike Catholics, the pastor implied, the group was not there to worship a place, or other objects. Instead, we were having an “authentic” religious experience with God in the actual place where Jesus was crucified and buried, the sense of which had been

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usefully established through the disparate treatment of the two places by the group’s pastor as well as our tour guide throughout the day.

Conclusion The examples provided in this chapter demonstrate the way language, classification, and other descriptive choices assign significance and insignificance. Thus, such practices work to construct the ways social groups experience and understand places, events, and the world. In this instance, a Christian tour to Israel became a focal point whereby a variety of social, political, and ideological interests could be naturalized through a mythical discourse that represented those interests as commonsense statements of fact that accurately reflected and reinforced biblical truth claims. It is unlikely that the participants on the tour needed significant convincing about Israel’s prophetic significance. However, the moral, political, and divine right of modern Israel to control the disputed territories it currently occupies, as well as their own identities as “authentic” Christians, was bolstered throughout the tour by the guiding narratives that the pastors and tour guide provided. For the church leaders, our trip to Israel was not just about visiting sites depicted in the Bible, walking where Jesus walked, or seeing a new country. It was about advancing biblical truth claims by representing them as observable “facts,” while also incorporating Israel’s political project into those truth claims. The guiding narratives of the church pastors, corroborated by our Israeli tour guide, were thoroughly political. One of the reasons such claims worked, what gave them their broader appeal, was their removal from any human source; instead, the pastors and guides wrapped their descriptions in a mythical discourse that denied from the equation any human interests, historical circumstances, or struggles for power. This transformed their descriptions into “facts” of nature. Elements of the land were presented as visible evidence regarding the “truth” of the Bible and Israel’s prophetic significance, and thus attributed “religious” status. Simultaneously, the denial of any kind of special or “sacred” status to more traditional Christian sites in Israel helped corroborate these claims. For, while Christian Zionists attribute prophetic significance to Israel as a representation of God’s continued activity in the world, other stripes of Christians deny this and simultaneously accuse Christian Zionists of advancing false doctrines while criticizing their support for Israeli actions that affect Palestinians. By denying a religious status to these self-identified Christians, then, Christian Zionists not only differentiate themselves, but they also effectively work to constitute their beliefs and practices, in conjunction with their hawkish Zionism, as the hallmarks of authentic Christian identity. Both of these examples add to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that there is no essence to “religion”; rather it is a political category that can be used by competing social groups to advance their interests. I opened this chapter with a description of a satirical film about a fictional biblical archaeologist with characters who employed similar rhetorical devices to engender a sense of greater purpose to their otherwise ordinary activities. The characters in Don Verdean justified their activities as part of a greater divine design, attempting

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to uncover material artifacts that confirmed the accuracy of events depicted in the Bible, and therefore their broader assertions about Christian truth claims. In many ways, the tour I participated in shared similar qualities. The pastors, tour guide, and other individuals we met  along the way made specific choices about what was and was not significant. By doing so, they employed mythmaking strategies to aggressively promote the moral underpinnings of Israeli colonialism as not only inherently good, but also as something that was natural, part of the “order of things,” and ultimately of divine design. Despite this, and the protestations that being pro-Israel was not about being “against” anybody, a passing joke our tour guide told us betrayed the underlying narrative that shaped much of our visit. As we stopped on the side of the road, looking out over what appeared to be a vast empty field, our tour guide drew our attention to a sign in English, Hebrew, and Arabic affixed to the fence that bordered the field. “You see the sign?” he asked, pointing the inscription in English that read “Danger [Land] Mines!” “What do you think it says in Hebrew?” There were a few mumbles from the back of the group, which repeated the English in the form of a question (“Danger, mines?”). “That’s right,” he said. “And what do you think it says in Arabic?” A few more voices emerged from the back of the group—“The same thing?” they asked. He paused briefly, a wry smile emerging on his face, before providing the punch line: “Picnic area.”

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“. . .that their heart might throb with love for Israel!”: Celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles with Charismatics and Messianic Jews in Jerusalem Katja Vehlow

Every fall during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, thousands of charismatic Christians and messianic Jews from all over the world travel to Jerusalem to celebrate the “Feast of Tabernacles.” The participants see themselves both as pilgrims and as delegates, for in addition to imitating Jesus by being in his homeland and celebrating events from his life and his eventual Second Coming, they seek to show their love for the Jewish people by supporting and lobbying for the continued existence of the state of Israel. I joined these pilgrim-delegate tourists in October 2016 as they prayed, sang, studied, shopped, and proclaimed their message of solidarity and love for Israel.1 In this chapter, I explore the “feast,” its organizer, and some of the theologies behind the enterprise. I detail the main reasons that the attendees see themselves as “pilgrims” and as “delegates” and how the practice of Sukkot in Jerusalem is explained by the groups in attendance and the organizing body, the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ). As for their identity as “pilgrims,” they make the trip to Jerusalem first as a way to imitate Jesus, who practiced this holiday, and second as a way to celebrate Jesus, whom they think is encoded in the ancient Jewish scriptures as the real/true reason for Sukkot. About their identity as “delegates,” the main rationale has to do with a desire to provide comfort to the Jewish people by helping ensure the continued existence of the state of Israel, and to counteract anti-Semitism through the combined activities of apologizing to the Jewish people in Israel for the persecution meted out at the hand of earlier Christians. Despite this rationale, I observed hardly anything in their practices that would be recognizable as a first-century Sukkot celebration or even a contemporary mainstream Jewish celebration; nor was there much, if any, awareness about the present-day circumstances of Israel or its current inhabitants.2 In fact, the discourses and practices of the feast focused on Jewish scriptures, the Jewish people, Jesus, and Israel, in a way that entailed and even necessitated the erasure of mainstream Jews and the plight of the Palestinians. I argue that this twofold erasure may be explained by the convergence between ICEJ ideology, on the one hand, and the mythmaking that justifies the practice Sukkot in Jerusalem as a Jesus-holiday, on the other.

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In the first section of this chapter, I will lay out a general account of the 2016 feast activities, plus observations about the erasure of mainstream Jews and the on-ground living conditions of Palestinians. Following that, I will analyze the history and ideology of the event’s organizing body, the ICEJ, including its changing ideology and aims. The ICEJ was at first heavily informed by dispensationalist theology, which included supersessionism and an interest in the nation of Israel that predominantly served Christian interests. The organization has since moved away from this ideology and more toward a covenantal theology, which values the Jewish people and land not as mere placeholders for the Christian eschaton but rather as coheirs who deserve apology and support because God demands it. Nevertheless, the discourses and practices at the feast have not entirely changed to reflect the ideological/theological changes in the ICEJ itself, which creates a jarring tension for an observer. In the following sections, I  show how Sukkot is reimagined as a Jesus holiday and I  detail the material and political support provided by the feast participants. Finally, after describing the considerable opposition that has arisen in response to the ICEJ, I  return to the question of erasure, ideology, and mythmaking. I  review the arguments about ideology and mythmaking as explanations for how the erasure happens and I  further suggest that the attendees are able to not see the erasure because they engage in what Véronique Altglas has called “paradoxical ignorance.”3 This term, first defined by the French literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov, postulates that the representation of idealized people entails the ignorance of their very reality and their cultures.4 The paradoxical ignorance that allowed feast participants to proclaim their fervent love for Jews and Israel involved remaining intentionally unaware of contemporary Jewish practices and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements and Occupation of the West Bank. Further, though, I  argue that when evidence of the conflict became unavoidable, it was immediately countered through use of religious discourse. In other words, the material, political, and human rights issues were rendered invisible through a strategic use of mythmaking.

The 2016 Feast I arrived in west Jerusalem in time for the opening of the feast on the First Day of Sukkot in 5776 on Sunday evening, October 16, 2016. The feast ended on the following Friday (and thus before the end of the Jewish week-long celebration of Sukkot). The program followed at the 2016 feast has been well-established for decades.5 It opened dramatically with the “Ein Gedi Desert Celebration” that included “biblical,” “Davidic dance” and worship under the stars in Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea. On the following morning, there was a communion service at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, where Protestants have commemorated Jesus’s burial since the nineteenth century. From the third to the fifth day, mornings were packed with prayers, Bible studies, and lecture series such as “Signs and Wonders,” “Israel and Families,” “One New Man,” “Succot” [sic], “Jewish Roots,” and, in acknowledgment of the growth of charismatic Christianity in China, a Chinese-language track.6 There were also separate programs

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for children, teens, and young adults. While the attendees were racially diverse, the speakers came mostly from the traditional white and often northern European elite that has guided the sponsoring organization—the ICEJ—for decades. Only six women gave lectures during the feast, reflecting the preference for male leadership in a public setting within the evangelical world.7 The feast took place in the Pais Arena, Jerusalem’s multipurpose sports stadium. During breaks, participants could peruse a dazzling variety of stalls. A  large stand selling publications of the ICEJ dominated the entrance hall, and booths of vendors and charities snaked around the walls of the arena, peddling messianic clothes, music, flags, oils, and ritual items such as tallitot (prayer shawls), mezuzot (pieces of parchment with handwritten passages from the Hebrew Bible and encased in a box to be affixed to a home’s doorposts), tzitzit (ritual fringes) and jewelry (Figure  5.1). Participants were invited to take selfies by a model of the third temple and they could pick up free copies of the New Testament and theological tracts. Israeli messianic charities solicited prayers and funds, among them Be’ad Chayiim (For Life), a pro-life group, and Joseph Project and Hands of Mercy, both involved in distributing humanitarian aid among Israel’s poor. Special tours for participants were offered by the new Friends of Zion Museum (opened in 2015)—a venue that tells the story of Christian Zionist support for Israel, located opposite the as yet incomplete Museum of Tolerance in central Jerusalem. Israeli institutions were also present, and the Magen David Adom, the Israeli branch of the Red Cross, solicited blood donations, and a bank branch allowed participants to exchange money.

Figure 5.1  Jewish-affinity and Jewish menorahs for sale at the Pais Arena. Photo K. Vehlow.

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In the afternoons when the venue was officially closed, many visited nearby Christian holy sites. I participated in trips to Bethlehem and the Gush Etzion Heritage Center in the West Bank, organized by Sar-El, a travel agency catering to evangelical travelers, on behalf of the ICEJ. Each evening was dedicated to a different topic.8 During “Israeli Guest Night,” for example, geared towards non-messianic Israelis, an extravaganza with music and at times moving presentations highlighted the embassy’s work in Israel. The feast culminated in a parade known as the Jerusalem March—the most visible and famous feature of the event. Somewhat incongruously joined by Israeli unionists and members of the police and sports clubs, the participants, grouped according to nationalities that occasionally sang and danced in costume through the streets of a bemused (west) Jerusalem. They blew shofarot (ram’s horns), waved to the thousands of half-wary, half-grateful onlookers lining the streets, and handed out trinkets from their home countries. Some carried signs and flags with religious messages in several languages or expressed remorse for Christian anti-Semitism. On the following morning, the conference closed with a three-hour prayer service held in the Clal Center near Machaneh Yehudah, the central market of Jerusalem, where the city’s largest messianic congregation regularly worships. The 2016 feast presented me with a paradox. I heard attendees speak glowingly and in detail about the third Jewish temple and the necessary temple utensils, clothes, or sacrificial practices—and yet most had never set foot into a mainstream Jewish synagogue. They happily bought Jewish-affinity jewelry or ritual items and, after all, had journeyed to Jerusalem for Sukkot/Tabernacles, but they voiced surprise that the conference venue observed the Jewish dietary laws, and many did not recognize the large structure standing adjacent to the stadium as a sukkah. Even the website of the ICEJ displayed unfamiliarity with Judaism when it depicted a Chanukkah menorah that had been lit from left to right (instead of right to left).9 In spite of their Zionist engagement, the attendees’ fascination with things Jewish rarely translated into familiarity or knowledge of mainstream Jewish practice, even related to Sukkot. Furthermore, the tourists participating in the 2016 feast seemed largely unaware of current political affairs in the region, which is surprising since many received and presumably read the ICEJ news flashes that landed in their email boxes day after day. The security barrier cordoning off the West Bank from Israel was only a few minutes’ drive from the stadium and yet, participants seemed oblivious to its presence. I drew blank stares when I mentioned it. Most travelers did not talk to any Arabs, an observation shared by Emma Green, a staff writer at ​The Atlantic who attended the 2017 feast.10 The only Arabs the travelers encountered were the workers at the Pais Arena or in their hotels, or Arab converts to Christianity such as the attendees from Saudi Arabia or Naim Khoury, the pastor at First Bethlehem Baptist Church who regaled us with the stories of his conversion and the difficult history of his community. Even when shopping, the visitors to the West Bank (and probably elsewhere) were steered clear of Muslim-owned stores and instead directed to Christian-owned businesses. In this, they do not differ from evangelical Christian or Jewish tourists visiting Israel, who rarely encounter Arabs on an equal footing.

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Dispensationalism, covenantal theology, and taking responsibility The ICEJ is one of the oldest and most influential Christian Zionist organizations in Israel, and the feast is the ICEJ’s most important event through which the organization spreads its religious and political messages and galvanizes its supporters into action. Founded in 1979 by northern European Christians living in Jerusalem, the stated goals of the ICEJ are to support Israel, spread the message of Christian Zionism to Christian communities overseas, and fight anti-Semitism.11 Today, the organization draws its support mainly from independent fundamentalist and charismatic churches, and claims a foothold in 150 countries and regions, and branch offices in some 90 countries, with an increasing presence in areas of evangelical growth such as Brazil and China.12 For decades, the ICEJ maintained a dépendance in the United States, first in Washington, DC, and since 2008 in Murfreesboro, TN. The organization lobbies the government of the United States and other countries on behalf of Israel’s expansionist agenda and successfully employs faith-based diplomacy. Supporters are kept informed through a number of sophisticated media outlets such as the ICEJ-News, a daily email digest of Middle Eastern and Israeli current events, as well as TV and radio broadcasts, all of which are offered at no cost. In recent decades, the leadership of the ICEJ has been marked by significant theological shifts. Initially, the ICEJ was guided by dispensationalism, a theology that views the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 as a fulfillment of the biblical prophecies relating to the ingathering of the Jewish people, who were seen as a necessary precursor to the Last Days.13 Many held that the Second Coming of Christ was immanent, and with it a series of events that would lead to the War of Armageddon and the establishment of Christ’s millennial kingdom. These beliefs found expression in a politics advancing a Greater Israel agenda, including the expansion of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, and especially aliyah (ascent), the Jewish immigration to Israel. In fact, the ICEJ has financed aliyah to the tune of $50 million since 1980, and roughly 10 percent of all immigrants who arrived in this time period came as a direct result of the involvement of the ICEJ.14 Dispensationalism was central to the Dutch-born Willem van der Hoeven, the initiator of several ministries in Israel, and one of the founders of the ICEJ who served for many years as its speaker and chief ideologue. Van der Hoeven was influenced by the writings of Lance Lambert, “Jerusalem’s hidden mega pastor,” a prominent charismatic writer and speaker on Israel’s role in a divinely guided history.15 A frequent speaker at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other conservative Jewish organizations, van der Hoeven routinely equates Palestinians, and especially the former head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Yasser Arafat, with Satan. The ICEJ has softened the language of dispensationalism in more recent years, and has been characterized as representing a “more optimistic, though non-evangelistic form of political dispensationalism.”16 The current executive director is Jürgen Bühler, a Germanborn trained physicist and minister in the German branch of the Assemblies of God, who represents a new generation of charismatic leadership. A fluent Hebrew speaker—in contrast to van der Hoeven—he and his wife Vesna have raised their children in Israel, where he has lived since 1994. Bühler’s approach to Jews, Judaism, and Israel/Palestine is

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borne out of his family’s history, a past often referenced in his talks. His father, a Pentecostal pastor who planted churches throughout Germany after the Second World War, survived Russian captivity thanks to the generosity of kind Ukrainian Jews and imprinted upon his children that, “we as a family owe our lives to the Jewish people for two reasons: We believe in the Jewish messiah, which gives us eternal life, and we as a family are alive because of those Jewish people who saved my life . . ..”17 Bühler speaks about his work at the ICEJ in terms of gratitude, and stresses the idea of providing “comfort to Israel,” a reference to Isa. 40:1-2 that is frequently quoted to underline support for Israel. The ICEJ now denounces dispensationalism and describes its theology as covenantal, that is, based on the idea that promises made to Israel in the Bible would come to pass.18 While some of the attendees with whom I spoke were not steeped in the problematic aspects of the Jewish-Christian past, the current leaders of the ICEJ regularly address the complicated history of Christians and Jews. They refer to issues arising out of conflicting and competing interpretations of the Bible, shared texts, forced conversions, violence, anti-Semitism, and, especially for the north Europeans, echoes of the Shoah.19 In 2010, David Parsons, today a vice president of the ICEJ, explained: Another great motivating factor is that we want to take responsibility for the bitter legacy of Christian anti-Semitism . . . These Christians are familiar with the history of the Crusades, the medieval expulsions of the Jews, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust . . . For them, supporting Israel is not a matter of guilt, but rather of taking responsibility for a bitter legacy and trying to remove the stain from the church’s name.20

For that reason, the Jerusalem March regularly displays large banners in shape of the Israeli flag, its Star of David replaced with remorseful or encouraging messages such as, “We apologize,” “You are priests and servants of the Lord,” or “Comfort, yes, comfort My people!” (see Figure  5.2). At the feast, Malcolm Hedding, a South African evangelical minister and former executive director of the ICEJ repeatedly and passionately spoke about the dangers of replacement theology or supersessionism, a theology claiming that the church has taken the place once held by Israel in God’s plan for the world.21 And yet, while the speakers located in Israel, in particular, rejected supersessionism, and their speeches promoted covenantal theology and a sense of Christian responsibility after a long history of violence, all of the older approaches described here were voiced at the feast. In the next section, I  look at how viewing Sukkot as a Jesus holiday still retains these approaches and promotes political support.

Tabernacles/Sukkot as a Jesus-holiday Sukkot, and marking Tabernacles/Sukkot in Jerusalem as a Jesus-holiday, is important to Jewish-affinity charismatics and messianic Jews. It is difficult to discern the intentions of individual participants; I explain their attendance at the feast, in part, in terms of a desire to construct and participate in a tradition that connected them not only to ancient scriptures and Jesus but also to the land of Israel. By focusing on an imagined past, the participants fostered a connection to Israel as the land of the

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Figure  5.2  “Nachamu, nachamu ami” (“Comfort, comfort my people”). Banner carried during the Jerusalem March. Photo K. Vehlow.

biblical past and to Jews as witnesses to the same, as well as a connection to Jesus Christ, and to an eschatological future. The Israel they encountered along the way was a living landscape in which they strove to inscribe themselves in manifold ways. For example, by journeying to Jerusalem for the feast, attendees actively imitated Jesus who had also traveled to the holy city to celebrate the so-called pilgrimage holidays of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Speakers made this point clear when they repeatedly welcomed the participants as “pilgrims,” whether they had come from overseas or lived a short drive from the conference venue in Jerusalem. Their stated temporary identity as pilgrims also helped them see themselves as participating in the broader more spiritual sweep of history:  for the duration of the feast, they stood, in the definition of John Eade and Michael Sallnow, at a specific conjunction of person, text, and place.22 Jewish-affinity Christians and messianic Jews celebrate Tabernacles/Sukkot as a Jesus-focused holiday that proclaims Jesus’s first and second coming. It is, as the website of the ICEJ explains, “a powerful statement of faith demonstrating that we believe the Millennial Kingdom of Jesus is coming . . . It is a [tasting] of the Joy of the Age to Come.”23 Charismatics and messianic Jews place Tabernacles/Sukkot in a sacred time continuum in which Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, all observed by Jesus according to the New Testament, play a central role.24 Their main sources are the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and rabbinic texts. But for the most part, these holidays were

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understood vis-à-vis the feast calendar in Leviticus 23—a calendar that does not correspond to current Jewish practice. The events mentioned in this calendar are interpreted as obvious prefigurations of the redemptive career of Jesus Christ, as Kevin Howard and Marvin Rosenthal, the authors of The Feasts of the Lord: God’s Prophetic Calendar from Calvary to the Kingdom note: “No box has to be manufactured, no text twisted, and no truth manipulated to make these appointed feasts conform to specific events in the Messiah’s life.”25 They further explain: The four spring feasts related to His first coming:  His death was depicted in Passover; that His body would not decay in the grave is seen in Unleavened Bread; His resurrection is illustrated in Firstfruits; and the commencement of the church and the New Covenant is typified in the Feast of Weeks. The three fall feasts portray events to be associated with His second coming. The Feast of Trumpets depicts the Rapture of the Church. The Day of Atonement anoints to a great host of people, Jews and Gentiles, who will be saved when they see Him coming and appropriate the benefits of His Death. The Feast of Tabernacles speaks of the day when the Messiah Himself will tabernacle among men, wipe away every tear, and bring in the utopian age or “golden age” of which men have dreamed since time immemorial.26

According to this, the first four holidays tell the story of Jesus’s life on earth: Pesach and the Feast of Unleavened Bread mark Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection, Bikurim and Shavuot symbolize the birth of the church with the outpouring of the holy spirit on Pentecost. Many commentators see themselves as living between the formation of the church and the end of time or, as many prefer to say, between the Shavuot/Feast of Weeks and Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the year. Also called “Trumpets,” this day signals the second coming of Christ and for some, following 1 Thessalonians 5, the onset of the rapture with its cataclysmic events. Foremost among them is Jesus’s descent to gather the true believers and judge those who reject him.27 Jewish-affinity theologians point out that already the Hebrew Bible sees Sukkot as the first universally celebrated eschatological feast, and many texts quote Zech. 14:16 in this context:  “Then all who survive of the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the festival of booths” (NRSV). The idea also appears in Deut. 31:12, and at the dedication of the first temple, when Solomon implored God to consider the prayers of foreigners offered therein, leading to the idea of Jerusalem and the temple as a “house of prayer for all nations.”28 Rev. 21:3-4, with its depiction of an eschatological Sukkot, further underlines the eschatological aspects of the holiday.29 In fact, this is a rare point where Jewish-affinity and Jewish interpretations of Tabernacles/Sukkot somewhat overlap. To this day, traditional Jews also recite Zechariah 14 on the first day of Sukkot, a practice already mentioned in the late antique Babylonian Talmud.30 However, according to Rashi, the foremost medieval biblical exegete, and to most modern exegetes, Zechariah referred here to the ultimate victory of monotheism (v. 9)—and not, as Jewish-affinity theologians would have it, to a time when all nations had accepted Jesus as their messiah.31

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But there is more. For some, Jesus was also born during the holiday. This understanding rests on a careful positioning of John the Baptist’s birth story in Luke 1 in relation to the priests’ rotation described in 1 Chronicles 24. In this interpretation, Zechariah’s priestly service in the Jerusalem temple was dated to June, and Jesus’s mother Mary was thought to have conceived Jesus six months later, around the Gregorian date of today’s Christmas, thus arriving at a delivery date during the Feast of Tabernacles. The presence of shepherds in the fields in Luke 2 is then taken as support for a fall birth during milder weather.32 Other participants turned to the Mishnah, the oldest rabbinic document dated to about 200 CE, and connect Jesus’ earthly celebration of Sukkot in John 7 with the establishment of the church and the world to come.33 For example, Jesus’s promise in John 4 to pour out living water and the holy spirit is then tied to the otherwise unknown ritual of the drawing of water mentioned in the Mishnah.34 Similarly, the image of Jesus as the light of the world is seen as prefigured in the elaborate ceremony of the lamp-lighting in the temple described in the Mishnah.35 The Jewish-affinity Christians and messianic Jews who support the ICEJ and travel to Jerusalem are not the only, or even the first, Christians to celebrate Sukkot; the practice of marking Tabernacles/Sukkot emerged in several communities through history. In the sixteenth century, Hungarian Sabbatarians living in Romania, for example, had Jewish-affinity observances because “whosoever accepts it [the Torah], will, like the Jews, receive eternal reward.”36 The Sabbatarians had little contact with Jews or rabbinic scholarship, thus their practices were most likely based on their reading of the Hebrew Bible alone. Pockets of Székely Sabbatarians persisted until recently, and while many perished in the Holocaust as Jews, some immigrated to Israel.37 In the United States, tent revivals were sometimes thought to have been inspired by Sukkot and its temporary dwellings.38 But Jewish-affinity interest in Sukkot is relatively recent and has been expanding since the 1980s. Where Victor Buksbazen’s 1954 The Gospel in the Feasts of Israel dedicated a mere ten pages to Sukkot, and Philip Goble’s 1974 Everything You Need to Know to Grow a Messianic Synagogue mentions only the Passover Seder, a plethora of books and manuals now detail the “fall holidays” for a growing readership interested in Jewish-affinity theologies and practices.39 Today, in addition to the Feast of Tabernacles celebrated by the ICEJ in Israel, dozens of similar assemblies take place across the United States and elsewhere, and the trend is growing. In addition to the religious/theological justification that enabled the attendees to see themselves as pilgrims, they also saw themselves as “delegates,” an identification that further reinforces a contemporary theoretical understanding that pilgrimage—and religion more generally—is always also a political act.40 The “delegate” identification was marked not only by the conference badge every pilgrim had to produce in order to enter the Pais Arena but also by the conscious efforts of the organizers to address them as representatives of their countries. The newly opened (in 2015) Friends of Zion Museum, for example, invited delegates to view their exhibit on the role of Christians in the establishment of the state of Israel. And each evening was hosted by a rotation of embassy representatives and dedicated to a different topic such as the “Roll Call of Nations,” which welcomes representatives from each country up onto the main stage (Figure 5.3).

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As delegates, they were agents of change and representatives of a specific country or region, and, implicitly, part of the ICEJ’s lobbying efforts in that area. The embassy regularly lobbies the government of the United States and other countries on behalf of Israel’s expansionist agenda. It also efficiently mobilizes its members, and employs faith-based democracy, as in the case of the 2016 UNESCO resolution to turn the Old City of Jerusalem into a World Heritage site that ignored the Jewish ties to the site. In one of the concluding assemblies of the feast, the participants were asked to mail Bibles to UNESCO, with highlighted passages stressing the ancient Jewish connection to the holy city.41 In addition, twenty-three international lawmakers who were in Israel at the invitation of the embassy and the World Jewish Congress, and who were all chairs of Israel Allies caucuses in their home countries, signed a resolution criticizing the UNESCO resolution because it sought “to deny Jerusalem’s Jewish origins and Christian beliefs and heritage.”42 Viewing Sukkot as a Jesus-holiday that is grounded within Jewish scriptures and inscribed upon the landscape of Israel enables attendees to frame political and other efforts in religious terms, justifying them as the enactment of God’s will and thereby viewing their completion of them as “blessings.”

Material, spiritual, and political support: “Blessings” By celebrating Tabernacles in Jerusalem, the participants confirm and express their support of the ICEJ’s ideological agenda, whether they are charismatics, messianic

Figure 5.3  The Roll Call of Nations. Photo K. Vehlow.

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Jews, or non-charismatic evangelicals. In fact, as I argue, it is support of this ideological agenda that they confirm above all else, as evidenced by the feast activities. Despite other differences that may exist between evangelicals (charismatic and non-charismatic) and messianic Jews, they are united in their material and spiritual contributions, their political activism on behalf of Israel, and especially their Christian Zionism (i.e., the support of Jewish nationalism located in a Jewish state of Israel as it was understood and carried out by evangelical Christians).43 Prayers on behalf of Israel in general, but also in order to ask for divine blessings for politicians, are a regular feature at the feast and in the ICEJ newscasts. Taken together, the material, financial, and spiritual contributions are fused together in a self-authorizing process piously known as “blessing Israel”—a reference to Gen. 12:3: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (NRSV). Indeed, the verse is so important that it inspired the motto of the 2016 feast, “All the Families of the Earth.” Pastor Daniel Yahav, raised in an observant Jewish family in Israel and the head of the messianic Peniel Fellowship in Tiberias, pointed to the similarity between the Hebrew word for blessing, brachah, and of knee, berekh, and suggested that blessing Israel meant “to come kneeling with a gift” in an act that was sure to bring divine reward.44 The travelers were constantly asked for monetary donations, which, of course, would be above and beyond the expense of attending the feast (itself no small expense): airfare, hotel, conference registration fees, donations, and souvenirs add up. Many attendees offset the cost by volunteering in some capacity in order to secure a discount, but it is still a considerable expense.45 Most participants travel to Israel in organized tours, and an entire cottage industry has sprung up to cater to these tourists who often travel the country before or after the feast, directly contributing to the Israeli economy.46 In addition to requesting financial donations, attendees were similarly encouraged to gift other valuable materials such as stock, life insurance, and wills to the ICEJ in the “Shomer Society” (Guardian Society).47 As mentioned in the description of the 2016 feast earlier, charities and even a blood donation center were on site for those who wanted to give even more of themselves to the cause. The donations and gifts are seen as tangible expressions of solidarity with Jews and Israel, often couched in millenarian terms, as when Rita from Cameroon stepped on the stage during Israel Solidarity Night and presented seventy sets of towels and blankets to Holocaust survivors living in the ICEJ-run nursing home in Haifa: none of the thousands of jubilant onlookers in the arena needed a reminder that she was alluding to the idea that there would be a period lasting 70 weeks that would lead up to Christ’s second coming.48 These political and material contributions have not gone unnoticed. In return for the staunch support proffered by the ICEJ, the organization has given $50  million for aliyah since 1980. Unsurprisingly, many Israeli politicians and rabbinic leaders warmly embrace the embassy. Already in 1979, when Israel faced growing diplomatic isolation, Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem, welcomed the roughly 1,000 attendees from thirty countries to the first “feast.” The official history of the ICEJ notes proudly that they received “a blessing from [the Ashkenazi Chief] Rabbi [Shlomo] Goren himself,”49 and that President Yitzhaq Navon emphasized that, “we

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appreciate what you are doing.” Since then, most Israeli prime ministers have spoken at the feast, with the exception of Ehud Barak.50 And while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not addressed the pilgrims in person since 2014, he sends a recorded message, and he regularly and happily tapes his Christmas and New Year’s greetings to the Christian world in the grounds of the ICEJ.51 In a pattern characteristic of much of the relationship between conservative Christian and Jewish Zionists, Israeli leaders for the most part have not engaged the millenarian tendencies espoused by the earlier ICEJ leadership.52

Opposition The ICEJ has many detractors who see the institution as “a divisive rather than a reconciling factor in the Middle East, particularly between the Arab and Jew in the ‘holy’ land.”53 Arab churches and liberal denominations in particular reject the proZionist stand of the organization and the persistent demonization of Palestinians and Palestinian resistance to the Occupation. Today, individual rabbis such as Shlomo Riskin of Efrat and his Center for JewishChristian Understanding and Cooperation continue to work with the ICEJ, but the rabbinic establishment as a whole remains wary, and the chief rabbinate periodically reiterates its opposition. For instance, in 2015 the chief rabbis acknowledged the ICEJ’s pro-Zionist stance, but deemed any Jewish cooperation “spiritually damaging” since it was the goal of the organization “to change the religion of Jews from the religion of Israel and to bring them under the wings of Christianity.”54 In the same year, and reacting to an incident of evangelizing directed at Israeli soldiers at the 2014 feast, David Parsons, then the spokesperson for the ICEJ, assured Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Aryeh Stern that sessions of messianic preachers—and indeed all sessions of the feast with the exception of Israeli Guest Night—were closed to the Israeli public, but that messianic Jews had participated in the feast for decades, and would continue to do so.55 Among the ICEJ’s most outspoken critics are Israelis who fear or resent missionary activity among Jews in Israel. They are particularly hostile to messianic Jews living in Israel whom they see as traitors and “ardent evangelists.”56 And in fact, seeing that the Zionism and philosemitism of Pentecostal missionaries were instrumental in the emergence of messianic Judaism in Israel, charismatics and messianic Jews remain close, further blurring distinctions and differences between the groups.57 For example, the King of Kings community in Jerusalem where the current executive director of the ICEJ, Jürgen Bühler, and his family worship, was founded by charismatics but is today messianic.58 At the same time, the prominence of charismatic practice bothered at least some attendees. At the concluding prayer service, I  overheard a group of Germans complain bitterly that they “had come for the Zionism” and disliked the charismatic style of leadership and worship.59 The ICEJ continues to disavow missionizing efforts among Israeli Jews.60 Participants in the yearly Jerusalem March are asked repeatedly to refrain from disseminating religious tracts. And in accordance with the Israeli anti-missionary Law

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of 1977, the embassy does not employ Jews, including Jewish converts to Christianity, although the latter have been invited to speak at closed gatherings.61 To avoid even the appearance of missionizing, the ICEJ never donates to local Israeli organizations or authorities directly, and instead collaborates with local authorities or agencies such as Keren Hayesod-United Israel Appeal or the Jewish Agency. While evangelization remains crucial for many messianic Jews, charismatic missionizing efforts today target the foreign worker communities in Israel, leading to the baptism of some 600 Chinese workers, as Dennis Balcombe, a missionary to China told us proudly.62

Paradoxical ignorance of Sukkot/Tabernacles and Gog and Magog Following Todorov, who posed that the portrayal of an imagined people and their ideas depended on deflecting the real-life circumstances of this same people, the feast attendees could not but ignore the reality of Jews and Judaism if they wanted to maintain their ideologies.63 Altglas has called this phenomenon “paradoxical ignorance”—an unknowing that reflects a deep ambiguity towards the representation of other people. Seeing the Other, in this case Jews, as exotic and wildly exciting, Altglas suggests, is a way to conquer their culture “from the inside,” through appropriation.64 When Jewishaffinity interpretations inserted Jewish content in their teachings or practices, this ultimately confirmed the truth of their religion. For example, the lectures, sermons, and conversations I observed at the feast were marked by a conspicuous absence of Jewish practice. For mainstream observant Jews, Sukkot is a major week-long holiday that predominantly takes place at home. Contemporary Sukkot practices are based on rabbinic injunctions of biblical descriptions. Especially in Israel but also elsewhere, many Jews build sukkahs— temporary dwellings—on balconies, gardens or front yards that are used for the meals and the extensive socializing that is a hallmark of the holiday, and sometimes for sleeping. Many also purchase a lulav, a bouquet consisting of a palm frond (the lulav) bound with myrtle, willow, and an etrog (citrus fruit). Most families buy at least one lulav and many—men, women, and children—shake it in a ritual manner in the sukkah or during daily prayers. Among the attendees, only those who lived as non-tourists in Israel seem to have observed some of these. Whether charismatics or messianic Jews, they spoke lovingly of their sukkahs; and at least one speaker brought a lulav for the participants to shake.65 In this instance, Jewish practice ceased to be exotic, and could be integrated without risking the integrity of the attendees’ beliefs.66 But the most poignant example of paradoxical ignorance was the delegates’ interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For many supporters of the ICEJ, “blessing Israel” entails rejection of the country’s perceived enemy, the Palestinians, and preference for a hard right-wing political stance regarding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In this, they follow the lead of the ICEJ that has been rumored to have used funds in support of illegal Jewish settlements and to maintain connections to the Jerusalem Temple Foundation.67 To counteract this unflattering image, today’s

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ICEJ leaders regularly emphasize that their support of Israel extends to all Israelis, including Arabs. My fellow travelers to the West Bank only noticed the military presence of Israel’s Occupation when we crossed back into Israel, especially when we hit rush hour and got stuck in traffic at a heavily armed checkpoint. With all the talk of the promised land, the visible reality of the Occupation was different, and more than one participant seemed baffled that Palestinians did not acquiesce to their role in a divinely ordained history. When a teenage participant asked our messianic tour guide to Gush Etzion, an Argentinian immigrant, about the strong military presence, the guide deflected his questions. Instead, she compared the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the struggle between Gog and Magog, the biblical enemies of Israel. By associating Israel’s adversaries with Syria, Russia, and Ethiopia, she mapped the Bible onto the landscape the bus was passing, circumventing present-day politics, and she wrote her audience into this very history while simultaneously excluding the lived conditions of current politics.68 As an Israeli, the tour guide herself was probably familiar with this method of reading the landscape. Field trips, known as tiyyulim, are a popular past time in Israel and are seen by many as an educational and patriotic ritual. Since the early twentieth century, the practice of such field trips, often led by guides, has helped new settlers and Israeli-born Jews to write Jewish geography over Arab Palestine. The (re)writing of the landscape conflates the personal experience of place with a mythical biblical history in the form of literary and historical texts. This process has thus evoked a sense of belonging and of obligation towards Israel—as it has simultaneously excised the non-Jewish past from the landscape and erased the Palestinian presence from the mind of the traveler.69

Conclusion The participants of the yearly Feast of Tabernacles celebrations come from a broad spectrum of Jewish-affinity communities, and there is no uniform approach to Tabernacles/Sukkot. For most attendees, this was a holiday with eschatological overtones, heightened by the location of the feast in Jerusalem where Jesus lived, taught, died, rose from the dead and, following a Christological reading of Zech. 14:4, will return again. To a large degree, the attendees’ approach to politics, to Judaism, and to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was framed by piety and devotion that in turn shaped their emotions. Perhaps not surprising for an event organized by a predominantly charismatic organization, attending the feast could be a spirited affair:  I observed raised hands, dancing, singing, laying on of hands, mass glossolalia, and at least one dramatic impromptu exorcism.70 At the same time, the organizers tried to direct this outflow of emotions. Instructions in the 2016 Program advised attendees to refrain from “blowing shofars or other loud instruments.” They were warned to not prophesy ex tempore. Instead, the booklet admonished, “if you believe you have a word from the Lord, please consult with one of the members of the feast Oversight Committee.”71 This did not always work; at the concluding service, a woman standing behind me was enthusiastically blowing two (!) enormous three-foot long shofars at the same time.

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Still, the overall infusion of piety deepened the attendees’ identification with a Jewishaffinity theology that is still taking shape in its details but entails the appropriation of originally Jewish ideas and texts. Most were conservative both politically and socially (I overheard a number of homophobic and misogynist remarks), and took, like many evangelicals, a right-wing stand on Israel. This devotion at the same time entailed and even necessitated the erasure of mainstream Jews, and the plight of the Palestinians who were also rendered invisible. And so, when Jürgen Bühler called on the “youth” present at the concluding prayer service to pray for the growth of the messianic Jewish community, “that their heart might throb with love for Israel,” this call was answered by impassioned prayers uttered in German, English, Hebrew, and Portuguese, and in glossolalia. “Love for Israel,” however, supposes a vision of the state that excludes non-Zionist Arab Christians and Muslims living across the 1949 Armistice Border known as the Green Line, a mere two kilometers down the road.72

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Anachronism as a Constituent Feature of Mythmaking at the BibleWalk Museum Jennifer Eyl

In this chapter, I will redescribe and analyze the anachronistic uses of time in practices of mythmaking. While anachronisms happen quite frequently in religious discourses, the case study I use is the BibleWalk Museum of Mansfield, Ohio.1 At BibleWalk, a visitor learns that Jesus Christ—a figure who first appears in the literary record in the midfirst century CE—existed centuries earlier and that evidence for his existence can be found in the texts of the Hebrew Bible. This anachronistic presentation of Jesus enables a larger ideological claim regarding the superiority and universality of Christianity insofar as it does not merely supersede Judaism, but is coterminous with, and even prefigures, early Israelite religion. Christ is presented as existing from the beginning of time and he makes special appearances in moments of what contemporary Westerners understand to be chronological human history. The creators of BibleWalk are hardly the only Christians to make such a claim, but this chapter rejects the notion that such an anachronism can be understood simply as the perpetuation of a hermeneutic tradition. Rather, I look at the claim in and of itself to understand how the reordering of figures in history operates. My argument is twofold: (1) anachronism is often no passive accident or oversight, but rather, an active, strategic reordering of chronological events for ideological purposes; and (2)  the practice of ideologically reordering time does not contradict the discursive construction of fixed chronology or the commonsense experience of chronological time, rather, it relies on the unquestioned factualness of chronology. The chapter will unfold in four stages. I provide a brief introduction to BibleWalk and the Diamond Hill Cathedral to which the museum is attached. Following that, I describe the ways that BibleWalk visually represents a reordering of chronology such that Jesus (and Christianity itself) existed in the far reaches of primordial time. I then draw on the theoretical work of Catherine Bell and Caroline Johnson Hodge to explore how the reordering of chronology operates so as to appear naturalized and normalized vis-à-vis mundane, unmarked practices of accounting for chronology and sequence. Finally, I look at how the visual reordering of chronology at the museum is discursively reinforced in a Sunday church sermon at Diamond Hill, next door. It is clear that BibleWalk uses anachronism strategically; what I explore here is how it works, how

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it is rendered invisible, and how is it naturalized. Although I  use BibleWalk as my case study, my observations about how anachronism is crafted as an accurate kind of chronology can be applied to other ideological scenarios. First, I  will clarify my use of three terms that are foundational to my argument:  anachronism, mythmaking, and ideology. By anachronism, I  refer to the practice of placing things, people, or events out of their chronological and/or sequential order.2 Anachronisms occur for various reasons, as when Shakespeare included a clock striking in Act II of Julius Caesar as a theatrical device to remind his audience of the Ides of March, even though the mechanical clock was not invented for over a thousand years after Caesar’s death. Monty Python’s Life of Brian inserts an animated futuristic rocket ship interlude into a scene of first-century Jerusalem as an outrageous and comedic deus ex machina. Ideologically motivated anachronisms in the service of mythmaking, however, are of a different order insofar as they assert truth claims about how the world ought to be seen presently by rearranging the order in which concepts, people, or events developed in history. As Johannes Fabian asserts in his famous study Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, “Anachronism signifies a fact, or statement of fact, that is out of tune with a given time frame; it is a mistake, perhaps an accident. I am trying to show that we are facing, not mistakes, but devices (existential, rhetoric, political).”3 By mythmaking, I do not mean telling lies. Indeed, my use of “mythmaking” does not pertain to lying or truth-telling at all, but to the active practice of generating discourses that reflect and condition values and meaning. As Russell T. McCutcheon points out, myths: (1) are not special (or sacred) but ordinary means of fashioning and authorizing their lived-in and believed-in “worlds,” (2) that myth as an ordinary rhetorical device in social construction and maintenance makes this rather than that social identity possible in the first place and (3) that a people’s use of the label “myth” reflects, expresses, explores, and legitimizes their own self-image.4 The mythmaking at BibleWalk renders possible the specific Christian identities of congregants at Diamond Hill Cathedral, as well as the Christian identities of tourists who visit the museum. Translating the nominal notion of “myth” into the verbal gerund “mythmaking” underscores the active processes by which myths are generated, and therefore, the active processes by which values and meaning are staked out and assigned. Part of mythmaking’s modus operandi is to deny human invention and to assert self-evident truth. To claim that something is self-evident is to remove evidence of the labor of those who frame the discourse of self-evidence.5 Thus, as we will see, when BibleWalk presents a Jesus who moves in and out of chronological history in a way that is simply self-evident and taken for granted, what disappears from this claim is the human (i.e., not divine) intellectual and rhetorical effort that produces such an anachronistic picture. And finally, I borrow Terry Eagleton’s notion of ideology, which is less a definition and more an observation: “To say that a statement is ideological is then to claim that

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it is powered by an ulterior motive bound up with the legitimation of certain interests in a power struggle.”6 Eagleton is correct to note that “ideology” is an overused word at risk of losing its usefulness, even abandoned by Foucault in favor of the notion of “discourse.” Yet, I hold that ideology is a meaningful category in this analysis insofar as we are able to determine “who is saying what to whom for what purposes.”7 As I will demonstrate, the makers of BibleWalk portray time and chronology in specific ways so as to craft a notion of Christianity that is supramundane, supersessionist vis-à-vis Judaism, and all-encompassing vis-à-vis normative practices of accounting for time. Crafting Christianity in this light also brings certain advantages to local congregants in Mansfield, Ohio, as they themselves participate in this cosmic time and can imagine themselves to be members of a divine family that is, incidentally, exempt from time and chronology as it is commonly understood.

BibleWalk Museum Midway between Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, one arrives at the town of Mansfield. With a population of approximately 46,000, Mansfield is midsized and surrounded by the features of American agribusiness: expansive fields, grain silos, and highways bisecting the rolling landscape. Advertising billboards invite passing motorists to visit the BibleWalk Museum, Ohio’s only life-sized wax museum of biblical scenes which is also one of the country’s largest biblically themed wax and fiberglass museums. Next to the museum, and part of the same complex, stands Diamond Hill Cathedral, a cavernous but cozy church founded in 1980 by Pastor Richard Diamond and his wife, Alwilda. Three years after moving their church to this location, they began work on the BibleWalk Museum, which opened to the public in 1987.8 Since Alwilda’s death in 2008, Pastor Diamond has continued the ministry while sharing the pulpit with various other pastors. The museum has expanded significantly in thirty years. Upon entering the museum, visitors pass a large mural of Noah welcoming one and all to his giant ark. The mural depicts all ethnicities of human beings and a range of animals that have existed throughout earth’s history, without regard to natural habitat or geologic period: panda bears, polar bears, koala bears, lions and tigers, elephants, sheep and lambs, zebras, gorillas, giant tortoises, bald eagles, parrots, and penguins all mingle alongside a pterodactyl, an apatosaurus (formerly called the brontosaurus), a stegosaurus, and a triceratops. A tyrannosaurus rex peers from behind a tree. To a biologist, the colorful mural might appear as a large “Where’s Waldo” of chronologically and geographically misplaced zoology. Yet the mural is a useful barometer in understanding how the museum uses time in mythmaking. BibleWalk offers five tours: Miracles of the Old Testament, The Life of Christ, the Museum of Christian Martyrs, Heart of the Reformation, and the recently completed Amazing Grace:  The Journeys of Paul.9 As of autumn 2017, a sixth tour is being designed. Each tour takes the visitor through an immersive journey in which fairly standard Christian ideas, images, and themes are recreated out of life-sized figures in individualized dioramas. In addition to the five tours, every Saturday the museum hosts a Dinner Theater: Dinner with Grace, which dramatizes the stitching together

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of current world headlines with biblical prophecy, to demonstrate the imminence of Jesus’s return to earth. From April through July 2017 the Dinner Theater was “Thy Kingdom Come: The Pearl of Great Price.” The latter half of 2017 offered “Moses and the Red C(hrist)” in which viewers learned what Moses had to say about Jesus and vice versa. Before beginning a tour, visitors can watch a short video that details Pastor Diamond’s relationship with God and the divine calling he and his wife experienced, inspiring them to build the museum. Outside of evangelical circles, BibleWalk is best known for its repurposed wax figures of Hollywood celebrities and British royalty. Journalistic treatment and various internet blogs have focused on this aspect of the museum.10 Because the museum was built without the multimillion-dollar donations characteristic of the Creation Museum or Ark Encounter, BibleWalk uses figures procured from other, now defunct, wax museums. Thus, John Travolta is redressed as King Solomon; there are two likenesses of Prince Philip; Abel, the son of Adam and Eve, bears a striking resemblance to a young Prince Charles; Moses’s mother is quite clearly Elizabeth Taylor in her heyday. This “kitsch” factor, bemusing to some visitors, is downplayed by the museum itself. Indeed, as James Bielo’s chapter (this volume) asserts, some designer-creators at other biblically themed parks attempt to distinguish their product from the folksyhomemade aesthetic of places such as BibleWalk (Figure 6.1). It is, however, this folksy-homemade aesthetic that reflects the deep relationship between the museum and the cathedral next door. Congregants at Diamond Hill Cathedral constructed and painted the museum; they operate as tour guides, run the gift shop, and perform as biblical characters in the weekly dinner theater. While some

Figure 6.1  Jonah emerges from the waters, covered in seaweed. Photo J. Eyl.

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commentators portray the museum as scary, laughable, or both, this chapter takes BibleWalk seriously as a site where Christian self-understanding is locally negotiated, especially with regard to how time is strategically organized in that negotiation. The intimate relationship between the museum and the cathedral next door underscores Eagleton’s observation that ideology is bound up in ulterior motives and power interests of those generating the ideological claims. That is to say, BibleWalk’s visual representations are a direct reflection of the interests and self-understanding of the congregants next door. The ideological implication is not merely that Christianity is the only legitimate religion, as evidenced by the timelessness of Christ and the service of Jewish texts in proving that, but that Diamond Hill congregants themselves participate in something that extends far beyond the reaches of Mansfield, Ohio, to primordial history and to a divinely ordered future. To confirm that this is the case, the figure of Jesus is maneuvered at will through varying places and times in history.

Diamond Hill Cathedral11 In its early years, locals referred to the Diamond Hill congregation as a “hippy church” due to its open-door policy and nondenominational stance. Church services are informal, personal, and even intimate, despite the cavernous interior of the cathedral building. Services begin sometimes with a pastor asking, “Is anyone here celebrating a birthday or anniversary this week?” Hands shoot up and worshippers shout out how old they are, or for how long they have been married, as fellow congregants clap in congratulations. The band plays uplifting Christian music alternating between country-gospel and contemporary Christian rock. Recently, the band favors the Christian gospel-rock hit, “Chain Breaker,” whose refrain is: “If you’ve got pain/He’s a pain taker/ If you feel lost/ He’s a way maker/ If you need freedom or saving/ He’s a prison-shaking savior/ If you’ve got chains/ He’s a chain breaker.”12 The song resonates curiously given the location of the BibleWalk/Diamond Hill complex directly across the road from the medium-security Richland Correctional Facility. The correctional facility itself is next door to the more historic and castle-like Ohio State Reformatory that opened just after the Civil War and closed in 1990. Thus, geographically and metaphorically, the BibleWalk/Diamond Hill complex stands opposite the two prisons, offering a juxtaposition of the incarceration of this world versus timeless liberation through Jesus. Because Diamond Hill Cathedral understands itself as a nondenominational Christian church that is open to everyone without judgment, there is variety in the appearance of the congregants. Some members come to church wearing a suit while others wear jeans and T-shirts. Some arrive in Sunday dresses, others in shorts and sandals. Teenagers with purple dyed hair share the pews with conservatively dressed women in their seventies. Friendliness and enthusiasm linger in the air. The congregation looks like a cross section of Midwestern America:  all ages, with what appears to be a predominant representation of middle- and working-class whites, although not exclusively so. Some churchgoers stand and hold their hands to the sky, singing, swaying, and taking in the music and prayer—a sensory practice as

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common at concerts as it is at evangelical churches. Combined with the lyrics of liberation, salvation, and eternity, this “losing oneself ” is one of losing oneself within the timelessness of a divine eternal plan. This makes sense, given the way that time is visually and aurally reorganized in the museum next door and in the sermons at the church. No doubt, the church celebrants would not perceive, in any way, that time, chronology, and sequence have been reimagined or reordered. The very intimate relationship between BibleWalk and Diamond Hill is evident in church services. The museum is, in many ways, an extension of the church and vice versa. Yet, while the museum enjoys tens of thousands of visitors a year, the church members themselves apparently do not visit the museum enough. This generates a kind of tension: the museum was originally built and continues to be operated by members of the Diamond Hill community, and its members act as tour guides and narrate each life-sized diorama. Thus, numerous members are quite active in the daily operations of the museum. Yet, Diamond Hill leadership would like to see more church members visiting the museum more often. In 2015, for example, in a sort of gallery, the museum placed on display life-sized artistic renderings of various parables. By mid-2017, two years later, the number of members who had come to the exhibit was disappointing. This was addressed in a church service in June 2017, when the director of the museum told the following story: on the day before, a large church group visiting from Akron and Cleveland had come to see the Dinner Theater. Afterwards the large group made its way to the museum and the parables exhibit. While viewing the parables, some of the group began speaking in tongues, crying, and the presence of the holy spirit was confirmed. The holy spirit was pouring out its blessings upon this group of visitors, but that blessing was originally intended for the congregants of Diamond Hill. For two years, she explained, the holy spirit waited to pour out such blessings upon Diamond Hill worshippers, and for two years they neglected to visit the parables exhibit, thereby refusing the blessing. As a result, the holy spirit chose to bless those more deserving. The museum director did not need to scold the church for its recalcitrance when she recounted this story; realizing that the holy spirit had passed them by might be enough to prompt church members to pay more attention to the parables exhibit. Thus, while many Diamond Hill members are committed to the daily operations of the museum next door, church leadership actively directs everyone’s attention to the museum on a regular basis and encourages greater participation.

Jesus in the Old Testament While the five tours offer an abundance of data worthy of scholarly attention, I focus primarily on the Miracles of the Old Testament tour. It is in this tour that we see the clearest examples of how chronology is rendered malleable to suit the mythmaking claims of the museum and Diamond Hill Cathedral. The tour includes twenty-five scenes: nineteen scenes were finished and opened to the public in 1994, and six more scenes were added in 2001. Because of the two waves of construction, one of the first things a visitor learns on this tour is that the various scenes are not in chronological order (e.g., scenes of Moses come before scenes of Abraham). The Miracles of the

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Old Testament tour begins with Genesis 1 and thereafter wends its way through a re-creation of various biblical scenes: Adam and Eve, Moses in the bulrushes, Moses delivering the Ten Commandments, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, Ruth and Naomi, and others. The scenes are arranged in large cubicle-like stalls, side by side along a narrow, darkened U-shaped hallway. Visitors enter through one door, walk their way through the exhibit hall, and exit into the main lobby at the end. Each scene lights up for the visitor, and the relevant prerecorded biblical text is broadcast through an overhead speaker. In two scenes, however, BibleWalk exhibits depart from the text read overhead. The eleventh scene depicts Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from chapter three of Daniel. In the biblical story, the three Israelites are bound and thrown into a blazing furnace for refusing to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian gods during the years of the exile. As punishment, the king intends to kill them through the torture of fire. The fire is so hot that even Nebuchadnezzar’s own guards are killed by the flames. And yet, when Nebuchadnezzar looks into the furnace he sees four figures—the three Israelites and another figure who has the appearance of a god (Dan. 3:25):13 Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up quickly. He said to his counselors, “Was it not three men that we threw bound into the fire?” They answered the king, “True, O king.” He replied, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth has the appearance of a god.” Nebuchadnezzar then approached the door of the furnace of blazing fire and said, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out! Come here!” So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out from the fire. And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the king’s counselors gathered together and saw that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men; the hair of their heads was not singed, their tunics were not harmed, and not even the smell of fire came from them. Nebuchadnezzar said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who trusted in him. They disobeyed the king’s command and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God. (Dan 3:24-28, NRSV)

Because of the protection offered them from this fourth unidentified angel who has the appearance of a divine being, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are untouched by the raging flames. They walk around comfortably in the fire while the very guards who threw them in have burned to death. This fourth figure has been sent by the Israelite God to protect his faithful servants and the result is an unwavering respect for Israelites and their God by the king who has razed and enslaved Judah. At BibleWalk, the diorama scene lights up and the viewer discovers that the fourth figure protecting the three Israelites is Jesus Christ (Figure 6.2). It is important to contextualize this scene, in order to make sense of BibleWalk’s strategic use of chronology. The book of Daniel is widely thought to have been written during the Maccabean Revolt (168–164 BCE), although it is set during the Babylonian exile (586–537 BCE). The author of Daniel, himself, makes strategic use of

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Figure 6.2  Jesus appears behind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Photo J. Eyl.

time insofar as he situates the narrative hundreds of years earlier so as to predict the traumatic political events of his own lifetime.14 As such, the author demonstrates to his contemporary Judeans how they ought to remain faithful in the second century BCE, by constructing “model Israelites” in the era of the exile, centuries earlier. In particular, the author’s portrayal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego might embolden faithful Judeans in their resistance to Antiochus IV, and remain stalwart in their certainty that their God will protect them against the brutality of the Antiochene regime. But according to BibleWalk, Jesus Christ is that fourth unidentified figure in the fire with the three Israelites. Thus, Jesus is physically present in a story set in the sixth century BCE, six hundred years before Jesus is assumed to have existed—never mind questions about the original author’s use of anachronism or literary invention. BibleWalk visually offers Jesus as a salvific figure not only for Christians today, but also for faithful ancient Israelites of the sixth century BCE. This visual scene presents a Jesus who has traveled back in time by centuries, and appears in a fictional text from the second century BCE that is intentionally set in the sixth century BCE. The second example I consider is from the last scene of the tour. The twenty-four prior scenes culminate here, where the Israelite high priest, draped in fine vestments, is depicted alone with the ark of the covenant in the holy of holies of the Jerusalem temple. Behind the priest and the ark is a curtain (Figure  6.3). Suddenly the velvet curtains part and the narrator reads not from the Bible, but proclaims instead that Christ is the “author of God’s new covenant with man.” The words coincide with the parting curtains, to reveal Christ on a cross, in the holy of holies with the high priest and ark (Figure 6.4). Thus, the visitor sees Christ, the high priest, and the ark together

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Figure 6.3  The high priest stands next to the ark of the covenant in the temple’s holy of holies. Photo J. Eyl.

Figure  6.4  The crucified Christ appears behind the high priest in the holy of holies. Photo J. Eyl.

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in the inner sanctum of the temple. For someone aware of the centuries that separate ancient Israelite religion and the beginnings of Christianity, this visual reveal comes as a surprise. But seen in light of Jesus’s presence in the scene with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, this last scene is neither a one-off nor a forced interpretation of the crucifixion scene from Mk 15:37-38 (then copied in Mt. 27:50-51). This is the end point for the Miracles of the Old Testament tour, which begins with Genesis and ends with the clear understanding that Christ is the “point” of Israelite history. Like the example with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, it is important to contextualize this final scene in order to understand how BibleWalk uses time and chronology toward mythmaking. It is traditionally understood that the high priest, alone, was permitted to enter this inner sanctum of the Jerusalem temple only one day a year on Yom Kippur.15 Furthermore, there is no indication that we are looking at a temple scene under Roman rule—all prior scenes have pertained to pre-Roman stories about Israelites. Thus, Jesus is located in a place and time outside the bounds of what would have been chronologically plausible. By placing Jesus in the holy of holies with the high priest, BibleWalk stitches together Israelite religion and the Christianity that will eventually unfold in the Roman Empire. Indeed, the scene erases the distinctions between chronological eras and ethnic-religious identities.16 These scenes are a perfect insertion of Christ into Israelite narratives, as well as an insertion of Christ into the most exclusive space in Israelite religion. The visual representation of Christ in the Israelite temple with the high priest ignores Israelite religion and culture as something to be considered in and of itself, and instead insists on reinterpreting Israelite religion as encompassed within the larger framework of a Christianity that is not beholden to time or chronological developments. Christ is the ark. Christ is the covenant. And Christ was present in texts centuries prior to traditions that actually refer to him. The Jesus figures inserted into the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament fold the Israelite narratives into the next tour, the Life of Christ. This “stitching in” propagates a longstanding Christian argument that Jesus is prefigured in the Hebrew Bible on multiple occasions, and even more importantly, that Israelite/Judean religion and history pave the way for, and culminate in, Christianity (thus we see the Christian terms “Old” and “New” Testament, and the notion that Christians are the “new Israel”). Indeed, similar to the Miracles of the Old Testament tour, The Life of Christ tour begins with a diorama illustrating Genesis 1. After reading part of Genesis 1, however, the narrator states that sixty-two prophecies from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament predict Jesus as the messiah.17

Strategic uses of time and chronology My observations about the stitching of Christ back into early Israelite religion are not novel. Even the apostle Paul claims that Christ’s eventuality is discernable in his holy books. This runs through the gospel writers, Augustine of Hippo, Isidore of Seville, Martin Luther, and up to today. One way to view BibleWalk’s anachronistic scenes, then, is to assimilate them with a Christian tradition of making prophetic or teleological claims of supersessionism (which has long been part of Christian

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thought).18 I  argue, however, that to understand the work accomplished by such anachronisms, it is necessary to look at ideological constructions of time as a dynamic strategy. By taking this approach, we can see that BibleWalk’s chronology is not simply an example of the passive reception of a hermeneutic tradition, in which an ahistorical, self-evident Christianity supplants or supersedes “Judaism,” but rather, it is an active practice in which ideology is masked as ahistorical, self-evident truth. Here, I take a cue from the work of Catherine Bell on ritual. Bell rejects the notion of ritual as simply the “dead weight of tradition”—a static something passively received and thus thoughtlessly repeated.19 Instead, Bell emphasizes the notion of ritualization as an active reinscription of practices that construct meaning every time. Ritualization is a deliberate way of acting,20 even when a given ritual is perceived to be repeated again and again. Ritualization, she writes, is “a strategic reproduction of the past in such a way as to maximize its domination of the present, usually by particular authorities defined as the sole guardians of the past and the experts on ritual.”21 Bell’s approach to ritual/ritualization, informed by practice theory, can be applied to the tinkering with time that we see in BibleWalk’s visual mythmaking. Thus, standing on the shoulders of tradition—as an explanation—hides the active ideological work made by the museum, as well as the tool for doing this work, namely, time. To be clear, I am not interested in time reckoning—that is, the increments by which time is measured or tracked (i.e., seasons, eras, seconds, minutes, or any other kind of interval, calendar, or cycle). Time reckoning and the importance of various time intervals is socially constructed and contingent. The rise and spread of capitalist means of production in the United States, for example, has resulted in time clocks at the job site, the concept of the weekend, the 40-hour work week, and 15-minute segments of time (called “breaks”) during which one is not expected to work. The rapid rise of email, internet culture, and social media has eroded much of those productionline time constraints to such a degree that many people are now endlessly available to their employers and the tracking of time vis-à-vis productivity is quickly changing. Questions about changes in time reckoning are different from questions of chronology and sequence. Rather than examine how ancient or modern people measure or carve up time into increments, I am interested in the contrast between the common experience of chronological order, and the willful practice of placing certain events or figures in a different chronological order from a well-established point in history. I  will return to the caveat a BibleWalk guide offered me upon one visit in 2013:  “the scenes are not in chronological order.” The guide was referring to the two waves of construction which resulted in Moses scenes appearing before Abraham scenes, and Noah’s Ark appearing after David and Goliath. But what this also means is that, like everyone around them, the BibleWalk builders and guides adhere to a notion of chronological time and sequence as they are commonly constructed. How, then, can time be so flexible? How can one simultaneously live in a world of passing days and years, with the cognitive ability to recount what happened yesterday morning and last night—along with features of the world that register (and construct) the passing of time, while simultaneously insisting that Jesus saved Shadrach, Meshach,

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and Abednego from a Babylonian furnace, or that Jesus appeared on the cross in the Jerusalem temple with the high priest? In terms of chronology, how does one argue that the triceratops ever coexisted with the polar bear? How do we make sense of these two competing versions of time—chronology and anachronology? I submit that we are not looking at two competing approaches to time at all; rather, one authorizes, or at least renders possible, the other. The discursive construction of fixed chronology supplies a framework for the plausibility of the anachronistic, provided it is not identified as such. Anachronism operates under the guise of chronology. The anachronistic relies on, almost parasitically, the unquestioned reliability of the commonsense experience of chronology. To demonstrate by analogy, I  will refer to Caroline Johnson Hodge’s comments on the “fixedness” vs. “malleability” of ethnicity.22 Using the work of anthropologist Gerd Baumann, Hodge is interested in the tension between the way we discursively construct ethnicity as a stable or “fixed” category— versus the things we do in practice with ethnicity (i.e., we render ethnic boundaries malleable and porous when expedient). The assumed fixedness of ethnicity, in fact, renders possible a tinkering of boundaries so as to rewrite boundaries for ideological purposes. For example, the ancient category of Ioudaios/Judean was imagined to be fixed, and yet the apostle Paul argued that his gentile followers could be brought into that ethnic lineage through receiving Christ’s pneuma (typically translated as “spirit”) in the ritual of baptism. The fixed or “natural” category of “Judean” was rendered porous and malleable by Paul, and Paul could convince others of this by claiming that “malleability” was not happening. Instead, in his letter to the Romans he claimed that gentiles were once members of this family but were later abandoned by God, and that he was sent to bring them back into the fold.23 Relying on the notion of fixed ethnic boundaries, Paul practiced porosity and malleability to suit his needs. Practicing malleable ethnic boundaries has no effect on the discursive claims to fixedness; on the contrary, the malleability is folded into that discourse and appears to disappear. Johnson Hodge writes, “The paradoxical nature of these concepts— ‘natural’ yet ‘malleable’ makes them particularly efficacious in the discursive practice of mythmaking.”24 The same holds true for the “natural” construction of chronological time that is rendered malleable and fluid in specific circumstances for specific goals. To push this even further, I  would argue that the redrawn, porous boundaries of ethnicity are legitimate because ethnicity is thought to be fixed. The redrawing goes unnoticed because an innovative myth is devised to explain that a redrawing has not even happened. Such is the case with ideological anachronism:  the redrawn, reallocated events pass by unnoticed as such precisely because they are innovatively and strategically situated within fixed chronology. Furthermore, the unquestioned, commonsense chronological construction of time on a day-to-day basis provides an authoritative vehicle for malleable time. This sense of chronology and sequence is more than just discursively constructed, insofar as it derives from being embodied on earth and noting the passing of the sun, the days, and seasons; from knowing that one wakes up in the morning before one showers in the morning. If members of Group A agree that time passes in such-and-such a way, and one can surreptitiously tinker with chronology, the anachronistic “time-claims” can harness the unquestioned, unexamined, authoritative position and legitimacy of

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the chronological. The two approaches to time are not at odds with one another, but rather, the practice of anachronism dons the clothing of chronology. Thus, the tour guide at BibleWalk can warn the viewer that the scenes are not in “chronological order,” (meaning that scenes of Moses should not really come before scenes of Abraham), thereby acknowledging his own notion of fixed chronology, but the presence of Jesus in Daniel and Jesus in the holy of holies in Solomon’s temple seem to require no explanation. In these latter cases, anachronism hijacks the widely accepted legitimacy of chronology. Embedded in this is a misrecognition that the terms of chronology are being adjusted in the service of mythmaking. Anachronistic time is naturalized and rendered invisible, couched within chronology. Thus, it appears normal and selfevident that Jesus be located centuries prior the first historical references to him. In any other arena, such anachronism would strike the reader/listener as preposterous. As a foil I will refer to the Facebook post of an academic colleague who bemoaned the type of historically inaccurate exam answers he sometimes reads from students, such as: “When George Washington freed the slaves during World War II with the Declaration of Independence, he angered King George.” Equally odd would be the assertion that the Greek philosopher Socrates was more a fan of Madonna’s music than he was of Mozart’s. Such statements are so wildly incorrect they ring shrill to the ears of a historian; they strike the listener as false and inaccurate because they are not ideological, they are not defended by truth claims or references to gods, and they have never been “naturalized” through a cultural practice of reordering time. They are simply examples of students who will likely fail a history exam or of people who seek to spin our heads for entertainment. Comparing BibleWalk’s anachronisms and the anachronism of the misguided history student underscores both the oddity of reconfiguring time and the degree to which an ideological reconfiguration proves convincing and often goes unnoticed. This brings us again to the tour guide’s initial comments:  “These scenes are not in chronological order.” The BibleWalk scenes demonstrate that Christ’s presence during the Babylonian exile or Christ’s presence in the temple’s inner sanctum is unquestionably folded into that sense of chronology (assuming we are talking about a first-century historical figure at all). That we are blind to how peculiar it is to imagine Christ in the book of Daniel or Christ in the holy of holies is a testament to how deft and thorough are the strategies of reordering chronology in practices of mythmaking.

Kingdom culture and kingdom time The visual reorganizing of chronology evidenced in the tours is discursively reinforced next door at Diamond Hill Cathedral. To illustrate, I will consider a sermon delivered by fellow Pastor Langston in late June 2017.25 Pastor Langston distinguishes between what he calls “church culture” and “kingdom culture.” Church culture is the weekly routine of going to church, including events common among American Christians such as bake sales, spaghetti nights, and yearly revivals. Church culture is the way one interacts with the church and its members in generic, mundane life. Kingdom culture, however, transcends church culture insofar as it is cosmic, eternal, and the culture

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of the domain of heaven. Church culture, at most, categorizes people as members or nonmembers, whereas kingdom culture understands people as sons and daughters of heaven. Whether church member or not, one’s actions, thoughts, and choices are supposed to be infused with and guided by kingdom culture. Pastor Langston is clear to assert, however, that “kingdom culture” does not refer to a new religion or a new practice; it is the same religion and same message handed down by the God of Abraham and Moses, brought to light by Jesus. In order to acquire kingdom culture, one must develop kingdom understanding. He declares in his sermon, “If you are not part of the family, part of the kingdom of God, you’re on the outside.” Children of the kingdom, he makes it clear, are part of something infinitely larger than themselves. As such, children of the kingdom are privy to the larger scope of time and its unfolding. This bigger plan and larger scope has implications that are practical:  members of the church are called to expand the number of people who attend and give money at the same time they are called to reject material wealth (something, Pastor Langston points out, Wall Street investment bankers fail to do). He suggests, “Culture of the kingdom is different from all other racial, political, religious, and social cultures. In order to migrate into the culture of the kingdom we must be willing to die to opposing cultures and be born by the Spirit. The culture of the kingdom can basically be understood as the original culture of mankind before the Fall.” And while this “larger scope” bears the practical responsibilities of evangelizing to neighbors which results in increased attendance and revenue for the church, the larger scope is simultaneously a reorganizing and reimagining of time. Kingdom culture is a divine ur-culture that has a different relationship to time: Jesus is not a figure who appears in the first century, as historians would understand it; Jesus is the main event even in the Old Testament. The time of kingdom culture is something we can only speculate about because it is too mysterious and too grand for human comprehension. Nevertheless, it is pinned to our commonsense understanding of chronology and sequence insofar as what we may call “kingdom time” is a discursive construction that liberates one to place events or people anywhere in history. It does not replace or compete with chronology, but erases evidence for the malleability of time it insists upon. To be clear, I am not arguing that Pastor Langston, Pastor Diamond, or members of Diamond Hill are focused on time or chronology. Indeed, they pay little if any explicit attention to the topic of time. Instead, I argue that in the discursive crafting of identities for members of Diamond Hill and visitors to BibleWalk, time is an effective tool used invisibly. By suggesting that congregants are part of something much larger, eternal, and cosmic, time/timelessness becomes a vehicle through which to convey that enormity. Chronology, as we understand and experience it, is mundane, whereas kingdom culture, and therefore kingdom time, are supramundane. The enormity of the cosmic kingdom runs on a chronology that nonbelievers cannot detect. Thus, the museum’s description of their Fall 2017 Dinner Theater, Moses and the Red C(hrist): “Many historians record Moses as the lead figure in the Old Testament and Jesus as the lead figure in the New Testament. Moses and The RED C emphasizes one true unchanging fact, Jesus is the main figure in both the Old and New Testaments.”26 Surreptitiously inserting Christ back into a time period and anthology of texts written

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centuries earlier, BibleWalk members extend their own religiosity and local identities outward, backward, and into the cosmos. The strategy is thoroughgoing. As Eagleton observes, “In the case of a ‘successful’ ideology, it is not as though one body of ideas is perceived to be more powerful, legitimate, or persuasive than another, but that the very grounds for choosing rationally between them have been deftly removed, so that it becomes impossible to think or desire outside the terms of the system itself.”27 At BibleWalk and Diamond Hill, it might be easy for a visitor or congregant to forget that cosmic history (or ancient New Eastern history, for that matter) might be otherwise than it is presented in sermons and in the museum displays. This is the success of ideological anachronism. This is also the success of mythmaking.

Conclusion If, as Eagleton suggests, “the ideological” is powered by an ulterior motive bound up with the legitimation of certain interests in a power struggle,28 then what ideology informs the manipulation of time at BibleWalk? What is being legitimated? And if anachronizing is an active, strategic practice—the goal of which includes authorizing specific constructions of the present, what present tense is under construction? BibleWalk is undoubtedly supersessionist—Miracles of the Old Testament Tour make this clear, as does the Moses and the Red C(hrist) Dinner Theater. Furthermore, before exiting the museum, visitors can peruse the gift shop, which includes a variety of Christian objects like coffee mugs, prayer books, framed prints, and keychains but also an assortment of Judaica—decorative ceramic tiles with Hebrew inscriptions, ornate menorahs, and mezzuzot for doorframes. But BibleWalk is more than supersessionist, and to see this we must look at the museum as a whole, its presence on the internet, and its relationship to the Diamond Hill Cathedral next door. Each of the five tours leads to the next, even if a visitor chooses to skip one. BibleWalk uses an immersive visual format and superabundance of “information” that one finds at a natural history museum, an archaeological museum, or the like. The visitor’s senses are stimulated with sight and sound, and the mind is bombarded with off-camber historical claims. The visual, tactile, and audio message encompassing the viewer is that Christianity was a fundamental structuring principle of the universe prior to the religion’s existence in the historical record. BibleWalk trades on what Russell T. McCutcheon (and Geertz before him), have called “the politics of nostalgia,” which “denotes an ideological position in which things purportedly archaic are unilaterally prevalued as essential and beneficial, becoming the norm against which other social arrangements and forms of human behavior are judged and found wanting.”29 He continues, “. . . to know is to remember the forms of the past, and to remember is to re-experience an authoritative past in the present. What is at stake in this debate over the politics of nostalgia is the unquestioned value and, more specifically, authority of some conceptions of the past to shape and judge the present.”30 BibleWalk’s “knowledge” of the past—presented with carefully crafted anachronisms that are situated side by side in the gift shop with framed historical photographs of Israel’s archaeological sites and Hebrew inscriptions—authorizes the

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supremacy of Christianity. This supremacy is also asserted in Diamond Hill services. Pastor Carrier, in a sermon from May 2017, declares: “Listen. There’s only one God. And his name ain’t Allah. It’s not Buddha. It’s the Lord God Jehovah. And his son is Jesus Christ”31 (to which many congregants clapped and shouted in agreement). Furthermore, it authorizes the sometimes-apocalyptic message of their Saturday dinner theaters. A description of the Autumn 2014 dinner theater titled “Christmas Revelation 2020:  Do You Hear What I  Hear?” read:  “Please do not be confused by the title; this timely portrayal is ‘the portrayal for all seasons and for only one reason, JESUS IS COMING SOON!’ What will life be like for the Christian before the return of our Lord Jesus Christ? We constantly hear of Christian Persecution in other countries, but could it actually come to America? Could it already be here?” Extending beyond the physical museum itself and the dinner theater performances, BibleWalk operates an informative website, which connects the history of Diamond Hill Cathedral to even the suffering of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Second World War.32 This, of course, extends naturally from the suffering of fifteenth and sixteenth century Reformists, the suffering of early Christian martyrs, the suffering of Christ, and the suffering of wrongly persecuted Israelites in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace—all recreated in the physical museum. Behind the scenes, then, is a timeless ahistorical Christ who irrupts into the world at various historical points, and whose adherents (including members of the Diamond Hill Cathedral) are consistently harmed or killed over time. This narrative is presented as not subject to change until the Second Coming. One perceives the long reach of history at BibleWalk, teleologically flowing from Genesis to ancient Israel to Jesus, to Diamond Hill. And if Wittgenstein was correct in observing that time is “exempt from doubt” and that time constitutes the invisible “scaffolding of our thoughts,”33 the scaffolding at Diamond Hill/BibleWalk thinking is such that “Jesus” the figure first referenced in the first century, was in fact present all along. This claim amounts to an ability to comprehend history in a manner that surpasses all others who are outside the kingdom. And such an ability should come as no surprise; as Pastor Diamond reminded his congregation in a June 2017 sermon: “If you are Christian, you are capable of things you did not know you could do.”

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Embodied Mythic Formation at the Holy Land Experience Erin Roberts

The introduction to this volume outlined an approach to Christian tourist attractions that treats them as active sites of mythmaking and identity formation. It defined myth as narrative about the past that functions to envision and authorize social landscapes that organize people according to their positions on present-day social issues, and claimed that there was a certain value in being able to see how people leverage stories about the past in ways that both serve and conceal their interests. The present chapter further develops this line of thought by considering how myth exploits the physicality of materialized pasts to render ancient characters and events intelligible, attractive, and useful for thinking about present-day concerns.1 Using examples from the Holy Land Experience (HLE) in Orlando, Florida, I argue that myth closes the gap between past and present by eliciting a process of inquiry that I call embodied mythic formation. As I explain in the first section, embodied mythic formation resembles other forms of practice-based inquiry in that it involves reflection upon self, others, and the world. In a manner unlike other forms of inquiry, though, it is engendered through interaction with a specific type of materialized discourse: selfauthorizing narratives about the past that construct groupings of people and map them onto a hierarchical socio-cosmic landscape in a way that accounts for some feature of the contemporary world. In the second section, I  describe the overarching myth that emerges when multiple discourses at the HLE are viewed together. I  conclude by noting the kinds of inquiry prompted by the mythic discourse and suggest that the efficacy of this prompting depends upon visitors’ ability not only to recognize how the constructed past could impinge upon present-day life, but also to misrecognize the material interests at stake.

An embodiment approach HLE opened its majestic gates in 2001 under the leadership of Marvin J.  Rosenthal and his Jewish outreach organization, Zion’s Hope, Inc.2 Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Rosenthal was ordained as a Baptist minister at the conservative Dallas

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Theological Seminary in 1965, and founded Zion’s Hope in 1989 as a way to “fervently, yet graciously share with the Jewish people the Gospel of Jesus, the Messiah.”3 The aims of Zion’s Hope were materialized at HLE, which Rosenthal envisioned as a place to teach Christians about Jewish history and ritual, promote pre-wrath eschatology, and win Jewish converts for the Lord.4 HLE was designed to immerse visitors into a semblance of Herod’s Jerusalem sometime during the first century CE.5 Inside the walled exterior could be found stations of the Via Dolorosa, Christ’s tomb, the Qumran caves, and a six-story replica of Herod’s temple.6 There was an Arabian-themed Oasis Palms Café and an Old Scroll Shop that had “gifts, keepsakes, and souvenirs from Israel,” such as menorahs and shofars, available for purchase “in a setting expertly conveying the distinctive shapes, forms, colors and textures of ancient Jerusalem.”7 Performers roved the grounds in character as peasants or priests, and an open-air market was populated with craftsmen and animated with the sounds of camels, sheep, and goats. There were live performances and films, as well as a sound-and-light show about ancient Israel’s system of animal sacrifice.8 The following year, another exhibit was completed:  The Scriptorium:  Center for Biblical Antiquities. The exhibit, built to resemble a Byzantine monastery, was created to house the collection of biblical antiquities amassed by Robert Van Kampen, the “evangelical mutual fund tycoon.”9 In 2015, Jana Mathews placed the collection’s holdings at 25,000 items and there is good reason to think that it already may contain any number of more recent acquisitions.10 HLE described the Scriptorium as a “nonsectarian library/research center” that also houses a “walk-through experience” to provide guests with “a dramatic understanding of the history of the Bible, its parallel to the history of civilization, and its impact on the world.”11 As is clear throughout the walk-through tour and within the materials produced by the Grace Sola Foundation, however, the Scriptorium and the Van Kampen Collection are far more than that: they evidence the “authenticity, accuracy, and authority of the Word of God.”12 Rosenthal still serves as executive director of Zion’s Hope but HLE has been under the leadership of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) since 2007, when Paul and Jan Crouch purchased HLE for an estimated $37 million as a production venue for their televangelist ministry. They renovated it to align with TBN’s curated public image and in 2011, work was completed on HLE’s Church of All Nations, the $20 million, 2,000-seat performance venue used for television production, worship, and regular performances of Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Painted in white and gold, the coliseum-styled venue can be seen from the highway, and its lavish interior includes mirrored bathrooms, lush carpeting, and elaborate chandeliers. Under the control of TBN, HLE became a timeless Jerusalem that glowed with a prosperitygospel aesthetic. Although Paul Crouch died in November 2013, Jan was still working tirelessly at the time of my visits during April and October of 2014.13 The assemblage of landscapes, architecture, performances, and exhibits at HLE may be familiar to those who know the Christian Bible, but to say that HLE is a biblically based venue might be a bridge too far for some. The jewel-encrusted stage in the Church of All Nations, the Chick-fil-A in Esther’s Banquet Hall, the unavoidable sounds of the Gaither Vocal Band, and the body and blood of Christ distributed in

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foil-sealed mini-cups by a headset-wearing Jesus inside a replica of a Qumran Cave, diverge in significant fashion from biblical accounts. Nevertheless, HLE was designed as a place where visitors could acquire knowledge of the Bible:  “designers carefully selected personalities, places and events that best represent key biblical ideas identified by the client. The larger story was thus broken down into separate museum-quality experiences, each able to stand alone. Collectively, however, they provide guests with a deeper, more thorough understanding of the Bible as a whole.”14 It seems that the obvious differences between HLE and first-century Jerusalem as depicted in the Bible do not matter; that the stories presented throughout HLE originated within the pages of a divinely given book whose “accuracy, authority, and authenticity” has remained intact, is sufficient.15 While it may seem obvious that an analysis of a 15 acre “living, biblical museum” on with the magnitude of HLE would benefit from a methodology that attends to its physicality, it may not be clear what type of theoretical framework best suits a site that makes claims about the truth of its materialized pasts: It’s Historical. The history of the Bible comes alive through presentations by our Biblical Archaeologists as they describe the significance of the Garden Tomb, the Qumran Caves, the Great Temple, the layout of the city of Jerusalem, and much more! And The Scriptorium: Center for Biblical Antiquities will take you on an incredible journey through the pages of history to learn how we can have the Bible today in our own language.16

HLE promotes its enacted physicality as a means through which visitors can better understand history. As some point out, though, these kinds of immersive, multisensory attractions function less to reconstruct history and more to conjure a sense of historical plausibility as a tactic to build credibility and authority.17 One way to deal with the park’s claims of historicity is to treat the site as the material expression of religious experience or belief, for in classifying the divergences from biblical narrative as expressions of belief, one can scarcely accuse HLE of textual or historical inaccuracy. Timothy Beal, for example, classifies HLE and a number of other Christian tourist attractions as places that “are usually founded on, inspired by, and organized around some revelation or similar original religious experience—a miracle, a vision, or the giving of a new law,” and which “are created to host the religious experiences of those who enter, individually and collectively.”18 Approaching tourist attractions as “outward, public expressions of a very inward, private religious life” or as “creative public response[s]‌to a profoundly life-changing personal experience,” allows for analysis of whatever ideologies or political positions are being promoted at the sites.19 While Beal does not like HLE’s supersessionist ideology, he does recognize that thinking about HLE and other sites of its type as material expressions of theological or religious belief can be a helpful way to explore its social entanglements.20 Despite this advantage, the religion-as-expression model has been critiqued due to its grounding in a Cartesian dualism that views mind as separate from the world. Jill Stevenson, for example, uses an embodiment approach that views human bodies as fully integrated and implicated not only with cognition and affect, but also with the

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world around them. The interpretive result is that the physicality of HLE is not viewed as an expression of belief but as a performative space for engaging human cognition via an identifiable set of sensory, affective, and kinesthetic strategies. Taken together, the strategies “achieve particular aesthetic, ideological, and experiential effects” that do “not merely represent theological concepts and depict biblical stories; rather, [they] confront users with vivid, sensual, and rhythmic experiences designed to foster embodied beliefs that respond to specific devotional needs and priorities.”21 Stevenson’s analysis shows how the performers use “dramaturgical strategies,” such as sensory stimulation, anachronism, and conceptual blending, “to cultivate an ‘energetic’ performer-audience dynamic that will foster ‘religiously real’ re-experiences for spectators.”22 My use of embodiment moves in a different direction. Rather than focusing upon HLE as a space that can produce certain kinds of experiences through the interaction between performers and audiences, I  conceptualize it as a space that can prompt certain kinds of inquiry. From this perspective, HLE comprises materialized mythic discourses that visitors can use, in whole or in part, as cognitive prosthetics for the formation of certain kinds of self-understanding. A visit to HLE may thus be viewed as a religious practice whereby practitioners use their bodies to interact with ritual implements that function as tools for inquiry rather than as expressions of belief. The visitor is no longer a Cartesian subject who walks around projecting or absorbing the information that travels between his mind and the world outside it. He is, instead, an active agent who explores and reconfigures himself and the world of which he is a part. Let me explain. By formulating the relation between HLE and the visitor in the manner just mentioned, I am heeding the advice that Kevin Schilbrack gave in his manifesto on philosophy and religion.23 In the manifesto, he takes traditional philosophers of religion to task for focusing exclusively upon matters of doctrine, faith, or belief. Religion is more than that, Schilbrack claims, and he argues his point by showing that human activity, on the whole, is more than that. To understand what he means, we must begin with the premise that “the body is not simply a passive object on which cultures write their variable meanings, but it is also that source from which one engages the world” and, further, that “the body is the very condition of subjectivity and the prereflective ground of self and culture.”24 He explains the importance of accepting this premise by way of the theory of conceptual metaphor as developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.25 Lakoff and Johnson posit that the human ability to manage abstract concepts is based upon the sensorimotor structuring that develops a through childhood exploration of the world: rolling a ball and watching where it stops contributes to a spatial logic of linearity, which lays the groundwork (i.e., produces the image schema) for thinking about purposes and goals as destinations toward or away from which one might move; putting toys in baskets helps develop a spatial logic of containment, which, in turn, enables them to think about objects or people as being either “in” or “out” of certain genres or categories. As time passes, interactions with objects and people become more sophisticated. In addition to creating the mental structures within which abstract thinking may take place, these interactions elicit certain kinds of questions and prompt certain

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kinds of answers. In other words, interaction with objects and people is itself a type of cognizing when we use them as if they were extensions of our mind. Introduced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, the theory of extended mind explains how it is that people can “exploit external structures in their environment” to “create aids that reduce the computational load on their brains and help them remember, process information, and solve cognitive problems.”26 When objects or people are used to accomplish mental tasks that otherwise could not be accomplished, they can be regarded as extracranial extensions of mind, prosthetic parts of the cognitive faculty. Bookmarks and Post-it notes help cue memory. Pencil and paper accept the spilling over of our thoughts and thus enable information processing. Scrabble tiles can be rearranged until the letters come together in a way that makes us think of a particular word.27 But there is more. Objects can also raise questions when they are manipulated in the right way. Consider the example of two people cutting down a tree with a long saw.28 The handling of the objects during the activity will prompt inquiries about the nature of the self, of others, and of the world: Am I in decent shape? Apparently not! Is my partner impatient? Why yes he is. What’s going on with this saw, it keeps sticking in the tree. Needs to be sharpened. When examined from an embodiment perspective, the practice of cutting down the tree prompts questions related to the materials (tree and saw) the subjects (the two people), and the overall context and aims of the activity (weather conditions, for example, and the reasons for cutting the tree). Schilbrack’s application of the embodiment perspective to “religious” practices provides a framework that is wellsuited for theorizing and explaining how a visit to HLE prompts a specific kind of practice-based inquiry. The immersive, multisensory mythic discourse at HLE and other similar attractions prompts inquiry into the self, others, and the world in a way that encourages visitors to take certain positions on an array of present day social issues by associating those positions with divine will, the forces of good, and the promise of salvation that consists in a blissful eternal existence in heaven. As I argue, this type of inquiry may aptly be classified as what I call embodied mythic formation, which may be defined as practice-based inquiry engendered through interaction with materialized, self-authorizing narratives about the past that construct a hierarchical socio-cosmic landscape and prompt people to think about their own identities in terms of that landscape. The process is embodied due to the interaction of the visitor with materialized discourse; it is mythic because the discourse leverages the past to authorize certain arguments about the present day social landscape; and because visitors are prompted to think about their own position within the bounds of the cosmic hierarchy, it entails a constrained type of identity formation. The next section examines the content of the materialized narratives and the constructed socio-cosmic landscape at HLE.

Materialized mythic discourse at HLE The materialized mythic discourses at HLE construct a hierarchical socio-cosmic landscape that spans from creation to eternity and includes angels, demons, gods,

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forces of good and evil, heaven, hell, and, of course, humans. Amid this landscape is the god of Judea (God), who not only is credited with creating the universe, but also has positioned himself as the authoritative judge of humanity. For quite some time now, God has been moving toward a long-term goal: to rid the universe of all forces and entities that do not obey him, so that he may then abide for eternity only with those who do precisely what he asks of them. Until that time, God has experimented with different ways to enforce obedience, with his most impactful innovation being written communiqués that provided precise instructions about getting rid of sin. The first of these missives detailed a system of animal sacrifice to be carried out with the  knowledge that the system would eventually need to stop and that the signal for the stoppage would be the birth of Jesus Christ. At his arrival, people who want to be good must dispense with the prior instructions about animal sacrifice and, instead, be baptized and profess the belief that Jesus’s death was the final sacrifice that would erase human sin once and for all. The news of this new rule-set was announced to humanity through various means but ultimately took the shape of a second set of writings that humans were told to preserve, translate, and disseminate to every human on earth. The overarching narrative just described is evident throughout HLE but here I focus on the three exhibits that best illustrate how HLE prompts embodied mythic formation. Taken together, the Wilderness Tabernacle performance, the Passion of the Christ Live Drama, and the Scriptorium Tour tell a story that brings the entire depth of the past to bear upon claims about the superiority of the Christian over the Jew, of the Protestant over the Catholic, and the colonization of the area now known as the United States as a manifestation of God’s will. The moments and characters that populate the story represent neither a series of haphazard events nor an infinite chain of cause and effect. Far from it, for as I highlight in the discussion that follows, the narrative logic of the constructed past is driven by conflict between two kinds of people: those who cooperate with God and obediently help him toward his goal, and those who actively try to disrupt his progress.

The Wilderness Tabernacle The Wilderness Tabernacle performance enacts what human obedience looked like while God’s first set of instructions was still in effect. In a large, dimly lit, airconditioned room, visitors face a large rectangular tent, a water basin, and an altar, all lit with a large orange moon hanging over the tableaux. The presentation begins as a man dressed as an ancient Judean priest offers a hearty “Shalom!” and explains that we are “about to go on an ancient journey back in time with God’s chosen servant, the brother of Moses.” He picks up a shofar and plays a steady tonal announcement. A prerecorded male voice then sings the candle-lighting blessing for Yom Kippur and then the Shehehiyanu (another candle-lighting blessing). The priest then goes fully into character as Aaron, the brother of Moses, and he moves silently about the staged area conducting Yom Kippur ministrations while the narration plays. The narration consisted of a single male voice representing the voice of Aaron that was interrupted at key points throughout the performance by a chanting chorus of multiple voices. All

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the while, two screens located on the walls at both ends of the bleacher seating area displayed diagrams, scriptural quotations, and other information. Visitors learn that God delivered his first set of instructions via Moses: “I remember how Moses ascended Mount Sinai to meet with the Lord and receive the 10 commandments along with the 603 other laws of our sacred covenant. And when he had made an end of speaking with the Lord on Mount Sinai he received two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.” To emphasize God’s direct role, the chorus echoes the last phrase by chanting, “Written with the finger of God.” Moses received “precise instructions for the building of a portable place of worship” that, if built properly, would bring God into their midst. The people were obedient: “every aspect of the tabernacle, down to the tiniest detail, was crafted by gifted artisans exactly according to the instructions God gave to Moses, including the garments of the high priest.” Moses also brought instructions from God for how to remove sin through the ritual sacrifice of animals and the manipulation of their blood. The narrator explains that, “for the sins of the entire nation of Israel, the propitiation is made through the blood of an animal sacrifice,” which is followed by a choral intervention: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood. And I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.” That the performance of the sacrificial preparations cast Aaron as pious and cooperative is clear enough. He describes his service as “a privilege beyond compare” and himself as the people’s “revered and spiritual leader.” He tends carefully to a fire and then wipes down an altar, to which he carries a stuffed lamb; he turns to show each aspect of his garments, slowly washes his hands, and walks over the threshold into the tabernacle. He lights a seven-branched lamp stand, arranges the loaves on the table, burns holy incense (made from “God’s own recipe”), and enters the holy of holies. There, as he moves his arms slowly over the ark of the covenant, we hear a deafening sound of thunderstorms and crashing waves, and we see flashes of light and a cloud of smoke shooting up from the ark and hovering over the holy of holies. After the smoke and noise disintegrate, the priest stands motionless while the narration continues: Though I’m near the end of my years, I dare to hope that I may live long enough to see the glorious day when the children of Israel will leave the wilderness and cross into the promised land. And lately I dream of a great temple where the ark of the covenant will reside ever after, and where our services will continue throughout our generations. Yet I wonder, is there more? Does God in his infinite wisdom have a greater plan for his chosen people? Could it be that our blessed sacrificial system is merely a rehearsal, a shadow of the wonderful things to come? Might the prophets of Israel be foretelling of a day when God will provide his perfect lamb as a final sacrifice for the sin of the world? Perhaps not in my own lifetime, but somehow I believe it will come to pass.

Aaron sees the sacrificial system as a gift from God that will be continued throughout the generations. At the same time, though, he makes an encoded claim: the entirety of

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God’s relations with humanity is headed toward a time when that history is rendered obsolete. While the narration does not explicitly specify the future plan that Aaron believed would come to pass, visitors familiar with the New Testament text of Hebrews would recognize the argumentation about Jewish sacrifice being inadequate and its necessary replacement by Jesus’s “final sacrifice.” For visitors not familiar with the text, though, the two video screens at the sides of the auditorium had been pushing toward a particular interpretation throughout the entire performance. As visitors listened to the narration about God giving the Israelites a system of animal sacrifice to atone for their sins and while the priest carried the stuffed lamb to the altar, the text on the screens read, “Jesus is the Lamb,” “Jesus is the Sacrifice”; as the narrator described the necessity of the priests’ purity before entering the temple and while the priest washed his hands, the text on the screens read, “Jesus is the Water that Cleanses Us”; as the priest first entered into the tabernacle, the text on the screens read, “Jesus is the Door to Salvation”; as the priest lit the seven-branched lamp stand, the text on the screens read, “Jesus is the Light of the World”; as the priest carefully placed the loaves on the table, the text on the screens read, “Jesus is the Bread of Life”; and during the priest’s musings about a bigger, better, future plan, the text on the screens read, “Jesus the Savior is Born. Jesus is the Final Sacrifice. Because He Loves You.”29 The message that Jesus’s blood was to have replaced the system of animal sacrifice as a means for removing sin was clear. Consequently, the Jewish tradition turns out to be properly owned by Christians and what remains—the detritus—is what contemporary Jews have left. This message is further articulated through the Passion of the Christ Live Drama, which makes clear that the Jews who continued to conduct or honor the ministrations in the Jerusalem temple once Christ had arrived epitomize disobedience of the worst kind.

The Passion of the Christ Live Drama The Passion of the Christ Live Drama is a stark portrayal of the kind of person who refuses to obey God and who in fact tries to thwart his progress. Performed in the Church of All Nations, the Passion tells the story of Jesus’s birth, baptism, temptation, betrayal, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. It concludes with Jesus on stage, having defeated Satan in a final battle, surrounded by angels, donning a purple robe and a crown, and reading from a glittery scroll emblazoned with the title, “Book of Life.” After an introductory narration and a scene depicting a woman at market, we witness the angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary about her pending pregnancy. After the usual protests, including the assertion that she is a virgin, Mary accepts the message and tells Joseph, who professes his support, love, and loyalty. Upon Jesus’s birth, there is an incredible celebration: the crowd cheering, hands upraised in praise, contemporary Christian music playing, angels circling and leaping onstage, elaborately dressed wise men (with equally elaborately dressed camels on wheels) parading down the aisle to congratulate Mary and Joseph, who were, as the narrator says, “the first to look upon the face of God as a baby.” Once the excitement cools down, a Roman soldier along with two Jewish priests— dressed in black robes, leaning on long staffs—watch skeptically as John the Baptist

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and a small entourage makes their way to the stage. The priests are Annas and Caiaphas. The three of them together commence with insults, taunting John about his appearance, diet, and odor. They instruct him to stay outside the city gates and not to come back. In a sneering tone, one priest asks John’s followers whether they want to be loyal to such a man rather than a priest who has led them safely for generations. To the priest’s dismay, John’s followers cry out that they prefer the messiah to the priest. This is a clear indication that the discourse is setting up a dichotomy between the Jews who refuse to accept that their priestly sacrificial system is now defunct and those who choose Jesus instead.30 After Jesus’s baptism by John, Satan makes his entrance: dressed in black clothing with decorative chains, red gloves, white face and black eyes, and speaking through a mixer that makes his voice sound demonic, he and his minions tempt Jesus, taunting and mocking him. At the final stage of the temptation scene, as Jesus screams, “Satan get behind me,” the crowd cheers. Jesus goes offstage, only to emerge again dressed in a white and blue prayer shawl. He calls his disciples and heals a deaf woman and a blind man as the priests—whose black clothing now stands in stark contrast to Jesus’s attire—whisper and laugh in the background, casting menacing glances and still leaning on their staffs. The leering and whispering continues, with the addition of loud laughter, as Jesus then addresses the audience to engage in an extended and chaotic faith healing session that ended with a man walking away from his wheelchair. The priests stop laughing, though, when Lazarus is raised, and instead cry blasphemy. Ominous music plays while Jesus, now in Gethsemane, instructs his disciples to pray and tearfully pleads, “Let this cup pass from me! It is too hard! It is too hard, Father!” All the while, Satan prowls around growling and the minions hover over the sleeping disciples. Judas, infected by Satan, kisses Jesus and the priests call for his arrest. Judas feels remorse as they pull him away and he thus cries out. The priests and Satan laugh as he is dragged offstage with an enormous red noose. When Pilate declares Jesus innocent, the priests are enraged. They cry out that his blood will be on their own heads as well as those of their children (modern-day Jews, presumably). In a chilling scene, the Jewish priests delight in the idea of the crucifixion while Satan murmurs in the background. The soldiers bind Jesus and begin the whipping while Caiaphas shrieks, calling for Jesus’s flesh to be ripped off. The sounds of the whipping change to hammering, and the cross is moved into place. Jesus takes his last breaths and the priests make their way through the crowd carrying a quivering stuffed lamb. They arrive at an altar that looks like a big, red, glowing brain. Just as they start to kill the lamb, a man runs in, screaming that the veil of the temple has been torn. Joseph of Arimathea carries Jesus’s bloody and limp body through the crowd. Taking all this to heart, the Centurion—Maximus Aurelius by name—grieves his actions, praises Jesus, and leads the audience in a salvation prayer. After a cosmic battle between good and evil, staged as a boxing match between Jesus and Satan, Jesus is resurrected to the sound of Dolly Parton singing Don Francisco’s He’s Alive, demands that Satan bow down, be bound, and cast into the bottomless pit. The finale comes when Jesus processes down the center aisle wearing a crown and a purple velvet robe with what must be at least a 100-foot train. The crowd roars with delight as the saved make their way up to greet him.

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Jesus and his followers demonstrate proper cooperation with God’s plan and they stand in clear contrast to those who rebelled. The temple priests and Judas have perverted God’s plan and will disappear entirely. They are collaborators with Satan himself. After Jesus’s baptism, the narrator again addresses the audience, “listen,” he says, “. . . can you hear it? The enemy trying to silence the truth . . . ,” and Satan appears, growling and hissing. The consistency with which Satan’s presence, and his attempts to silence the truth, is paired with the presence of the Jewish priests sends a clear message not only that the Jews killed Jesus but that in doing so, they were willing to embody evil itself. They whisper together as they collaborate with Judas, they laugh together as they beat Jesus to a pulp and leave him for dead, and they cry out in anger together when Jesus performs his miracles of healing. There are those who see and are blessed, and there are those who are blind, and fall away. The narrative forcibly interpellates the viewer as either with Jesus or against him.

The Scriptorium Tour The Scriptorium Tour highlights the virtuous determination of those who helped God by widely distributing his most recent set of written instructions. Even though the early parts of the tour cover times before the first century CE, the entire history is marked as a Christian one. Within a few minutes of hearing about the creation of the world in the first room, visitors move ahead and gaze upon cuneiform tablets from the twentieth century BCE. Despite the narration that emphasizes that we are now 3,000 years before Abraham, an ornate golden cross, perched atop a golden column approximately four times the height of the cross itself, sits quietly in a corner, signaling that this history is part of the Christian heritage. The narrative of the tour is driven by conflict between two groupings of people: those who endeavored to preserve God’s writings and those who sought to hinder their efforts; in doing so, the narrative asserts the superior obedience of Protestant Christians and praises those who took heroic measures by arriving on the rocky shores of Massachusetts as the doers of God’s will. The virtue of key figures is heightened by their courage in the face of physical danger, which is interpreted as active rebellion against God’s will, for as the narration explains early on in the tour, “wherever there is knowledge of the truth to be shared, there will always be those who strive to suppress it.” The monks and scribes of Europe toiled away, in places of relative safety, to preserve the Bible as the flames of war swept through the lands: “dedicated scribes painstakingly copied the biblical texts by hand, one page at a time . . . scribes spent their lifetimes laboring from dawn to dusk, at the grueling task . . . their commitment assured that each copy would be accurate.” John Wycliffe and the Lollards, William Tyndale, Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, and the Pilgrims, heroically saved the Bible from the dangerous clutches of the enemy, the Church of England. This courage is illustrated clearly by the presence, in the Tyndale room, of “the 1537 Matthews Bible, also known as the Martyr’s Bible,” because it “graphically testifies to the sacrifices of those who sought to uphold and protect the word of God, for the stain visible upon its pages is human blood.” John Bunyan and Charles Spurgeon went to great lengths to secure large audiences for more creative versions of God’s plan.

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The grouping of people faithful to God’s plan did not all remain in England or Europe, though, for in the early years of the seventeenth century, “there were those who sought their spiritual destinies elsewhere”: Yearning for the religious freedom denied to them in their homeland they boarded the tiny ship, Mayflower, and set off from England on a voyage across the storm tossed Atlantic. Finally on December 26, in the year 1620, 102 brave defenders of Christian liberty came ashore on the rugged coast of Massachusetts. Here these pilgrims planted the seeds of their faith in Christ, which would soon blossom across the New World.

This blossoming was not without its toils, for “the vast untamed North American frontier was filled with both promise and peril. It took a special commitment and determination to spread the word of God across such a tremendous expanse.” It was through this determination, though, that “the indomitable American spirit was forged.” Remaining faithful servants of God’s plan, those who ventured across the sea produced Bibles for Native Americans, children, and even for the blind. “In whatever language or form it may be presented,” the narration reminds us, “the Bible continues to endure now and for all time. In the words of the apostle Peter, ‘the grass withers and the flower falls off but the word of the Lord abides forever.’ ” In case the characteristics of those obedient to God’s plan had not yet been made clear, the second to last room of the tour spells them out explicitly: Devotion. Courage. Sacrifice. These are the qualities of those whom God used to transmit and preserve his word. Each of their lives tells the story of divine providence working through human diligence. Against overwhelming barriers this book has prevailed as the revealed and inspired word of God. In reading this great book we encounter individuals whose unwavering devotion to God’s word inspired countless generations.

One by one, ten heroic individuals are introduced, with red velvet curtains opening to reveal a painting of each: Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Ezra, Mary, John, Peter, and Paul. None of these figures were featured previously in the tour and thus their function is to extend the mythic grouping of obedient people deeper into the past by setting the more recent heroes—medieval scribes, English and German reformers, Pilgrims—alongside the heroes found in the Bible itself. Visitors learn from the narrator that through these kinds of people God’s plan was advanced. The continued existence of God’s instructions to humanity brings God’s will to fruition, even now, despite all efforts to thwart it. The narrator identifies this final set of ten heroic individuals in this way: “Through individuals such as these God advanced his loving plan for mankind’s redemption, a plan that has at its foundation the laws handed down to us by God himself.” Thus it is here, near the end of the tour, that visitors are finally told about the origins of the Bible. It all began with the giving of the law, materialized as an illuminated outline of two stone tablets appearing overhead in the darkened room, with Hebrew words appearing on the tablets amidst sounds of

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thunder and flashes of lightning. As a large cross hanging over the tablets came into view, the recording bellowed forth: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Thou shalt have no other God before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. Thou shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, wife, nor anything of thy neighbor.

Further, the narration asserts that, Man has never been able to keep these commandments and is therefore under the judgment of God. But Jesus Christ the son of God became the savior of mankind by his perfect life, sacrificial death, and miraculous resurrection from the dead. All who place their faith in him receive the gift of eternal life. This is the only hope of mankind. This is the message of the Bible. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.

Upon hearing a blast of triumphant music, visitors move through a simply-appointed sitting room and then into the gift shop which offers trinkets, Bibles, and a host of items representing Christianity as the providential continuation of Judean history: necklaces with the Star of David connected to a cross and a Jesus fish, Jewish prayer shawls, and various trinkets with Hebrew lettering. In light of the discourse of HLE, these items could not be further from representing a happy merger between Judaism and Christianity. They assert, instead, that Jewish history is actually Christian history and that this was God’s plan all along.

Embodied mythic formation The primary type of inquiry elicited through the three exhibits concerns what is commonly referred to as identity formation. Due to complications related to identity as an analytical category, I use a more precise array of terminology to indicate the various kinds of classificatory and explanatory labor with which identity as a category has been saddled.31 Following Rogers Brubaker, I refer to practices concerning classification as identification or categorization to emphasize a process rather than a condition. Once identified, individuals may then be categorized according to any number of arbitrary criteria (usually through the possession of some shared feature). Identification and categorization may be self-directed or other-directed. Concerning the explanatory sense in which the category of identity has often been put to work, I  again follow Brubaker, who in lieu of accounting for action as the expression of an essential identity (e.g., “she wore a dress because she is a girl”), prefers to explain behavior as issuing from situated subjectivity and thus uses the terms self-understanding and social location.32 To

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put it more precisely, then, the inquiries elicited at HLE cluster around the practices of identification and categorization, as well as the nature of the relationships between behaviors and dispositions, on the one hand, and self-understanding and socio-cosmic location, on the other. The ability of materialized mythic discourse to prompt inquiry about identification and self-understanding depends upon visitors’ ability to recognize that and how the narrative logic and socio-cosmic landscape of the constructed past could have anything to do with their present-day social location, as well as to misrecognize the material interests that are served when the mythic logic and landscape is brought to bear upon the present. In other words, if the visitor is to be able to engage the materialized discourse as a cognitive prosthetic, there must be some point of intelligibility; in addition, the visitor must recognize something of interest in order to be prompted toward inquiry. This would be true even in the case of the tree-felling discussed in the first section of the chapter, for without recognizing the double-handled saw qua saw and without any inkling that cutting down a tree might be of interest, the two people would not have had the opportunity to engage in that particular practice-based inquiry. As embodied agents, though, visitors are equipped to manage the conceptual metaphors that figure most prominently at HLE, for those metaphors build upon the mental structuring (i.e., the image schemas) forged through the agent’s mastery of the spatial logics of linearity and containment. The narrative logic of the mythic past at HLE is driven by the interweaving of two metaphors: first, the conceptualization of goals and plans as destinations toward or away from which one may move, and second, the concept of the category as a container into which people or other entities may be placed. That the discourse is heavy on the goal as destination is clear enough, as is the idea that a person moves toward or away from it (or moves history toward or away from it) depending upon her behaviors and dispositions. Puzzling through this, though, prompts questions about self-understanding and socio-cosmic location. Sociocosmic location could be thought about in terms of location along the chronological trajectory from creation to the final judgment, which would involve thinking about movement toward and away from it. It could also be thought of in terms of proximity to the designated path, which would involve thinking not about forward and backward movement, but about side to side movement, as one gets closer or further away from the plotted line. It is this latter manner of thinking about location that seems to be more closely related to self-understanding insofar as adherence to the proper path is cast in terms of the value of somebody’s behaviors and dispositions. At HLE, the range of possible answers to queries about self-understanding is constrained to a relatively small set of possibilities. As we saw in all three exhibits, a person either acts from a desire to please God, to obey him, to be in his presence, to cooperate with his long-term goal, or else from desire to displease, disobey, avoid, or thwart all of God’s hopes and dreams. Not only is the possible array of selfunderstandings quite narrow, but visitors are also pushed to make the choice to please God. In the Passion, the enactment of Satan and his minions hovering around those who did not accept Jesus was unsettling. Other scenes were layered over with narration that asked the audience to join Jesus as allies, due precisely to all the pain that he had

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endured. As Jesus suffers and tearfully begs God to spare his life in Gethsemane, we hear from the narrator that, “as he stepped into the garden you were in his prayers . . ..  His final prayer was about you. His final passion was you. He saw you there, betrayed by those you love. . . . staring into the pit of your own failures and the mouth of your own grave.” Jesus then opens his arms to the crowd as he utters, “I’d rather go to hell for you then go to heaven without you.” It prompts the audience to think about themselves in relation to the groupings and the socio-cosmic landscape, and then to decide where they want to fit. The mythic discourse is also driven by the concept of the category as container into which people may be placed. It light of the binary option for self-understanding noted earlier, the principle that objects may be either inside or outside a container fits HLE’s mythic landscape quite well:  there are good people and there are bad people, and you are either one or the other. The concept of a category as container, on its own, does not entail that objects, or in our case, people, will be placed into categories according to any particular criteria. It is here that the visitor will have to do more cognitive labor: taking into account the entire narrative, noting who have been praised as good and who have been called out as evil, the visitor will need to work to make the connections. It is not clear, for example, why the heroes in the Scriptorium Tour were designated as such. What do unnamed Mesopotamian scribes, librarians in Alexandria, medieval monks, John Wycliffe and the Lollards, Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, William Tyndale, an unnamed martyr, John Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon, the Pilgrims, the American frontiersmen and brave missionary evangelists, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Ezra, Mary, John, Peter, Paul, and Christ all have in common? That this grouping would comprise a category due to their bravery and heroism is by no means self-evident, and thus the visitor will be faced with a problem to solve. The spoiler was in the prior section, but the tour is careful to make it abundantly clear that existence in this categorically constructed grouping depends upon certain acts of identification. In my description of the Scriptorium Tour, I noted that visitors pass through a sitting room just after seeing God deliver his instructions to Moses and just before they enter the gift shop. In the sitting room, it is the visitors who become the focus of the tour. The narrator’s voice reminds them of the “unceasing efforts and personal sacrifices” of the heroes they just met. Visitors are gently shamed for taking the accessibility of the Bible for granted. The final words of the tour prompt them to notice the reasons for the identification of the figures as heroes while also challenging them to decide if they, too, want to develop a self-understanding that would enable them to join the grouping of heroic ancestors: [We] welcome you back the time we call now to the 21st century, a time filled with distractions [sound of dog barking and baby crying]. Because of the unceasing efforts and personal sacrifices of so many great people to the centuries, the Bible is more readily available to us now than ever before and yet with all of these distractions it is far too easy to take this priceless gift for granted. What are you doing with the word of God in your world today? The word of God contains the answers to all of your questions and all of your needs. May God grant you grace

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and mercy as you begin, continue, or reunite in the study of his glorious word, the standard of truth.

These figures from the past had the kind of disposition that drove them to particular actions, and because they understood God’s goal for his writings, they drew upon those motivations to complete the necessary actions even when things were difficult. The idea of socio-cosmic location is involved as well, for in the final lines of the quotation, one learns that proper action and disposition (i.e., self-understanding) puts humans in closer proximity to God; being focused on the Bible as God’s standard of truth despite distraction, and consulting it in times of questioning or need is what gets a person close to God. As for misrecognition, I contend that if visitors inquired about the material interests of themselves and of others, or the material implications that have arisen over time from applying the narrative logic and landscape of HLE’s mythic discourse to the practices of authoritarian identification and the sorting of actual people, they would risk coming face-to-face with some harsh conclusions. My use of misrecognition follows Bourdieu, who uses it to indicate the “social practice of collective or individual misattribution . . . an everyday and dynamic social process where one thing (say, a situation, process, or action) is not recognised for what it is” but is instead “attributed to another available realm of meaning, and, in the process, interests, inequities or other effects may be maintained whilst they remain concealed.”33 Misrecognition is a necessary part of social interrelatedness, for “[m]‌isrecognition of the ‘objective’ truth of the relation of exploitation is part of the full truth of the relation, which can exist in this form only to the extent that it is misrecognized.”34 In mythmaking—which is, after all, the intellectual labor through which societies are managed—the effective cueing of misrecognition is the practice that hides the dark underbelly of “ ‘naked self-interest’ and egoistic calculation.”35 Consider this example from the Scriptorium Tour’s narration: In the 18th and 19th centuries the vast untamed North American frontier was filled with both promise and peril. It took a special commitment and determination to spread the word of God across such a tremendous expanse. In the shadows of the majestic mountains, in the solitude of the green forests, on the sleeping expanses of the great prairies, the indomitable American spirit was forged. That spirit comes across in the indigenous versions of the Bible produced by these steadfast missionaries. With Bibles in hand circuit rider preachers penetrated this new land and courageous evangelists carried the message of the gospel to the outlying territories, and eventually beyond the shores of America.

Notice how the land is described. It was a “vast untamed” frontier holding “promise and peril.” There was “a tremendous expanse” including “the shadows of the majestic mountains,” “the solitude of the green forests,” and “the sleeping expanses of the great prairies.” It was a “new land” with “outlying territories” and opportunity was waiting even beyond its shores. Also notice the activities that are described. The frontiersmen were there to “spread the word of God,” to produce “indigenous versions of the Bible,”

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“penetrate the new land” with “Bibles in hand,” and carry “the message of the gospel.” Consider the humans who are mentioned and the dispositions that they possessed. There were “steadfast missionaries,” “circuit rider preachers,” and “courageous evangelists.” Note the dispositions that are not attributed to anyone in particular: “a special commitment and determination,” “the indomitable American spirit,” which “comes across” in some writings. Finally, notice what and who are absent. It is difficult to know whether the “untamed” nature of the North American frontier refers to wilderness or to inhabitants. No humans are mentioned except for the missionaries, preachers, and evangelists, and so it is possible that “untamed” refers to the rough terrain. At the same time, though, whom would the missionaries, preachers, and evangelists be targeting if not for other humans? Why would they be taking Bibles “across such a tremendous expanse,” to “the shadows” of the mountains, to “the solitude” of the forests, or to “the sleeping expanses” of the prairies? Are we to believe that the preachers penetrated the land? Even the one word, “indigenous,” that could indicate some form of human life, describes Bibles, not people. To be fair, we do hear later that, “the first Bible printed in America is also the first specifically translated and printed for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel to Native Americans. As missionaries to the Algonquin tribes, the Puritans in their efforts heralded the beginning of missionary work in America, leading to American missions around the world.” But this is all we hear of a native population, who seem to be there only as a prelude to fulfilling the greater mission: to spread Bibles all around the world. The narration gives the distinct impression that the land was just empty, that perhaps nobody was there (it was “new,” after all). If visitors are to understand that there was scarcely a native population inhabiting the land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then they would not be wrong, given the rapid decline in population resulting from the diseases brought over from Europe. Never mind the violence, wars, displacement, and enslavement that also contributed to their conspicuous absence. This is a cue for misrecognition. The genocide that began with European arrivals was not mentioned once. It is not that the exploitation, dehumanization, victim blaming, isolation, and continued mistreatment has been watered down or even ignored. It is that the presence of an entire people is erased, save for the one mention: “the first Bible printed in America is also the first specifically translated and printed for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel to Native Americans. As missionaries to the Algonquin tribes, the Puritans in their efforts heralded the beginning of missionary work in America, leading to American missions around the world.” This mention, moreover, is not even about the Native Americans or the Algonquin tribes. It is about the “the indomitable American spirit.” It is a civilizing narrative that justifies colonialism and genocide in the name of God’s plan. It envisions and authorizes a present-day socio-cosmic landscape that allies Protestant Christian Americans with God’s will and does not even place the remaining indigenous peoples on the map at all, except to highlight the virtues of the American Bible industry: “In whatever language or form it may be presented the Bible continues to endure now and for all time. In the words of the apostle Peter, ‘the grass withers and the flower falls off but the word of the Lord abides forever.’ ”

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Elicited through engagement with materialized mythic discourse, embodied mythic formation is a form of practice-based inquiry about identification, categorization, self-understanding, and social location. It is a process through which an embodied agent observes the identifications and categorizations that are made throughout the self-authorizing narratives about the past, inquires about how she and others might be identified and categorized if they were evaluated in their current social location according to the narrative logic and categorical criteria evident within the narrative, thinks about various courses of future action that would be coherent with each of a restricted set of possible self-understandings, and considers the relative appeal and feasibility of each. Having chosen a desired path forward, visitors emerge from the walls of HLE with a divinely authorized socio-cosmic map with which they can make sense of themselves, others, and the world around them. More importantly, though, this map also provides cues for concealment, cues that allow its adherents to misrecognize the pursuit of their own self-interest as pious obedience, thereby justifying—perhaps even sanctifying—that pursuit even when others are exploited or harmed along the way.

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On the Myth of Religion’s Uniqueness Craig Martin

Each of the preceding chapters in this volume has considered Christian mythmaking and identity formation at various tourist destinations. Each has emphasized that a certain vision of what it means to be a “Christian” is at stake in the discourses, displays, rituals, and reenactments that take place at each site. Many of the chapters have drawn on Bruce Lincoln’s important work on mythmaking; few scholars in the field of religious studies have attended more carefully to the political stakes of religious mythmaking, and the model of scholarship he offers is perhaps the best adaptation of Marxist or Marxian approaches to ideology critique from the last half century. Crucial to Lincoln’s work1 is a distinction between “terrestrial” and “transcendent,” as well as all of the following related homologies: transcendent/terrestrial eternal/temporal spiritual/material divine/human myth/history2 These homologous distinctions are at the crux of Lincoln’s stipulative definition of religion provided in Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. The four domains of a religion, for Lincoln, are: discourse, community, practice, and institution.3 However, these four things are, arguably, sufficient for any type of organization or cultural tradition. What, then, makes a religious tradition religious? For Lincoln, when it comes to religions, the regnant discourse is not just any discourse but rather must be one that concerns “transcendent” matters; religious discourse is [a]‌discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status. Discourse becomes religious not simply by virtue of its content, but also from its claims to authority and truth. Astrophysicists, for instance, do not engage in religious speech when they discuss cosmogony, so long as they frame their statements as hypotheses and provisional conclusions based on experimentation, calculation, and human reason. The same

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is true when morticians describe what happens after death. But should they ground their views in Scripture, revelation, or immutable ancestral traditions, in that moment their discourse becomes religious because of its claim to transcendent authority. Insofar as certain propositions or narratives successfully claim such status, they position themselves as truths to be interpreted, but never ignored or rejected. Contestation then takes place within the realm of hermeneutics. Religious discourse can recode virtually any content as sacred, ranging from the high-minded and progressive to the murderous, oppressive, and banal, for it is not any specific orientation that distinguishes religion, but rather its metadiscursive capacity to frame the way any content will be received and regarded.4

Although Lincoln is a functionalist in his overall approach insofar as he focuses on how discourses—including both “religious” and “nonreligious”—function to authorize social formations, his stipulative definition of religion would rightly be classified as substantive rather than functionalist: it is the transcendent content of the discourse— the appeal to something beyond the mundane—that makes it specifically religious, rather than the authorizing function of the discourse (since any discourse could be authorizing, for Lincoln). Lincoln’s purpose in stipulatively defining religion in this manner was, in part, to draw attention to the similarities between George W. Bush’s and Osama bin Laden’s public speeches following the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. In his public speeches—released on videotape—bin Laden described the sins for which Americans should rightly be considered “infidels,” in part due to their support of Israel against Palestine, their military presence on Muslim “holy lands” in Saudi Arabia, and so on—sins for which righteous Muslims justifiably responded with the attacks of September 11. Bush similarly characterized the confrontation as one between good and evil, or between the civilized peoples and uncivilized, fanatical terrorists. We might be tempted to see Bush’s speech as “political” and bin Laden’s as “religious,” insofar as the former was a “politician” while the latter was a “Muslim” leader, who couched his rhetoric in explicitly Islamic or Qur’anic terms. However, according to Lincoln, both men “represented themselves as righteous protectors of the weak”5 and “constructed a Manichean struggle, where Sons of Light confront Sons of Darkness, and all must enlist on one side or another, without possibility of neutrality, hesitation, or middle ground.”6 One of Bush’s speeches even emphasized that “the United States has enjoyed divine favor throughout its history.”7 Consequently, Bush and bin Laden’s discourses bore more than passing similarities; in fact, their speeches “mirrored one another.”8 Lincoln’s stipulative definition was therefore useful in at least one respect: it permitted us to see often ignored similarities in social function across popular discourses typically viewed—especially in journalism—as completely different. Arguably, Lincoln’s work is primarily useful insofar as it forces us to reconsider our demonization of those communities we are tempted to identify as totally “other”—at the end of the day, perhaps “our” discourses are far more similar to “theirs” than we would be willing to admit. Insofar as definitions can be neither true nor false, I  would never suggest that Lincoln is wrong to stipulatively define religion in this manner. However, stipulative

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definitions can be more or less useful. It is worth asking: Is this one sufficiently useful to warrant continued use in academic or scholarly contexts? In what follows, I want to consider the sort of mythmaking that takes place at an apparently “nonreligious” or “secular” museum site, as well as the extent to which the mythmaking there is different from or similar to the sort of mythmaking that takes place at the Christian sites considered in previous chapters. It is not self-evident to me that separating out the “nonreligious” sites from the “religious” ones offers scholars any analytical advantage; distinguishing sites in this manner may be more ideological than scholarly.

Discourse and the (anachronistic) construction of society As Lincoln’s work rightly demonstrates, social formations exist only insofar as they are imagined into existence; however, insofar as imaginations both differ from one another and change over time, social formations require ongoing maintenance. The existence of competing visions necessitates cultural production—especially by hegemonic forces— in order to remind people in the community who they are or who they ought to be. Much as a snake grows a new skin while shedding the old, discourses constitutive of the social order must be consistently renewed. It should be clear, however, that renewed discourses are never identical to the ones replaced; displacing old myths with new ones can permit one to “reformulate social sentiments, borders, and, ultimately, society itself.”9 These constitutive discourses are the rhetorical equivalents of an architect’s blueprints: they draw lines of demarcation between an inside and an outside, as well as rank subject positions assigned to various floors within the community, showing who is at the top and who is at the bottom. Different functions are associated with each floor, and as a result varying rights, privileges, duties, and responsibilities are assigned to the different subject positions. Origin myths often serve as the best repositories for discourses constitutive of group boundaries. Such myths describe the birth of the community, often disclosing a telos or eschaton toward which the group ought to aspire. Birth narratives—in the broad sense of, for example, the “birth of a nation”—also entail a parturition or partition: a becoming-new is always also a taking-leave from what one is not. Birth narratives can therefore provide both an identity and an other, an “us” and a “them.” As Lincoln puts it, such mythic narratives are “one of the chief instruments through which [groups] maintain themselves separate from, hostile toward, and convinced of their moral . . . superiority to their . . . neighbors.”10 For instance, many Christian origin narratives throughout the last two millennia have emphasized the birth of “Christianity” out of “Judaism”; have portrayed the Jews as “Christ-killers” who ignored and murdered God’s messenger; and have thereby attempted to establish the apparent superiority of—and claim God’s favor toward—Christians over the Jews. These narratives have functioned to authorize the superiority of those who claim to be Christian and encouraged sentiments of antipathy toward Jews.11 In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson notes that nationalist narratives are necessary to build solidarity between people who might share nothing in common

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other than their purported nationality: nations are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”12 The solidarity such narratives conjure “make it possible . . . for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die” for their nation.13 The nations we imagine into reality require both killing and dying for their ongoing existence; the political stakes of origin myths are literally life and death. Later in the book, Anderson goes on to note that museums are important sites at which modern nations distribute and make publicly accessible origin myths and identity markers. The collation of artifacts from one’s own and others’ nations— artifacts marked with information panels denoting the country of origin—functions to reify the existence of those very nations. Narratives on display retroactively—and anachronistically—construct identity from difference, continuity from discontinuity, providing the present nation with an air of ancient authority. For instance, the modern state of Iran can claim the former Persian Empire as its own, or the modern state of Egypt can claim the pyramids as representative of its ancient and abiding culture. Thus, can museums provide a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there.14

Museums thereby naturalize the divisions between “us” and “them” by putting identities and differences on display for all to see—objectively, right before our eyes— and frequently presenting them as ancient in origin. This mode of cultural production is satirized in National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC’s) sitcom, Community, a show that follows the lives of a number of students at the fictional Greendale Community College. In one episode, Vice Dean Laybourne (played by John Goodman) attempts to persuade student Troy Barnes (played by Donald Glover) to transfer to the Greendale Air Conditioning Repair School, an annex of Greendale Community College.15 Dean Laybourne promises that air-conditioning repair is lucrative, takes Troy on a tour of the repair school campus, and at one point shows him a small museum dedicated to the history and evolution of air-conditioning. When walking past a display featuring an ancient stone with Egyptian hieroglyphics, alongside a palm frond labeled “Egyptian Frond, 2,600 B.C.,” the dean says, Mr. Barnes, air conditioning repair is an elite, worldwide family dating back to the very beginnings of civilizations. Our predecessors were slaves, fanning the pharaohs with palm fronds. Over time we became experts at making our superiors feel comfortable. We made it our business. And, along the way, we learned to make ourselves comfortable. No more palm fronds, Troy—now we are the pharaohs.

The joke is funny because viewers know that ancient Egyptian slaves did not think of themselves as air-conditioning repair technicians, having lived millennia before the

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invention of air-conditioners. By contrast, we typically do not have sufficient ironic distance from the objects in real museums to see that neither did ancient Persians think of themselves as Iranian. If we see ancient Persians and modern Iranians as “the same,” it is only because our constitutive discourses render them as such.16 In the next section, then, I wish to turn to a specific example: a museum origins narrative designed to tell the story of the formation of Canada (notably, at a museum funded by the Canadian government, and thus in some sense an “official” narrative subsidized by the state). We will pay special attention to the place of so-called Native Americans, First Nations, or First Peoples in the story: Are they part of or excluded from the nation imagined by the discourse? Are they part of the Canada’s “us” or Canada’s “them”?

A Canadian origin myth In January of 2017, I visited Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. At that time, the downtown area was saturated with banners and signs marking “Canada 150,” the year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of the creation of Canada as a self-governing dominion or confederation, independent of Britain (established via the British North America Act, 1867). The Canada 150 logo (Figure  8.1) could be seen on just about every street. As the Canada 150 website claims, the logo is composed of a series of diamonds, or “celebratory gems,” arranged in the shape of the iconic maple leaf. The four diamonds at the base represent the four original provinces that formed Confederation in 1867:  Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Additional diamonds extend out from the

Figure 8.1  Canada 150 Logo.

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base to create nine more points—in total representing the 13 provinces and territories. The Canada 150 logo is an evocative symbol and will become an enduring reminder of one of Canada’s proudest moments. The maple leaf motif is recognized at home and abroad as distinctively Canadian, and it fosters feelings of pride, unity and celebration.17

Although the four diamonds are said to represent the “original” provinces, just what exactly constitutes the “origin” of Canada is, in fact, a deeply contested matter. The website claims the maple leaf “fosters unity,” but other cities—such as Vancouver18— have launched a “Canada 150+” campaign in order to note that there were aboriginal people in North America long before the formation of the confederation in 1867, and that those aboriginal people are perhaps a part of a “Canada” that existed prior to that particular point in time. Tensions between aboriginals and those descendants of the French and British colonials have been present since the European settlers first arrived, and the status of the First Peoples is to this day subject to ongoing legal battles. I found a particularly interesting site for the complex discursive construction of “Canada” at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, particularly in the “Early Wars in Canada” permanent exhibit.19 According to the museum’s website, this exhibit focuses on “The wars of First Peoples, the French and the British [which] shaped Canada and Canadians.”20 What is ambiguous here, of course, is just what the referent of “Canada” is in “Early Wars in Canada.” Since most of the exhibit concerns a time period before the confederation of 1867—the exhibit begins by noting that it will cover “earliest times to 1885”21—to what does the term Canada refer? The exhibit claims to depict “Wars on Our Soil,” but who constitutes the “we” behind the “our” in “our soil”? One of the first messages in the exhibit claims that “War has shaped Canada and Canadians for at least 5,000  years.” The excavation of eleven bodies with “fractured skulls and smashed facial bones and teeth” at an archaeological site at Namu, British Columbia—dated from four or five millennia ago—is cited as evidence. Notably, such a claim implies that the region in North America that eventually became the state of Canada was always Canada, and that the people who lived there were always Canadians—or, if not always, at least from approximately 3,000 BCE. In this way, Canadian-ness is anachronistically—yet strategically—projected backward in time from the present, making the present a teleological end-goal of the last 5,000 years. Notably, such an anachronistic projection of the present into the past could be done at any moment in history. For instance, imagine that in a thousand years what we now consider the nation of Canada becomes annexed to Mexico; at that point, the narrative could be altered such that, “War has shaped Mexico and Mexicans for at least 6,000 years.” Nothing ensures that the retroactive identification of the past with the present will be stable; the past, then, can continually be rewritten. Revisionist history is, perhaps, the only type of history possible. The survey of particular wars that have taken place across “Canada” begins with inter-tribal battles between First Peoples. Citing a narrative from the Odawa tribe, the exhibit notes that hunters who went beyond the respected boundaries of their tribe risked death at the hands of neighboring tribes; as more deaths occurred, “several

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states were obliged to declare open hostilities against each other . . . From this time they were engaged in constant warfare.” The inclusion of the Odawa tribe and the First Peoples generally in an exhibit within the Canadian War Museum implies that these peoples were Canadians, even if they did not identify as such. Much as many Christians co-opt ancient Israelite traditions for Christian purposes, here it seems contemporary Canadians claim ancient First Peoples as their own, for the purpose of cloaking their contemporary identity with an air of antiquity. Further into the exhibit, following displays of material evidence of the means of war between such tribes (i.e., spears, bows and arrows, etc.), a more cautious note appears: “In Iroquoian communities in what is now southern Ontario, every man and woman had a military role” (emphasis added). This is notable insofar as it attempts to avoid the anachronism seen in the previous parts of the exhibits. However, it also rhetorically distances the First Peoples from contemporary Canadian identity. Although the Iroquois may have lived on the land now known as Ontario, perhaps they were not Ontarians. (Arguably, the creators of the exhibit want to have their cake and eat it too: staking out Canada’s ancient authority or authenticity by including First Peoples at one point, but excluding First Peoples when it comes to contemporary political authority.) Mere presence upon what came to be known as Canadian soil is apparently insufficient to make one a Canadian, as museum-goers next learn when the exhibit comes to the Vikings, who are described as “alien invaders.” Although they “established an outpost” at what came to be Newfoundland, they were enemies of the First Peoples and were eventually defeated and forced to leave the continent. From this it appears that the First Peoples were Canadians, but the Vikings—despite their stay—were not. By contrast, when the exhibit gets to the arrival of the French, the French are not characterized as “alien invaders.” On the contrary, they are said to have “settled” and to have “founded” Quebec. In addition, they built forts “for defence against European rivals.” The status of the French is thus, at this point, ambiguous. Although they have “settled” in Canada, they are also “European” and have “European rivals.” Perhaps, at that point, the French occupied a liminal space between France and Canada? Perhaps their parturition from France and the birth of Canada was not yet complete? Either way, it is clear that their identity is here, at this point in the narrative, individuated primarily from the fact that they arrived from France, insofar as they are consistently referred to as “the French.” That individuation seems to have priority over their other possible identities. The Europeans brought guns with them, and the exhibit notes that as the First Peoples adopted their use, it changed the way they engaged in war: “Algonkians and Hurons acquired matchlock muskets through trade. When they realized that wooden armour provided no protection against lead bullets, First Peoples stopped wearing armour and fighting battles in the open.” Here the First Peoples’ identities are individuated through their tribal names—Algonkian and Huron—but insofar as the header above this text claims that “Firearms changed First Peoples warfare in Canada” (emphasis added), perhaps as First Peoples they are nevertheless still Canadians. However, the exhibit then turns to note that as the Algonkians and Hurons allied with the French, they

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collectively warred against “the Iroquois League and the British.” Is Canada a land divided at this point? If the Iroquois are part of Canada, is this civil war? The “Post-Contact Wars” between the Iroquois and the “Algonkian-French-Huron alliance” had the effect of “militarizing” Canada: Every man became a soldier, every parish had its own militia, and every town had a garrison, fortifications, and a military commander. The Governor-General, who served as commander-in-chief, could mobilize Canada’s entire armed strength within days. (Emphasis added)

The use of the word “entire” is instructive here; if the governor can mobilize all of Canada’s military against the Iroquois League, then it follows that the Iroquois are, apparently, not part of Canada. Later the display claims that “Canada faced defeat by the Iroquois League,” further implying that the Iroquois were not included among the Canadians. The exhibit goes on to say that, “[b]‌eginning in 1669, Canadian men aged 16 to 60 received military training and served in the militia . . .. They joined First Peoples warriors on raids against the Iroquois League and the British.” Here Canadian men joined First Peoples, in which case First Peoples are apparently not Canadian; here “Canadian” appears to refer only to the French forces. Later in the exhibit, museum-goers learn that the relations between the First Peoples and the Europeans involved both tension and accommodation. As the exhibit notes, “First Peoples found themselves accommodating to or resisting the European presence, while working to preserve their own culture and heritage.” What is remarkable about this statement is, in part, that First Peoples’ “own culture” seems, implicitly, to be something pre-Canadian. They had their own culture, which they tried to preserve from (corruption by?) European influence. Are they, then, pre-Canadian Canadians? The same paragraph continues: “This accommodation and resistance continues today.” This last claim implies that perhaps there is still something un-Canadian about both First Peoples and the “European presence” in Canada. Perhaps, then, we are dealing not with civil war but a war between foreign nations on Canadian soil? This conclusion seems to be confirmed when the narrative goes on to emphasize ongoing conflict between the French and the British, culminating in the “Seven Years’ War.” The “local clash” between the French and the British quickly escalated into a world war. Beginning in 1755, Britain and France sent thousands of professional soldiers to North America. A  year later, hostilities spread to Europe and both nations formally declared war. By 1759, war raged in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, and Quebec was under attack by a British fleet and army.

Here, it seems, there are foreign nations—France and Britain—clashing on Canadian soil. The one discursive exception is in the last clause:  if Quebec is part of Canada, then perhaps the French there were Canadian, as opposed to the British foreigners at their door. This is confirmed when the exhibit goes on to say that Louisbourg, “a Canadian city” founded by the French, was destroyed by the British. Apparently the

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French in Louisbourg were Canadians, although the British exiled them to France after the defeat. By the time museum-goers get to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, we learn that the partition of the United States from Britain helped to constitute Canada as a nation. British-American colonists who rebelled against the British homeland also attacked Canadian territory, forcing Canadians to collectively defend their territory. The display says that during the War of 1812, “British regulars, Canadian militia, and First Peoples warriors smashed a major American invasion at Queenstown Heights.” What’s interesting here is that apparently First Peoples are not part of Canada, as they must be mentioned in addition to the Canadian militia. The exhibit insists that this alliance repelled similar American attacks from 1812 to 1814, “and saved Canada from annexation.” Are the British and First Peoples part of this Canada that resisted annexation, or are they merely allied with the Canadians? The narrative draws attention to one “Canadian civilian” who alerted “Mohawk and Ojibwa warriors” to important intelligence regarding the American armies: If she was Canadian but they were Mohawk and Ojibwa, perhaps they were not Canadian? Later we’re told that in 1885 “a small Canadian army suppressed Métis and Cree resistance” to Ottawa’s administration of the province. The narrative assures museumgoers, however, that “both societies survived as viable communities, which continue to work to protect their rights and heritage.” Here, it seems, not only were the Métis and Cree not part of Ottawa or Canada, but that they continue to be distinct communities. Eventually “Canadians” took the Prairies away from “First Peoples”:  “In 1870, First Peoples controlled the Prairies. By 1880, Canadian settlers dominated the region.” Here it is quite clear that First Peoples are not Canadian, especially as “First Peoples resented the Canadian settlers.” The French settlers have, at this point, now become Canadian settlers. We have, then, an inconsistent and contradictory message. Despite the inclusion of First Peoples as part of Canada at the beginning of the exhibit, the overwhelming message throughout is that the French settlers are the real Canadians. The French are the only group consistently identified as Canadian, and First Peoples are largely depicted as either allied with or against these authentic Canadians, rather than as Canadians themselves.

Analysis The matrix of individuation applied in this origin myth involves all of the following identities: Algonkian, American, British, Canadian, Canadian militia, Cree, European, First Peoples, French, Huron, Iroquois, Iroquois League, Louisbourg, Métis, Mohawk, Odawa, Ojibwa, Ontarian, Québécois, and Viking. Mere presence on “Canadian soil” (at least as drawn at the time of the exhibit’s creation) does not make one “Canadian,” as many of those groups present on that “soil” are depicted as invaders, interlopers, outsiders, or allies. In the case of most of the groups mentioned, their initial identity or primary individuation appears to be based on their European country of origin or their tribal name. That is, at first French Canadians appear to be French first, and Canadian

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second; Canadian-ness thus seems to be a second order individuation built upon other, previously existing identifications. By the end, however, the French Canadians become the true Canadians. As noted earlier, at first the exhibit seems to want to include the First Peoples’ tribes as part of Canada—hence the claim that Canadian wars go back 5,000  years. However, by the time we get to the end of the nineteenth century, it appears that those individuated as First Peoples are not part of Canada and, in some cases, perhaps at odds with or at war with Canada. By contrast, the Vikings and the British-Americans mentioned, despite their residency on “Canadian soil,” are consistently treated as alien interlopers, clearly outside Canada proper. If a group’s presence on Canadian soil does not qualify one as Canadian, what does? What criterion underlies the determination of Canadian-ness? No such criterion is made explicit in the exhibit, although those first identified as French (and a few of the British) eventually became Canadian. Arguably, there could be no objective or publicly available criterion by which some are identified as Canadian and others not— ultimately, Canadian-ness is accomplished by fiat via the recitation of these very sorts of discourses. The discourses cannot appeal to something outside themselves to justify their boundary drawing, as the Canada to which they point is the performative result of their recitation rather than their condition. The discourses that individuate Canada in this exhibit clearly have no legal authority—to some extent it’s merely a museum discourse. Border control agents cannot appeal to it in order to determine who may enter the country. However, that does not mean the discourses at such sites are meaningless, purposeless, or completely without social consequences. On the contrary, insofar as the functions of discourse include the ranking, normalization, and valuation of distributed identities, subjects who identify as Canadian may develop sentiments of affinity or estrangement—or sympathies and antipathies—toward the various groups individuated in the discourse at hand. As noted earlier, Lincoln rightly argues that mythic narratives are “one of the chief instruments through which [groups] maintain themselves separate from, hostile toward, and convinced of their moral . . . superiority to their . . . neighbors.”22 French Canadians may, for instance, develop sentiments of estrangement toward those who identify with their aboriginal ancestry; they may perceive First Peoples as a “them” apart from an “us.” So, although the discourses found in a museum may not have an official, legal status in Canada, they may indirectly shape the voting choices of citizens or the judiciary’s interpretation of the law. These discourses can interpellate subjects, teaching them who or what they are, but also telling them who they are not. Last, it is worth noting that, on the surface, this myth of origin would apparently fall under the category of “nonreligious” on Lincoln’s stipulative definition of religious discourses. The narrative of how Canada came to be seems to depend on little more than humans coming together to form groups (and to differentiate themselves from other groups). The museum’s narrative invokes nothing obviously transcendent, eternal, spiritual, or divine, but mere human formations. That makes the narrative seemingly different in at least one respect (i.e., it appeals to mundane rather than transcendent authorities), but how much difference does that difference make?

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How does this myth of origin compare to the authorizing techniques discussed in the other chapters of this volume? It appears to share with them a retroactive teleological narrative leading from an imagined past to a present, for the purposes of establishing who is rightfully an insider at the present moment, as well as who is an outsider, interloper, or enemy. In Erin Roberts’s reading of the Holy Land Experience, the dramas on display tell of an ancient lineage of God and God’s people versus Satan, the temple priests, and Judas. Of course, the point is to connect the imagined past to a particular present; the narratives construct “a past in such a way as to support one’s existence and social location in the present.” Consequently, those narratives function “to forge boundaries between . . . two lineages as well as privilege one lineage over the other.” By placing Jesus in the lineage connected to God and his people rather than in a lineage with Satan, the myth functions as a boundary, wherein, “[t]‌here are those who see and are blessed, and there are those who are blind, and fall away.” The park promotes the superiority of God’s lineage and especially those who see themselves as part of the lineage because of Jesus. Similarly, in her chapter Jennifer Eyl argues that the Biblewalk Museum’s “ ‘knowledge’ of the past—presented with carefully crafted anachronisms that are situated side by side framed historical photographs of Israel, archaeological sites, Hebrew inscriptions—this knowledge of the past authorizes the supremacy of Christianity” over and against those who wrongly persecute God’s people. “Behind the scenes [of the mythic narrative], then, is a timeless ahistorical Christ who irrupts into the world at various historical points, and whose adherents (including members of the Diamond Hill Cathedral) are consistently discriminated against and killed over time”—that is, the narrative creates an authentic “us” allied with divine forces opposed to “them” who are the enemies of God. To consider just one more example, Sean Durbin considers how an ideologically charged evangelical Christian tour of Israel constructs a narrative separating Christian Zionists and modern Israeli Jews—the true bearers of God’s plan—from others, such as Catholics and Muslims. In addition, as Durbin notes, the narrative is tied to a particular interpretation of the Bible, according to which the creation and existence of modern Israel is understood to authenticate particular biblical prophecies: “although Christian Zionist visitors to Israel are interested in the past and historical sites, they are equally if not more interested in modern political Israel, in the sense that its sheer existence as a Jewish state is demonstrative of the ongoing validity of the [Christian] Bible.” The way in which the sites on the tour are integrated into the overarching narrative from the Bible to the present world supports this; for instance, the Green Line—which demarcates Israel from one of the Palestinian territories—is read as reflecting God’s division between Promised Land and desert. As such, the narration of the past—particularly the narrative of the Israelite’s invasion of the region—props up political distinctions in the present. In each of these three cases, then, the “religious” narratives function to perform exactly the same social and political work as the museum’s “nonreligious” narrative. The past is used to authorize an opposition between an “us” and a “them” in the present, and functions (intentionally or not) to distribute sentiments of affinity and estrangement along the same lines. From the perspective of social theory, if the narratives function

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identically—if naturalization works the same way as supernaturalization—do we gain any analytical traction by drawing a distinction between them? What do I mean by “analytical traction”? I would argue that distinctions are more or less useful depending on what we want to accomplish by them. Consider the various ranks assigned to college professors:  adjunct instructor, visiting assistant, assistant, associate, or full professor. For students looking at the course offerings and organizing their schedule for the next semester, these distinctions are largely, if not entirely, irrelevant. On the contrary, for most students the important distinctions are likely the level of the courses, their necessary prerequisites, whether the courses fulfill a general education or a major requirement, as well as the days and times of the classes. However, if a student requires a letter of recommendation, the distinctions between faculty ranks might be relevant: a letter from a full professor might count more than a letter from an adjunct. Similarly, when faculty are calling for nominations for a tenure and promotion committee, the rank of those nominated might be crucial—at my college one must be associate or full professor to be eligible to be nominated for the tenure and promotion committee. Of course, there are practically an infinite number of distinctions about professors that we could make: some are short while others are tall; some have more publications than others; some are easier graders; some have social security numbers that end in odd numbers; some were born on a Tuesday; the list could go on. Which distinctions are relevant, again, depends on what we want to accomplish. What might we, as scholars, want to accomplish by differentiating “religious” from “nonreligious” discourses?

Usefulness of discriminating “religious” from “nonreligious” discourses? Lincoln’s scholarship is consistently written from a Marxian materialist perspective: when he refers to discourses that appeal to transcendent or spiritual powers, he assumes that the discourses are false. Even in his earlier work, in which he to some extent romanticizes, for instance, rituals of women’s initiation, he drew attention to their falsehood: The notion that the universe is renewed through the initiation of a woman can be seen as an opiate, a comforting and intoxicating fantasy provided for those who will never be granted power or position. Viewed thus, it is a cynical lie, an opportunistic stratagem that functions to preserve male hegemony. No romantic appreciation for the depth and beauty of women’s initiation should keep us from seeing [the rituals’] darker side.23

In fact, “religious discourses” seem to be of interest to him because they are false; if the discourses were true they wouldn’t need to be demystified or unmasked. His scholarship therefore fits well in the European Enlightenment tradition of differentiating true speech from false speech, rationality from irrationality, or scientific

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truth from ideology. To be clear, I  suspect that Lincoln would certainly accept that “objective truth” is an asymptotic goal that can never be fully reached but nevertheless one toward which we should, as scholars, aspire. However, that qualification in no way alters the ideal of historians—and scholars more generally—as arbiters of truth. The idea that religion is somehow fundamentally irrational is frequently invoked in far less sophisticated contexts, such as contemporary public discourses, particularly by popular scientists and New Atheists who want to assert a special authority for their own discourse. Consider, for instance, the rhetoric of Neil deGrasse Tyson in a recent blog for the Huffington Post titled “What Science Is—and How and Why It Works.”24 According to Tyson, science—a trusted source—depends on evidence and accuracy, is probing and predictive, leads to health, wealth, security, and confidence, and offers us informed, enlightened, objective truths about the deep realities of the natural world. By contrast, counterposed to science are personal, biased, inadequate, misleading, inaccurate, false, or fraudulent opinions that lack integrity. For Tyson, it seems “religion” falls often, if not always, in the latter group. He writes, Personal truths are what you may hold dear, but have no real way of convincing others who disagree, except by heated argument, coercion or by force. These are the foundations of most people’s opinions. Is Jesus your savior? Is Mohammad God’s last prophet on Earth? . . . Differences in opinion define the cultural diversity of a nation, and should be cherished in any free society. You don’t have to like gay marriage. Nobody will ever force you to gay-marry. But to create a law preventing fellow citizens from doing so is to force your personal truths on others. Political attempts to require that others share your personal truths are, in their limit, dictatorships.

On the scale of truth, apparently “religion” falls on the personal or subjective end of things, something to be “cherished”—a condescending adjective—but, to be sure, publicly and politically irrelevant (or, worse, rhetorically associated with dictatorship). Tyson’s conclusion? Political decisions should be based on science rather than other things, such as “personal truths” or religion. Science “can empower politicians in ways that lead to enlightened and informed governance. But this won’t happen until the people in charge, and the people who vote for them, come to understand how and why science works.” To begin with, note that Tyson’s rhetorical distinction between science and religion functions to do the same social or political work as the discourses discussed above:  to “reformulate social sentiments, borders, and, ultimately, society itself,”25 as well as to permit Tyson and his peers to “maintain themselves separate from, hostile toward, and convinced of their moral . . . superiority to their . . . neighbors.”26 Much like colonialist discourses differentiating backwards, “primitive religion” from the culture of “advanced” societies, Tyson distinguishes an irrational and possibly dictatorial “them” from a more reasonable “us.” If these antireligious discourses do exactly the same social work as the religious discourses to which they oppose themselves, in what sense are they different?

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Of course, one objection is likely to be that science depends on empirical evidence, whereas religious discourses depend on appeals to revelation from spiritual or divine sources transcendent to and unavailable in the empirical world. However, as a scientific realist Tyson himself appeals to what is in some ways transcendent to the empirical: Objective truths exist outside of your perception of reality, such as the value of pi; E=mc2; Earth’s rate of rotation; and that carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases. These statements can be verified by anybody, at any time, and at any place. And they are true, whether or not you believe in them. (Emphasis added)

It is clearly false that such statements can in fact be verified by anybody, at any time, and at any place; in order to discern that E=mc2 one must have at one’s disposal Arabic numerals, two millennia of mathematics, and the last few centuries’ recently invented scientific testing apparatuses. Elsewhere in the piece, Tyson explicitly says that previous scientists failed because they depended on immediate empirical evidence: “before the 17th century, when our senses—inadequate and biased—were the only tools at our disposal to inform us of what was and was not true in our world,” and, as such, they did not arrive at “objective truths.” The objective truths toward which they aspired were out there, even if they were not (yet) empirically available. For Tyson, objective truths exist—eternally27—outside of our perception, even though they may be eventually available to us via (assisted) perception. Just as Christians say that God exists even if you cannot perceive him, so Tyson insists that objective scientific truths exist even if you do not perceive them. Long before the objective truths of science were revealed to scientists via the adoption of special, privileged instruments unavailable to lay people, they were out there, waiting to be discovered. In addition, note that this sort of argument appeals to an idealized, teleological end point of scientific investigation that is not empirically present in our contemporary moment. For instance, at present some of these “objective truths” of science are not yet known; knowledge, on many scientific frontiers, is still highly contested. Lay people are, apparently, supposed to accept the authority of prophets such as Tyson that those not-yet-empirical truths will nevertheless someday be discovered; like a deus ex machina, those truths will someday descend on us. Although Lincoln argued that “[a]‌strophysicists . . . do not engage in religious speech when they discuss cosmogony, so long as they frame their statements as hypotheses and provisional conclusions based on experimentation, calculation, and human reason,”28 in his rush to authorize “science” Tyson appeals to eternal truths that transcend and exist independently of mere human reason. In sum, this scientific, antireligious discourse that privileges empirical evidence appeals to what is transcendent to existing empirical evidence, but which will be revealed in the future.29 The irony is staggering. A second objection might be that perhaps Tyson engages in this sort of popular rhetoric when engaging the public, but he is likely far more sophisticated when writing for astrophysics journals. While I’ve no doubt that this is true, this objection is not particularly helpful in establishing useful boundaries between religious and nonreligious discourses. To begin with, it’s unclear that Tyson or those lodging

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this objection would consider his popular writings “religious.” If we secure as “nonreligious” only those highly sophisticated and rigidly empirical discourses like those in astrophysics journals, then that still leaves most human culture potentially under the opposite category. For another example, consider famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s passionate attack on religion and defense of science and atheism in his widely known and bestselling book, The God Delusion (from which I’ll quote at length, so as not to be accused of misrepresenting his—at times seemingly bizarre—claims). Speaking more pejoratively than Tyson, Dawkins associates religion with a wide variety of social evils. He begins, in the preface, by inviting the reader to think about how much better the world would be without religion: Imagine . . . a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ-killers”, no Northern Ireland “troubles”, no “honour killings”, no shinysuited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (“God wants you to give till it hurts”). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.30

Anticipating the objection that he is unfairly “hostile” to religion, Dawkins argues that not only does religion cause people to do these evil things, but it blocks scientific reasoning and attention to empirical evidence. In the section titled “Fundamentalism and the Subversion of Science,” he tells an anecdote about a man named Kurt Wise who was torn between his belief in the young earth theory—which he saw as grounded in and authorized by the Bible—and his knowledge of evolution and modern geological scientific discoveries. Wise claimed: Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.31

For Dawkins, this story is “sad” and “just plain pathetic—pathetic and contemptable.”32 By contrast, Dawkins argues that scientists such as himself form beliefs solely on the basis of evidence: What I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I  believe not because of reading a holy book but because I  have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books.33

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Further, “we believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.”34 So, for Dawkins, religious people believe without evidence—“religious people know, without evidence, that the faith of their birth is the one true faith, all others being aberrations or downright false”35—whereas scientists believe on the basis of evidence. However, at one point in the book Dawkins attempts to address the question as to why people might be moral without a religious foundation for morality. Without such a foundation, “how . . . do we decide what is right and what is wrong.”36 His answer involves the claim that morality seems to progressively evolve over time: Slavery . . . was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman’s vote, in an election or on a jury, is the equal of a man’s. In today’s enlightened societies . . . women are no longer regarded as property . . .. [W]‌e have all changed massively in our attitude to what is right and what is wrong.37

Then Dawkins asks a crucial follow-up question: “[w]‌hat is the nature of this change, and what drives it” (emphasis added)?38 In order to explain the progressive evolution of morality, he literally appeals to a non-empirical “spirit”: “In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades, and for which it is not pretentious to use the German loan-word Zeitgeist (spirit of the times).”39 For one example of the movement of this “mysterious” spirit, Dawkins points to the fact that we have come all the way from believing in the inferiority and justified slavery of African-Americans to supporting racial equality:  “[g]‌oing back to the eighteenth century it is, of course, well known that Washington, Jefferson and other men of the Enlightenment held slaves. The Zeitgeist moves on, so inexorably that we sometimes take it for granted and forget that the change is a real phenomenon in its own right.”40 Dawkins goes on to share other examples, which he claims are “numerous,”41 including how we have moved away from permitting animal cruelty, using slurs like “negro” or “Semite,” and widespread murder through war, as seen with historical military leaders like Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. Leaving aside his arguably overoptimistic view of how far we have “evolved,” let’s return to the question he’s attempting to answer here: What drives changes in morality? His answer is this Zeitgeist. How does this Zeitgeist work? Dawkins ultimately declines to answer: Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness come from? The onus is not on me to answer. For my purposes it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion. If forced to advance a theory, I would approach it along the following lines. We [would first] need to explain why the changing moral Zeitgeist is so widely synchronized across large numbers of people; and we need to explain its relatively consistent direction.42

He exempts himself from empirically investigating this ghost, however:

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It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any further in explaining why the moral Zeitgeist moves in its broadly concerted way. For my purposes it is enough that, as a matter of observed fact, it does move, and it is not driven by religion—and certainly not by scripture. It is probably not a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate forces . . ..  Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good.43

So, God and religion don’t make us moral—this inexorable, invisible, non-empirical, mysterious spirit, force, or interplay of forces makes us moral. Ironically, Dawkins’s rhetoric mirrors that of the early phenomenologists of religion—like Rudolf Otto or Joachim Wach—who claimed that a non-empirical spirit manifests itself in worldly phenomena. This argument is all the more ironic because it is functionally identical to one of the intelligent design or creationist arguments—which he calls “the God of the Gaps strategy”—that he openly derides. According to Dawkins, the “God of the Gaps” argument looks for gaps in the fossil record and attributes the leap from one biological organism to the next to God: “If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.”44 The following is hypothetical but entirely typical. A  creationist speaking:  “The elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog is irreducibly complex. No part of it would do any good at all until the whole was assembled. Bet you can’t think of a way in which the weasel frog’s elbow could have evolved by slow gradual degrees.” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, the creationist draws a default conclusion: “Right then, the alternative theory, ‘intelligent design,’ wins by default.” Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right.45

Dawkins suggests that this argument is as absurd as a person, upon seeing an illusion performed by a magician but for which this person cannot come up with a plausible explanation as to how it was executed, concludes that it must have been magic: “It must be a miracle. There is no scientific explanation. It’s got to be supernatural.”46 Arguably, however, Dawkins himself has used precisely the same rhetorical strategy: “I don’t know where morality comes from, but I know it can’t come from religion, so it must come from a spirit, a Zeitgeist that haunts our contemporary moment.” And, as with Tyson, once more this discourse functions to divide truth from falsehood, blind faith from evidence-based reasoning, science from religion. This discourse— which explicitly appeals to a transcendent, non-empirical spirit—functions to permit Dawkins and company to—in Lincoln’s words—“maintain themselves separate from, hostile toward, and convinced of their moral . . . superiority to their . . . neighbors.”47 I would argue—and this is my central claim—that just about all discourses authorize themselves through appeals to various types of transcendence. Scientists justify their own authority via appeals to idealizations of science that exist only theoretically. Democracies justify their own authority via appeals to an idealized

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demos—“the people”—constructed in political speeches but never speaking for itself in the real world. Human rights propagandists authorize their agendas via appeals to human rights that apparently exist “universally” but which empirically appear nowhere (only historically specific, locally instituted rights are empirically available to perception). Politicians authorize political action via appeals to “self-evident truths” and “unalienable rights” that no one has ever seen. On a recent visit to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC, my tour guide reported that the room in the center of the building—below the rotunda—is called “The Temple of Liberty.” On the ceiling of this “temple” is a painting of George Washington rising to the heavens, accompanied by angels; the painting is titled, not so subtly, “The Apotheosis of Washington.” Finally, to circle back to where we began, even the British North America Act of 1867—which performatively ushered the dominion of Canada into existence—authorizes itself though an appeal to “Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal.”48 Lincoln would like to treat the distinctions between myth and history, eternal and temporal, and non-empirical and empirical as if they were homologous to the distinction between religious and nonreligious; however, the latter distinction—at least on its colloquial use—is not at all homologous to the others. And were we to extend to word “religion” to cover all discourses that appeal to nonempirical matters, the term would absorb many if not most of those discourses colloquially called nonreligious. If just about all discourses make appeals to non-empirical idealized or imagined entities—even those antireligious, scientific discourses ostensibly opposed to appeals to non-empirical entities—then the distinction between religious and nonreligious discourses largely begins to look like just another mundane authorizing technique designed to separate an “us” from a “them.”

Conclusion I have argued, first, that apparently nonreligious discourses serve the same social function as so-called religious discourses: to differentiate insiders from outsiders and to disparage the latter or encourage sentiments of estrangement or antipathy toward them. Second, I have argued that those apparently nonreligious discourses are almost always guilty of the same appeals to transcendence or non-empirical entities for which they condemn religious discourses. As such, these “nonreligious” discourses are “religious” on their own terms. If that is the case, the distinction between religious and nonreligious discourses is socially useful for demonizing others but not particularly analytically useful for scholarship. Like the early anthropologists’ distinction between primitive and advanced societies, this differentiation is useful only to the extent to which it mystifies the similarities across the entities it divides. Although the title of this chapter draws attention to the “myth of religion’s uniqueness,” in a way it is really about appeals to science’s uniqueness. For Lincoln, Tyson, and Dawkins, “religion” is a foil over and against which they can normatively defend the uniqueness and authority of their own discourses. While I fully agree with Lincoln that those discourses we colloquially call religious function to authorize social

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boundaries, I’m unpersuaded that his discourse escapes the same orbit. This chapter could just as well have been titled “On the Myth of Science’s Uniqueness.” It does not follow from this that all discourses are equivalent or equally subjective (depending on how one defines the latter term). On the contrary, from my perspective there are many good reasons to accept modern, scientific cosmologies as more authoritative than creationism or theories of intelligent design. Likewise, I can think of many good reasons to accept the claims of climate change scientists over those of climate change deniers. However, our reasons for differentiating them must be more sophisticated than simply calling the latter religious. We are right to be suspicious of those so-called religious discourses that function to differentiate and demonize, but sophistication requires us to avoid falling into the trap of superficially demonizing such discourses ourselves. We can abandon the terms “primitive” and “advanced” and simultaneously hold that there are other, less normative and more useful analytical distinctions to be made between nations. What other distinctions might be useful is beyond the scope of this chapter; here my purpose was narrowly to argue that the distinction between religious and nonreligious is too problematic to be useful for the academic study of human culture broadly. My focus throughout this chapter has been consistently on the function rather than the content of the discourses at hand. Despite the fact that the war museum’s discourse invokes no transcendental or non-empirical content, it functions to differentiate insiders from outsiders in ways very similar to those discourses Lincoln classifies as “religious.” Despite the fact that Tyson and Dawkins distinguish their so-called scientific discourses from what they identify as “religious” discourses, and although I have shown that they both appeal to transcendental or non-empirical content along the way, what is most interesting to me is that their claims function similarly to the “religious” discourses from which they would like to distinguish themselves. In addition, Dawkins’ rhetoric is arguably just as Manichaean as Bush and bin Laden’s rhetoric, functioning to divide an “us” from a “them” and to present the latter as evil or beyond redemption. While my claims are perhaps against the letter of Lincoln’s writings, I  would argue that they are nevertheless completely within the spirit of his writings (and, note, in making such a distinction I’m projecting a “spirit” onto Lincoln’s writings that transcends the literal, empirical text). In Holy Terrors Lincoln wanted to draw attention to how both Bush’s and bin Laden’s discourses “constructed a Manichean struggle, where Sons of Light confront Sons of Darkness,” discourses that functioned to demonize each’s opponents. To draw attention to this, Lincoln laid out a stipulative definition whereby we could classify both as “religious,” insofar as they both appeal to transcendent sources of authority—thus seeing them as more similar than different and thereby encouraging critical comparison. From my perspective, however, on such a broad definition it would follow that almost all of human discourses are religious, and thus the term would be vacant of analytical usefulness. In my opinion, we would gain little insight by classifying Tyson’s and Dawkins’s seemingly “scientific,” “nonreligious,” or “antireligious” rhetoric as falling within the boundaries of “religion,” even if they appeal to non-empirical content—we would end up, as the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel put it, with a night in which all cows are black. By contrast, I think it would be far more useful to deploy narrower categories that draw attention to the functions of

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discourse rather than its content, categories such as authorizing, legitimating, othering, demonizing, mystifying, naturalizing, essentializing, and so on—and this is, at bottom, what I think Lincoln most wanted to draw attention to, despite his use of a substantive definition of religion that emphasized the content of discourse. As David Kertzer argues in his book on social and political ritual, the distinction between “religious” and “nonreligious” culture “is more of a hindrance than a help in understanding” how these forms of culture function.49 As Erin Roberts notes in the introduction to this volume, the social theory assumed by the collaborators takes “religious” discourses to be “mundane” techniques that function to authorize social formations. I would add that there’s nothing more mundane than appealing to the supramundane, and that therefore there’s little analytical usefulness to distinguishing between the mundane and the supramundane. Arguably, following Lincoln’s and Roberts’s direction would lead us away from “religion” and toward other, more careful and less normative analytical distinctions.

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Notes Introduction: Myth, Our Bloodless Battleground Thank you to Jennifer Eyl, Craig Martin, and Russell McCutcheon for their incisive critiques on previous drafts, and to Craig Martin again for allowing me to use his imagery of myth as a “bloodless battleground” for the title of this chapter; Craig Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017), 116. 1 Eusebius, Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine) 3.25–51 narrates Constantine’s building campaign in Palestine and other Eastern provinces as well as Helena’s travels to these regions; Helena’s divinely guided discovery of the “true cross” may be found in a number of ancient sources, including Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiastica (Church History) X.7–8; Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 2 Kathryn M. Rudy, “A Guide to Mental Pilgrimage: Paris, Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal Ms. 212,” Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte, 63, no. 4 (2000): 494–497. 3 Kathryn M. Rudy, “Fragments of a Mental Journey to a Passion Park,” in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting and Manuscript Illumination, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne S. Korteweg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 405–419; Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 Burke O. Long, Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003); Wharton, Selling Jerusalem. 5 Ken Ham, Twitter posts, July 18, 2017, 1:45 a.m., 1:46 a.m., 1:49 a.m., 2:17 a.m., http:// twitter.com/aigkenham. 6 Ken Ham, “Rainbow Lights at the Ark,” Ken Ham Blog, December 20, 2016, https:// answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2016/12/20/rainbow-lights-at-ark/ (accessed July 27, 2017). He initially voiced his concerns about the colors of the rainbow being implicated with “the gay and lesbian movement” in 2007, in Ken Ham, “Taking Back the Rainbow,” Answers Magazine, March 27, 2007, last featured August 22, 2015, https://answersingenesis.org/the-flood/taking-back-the-rainbow/ (accessed July 27, 2017). He continued to publish articles on the same topic and was especially vehement about his cause in June 2015, when the White House was lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges. 7 Ham, “Rainbow Lights at the Ark.” 8 Sarah Moczygemba, “Whose Symbol Is It Anyway? The Rainbow in Public Space,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion (blog), July 25, 2017, https://bulletin.equinoxpub. com/2017/07/whose-symbol-is-it-anyway-the-rainbow-in-public-space/ (accessed January 13, 2018). 9 Paola Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher, “MoMA | MoMA Acquires the Rainbow Flag,” Inside/Inside Out, A MoMA/MoMA PS1 Blog, June 17, 2015, https://www. moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/06/17/moma-acquires-the-rainbow-flag/

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(accessed January 13, 2018). An audio recording of the interview may be found in Maria Popova, “MoMA Acquires the Rainbow Flag as a Design Icon: A Conversation with the Artist Who Made It,” Brain Pickings (blog), June 18, 2015, https://www. brainpickings.org/2015/06/18/moma-rainbow-flag-gilbert-baker-paola-antonelli/ (accessed January 14, 2018). 10 Antonelli and Fisher, “MoMA Acquires the Rainbow Flag” (emphasis in original). 11 Moczygemba, “Whose Symbol Is It Anyway?” 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Antonelli and Fisher, “MoMA Acquires the Rainbow Flag.” 16 Ibid. (emphasis in original). 17 James J. Ferrigan, “The Evolution and Adoption of the Rainbow Flag in San Francisco,” Flag Bulletin, no. 130 (1989): 116–122. 18 Antonelli and Fisher, “MoMA Acquires the Rainbow Flag.” 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ham, “Taking Back the Rainbow.” 22 Russell T. McCutcheon, “Myth,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Continuum, 2000), 200. 23 Ham, “Rainbow Lights at the Ark” (emphasis added). 24 2 Pet. 3:10, NRSV: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.” 25 Ham, “Taking Back the Rainbow.” 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.; Ezek. 1:26-28, NRSV: “And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around; and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of someone speaking.” Rev. 4:2-3, NRSV: “At once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and carnelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald.” 28 Ibid. (emphasis added); Jn 10:9, NRSV: “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” 29 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17–18. 30 My analysis follows ibid., 19–23. 31 Odyssey 8.479–481, as translated in Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 20. 32 Kathryn A. Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Whether it was in fact Plato who enacted this final move (or whether there even was a final, definitive move at all) is beside the point; the important thing is that scholars credit Plato—and the Phaedrus in particular—as the tipping point for the power of the poets. 33 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 3–43; McCutcheon, “Myth,” 191–193.

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34 Phaedrus 265b. 35 It is of course more complicated than this, for Plato and others who participated in the exclusion of the poets intentionally appropriated myth into their own works; Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. 36 Ibid., 45. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 18. 37 Including F. Max Müeller, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang, Edward Tylor, and James Frazer. 38 Viewing myth as narrative that embellishes heroes is commonly known as “Euhemerism”; McCutcheon, “Myth,” 193–194. 39 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 70. 40 Ibid., 50–54. 41 McCutcheon, “Myth,” 194–195. 42 Ibid., 195–196. 43 Ibid., 196. 44 Ibid., 196–197. 45 Ibid., 197–198. 46 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 101. 47 McCutcheon, “Myth,” 199. 48 Smith, To Take Place, 101. 49 Ibid., 102. 50 Roland Barthes, Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, 2nd edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 219–226. 51 Bruce Lincoln, Between History and Myth: Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 113–119. 52 Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 116 (emphasis in original). 53 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. 54 Ibid., 2. 55 Ibid., 2–3. 56 Douglas R. Egerton, “The Long, Troubled History of Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church,” New Republic, June 18, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/122070/longtroubled-history-charlestons-emanuel-ame-church (accessed August 14, 2017). 57 Ibid. 58 Burton L. Mack, Christian Mentality: The Entanglements of Power, Violence and Fear (London: Equinox Publishing, 2011), 27. 59 D. Travers Scott, “Reconciling Hall with Discourse, Written in the Shadows of ‘Confederate’ and Rainbow Flags,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33, no. 5 (December 2016): 433. 60 Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ in the History of Early Christianity,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 23, no. 3–4 (2011): 238–256; Stanley K. Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals and Power: Paul and the Corinthians,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller, 105–149 Early Christianity and Its Literature 5 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). 61 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 62 Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 22–24.

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63 Ibid., 23 (emphasis added). 64 Ibid. 65 For further nuance about the category of history, especially as certain forms of it shade into myth, see Lincoln, Between History and Myth, 113–119. 66 Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 23. 67 James S. Bielo, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 68 Mack, Christian Mentality, 25. Although Mack agrees with Lincoln on many fronts, his definition of myth emphasizes social interest more explicitly than it does authority. Another difference of emphasis lies is Mack’s focus on the “mythic world,” which he consistently describes as fictional and imaginary, even when referring to narratives about the past. 69 Burton L. Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social Theory of Religion (London: Routledge, 2014), 74. 70 Ibid., 52–72. 71 Mack, Christian Mentality, 1–2. 72 Ibid., 21–23. 73 Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation, 78. 74 Peter J. Reilly, “Ark Encounter Local Tax Scandal Not Very Scandalous,” Forbes, July 25, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2017/07/25/ark-encounter-localtax-scandal-not-very-scandalous/ (accessed January 13, 2018); Lizzie Wade, “Can the Museum of the Bible Overcome the Sins of the Past?” Science | AAAS, October 16, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/can-museum-bible-overcome-sinspast (accessed January 13, 2018). 75 McCutcheon, “Myth,” 202.

1  The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America 1 Steve Green, “Foreword” in Jeremiah J. Johnston, Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017), 12. 2 Steve Green and Jackie Green, This Dangerous Book: How the Bible Has Shaped Our World and Why It Still Matters Today (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 165. For an example of the rhetoric of facts, see ibid., 18. 3 See Jill Hicks-Keeton, “The Museum of Whose Bible?: On the Perils of Turning Theology into History,” Ancient Jew Review, January 24, 2018. Available online: http:// www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/1/24/the-museum-of-whose-bible-on-theperils-of-turning-theology-into-history (accessed January 24, 2018). While Candida Moss and Joel Baden wrote before MOTB opened, they carefully interrogated the “non-sectarian” and “just the facts” rhetoric of its spokespeople and traveling preexhibits (Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017]). 4 Greg Dickinson, Brian Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 3, no. 1 (2006): 27–47. 5 Green, Dangerous Book. While Steve and his wife Jackie Green are both listed as authors, in this chapter I refer to Steve Green as the author. His voice seems to be the default one, with Jackie Green’s tending to be marked in sections about the

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Bible’s relevance for their family and her support of her husband (e.g., 58–59, 64–70, 126–139). Ibid., 74–76, 145–151. Green repeatedly lists such examples (ibid., 145–154, 156–161, 188–193, 216–217). Ibid., 219. Ibid., 227. Decline rhetoric surfaces in Green’s book (e.g., ibid., 41, 156–167). For a sampling of studies about decline rhetoric in Evangelical culture, see Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 153–181; Leslie Dorrough Smith, Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Daniel Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 80–88, 89–90, 120–121, 175–177, 181–184. For the quote, see Green, Dangerous Book, 148. For a discussion of Evangelicals representing religion, and especially Christianity or “Judeo-Christian principles,” as an inherent societal good—and even a “glue” or “foundation” for a healthy society—see Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 162–66; Stephen Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 88–102, 106–116, 120–130, 147; Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 15–16, 27, 30–31, 51, 58–94, 130–142. Evangelicals are not unique in presenting religion or Christianity as an inherent societal good. This is common among liberal Protestants (Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, 88–94). For critical analysis of a similar phenomenon among scholars of religion and within political discourses, see Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 12, 16, 25–26, 35–39, 42–48, 52–53, 61–64; Monica Miller and Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, “Habits of the Heart: Youth Religious Participation as Progress, Peril, or Change?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 637 (2011): 78–98. This strand runs through Green’s book as the stated motivation for establishing MOTB (Dangerous Book, 218–219, 226–229). Moss and Baden have synthesized other materials from Green to illustrate such social and political goals coordinated with promoting the biblical foundations of the United States and subsequent decline (Bible Nation, 13, 27–28, 99, 102–103, 131–132, 138, 151–153, 164, 182–183). On the alignment between Evangelical cultural production—particularly about decline—with consumer capitalism, American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and patriarchal heteronormativity, see, e.g., Dowland, Family Values; Curtis Evans, “White Evangelical Protestant Responses to the Civil Rights Movement,” Harvard Theological Review, 102, no. 2 (2009): 245–273; Fred Fejes, “Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic: The 1954 Media Campaign against Miami’s Homosexuals and the Discourse of Civic Betterment,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 9, no. 3 (2000): 305–347; R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017), xi, 75, 83–120, 110–120; Sara Moslener, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–3, 5, 8–10, 15, 17–18, 22–23, 77–108; Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 11, 261, 286–288, 290, 295.

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14 Dowland, Family Values, 6, 9–13, 19, 39–48; Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 155, 166–81; Janet Jakobsen, “Why Sexual Regulation?: Family Values and Social Movements,” in God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life, ed. K. M. Sands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104–123; Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 26, 30, 49, 51, 98, 152–153. 15 Timothy Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 3–5. See also Dowland, Family Values, 11–19. 16 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure; Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Sutton, American Apocalypse, 232–366. 17 It has become a commonplace in religious studies to note the Protestant ideological genealogy of defining religion in terms of “belief ” or “faith.” For a classic articulation of this point, see Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27–54. 18 The subordination of “debate among historians” to the plain facts of Washington’s (Protestant Christian) religion aligns with prevalent polemical discourses in Evangelical culture about skeptical academics who pursue their secularizing agendas without regard to the plain facts or primary sources for history, which faithful academics or Christian leaders prize instead. For example, “In contrast, consider how many in the scholarly world routinely make strong statements not based on sourced facts but based solely on their own personal agenda” (Green, Dangerous Book, 165). For recent interrogations of such Evangelical discourses, see Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and, at a more popular level, Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 8–10, 61–96, 233–236. 19 For Green, the Bible contains one, single story that culminates in Jesus, Protestant Christianity, and America (Dangerous Book, 42, 45, 51, 52–57, 100, 108, 142, 165, 222). He also treats this story as his (or “our,” if including the voice of Jackie Green) story, which is also the story of the creation of MOTB (ibid., 17, 40, 228–229). 20 For example, while also a normative-theological study, Christian Smith’s sociological analysis of Evangelical “Biblicism” and “Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism” illustrates these facets of Evangelical culture (The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011]). 21 For discussion of Evangelical positions about inerrancy, as well as how interrogating inerrancy within Evangelical intellectual culture is a fruitful lens for analyzing Evangelical knowledge production and social-institutional networks, see Worthen, Apostles of Reason; and also see my article, “Protective Strategies and the Prestige of the ‘Academic’: A Religious Studies and Practice Theory Redescription of Evangelical Inerrantist Scholarship,” Biblical Interpretation, 23, no. 1 (2015): 1–35. 22 Green illustrates this phenomenon (Dangerous Book, 207). See also Josh McDowell’s apologetics handbook (current version: New Evidence that Demands a Verdict: Evidence I and II, Fully Updated in One Volume to Answer Questions Challenging Christians in the 21st Century [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999]), which decisively shaped apologetic discourses about inerrancy and biblical exceptionalism. It is common for current day apologetics to reproduce not simply the arguments, examples, and methods from McDowell (e.g., Green, Dangerous Book, 106–7,

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113–114), but even his accompanying cultural references from the 1970s through early 1990s. 23 Such analytical points about museums are widespread. For particularly relevant examples, Victoria Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2, no. 2 (1999): 304–308, 315–317; Stephen King, “Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums: Constructive Authenticity and the Primitive Blues Subject,” Southern Journal of Communication, 71, no. 3 (2006): 237–241; See also Greg Dickinson, Brian Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication, 69, no. 1 (2005): 85–108. 24 Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation,” 304–305; King, “Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums,” 235, 237–247. 25 For example, Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For further discussion of theoretical resources in religious studies about mythmaking and social formation beyond my brief, schematic comments below, see Erin Roberts’s introduction to this volume. 26 Russell T. McCutcheon, “Myth,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (New York: Cassell, 2000), 199–200 (emphasis original). 27 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 149. 28 McCutcheon, “Myth,” 204 (emphasis original). 29 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2–3. 30 See the similar points Casey Kelly and Kristen Hoerl make about the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum (“Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum,” Argumentation and Advocacy, 48, no. 1 [2012]: 124–127). 31 Bruce Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. R. Greenberg, B. W. Ferguson, and S. Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 131–132. 32 Ibid., 131; capitalization original. It is worth noting that most of the studies of museums with which I theorize here either implicitly or explicitly treat them as “texts” to be analyzed (Dickinson, Ott, Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering,” 29; Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 127–128). While I demur from the post-structuralist distillation of reality down to texts or discourses, I would argue that we could retheorize in terms of practices, space, and the circulation or activation of discourses through practices and achieve much of the same analytical payoff. Thus I retain some of the textual, rhetorical language from museum studies in my own analysis. 33 Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 126–128. 34 Sharon Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition: An Introduction to the Politics of Display,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. S. Macdonald (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1. Tamar Katriel explicates similar points about heritage or history museums as “important arenas for cultural production and ideological assertion” in the “compelling culturally legitimating idiom” of museums and the auras of history or factuality (“Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80, no. 1 [1994]: 1, 5). 35 Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power,” 3. 36 Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 126. See also King, “Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums,” 237–239.

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37 This is how Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki explicate their similar analysis of the Buffalo Bill Museum (“Memory and Myth,” 87). It is also worth noting that the purpose of interrogating the interconnections between MOTB and the Greens is not most basically an attempt to discredit MOTB through guilt by (conservative Evangelical) association. For an example of this misguided critique of scholars such as Moss and Baden, see Diana Mui Appelbaum, “Who’s Afraid of the Museum of the Bible?” Mosaic, January 2, 2018. Available online: https://mosaicmagazine. com/essay/2018/01/whos-afraid-of-the-museum-of-the-bible/ (accessed January 8, 2018). 38 This develops Lincoln’s points above about mythmaking as something not only available for validating an existing order of society (Discourse and the Construction of Society, 2–3) and also adapts Tony Bennett’s argument that while museums often “functioned as instruments of a conservative hegemony in helping to maintain the existing social order,” many museum administrators have been “liberal reformers who, far from espousing a commitment to the status quo, valued museums for the contributions they might make in facilitating an ordered and regulated transformation of the existing social order” (“Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility and the Social Order,” in Politics of Display, ed. S. Macdonald, [New York: Routledge, 1998], 26). In the case of MOTB, we could theorize with Bennett to redescribe Green as a reformer seeking a decidedly capitalistic and “Judeo-Christian” transformation, or perhaps intensification, of the existing social order. 39 See especially, Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation,” 304, 307–308, 315–318. 40 Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering,” 29. 41 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. R. Greenberg, B. W. Ferguson, and S. Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 71–73, 74. 42 Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering,” 29–30, 35–40. On national mythmaking that involves such tacit acknowledgment while also disavowal or suppression of the conquest of indigenous peoples, see Kay Anderson and Mona Domosh, “North American Spaces/Postcolonial Stories,” Cultural Geographies, 9, no. 1 (2002): 126. 43 Brian Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8, no. 3 (2011): 216–217. 44 This is a nearly ubiquitous point in secondary literature: for example, Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17– 105; Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 126–128; Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power,” 1; Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns,” 218; Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger, Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 22. 45 Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 7, see also 7–25. 46 Ibid., 5–7; Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power,” 1–3. 47 Katriel, “Sites of Memory,” 6; see also 12. 48 Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 127–129. 49 On the rhetoric of disinterest, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press). On the premise of appearance of separation from power and politics, see Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power,” 2. On glass cases creating the misimpression of transparency

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50 51

52 53

54 55

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

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through decontextualizing objects, Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns,” 217. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction. New and Updated Version (New York: Verso, 2007), 40. For discussion of classic American exceptionalist creeds and national mythmaking— and specifically their contours of white legitimacy, capitalism, and the idea of national superiority and progress—see Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Exceptionalism, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 16– 79; Meghana Nayak and Christopher Malone, “American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony,” International Studies Review, 11 (2009): 259–260, 263–271. I specify partially linear since at each point the visitor can choose between attending to any number of exhibits. Exhibits surround the space such that one would have to backtrack or constantly turn around to engage everything. These points have become basic in the study of narrative, media, rhetoric, and communications. Thus, aside from the discussion above of mythmaking and museums, see, for example, a classic piece from media studies: Stuart Hall, “The Narrative Construction of Reality: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Southern Review, 17, no. 1 (1984): 3–17. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Memory and Myth,” 90; see also Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation,” 306. On the relevance of how a visitor moves through a museum, and thus exhibit ordering and (even partial) linearity, for their material mythmaking, see Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Memory and Myth”; John Lynch, “ ‘Prepare to Believe’: The Creation Museum as Embodied Conversion Narrative,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 16, no. 1 (2013): 5–7, 15–19; Trollinger and Trollinger, Righting America, 20–25, 148–191. From Lynch’s analysis of the Creation Museum (“Prepare to Believe,” 6–7). From Bennett’s theorizing about museums (“Exhibitionary Complex,” 74; see also idem, Birth of the Museum, 95–98, 177–245). For a brilliant analysis of how individual exhibits metonymically reinforce a museum’s “master narrative,” see Katriel, “Sites of Memory,” 10–12. For discussion of the Angola seminary and Evangelical prison education phenomenon, see Derek Jeffreys, “The Christian Agenda behind Inmate Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 30, 2017. Available online: https://www.chronicle. com/article/The-Christian-Agenda-Behind/239904 (accessed January 13, 2018). Again, see Green, Dangerous Book, 42, 45, 51–57, 100, 108, 165, 222. For interrogation of this facet of MOTB, see Hicks-Keeton, “Museum of Whose Bible.” Moss and Baden critically anticipate this facet of MOTB (Bible Nation, 146–150). Katriel, “Sites of Memory,” 4, 5, 13. Green frequently mobilizes such discourses (e.g., Dangerous Book, 18, 72–78; see also his own discussion of attacks on the Bible in terms of these discourses, 198–209). Bibliography on Evangelical rhetoric about secular humanism and worldviews is immense; see, for example, Dowland, Family Values, 30–34; Worthen, Apostles of Reason. In relation to the Greens and MOTB, see Moss and Baden, Bible Nation, 102–3. Green, “Foreword,” 12–13. Ibid., 13–14. Bibliography on discourse about liberty or religious freedom in Evangelical culture, its productivity for enacting their ideologies, and associations with promoting capitalism and American exceptionalism is vast. For a sampling, see Elizabeth Castelli, “Praying

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for the Persecuted Church: US Christian Activism in the Global Arena,” Journal of Human Rights, 4, no. 3 (2005): 321–324, 330, 332–334; Dowland, Family Values, 9–10, 19, 30–48; Kruse, One Nation under God; Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2016), 91–98. On the paths between American exceptionalist discourses and capitalism (and antisocialism/communism), see Lieven, America Right or Wrong; Nayak and Malone, “American Exceptionalism,” 267. For Green on the Bible, America, and religious freedom, see Dangerous Book, 53, 72–76, 145–154. 67 See the rich discussions of Dickinson, Ott, Aoki (“Spaces of Remembering,” 29–31, 35–40) and especially Gallagher (“Memory and Reconciliation,” 307, 315–318). See also Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Memory and Myth,” 102–103; Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns,” 216–217, 219–223, 227–231. 68 For a discussion, which informed my analysis, of how the Plains Indian Museum packages memory about the violent conquest of Native Americans in a way that “privileges forgetting over remembering” for the purposes of mythmaking about nationalist progress, see Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering,” 38–42. 69 For example, George Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 4, 8, 43–45, 54, 62–64, 73–74, 79. For related discussion of how various Southern theologians, ministers, and leaders interpreted the Bible, the Confederacy, slavery, and God’s plans, see Stephen Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–174; Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1–94. 70 Speech accessible: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/ cornerstone-speech/. 71 For example, Green, “For the most part, [the US founders] built this nation from a biblical worldview. Imagine if our country’s founders had a Hindi, Muslim, or atheistic worldview. Our nation would look much different” (Dangerous Book, 148). On the “worldview” and no-neutral-presuppositions rhetoric pervading Evangelical culture, see Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 22–23, 27–32, 54, 59, 84–87, 122–123, 201– 228, 249–253, 261–265. On the interfaces between Green/MOTB and such worldview rhetoric, see Moss and Baden, Bible Nation, 14–15, 102–103. 72 On the dynamics of narrative constructing stories/realities that foreclose space to enter or interrupt with critical questions, see Hall, “Narrative Construction of Reality,” 4–5. 73 For examples of the straightforward relationship between such version of freedom and equality and the Bible in Evangelical cognitive landscape, see Green, Dangerous Book, 145–154. 74 Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns,” 216–217. 75 Green, Dangerous Book, 15, 76, 207. For analysis of this rhetoric by Green and spokespeople of MOTB, see Moss and Baden, Bible Nation, 150–152, 161–162. 76 For such analysis of museum mythmaking, see Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering,” 36. 77 Davi Johnson, “Psychiatric Power: The Post-Museum as a Site of Rhetorical Alignment,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 5, no. 4 (2008): 346, 350– 356. The reader may note that Johnson is theorizing in particular with Foucault’s ideas about “governmentality.” 78 Ibid., 346, 350–354.

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2  The Materiality of Myth: Authorizing Fundamentalism at Ark Encounter 1 Susan F. Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2 Ibid., 223. 3 Ibid., 224. 4 Ibid., 88. 5 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147. 6 I use the term “poetics” in the linguistic anthropology tradition of a “network of interrelated tropes, or rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive figures and conventions.” See Aaron Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 29. 7 The methodological details of this fieldwork were unconventional and not always ideal. I was not granted complete access to the team’s creative labor. I had to arrange each fieldwork visit weeks ahead of time. Throughout the research period (October 2011– June 2014), planned visits were canceled or rescheduled by the team on numerous occasions, often with little advance notice. Ultimately, I logged ~125 hours at the design studio. My primary forms of data collection were observing and interviewing the artists while they worked at their cubicles and recording team meetings. Because the offices were filled with concept art and other forms of material culture tied to their creative labor, I relied heavily on fieldwork photography (with a cache of more than 750 jpeg images). I also audio-recorded semi-structured interviews with each team member. The Ark Encounter website has also been a valuable data source, in particular the project blog that provides publicity-oriented updates on the team’s progress and arguments in support of creationist historical claims. I supplemented this fieldwork and textual archive with numerous visits to the Creation Museum, observations at other AiG events, and observations at other materializing the Bible sites. From September 2014 through February 2016, I interviewed nine committed creationists who planned to visit the park during its opening season. 8 John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1961). 9 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 10 Matthew Engelke, God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xv. 11 Peter G. Stromberg, Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 12 Dan Phelps, “Kentucky Gets an Ark-Shaped Second Creation ‘Museum,’ ” National Center for Science Education (2016). Available online: ncse.com/library-resource/ kentucky-gets-ark-shaped-second-creation-museum (accessed January 9, 2018). 13 I highlight Phelps’s self-authored experience at the park because it is the most extensive treatment of the park from a skeptic’s standpoint that is available. His engagement with the park should not be mistaken as the only way in which the hermeneutic of suspicion can be performed. As noted, he clearly identifies as someone working to delegitimize AiG’s claims to public legitimacy. However, as a committed

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skeptic, his approach to Ark Encounter can fairly stand in for others who reject creationism on scientific grounds. Certainly, a detailed ethnography of consumption is necessary to capture the range of standpoints that fall outside of committed creationism: from skeptics to progressive Christians who reject creationism on theological as well as scientific grounds. 14 Dan Phelps, “The Anti-Museum,” National Center for Science Education (2007). Available online: ncse.com/library-resource/anti-museum-overview-review-answersgenesis-creation-museum (accessed January 9, 2018). 15 Phelps, “Kentucky Gets an Ark-Shaped Second Creation ‘Museum.’ ” 16 In his 1675 book, Arca Noe, Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was the first to calculate the logistical details of a literal reading of the Noah story—such as the number of stalls, beasts, snakes, birds, and how the animals were cared for while onboard. See Janet Brown, “Noah’s Flood, the Ark, and the Shaping of Early Modern Natural History,” in When Science and Christianity Meet, ed. D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 111–138. 17 Phelps, “Kentucky Gets an Ark-Shaped Second Creation ‘Museum.’ ” 18 Christopher P. Toumey, God’s Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 19 James S. Bielo, Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 20 Melani McAlister, “What Is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere,” American Literary History, 20, no. 4 (2008): 870–895. 21 Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 22 See Roberts, this volume. 23 Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 62. 24 Kary D. Smout, “Attacking (Southern) Creationists,” in Religion in the Contemporary South: Diversity, Community, and Identity, ed. O. K. White, Jr. and D. White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 59–66. 25 Ibid., 60. 26 Chris Rojek, “An Outline of the Action Approach to Leisure Studies,” Leisure Studies, 24, no. 1 (2005): 24.

3  Rival Epistemologies and Constructed Confusion at the Creation Museum 1 For a comprehensive analysis of the museum see Steven M. Watkins, “An Analysis of the Creation Museum: Hermeneutics, Language, and Information Theory.” PhD diss., University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, (2014); Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Julie Anne Duncan, “Faith Displayed as Science: The Role of the ‘Creation Museum’ in the Modern American Creationist Movement.” BA honors thesis, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, 2009). 2 YEC is one of several creationist positions. It is the most literal and extreme of creationist viewpoints as it insists that the earth was created only 6,000 years ago in a 6-day divine fiat.

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3 Lincoln, for example, identifies authority as that which separates myth from other types of narrative like fable, legend, and history. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–24. 4 See Stephen T. Asma, “Risen Apes and Fallen Angels: The New Museology of Human Origins,” Curator, 54, no. 2 (2011): 141–163; Jill Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Trollinger and Trollinger, Righting America. 5 As of early 2018, entrance to the museum is $30 per adult. Ticket prices include the museum only; the planetarium, zip line, and petting zoo rides are additional fees. 6 Ken Ham, The Lie: Evolution/Millions of Years, rev. edition (Green Forest: Master Books, 2012): 24 [emphasis mine]. 7 Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 8 IT is also sometimes referred to as “communication theory” because, at the most basic level, information is always essential in any form of communication—whether such communication is digital or mathematical code or an individual reading a newspaper. See Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventure in the Simple and the Complex (New York: W. H. Freeman & Company, 1994); John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, 2nd revised edition (1961; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1980), 24. 9 Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (1948): 379–423 (July) and 623–656 (October). 10 Shannon’s interest in information related to computer 1–0 coding and the dynamics of computational models in mathematics. Even early on, Shannon saw that informational dynamics had wide-reaching implications for research in an undetermined number of fields from the sciences to social sciences. Referring to IT and its implications, Shannon writes: “The word ‘information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field.” Claude E. Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: I. E. E. E. Press, 1993), 180. 11 Neil Johnson, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 3–4. 12 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 9. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, 195–232. 15 Ibid., 207. 16 Trollinger and Trollinger, Righting America, 115–133. 17 A virtual tour of Starting Points is available online: Answers in Genesis, https:// creationmuseum.org/creation-science/lucy/ (accessed January 8, 2018).

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18 The Creation Museum, “Lucy the Ape” is available online: https://creationmuseum. org/creation-science/lucy/ (accessed July 10, 2017). 19 Answers in Genesis, Men in White, (Hebron, KY: Answers in Genesis, 2007), DVD. 20 Trollinger and Trollinger, Righting America, 152. 21 Stevenson, Sensational Devotion, 140. 22 Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 24. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 See, for example, Robert N. McCauley, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science: Why Science Doesn’t Make (Common) Sense (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). CM’s arguments against science point to the practices that actually make science so rigorous and impressive; the self-correcting nature of science strives to catch and discard bunk theories, mistakes, and to explain anomalies. 27 Ham, The Lie, 82. 28 Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) was an Irish clergyman who famously calculated the time of creation at 6:00 PM on October 22, 4004 BCE. He constructed this date through adding all of the biblical genealogies back to Adam and Eve. A reprinted copy of his book, James Ussher, The Annals of the World, ed. Rev. Larry and Marrion Pierce (Green Forest: Master Books, 2003), is sold at the Creation Museum bookstore. 29 Ham, The Lie, 24. 30 See Ella Butler, “God Is in the Data: Epistemologies of Knowledge at the Creation Museum,” Ethnos, 75, no. 3 (2010): 229–251. 31 In my interviews of staff at CM, not a single informant identified as Catholic. One of my standard opening questions was, “What denomination or Christian tradition do you consider yourself to be a part of?” All informants identified as belonging to some variety of Protestantism. 32 An example of this struggle is offered, to some degree, in Men in White. Wendy had lost hope and a sense of meaning because she believed in evolution and “billions of years.” But the attack on God’s word today is formidable, perhaps greater than at any time in history. 33 For a scholarly account of this trial, see Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 34 Kitzmiller vs. Dover, Edwards vs. Aguillard, McLean vs. Arkansas, and so on. 35 While this chapter does not allow for a close examination of this issue, I would be remiss to ignore the racialization of godliness at CM. For example, in an exhibit titled Dig Site—early in the main exhibit—mannequins of two paleontologists are placed side by side as they look at the fossilized remains of a Utahraptor. The creationist paleontologist is a white, Anglo-Saxon male and the evolutionist has dark skin and black hair (possibly of Native American or South American descent). This coheres with the shiny white angels in Men in White, as opposed to the black-and-white and overwhelmingly negative scientists portrayed in the film. CM consistently portrays creationists as white, positive, good humored and supporters of evolution with darker skin, shrill voices, unflattering facial expressions and often captured in black and white (instead of color). The level of lighting is an explicit tactic by museum designers, whereas one would hope that skin color is coincidental. Given

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the consistency with which brightness and light overwhelmingly point to God and moral goodness throughout the museum, however, it is difficult to see how skin color would not be used symbolically. The museum’s curators consistently demonstrate that darkness descends on selective slices of the modern world which contain tragedy, suffering, death, and confusion. I suspect that the overwhelmingly white, middle to upper-middle class visitors do not consciously register these strategies of racializing godliness. I have seen stunningly few black, Hispanic, or Asian visitors in my eight years of research at CM—this is supported by colleagues who have also researched and written about the facility. Moreover, the inner city, as presented in Graffiti Alley, is the prime example of what happens when “The Modern World Abandons the Bible.” Dark, crime ridden, and graffiti covered, this scene is shown as the result of evolutionary science. It is no coincidence that the alley comes right after the Scopes exhibit. I hesitate to assume that a racialized presentation was intentional especially given that CM links racism with social Darwinism and eugenics—another result of evolutionary ideas. See Steve M. Watkins, “Eyewitness to the Debate: Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye,” Reports for the National Center for Science Education, 34, no. 2 (2014): 1–5. 36 Bernadette Barton, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 167. 37 Ibid., 168. 38 See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). Pinker’s book is a thorough look at the historical decline in all forms of violence on a global level. 39 Rosenhouse, a mathematician, has identified the advantages of simplicity in the YEC message which he describes as having “the virtues of simplicity and clarity.” Jason Rosenhouse, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Lines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 159. 40 Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1967; repr., Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1985), 129. 41 Ham, The Lie, 29. 42 Lincoln, Discourse, 24.

4  “It is what it is”: Mythmaking and Identity Formation on a Christian Zionist Tour of Israel 1 Don Verdean (2015) [Film] Dir. Jared Hess, USA: Lionsgate Premier. 2 For more on the history and uses of the jeremiad in American culture see: Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). For a discussion of its use in conservative religious contexts, see: Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 153–182; Sean Durbin, “ ‘I am an Israeli’: Christian Zionism as American Redemption,” Culture and Religion, 14, no. 3 (2013): 324–347. 3 The Jerusalem Summit included Faith Bible Chapel, as well as eight other pro-Israel church groups involved with CUFI. In addition to the individual tours that each group participated in, the broader summit included an “Israel Solidarity Rally,” where hundreds of pro-Israel Christians marched down the streets of Jerusalem waving American and Israeli flags; speeches by CUFI officials about the importance of Christian support for Israel; and, most notably, a private event that included a private address by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the touring Christians.

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4 The only reason I point out that our Israeli tour guide is not evangelical is because throughout the tour he collaborated with our pastors in advancing their truth claims about the prophetic significance of Israel and other Christian Zionist narratives. 5 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147. 6 Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 55. 7 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 143. 8 William E. Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 116. Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Relgion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 56. 9 For more on “religion” as a political category, see: Arnal and McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane. 10 Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 68. 11 Jackie Feldman, “Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee,” History and Memory, 23, no. 1 (2011): 66. 12 Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “3.3 Million Visitors to Israel in 2014,” available online: http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/PressRoom/2015/Pages/3-3-million-visitors-toIsrael-in-2014.aspx. (accessed January 17, 2017). 13 Ibid. 14 Feldman, “Abraham the Settler,” 66. See also: Timothy P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004); Donald Wagner, “Reagan and Begin, Bibi and Jerry: The Theopolitical Alliance of the Likud Party with the American Christian ‘Right,’ ” Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), 20, no. 4 (1998): 33–51. 15 Feldman, “Abraham the Settler,” 66. 16 Ibid. 17 Stephen Sizer, “Pilgrimages and Politics: A Survey of British Holy Land Tour Operators,” Living Stones Magazine, 14, no. 3 (1997): 14. 18 Faydra L. Shapiro, “ ‘Thank You Israel, for Supporting America’: The Transnational Flow of Christian Zionist Resources,” Identities, 19, no. 5 (2012): 617. 19 For more general overviews of contemporary Christian Zionism, see: Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Weber, On the Road to Armageddon. For some historical treatments of Christian support for Jews and the establishment of the State of Israel, see: Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, & the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 20 Hillary Kaell. Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York: NYU Press, 2014). 21 Faydra Shapiro notes similar traits among the Christian Zionists she studied: “the encounters with modern Israel had a much deeper effect on these active, committed Christians—seemingly ‘just’ tourism—than their visits to the more traditionally religious sites . . .. What seemed especially important to the visitors, what appeared to move them the most, were places and experiences associated with the modern,

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political state of Israel. It looked like tourism. It certainly looked ‘political’ and ‘secular’ rather than ‘religious’. Yet it was all of these at the same time.” See Faydra L. Shapiro, “To the Apple of God’s Eye: Christian Zionist Travel to Israel,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 23, no. 3 (2008): 310. 22 Robert Stearns, Watchmen on the Wall: A Practical Guide to Prayer for Jerusalem and Her People (Clarence, NY: Kairos Publishing, 2005). 23 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 209. 24 Miriam Rodlyn Park, “Introduction,” in Watchmen on the Wall: A Practical Guide to Prayer for Jerusalem and Her People, ed. Robert Stearns (Clarence, NY: Kairos Publishing, 2005), viii. 25 Feldman, “Abraham the Settler,” 67. 26 See also: Sean Durbin, “ ‘I Will Bless Those Who Bless You’: Christian Zionism, Fetishism, and Unleashing the Blessings of God,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 28, no. 3 (2013): 507–521. 27 For some primary literature outlining some of what counts as blessing/cursing Israel, and the consequences of both, see: John Hagee, In Defense of Israel (Lake Mary, FL: FrontLine, 2007); John Hagee, Financial Armageddon (Lake Mary, FL: FrontLine, 2008); John Hagee, Can America Survive? 10 Prophetic Signs That We Are in the Terminal Generation (New York: Howard Books, 2010); Mike Evans, Cursed: The Conspiracy to Divide Jerusalem (Phoenix: Time Worthy Books, 2010). 28 Author’s transcription. 29 See for example: Evans, Cursed. Recently, John Hagee, the founder and chairman of the lobby group CUFI—an organization in which the pastors I traveled with hold leadership roles—announced that reports of the Ebola virus in the United States was demonstrable proof that God intended to punish America for Obama’s attempt to “divide Jerusalem.” See: http://www.jpost.com/Christian-News/ChristianPastor-warns-Ebola-is-Gods-Punishment-for-Obama-dividing-Jerusalem-379207 (accessed January 17, 2017). And this goes for Israeli leaders as well: the stroke Ariel Sharon suffered after withdrawing Israeli settlers from Gaza, as well as Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by Yigal Amir after signing the Oslo Accords, are often spoken of as “obvious” examples of the ongoing reality of Gen. 12:3—misfortune and deaths were demonstrable curses incurred as a result of “dividing God’s land.” 30 Durbin, “I am an Israeli.” 31 Again, Roland Barthes’s work on myth helps clarify my argument. He writes: “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” Barthes, Mythologies, 143. 32 Smith, Imagining Relgion, 54–55. 33 Author’s transcription. Jerusalem, March, 2012. 34 Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 35 See also Jackie Feldman, “Constructing a Shared Bible Land: Jewish Israeli Guiding Performances for Protestant Pilgrims,” American Ethnologist, 34, no. 2 (2007): 351–374. 36 Author’s transcription. Jerusalem, March, 2012. 37 Ibid. 38 Russell T. McCutcheon, “ ‘They Licked the Platter Clean’: On the Co-Dependency of the Religion and the Secular,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 19, no. 3 (2007): 176.

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39 Author’s transcription. Jerusalem, March, 2012. 40 I have borrowed this idea from Bruce Lincoln’s description of the construction of authority, where he suggests that the discursive tactic of inviting divine vengeance in the presence of falsehood, along with the inevitable absence of such vengeance, has the discursive effect of producing a truth. Thus, the pastor’s suggestion that proper support for Israel brings God’s blessings effectively constituted those areas we had seen that were not “blessed” or developed as those which were against God. See: Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 110–111. 41 Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 92. 42 Author’s transcription. Jerusalem, March, 2012. 43 Ibid. 44 An additional subtext that is important to understand as part of this contestation of authenticity and identity is the contempt with which Christian Zionists hold Catholics and Protestants who do not place the same theological significance on contemporary Israel, and instead profess “replacement theology” whereby the church has replaced Israel as God’s chosen people. 45 Author’s transcription. Jerusalem, March, 2012. 46 Ibid.

5  “. . . that their heart might throb with love for Israel!”: Celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles with Charismatics and Messianic Jews in Jerusalem 1 As a German-born Hebrew speaker living in the United States, I blended in with the small white US American contingent (perhaps 10 percent), messianic Israelis, and especially the northern Europeans who once formed the classical constituency of the embassy. But as a white woman, I was in the minority in an increasingly non-white and majority charismatic audience. 2 “Mainstream” here includes all Jews who are not messianic. 3 Véronique Altglas, From Yoga to Kabbalah; Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13. 4 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 265. 5 “2016 Official Program; All the Families of the Earth; Feast of Tabernacles,” 32–33. 6 Most talks at the arena were simultaneously translated and streamed online at icej.org/ live. Attendees could also download the ICEJ Feast app from the Google Store, https:// play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app_feastoftabernacles.layout&hl=en. All websites in this chapter were accessed on January 8, 2018. 7 The program lists six women, twenty-nine men, and four heterosexual couples who spoke at the feast. 8 The Gush Etzion’s new light show in the Heritage Center opened in 2016. 9 ICEJ email of December 17, 2017, and “Hanukkah Immigrant Assistance; Bring Light and Hope to New Immigrants this Hanukkah Season!” 2018. Available online: https:// us.icej.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=77.

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10 “None of the people I met said they had any interaction with Arabs during their visit to Israel, except for the delegation of 20-something women from Samoa, who had befriended a Muslim woman at their hostel.” Emma Green, “White Evangelicals Used to Dominate Christian Zionism, but Not Anymore,” The Atlantic, October 20, 2017. 11 “2016 Official Program,” 11. 12 Ibid., 16. 13 Yaakov Ariel, “A Christian Fundamentalist Vision of the Middle East: Jan Willem van der Hoeven and the International Christian Embassy,” in Spokesmen for the Despised; Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, ed. R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 363–397; Eric Nelson Newberg, The Pentecostal Mission in Palestine; The Legacy of Pentecostal Zionism (Eugene: Pickwick, 2012), 165–212. 14 Email from David Parsons, January 3, 2018. 15 Noga Tarnopolsky, “Estate Sale on Jerusalem’s Hidden Mega Pastor, Lance Lambert,” Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2016. I have not found a scholarly appraisal of Lambert. 16 Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2006), 198. 17 For example, Matti Friedman, “A Journey of Faith, from Germany to Jerusalem,” Times of Israel, September 24, 2013. Available online: https://www.timesofisrael. com/a-journey-of-faith-from-germany-to-jerusalem/. 18 Manfred Gerstenfeld for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “Israel and Christians; Friends and Foes of the Jewish People. Interview of David Parsons, ICEJ Media Director,” 2010. Available online: https://int.icej.org/media/israeland-christians. 19 The ICEJ book store promotes books such as Jobst Bittner’s Breaking the Veil of Silence (Tübingen: TOS Publishing, 2013). 20 Gerstenfeld, “Israel and Christians.” 21 Malcolm Hedding Ministries, “Understanding Replacement Theology; The Dangers of False Teaching on Israel,” published in 2014. 22 Victor Turner, “Pilgrimage as Social Process,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 167–230; John Eade and Michael Sallnow, Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, 2nd edition (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2000). 23 “Feast of Tabernacles, About.” Available online: https://feast.icej.org/about. 24 For example, Tim Warner, “The Feasts of Israel.” Available online: http://www.pfrs. org/jewish/hr01.html. John Keegstra, God’s Prophetic Feasts. The Joy and Importance of Seasonal Celebrations (Jerusalem: Tsur Tsina Publications, 2012). 25 Howard and Rosenthal, Feasts of the Lord, 31. 26 Ibid., 14. 27 Ibid., 25–26; Zech. 12:9-10. 28 2 Chron. 6:32-33; Isa. 56.7; Mt. 21:13. 29 For example, in Barney Kasdan, God’s Appointed Times: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Celebrating the Biblical Holidays (Baltimore: Lederer Books, 1993), 100; Warner, “The Feasts of Israel”; Daniel Yahav, “Feast of Israel. ICEJ 2013.” CD. 30 For example, bMeg 31a. 31 Michael Fishbane (ed.), JPS Bible Commentary Haftarot (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 288. 32 For example, Kasdan, God’s Appointed Times, 96–99.

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33 For example, David Brickner, Christ in the Feast of Tabernacles (Chicago: Moody Press, 2006), 97; Mitch and Zhava Glaser, Fall Feasts of Israel (Chicago: Moody Press, 1987), 179–203; Ellwood McQuaid, The Outpouring: Jesus in the Feasts of Israel (Bellmawr: Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, 1990), 91–101. 34 Jn 4.13-14; mSukkah 4.9; Keegstra, God’s Prophetic Feasts. 35 mSukkah 5; Jn 8.12. 36 Six hymns in the Old Sabbatarian Hymnal are devoted to Sukkot, and there is an emphasis on charity toward the poor in the face of the approaching harsh Romanian winters which was of critical importance. Samuel Kohn, Sabbatharier in Siebenbürgen. Ihre Geschichte, Literatur und Dogmatik (Budapest: Singer und Wolfner, 1894), 95. 37 Kohn, Sabbatharier, 61, 67; Gábor Győrffy, Zoltán Tibori-Szabó, Júlia-Réka Vallasek, “Back to the Origins: The Tragic History of the Szekler Sabbatarians,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 20, no. 10 (2017): 1–20. 38 Andrew Manship, History of Gospel Tents and Experience (Philadelphia: self published, 1884), 57. 39 Victor Buksbazen, The Gospel in the Feasts of Israel (Bellmawr: The Friends of Israel Gospel Mission, 1954), 45–55; Philip Goble, Everything You Need to Know to Grow a Messianic Synagogue (South Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1974). Available online: http://www.afii.org/digitalibrary/0878084215.pdf. Among the many publications: Mitch and Zhava Glaser, Fall Feasts of Israel, 173–203; McQuaid, The Outpouring, 91–101; Kasdan, God’s Appointed Times, 100; Howard and Rosenthal, The Feasts of the Lord, 134–148; Brickner, Christ in the Feast of Tabernacles; Petra van der Zande, A Christian Guide to the Jewish Festival of Sukkot (Jerusalem: Tsur Tsina Publications, 2010); Keegstra, God’s Prophetic Feasts, 63–85; J. K. McKee, Moedim: The Appointed Times for Messianic Believers (Richardson: Messianic Apologetics, 2013), 21–22; Yahav, “Feast of Israel. ICEJ 2013.” 40 See Durbin, this volume. 41 UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova alone received close to 500 Bibles and 50,000 emails in protest. David Parsons, “Christians send thousands of Bibles to UNESCO,” Word from Jerusalem (USA Edition (2/2017), 9. 42 Remarks on October 19, 2016. Also see, Tamara Zieve, “Israel Allies Foundation brings together 23 PMs to condemn UNESCO decision,” Jerusalem Post, October 22, 2016. 43 Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century in direct response to the rise of nationalism in Europe, it was in effect Jewish nationalism, and understood in many different ways. Today, Zionism is an umbrella term used for ideologies supporting the existence of a Jewish homeland on the disputed territory of Palestine/Israel. Zionism encompasses many ideologies. See Durbin, this volume, for more on Christian Zionism and “blessings.” 44 Conference notes, October 19, 2017. 45 In 2016, registration fees amounted to $390–465 per adult, and $125 per youth, with reduced rates for Israelis. 46 As is noted elsewhere in this volume, tourism, and especially Christian tourism is a booming business in Israel, making up 6.8 percent of the country’s GDP in 2016. In 2014 (the last date for which I found public data), over half of all visitors selfdescribed as Christians, and roughly a quarter as Protestants. Cf. Travelweek Group, “Israel Achieves Record Number of Tourist Arrivals in 2016,” January 11, 2017. Available online: http://www.travelweek.ca/news/israel-achieves-record-numbertourist-arrivals-2016/. A study commissioned by the Jerusalem Development

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Authority came to much lower numbers; Israel Kimchi, Omer Yaniv, and Lior Regev, “Ha-Tayyarut ha-evangelistit le-yisra’el ule-yerushalayim,” 2014. Available online: http://jerusaleminstitute.org.il/.upload/jerusalem/marom2014/%D7%AA%D7 %99%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA%20%D7%90%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A0 %D7%92%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%99%D7%AA.pdf. 47 “2016 Official Program,” 89. 48 This interpretation rests on a Christological reading of Dan. 9:24-27. 49 “The ICEJ’s Story and Purpose.” Available online: https://int.icej.org/history. 50 Robert O. Smith, More Desired than Our Own Salvation; The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12. 51 Benjamin Netanyahu, “To all of our Christian friends around the world, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!” December 22, 2016. Available online: https://int. icej.org/content/pm-netanyahus-christmas-greeting. 52 It seems unlikely that Navon appreciated the news that Christian leaders had spent an hour “sharing” (i.e., proclaiming the gospel) with him, for example. 53 Donald E. Wagner, Anxious for Armageddon: A Call to Partnership for Middle Eastern and Western Christians (Scottsdale: Herald Press, 1995), 105. 54 “Rabbi Riskin’s Universal Message Used by ICEJ to Promote Jesus and Christian Worship in Jerusalem,” Jewish Israel, February 4, 2014; Jeremy Sharon, “Chief Rabbis Attack Pro-Israel ICEJ Christian Group Accused of Proselytizing,” Jerusalem Post, September 16, 2015. For the full text of the letters of the rabbis and the response of the ICJE see Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, “Christian Embassy Denies Claims of Proselytizing at Sukkot Festival,” Breaking Israel News, September 15, 2015. Available online https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/49136/chief-rabbisaccuse-christian-embassy-of-missionizing-jerusalem/#tg4FgeQfFIX0GVoD.97. This was preceded by similar objection to the ICEJ in 2014 and in previous years. See Sarah Posner, “Israel’s Chief Rabbis Say No to Christian Zionist Event,” Religion Dispatches, October 2, 2014. Available online http://religiondispatches.org/ israels-chief-rabbis-say-no-to-christian-zionist-event/. For the issues see Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Yaakov Ariel, Philosemites or Antisemites? Evangelical Christian Attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel (Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2002). 55 Sharon, “Chief Rabbi.” 56 Newberg, Pentecostal Mission, 191. 57 Peter Hocken, The Glory and the Shame: Reflections on the 20th-Century Outpouring of the Spirit (Guildford, Surrey: Eagle, 1994), 19–20. 58 Cf. King of Kings, “Our History.” Available online: http://www.kkcj.org/about/ our-history. 59 While taking a break from the concluding service in the Clal Building, October 21, 2016. 60 For the ongoing discussion regarding the relationship between Christian Zionism and evangelism see Smith, Salvation, 19–25 and the messianic Kai Kjær-Hansen, “Resolution on Christian Zionism and Jewish Evangelism,” Mishkan, 59 (2009): 4–6. 61 “Israeli Anti-missionary Law 5728,” January 1, 1977. Available online: https:// berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/quotes/israeli-anti-missionary-law-5738. 62 Plenary talk “Prophecies of the Faith for All?” October 19, 2016. See also Barak Kalir, “Finding Jesus in the Holy Land and Taking Him to China: Chinese Temporary

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Migrant Workers in Israel Converting to Evangelical Christianity,” Sociology of Religion, 70, no. 2 (2009): 130–156. 63 Todorov, On Human Diversity, 265. 64 Altglas, From Yoga to Kabbalah, 13. 65 Lev. 23:33-34; Num. 29:12-40. 66 This practice does not mean that charismatics or messianics were not appropriating Jewish ritual. 67 The Jerusalem Temple Foundation is an extremist organization that works toward the destruction of Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount and the construction of the Third Jewish Temple in their stead. See Donald E. Wagner, Dying in the Land of Promise: Palestine and Palestinian Christianity from Pentecost to 2000 (London: Melisende, 2001), 23. 68 Cf. Ezekiel 38–39 and Rev. 20:7-8. 69 Rebecca L. Stein, “Travelling Zion; Hiking and Settler-Nationalism in pre-1948 Palestine,” Interventions, 11, no. 3 (2009): 334–351. 70 The exorcism took place in the First Baptist Church in Bethlehem, when a Finnish pastor demanded during the concluding prayer that Pastor Khoury’s wife should expel demons from a young woman “in such a holy place.” She did so at first reluctantly, and then with increasing fervor. I was still breastfeeding my 10-month old son, and emotions during the 40-minute exorcism ran so high that I began to lactate. 71 “2016 Official Program,” 111. 72 Bühler fired them on: “The Lord has given me a word: . . . You are Yeshua’s generation, . . . you will go beyond!” Prayer Service, October 21, 2016.

6  Anachronism as a Constituent Feature of Mythmaking at the BibleWalk Museum 1 I thank Erin Roberts for her helpful suggestions, questions, and critiques. 2 Chronology and sequence are related, but not synonymous. Chronology pertains to location in history or time, whereas sequence pertains to the order of things. For example, the chronological and sequential order of the deaths of Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, and Amelia Earhart is as follows: 1431, 1913, and 1937, respectively (according to the Western, Gregorian calendar). The sequential order can be preserved even if chronology is incorrect, such as locating Joan of Arc in the fifth century, Harriet Tubman in the seventeenth century, and Amelia Earhart in the early twenty-first century. The anachronisms at BibleWalk pertain to both chronology and sequence. 3 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 32. 4 Russell T. McCutcheon, “Myth,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (New York: Cassell, 2000), 200. On this last point (3), McCutcheon wisely points to scholars (like those in this volume) who describe the stories of others as “myth,” thereby distinguishing their own intellectual practices as not mythmaking. 5 Ibid., 201–202. 6 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 16. 7 Ibid., 9.

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8 This information is made available at the museum’s website (http://biblewalk.us/), and in the informative video played for visitors prior to taking the tours. 9 BibleWalk is fairly inexpensive; tours range in price from $5.25 to $6.00. The 3 hour and 25 minute visit to all five tours can be purchased for $26.75 (as of 2017). 10 See, for example, Greg Newkirk, “We Visited Mansfield, Ohio’s Haunted BibleWalk, The Largest (and Scariest) Wax Museum in the State.” Week in Weird, May 15, 2015. http://weekinweird.com/2015/05/15/we-visited-mansfield-ohios-haunted-bible-walkthe-largest-and-scariest-wax-museum-in-the-state/ (accessed June 28, 2017); David Lawler, “Wax Figures of British Royals Appear at US Biblical Museum.” The Telegraph, August 13, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/11802032/ Wax-figures-of-British-royals-appear-at-US-Biblical-museum.html (accessed June 27, 2017). 11 Traditionally, “cathedral” denotes a church that serves as the seat of the bishop, typically in a Catholic diocese, but also among Anglicans, Orthodox, and Lutherans. Diamond Hill is not a cathedral in the sense that is stands as the hierarchical seat of power among an array of associated churches in the Ohio region. Instead, “cathedral” seems to mean “very large church” similar to Rev. Robert H. Schuller’s use of the term for his Crystal Cathedral in southern California. The Crystal Cathedral was later sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in 2011. 12 Jonathan Lindley Smith, Mia Fieldes, and Zach Williams, “Chain Breaker.” From the album Chain Breaker performed by Zach Williams. (Franklin: Provident Label Group, 2016). 13 The Greek LXX describes this as “the likeness of a messenger/angel of god” (3:92); the Theodotion manuscript describes this figure as having the “likeness of the son of a god.” The Hebrew/Aramaic is l’var Elahin (lit. son of gods). The NRSV derives its translation from the Hebrew, not the Greek. 14 John Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984); Fergus Millar, “Hellenistic History in a Near Eastern Perspective: The Book of Daniel,” in The Greek World, The Jews, and the East, ed. Hannah Cotton and Guy Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 51–66. 15 Leviticus 16; Heb. 9:7. 16 That is to say, a first-century Judean is not the same as an eighth or sixth-century Israelite. 17 Neither the Miracles of the Old Testament nor the Life of Christ tours illustrate any of the sixty-two prophecies; the figure is simply a claim made by the narrator. 18 I am not arguing that Paul was supersessionist, but that his letters have used by later interpreters to defend supersessionist claims. 19 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 Ibid., 123. 22 Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 23 Romans 1. 24 Johnson Hodge, If Sons, 10. 25 June 25, 2017. This sermon is archived at Diamond Hill’s Vimeo page: https://vimeo. com/biblewalk (accessed August 8, 2017).

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26 http://biblewalk.us/dinner-theatre. Accessed August 8, 2017. 27 Eagleton, Ideology, 129. 28 Ibid., 16. 29 Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 33–34. 30 Ibid., 34. 31 Pastor Carrier, May 21, 2017. Archived on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/biblewalk (accessed August 8, 2017). 32 Diamond Hill is not a Jehovah’s Witness Church, but the church and museum appropriate the Holocaust suffering of some Christian groups, thereby participating in that suffering by extension. 33 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 211.

7  Embodied Mythic Formation at the Holy Land Experience A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of NAASR in San Diego, CA. Jennifer Eyl, Craig Martin, Kevin Schilbrack, and Oleg Uvarov provided valuable feedback. 1 Unless otherwise noted, “myth” will refer to the materialized presentation of mythic discourse as found at Christian tourist attractions. Stephen L. Young refers to this manner of cultural production as “materialized mythmaking”; see Young, this volume. 2 Descriptions of HLE, including its history, are plentiful. See, for example, Timothy K. Beal, Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 49–70; Joan R Branham, “The Temple That Won’t Quit: Constructing Sacred Space in Orlando’s Holy Land Experience Theme Park,” Cross Currents, 59, no. 3 (September 2009): 364–370; Jonathan Fink, “The Holy Land Experience,” Southwest Review, 98, no. 3 (2013): 346–364; Mark I. Pinsky, A Jew among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 129–143; Jill Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 50–55; Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 189–232. 3 “Zion’s Hope, The Ministry,” History, Legacy, Purpose, http://www.zionshope.org/ iframe_html/ZH_ministry_v003.html#history (accessed March 23, 2018); Beal, Roadside Religion, 51. 4 Ibid., 52. 5 A detailed overview of the site and the multiple considerations that figure into how to define it is provided by Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 189–232. 6 Branham, “The Temple That Won’t Quit.” 7 “The Old Scroll Shop,” ITEC Entertainment, http://www.itec.com/the-old-scroll-shop/ (accessed March 26, 2018). 8 Dana Canedy, “A Biblical Theme Park in Florida Begets Ill Will,” The New York Times, February 3, 2001, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/03/us/a-biblical-themepark-in-florida-begets-ill-will.html (accessed March 24, 2018); Sue Ann Pressley, “Holy Land Theme Park Opens the Gates to Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/feb/28/news/cl-30985 (accessed March 24, 2018).

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9 Jana Mathews, “Theme Park Bibles: Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Holy Land Experience and the Evangelical Use of the Documentary Past,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 27, no. 2 (2015): 89. A description of the collection’s holdings is provided by the Grace Sola Foundation, Inc., available online at http://www. solagroup.org/vkc.html (accessed December 24, 2017). See also, Scott Carroll, “Biblical Treasures in Private Holdings: The Van Kampen Collection,” in The Light of Discovery: Studies in Honor of Edwin M. Yamauchi, ed. John Wineland, The Evangelical Theological Society Monograph Series 6 (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2007). To view some of the holdings, one may visit the free online database maintained by David Jenkins at Princeton University and search for “scriptorium” in the library list, “Digitized Greek Manuscripts,” Modern Language Translations of Byzantine Sources, http://library.princeton.edu/byzantine/manuscript-title-list (accessed March 26, 2018). 10 Mathews, “Theme Park Bibles,” 89. According to the Grace Sola Foundation, though, the collection is “a continually evolving entity,” specifically with regard to the Secondary Holdings (classical and modern reference texts useful for research on the collection’s Primary Holdings); see http://www.solagroup.org/vkc/secondary.html (accessed December 24, 2017). 11 “The Scriptorium—The Holy Land Experience,” http://www.holylandexperience. com/exhibits/the_scriptorium.html (accessed November 7, 2014). At some point in 2018, though, the word “non-sectarian” had been eliminated, and the word “factual” put in its place; “The Scriptorium | Where The True Heroes Live,” https:// holylandexperience.com/exhibit/the-scriptorium (accessed May 28, 2018). 12 Herbert Samworth, Scott Holmgren, and Stu Kinniburgh, A Guide to the Scriptorium (Orlando: Sola Scriptura, 2003). For an insightful analysis of how the Van Kampen Collection and the Scriptorium function to legitimize and authorize TBN see Mathews, “Theme Park Bibles.” 13 Jan Crouch died in May 2016, and HLE has subsequently faced financial troubles. Beth Kassab, “Jan Crouch’s Absence Felt at Holy Land,” Orlando Sentinel, July 22, 2016, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-holy-land-jan-crouch-bethkassab-20160722-column.html (accessed March 26, 2018); Paul Brinkmann, “Holy Land Experience to Unload Furniture, Statues amid Financial Turmoil,” Orlando Sentinel, July 20, 2016, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/brinkmann-onbusiness/os-holy-land-auction-20160719-story.html (accessed March 26, 2018). 14 As quoted in Stevenson, Sensational Devotion, 51. I have been unable to access the original ITEC report cited in Stevenson, 255 nn.3, 304: ITEC Entertainment Corporation, “The ITEC Solution: The Holy Land Experience Project,” n.d., http:// www.itec.com/Portals/20/Skins/itec/pdf/solutions/2008_Holy_Land.pdf.  15 This refrain was repeated throughout the Scriptorium Tour. Quotations from the three exhibits have been taken from my own transcriptions of the exhibits and performances while visiting HLE on October 24–25, 2014. 16 “About the Experience,” The Holy Land Experience, Where the Bible Comes Alive!, https://holylandexperience.com/about/ (accessed March 25, 2018). 17 Casey Ryan Kelly and Kristen E. Hoerl, “Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum,” Argumentation and Advocacy, 48, no. 3 (2012): 123–141. Also see Bielo, this volume. 18 Beal, 9–10. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Ibid., 69.

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21 Stevenson, Sensational Devotion, 4. She develops her approach in terms of embodiment and cognitive theory, in part, in Stevenson, 11–16, 27–29. 22 Ibid., 50. By “religiously real,” Stevenson takes up Beal’s language, which is meant merely to describe the experience of an audience member who “gets lost in the story” and feels present within it. 23 Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). 24 Ibid. 34. He adopts the “embodiment paradigm” as introduced in Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos, 18, no. 1 (1990): 5–47; Thomas J. Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology, 8, no. 2 (1993): 135–156; Thomas J. Csordas, “Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the World,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–24. 25 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 26 Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 40; Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis, 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19; Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 27 Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 41. 28 The tree cutting analogy is from Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 44–45. 29 There was also music about the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world playing in the background. 30 For a different view, see Branham, “The Temple That Won’t Quit.” Branham argues that HLE promotes the possibility of Judaism and Christianity being merged together. 31 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 33–40. 32 Ibid., 41–48. 33 David James, “How Bourdieu Bites Back: Recognising Misrecognition in Education and Educational Research,” Cambridge Journal of Education, 45, no. 1 (2015): 100. 34 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 159. 35 Ibid., 118.

8  On the Myth of Religion’s Uniqueness 1 That is, crucial to Lincoln’s work following his critical turn in the 1980s; see the afterword to Emerging from the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women’s Initiation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and “The Two Paths,” in Death, War, and Sacrifice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) for Lincoln’s narrative regarding this critical turn. 2 These terms are all used in Lincoln’s “Theses on Method,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 17, no. 1 (2005): 8–10.

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3 Lincoln’s full definition can be found in Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5–7. Excluding the gloss he offers on each of the four elements, his definition is as follows: 1. A discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status . . . 2. A set of practices whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or proper human subjects, as defined by a religious discourse to which these practices are connected . . . 3. A community whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its attendant practices . . . 4. An institution that regulates religious discourse, practices, and community, reproducing them over time and modifying them as necessary, while asserting their eternal validity and transcendent value. (italics removed) 4 Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 5–6, emphasis in original. 5 Ibid., 24. 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Ibid., 30. 8 Ibid., 27. 9 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 32. 10 Ibid., 29. 11 For instance, see Martin Luther’s infamous text, The Jews and Their Lies. For a scholarly analysis of this anti-Jewish rhetoric and its adoption by Protestants in criticisms of Catholicism, see Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 13 Ibid., 7. 14 Ibid., 184. 15 Community. “Advanced Gay.” Season 3, Episode 6. Directed by Joe Russo. Written by Dan Harmon and Matt Murray. NBC, November, 2011. 16 Notably, Lincoln addresses the use of myth in the construction of modern Iran in “The Politics of Myth,” the second chapter of Discourse and the Construction of Society (in particular, see 32ff). 17 See http://canada.pch.gc.ca/eng/1469537603125 (accessed August 8, 2017). 18 See https://canada150plus.ca/ (accessed August 8, 2017). 19 Thanks go to Naomi Goldenberg, Cameron Montgomery, and Stacie Swain at the University of Ottawa for hosting my trip to the war museum, and especially to Stacie for helping me interpret those parts of the display that depended on background knowledge about Canada that I did not have; I couldn’t have written this without Stacie’s help. 20 See http://www.warmuseum.ca/event/canadian-experience-gallery-1-early-wars-incanada/ (accessed August 8, 2017). 21 Quotations from the exhibit displays are from the author’s notes, taken on January 23, 2017. 22 Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 29. 23 Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis, 108. 24 See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-degrasse-tyson/what-science-is-and-howand-why-it-works_b_8595642.html (accessed August 8, 2017). (All quotations from Tyson below are from this online article, which lacks pagination.)

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25 Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 32. 26 Ibid., 29. 27 Tyson writes, “Once an objective truth is established by these methods, it is not later found to be false.” 28 Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 5. 29 This critique of Tyson is precisely the same critique Jacques Derrida provides of Edmund Husserl’s corpus in Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 30 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 1–2. 31 Ibid., 285. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 282. 34 Ibid., 283. 35 Ibid., 314. 36 Ibid., 262. 37 Ibid., 265. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 267. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 270. 43 Ibid., 271–272. 44 Ibid., 125. 45 Ibid., 126. 46 Ibid., 129. 47 Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 29. 48 The full text of this act can be found online here: http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/ csj-sjc/constitution/lawreg-loireg/p1t11.html (accessed August 8, 2017). 49 David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 9.

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Smith, Robert O. More Desired than Our Own Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Stein, Rebecca L. “Travelling Zion; Hiking and Settler-Nationalism in pre-1948 Palestine.” Interventions, 11, no. 3 (2009): 334–351. Tarnopolsky, Noga. “Estate Sale on Jerusalem’s Hidden Mega Pastor, Lance Lambert,” Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2016. Todorov, Tzvetan. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Travelweek Group, “Israel Achieves Record Number of Tourist Arrivals in 2016,” January 11, 2017. Available online: http://www.travelweek.ca/news/israel-achieves-recordnumber-tourist-arrivals-2016/ (accessed January 8, 2018). Turner, Victor. “Pilgrimage as Social Process,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, 167–230. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Wagner, Donald E. Anxious for Armageddon: A Call to Partnership for Middle Eastern and Western Christians. Scottsdale: Herald Press, 1995. Wagner, Donald E. Dying in the Land of Promise: Palestine and Palestinian Christianity from Pentecost to 2000. London: Melisende, 2001. Warner, Tim. “The Feasts of Israel.” Available online: http://www.pfrs.org/jewish/hr01. html (accessed January 8, 2018). Yahav, Daniel. “Feast of Israel. ICEJ 2013.” CD. Zande, Petra van der. A Christian Guide to the Jewish Festival of Sukkot. Jerusalem: Tsur Tsina Publications, 2010. Zieve, Tamara. “Israel Allies Foundation Brings Together 23 PMs to Condemn UNESCO Decision.” Jerusalem Post, October 22, 2016.

6  Anachronism as a Constituent Feature of Mythmaking at the BibleWalk Museum Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Collins, John. Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Johnson Hodge, Caroline. If Sons Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lawler, David. “Wax Figures of British Royals Appear at US Biblical Museum.” The Telegraph, August 13, 2015. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/theroyalfamily/11802032/Wax-figures-of-British-royals-appear-at-USBiblical-museum.html (accessed June 27, 2017). McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. McCutcheon, Russell T. “Myth,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, 190–208. New York: Cassell, 2000. Millar, Fergus. “Hellenistic History in a Near Eastern Perspective: The Book of Daniel,” in The Greek World, The Jews, and the East, ed. Hannah Cotton and Guy Rogers, 51–66. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

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Newkirk, Greg. “We Visited Mansfield, Ohio’s Haunted BibleWalk, The Largest (and Scariest) Wax Museum in the State.” Week in Weird, May 15, 2015. Available online: http://weekinweird.com/2015 /05/15/we-visited-mansfield-ohios-hauntedbible-walk-the-largest-and-scariest-wax-museum-in-the-state/ (accessed June 28, 2017). Smith, Jonathan Lindley, Mia Fieldes, and Zach Williams, “Chain Breaker.” From the album Chain Breaker Performed by Zach Williams. Franklin: Provident Label Group, 2016. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.

7  Embodied Mythic Formation at the Holy Land Experience “ ‘About the Experience.’ The Holy Land Experience, Where the Bible Comes Alive!” Available online: https://holylandexperience.com/about/ (accessed March 25, 2018). Beal, Timothy K. Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Branham, Joan R. “The Temple That Won’t Quit: Constructing Sacred Space in Orlando’s Holy Land Experience Theme Park.” Cross Currents, 59, no. 3 (September 2009): 358–382. Brinkmann, Paul. “Holy Land Experience to Unload Furniture, Statues amid Financial Turmoil.” Orlando Sentinel, July 20, 2016. Available online: http://www.orlandosentinel. com/business/brinkmann-on-business/os-holy-land-auction-20160719-story.html (accessed March 26, 2018). Brubaker, Rogers. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Canedy, Dana. “A Biblical Theme Park in Florida Begets Ill Will.” The New York Times, February 3, 2001, sec. U.S. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/03/ us/a-biblical-theme-park-in-florida-begets-ill-will.html (accessed March 24, 2018). Carroll, Scott. “Biblical Treasures in Private Holdings: The Van Kampen Collection,” in The Light of Discovery: Studies in Honor of Edwin M. Yamauchi, 235–283, ed. John Wineland. The Evangelical Theological Society Monograph Series 6. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2007. Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19. Csordas, Thomas J. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos, 18, no. 1 (1990): 5–47. Csordas, Thomas J. “Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the World,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas, 1–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Csordas, Thomas J. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology, 8, no. 2 (1993): 135–156. “Digitized Greek Manuscripts.” Modern Language Translations of Byzantine Sources. Available online: http://library.princeton.edu/byzantine/manuscript-title-list (accessed March 26, 2018).

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8  On the Myth of Religion’s Uniqueness Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, 2nd edition. London: Verso, 1991. Canada Department of Justice. “British North America Act, 1867—Enactment no. 1.” Justice.gc.ca. Available online: http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/constitution/ lawreg-loireg/p1t11.html (accessed August 8, 2017). Canadian War Museum. “Early Wars in Canada.” Warmuseum.ca. Available online: http:// www.warmuseum.ca/event/canadian-experience-gallery-1-early-wars-in-canada/ (accessed August 8, 2017). City of Vancouver. “Canada 150+: Moving Forward Together.” Canada150plus.ca. Available online: https://canada150plus.ca/ (accessed August 8, 2017).

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 207

Index Note: Page numbers in italics denote figures. absolute faith 45 Adam and Eve 70, 114, 117, 178 n.28 adaptive network theory 62, 63 affective response 48 Algonkians 151–​2, 153 Algonquin tribes 142 aliyah 99, 105 Altglas, Véronique 96, 107 Amir, Yigal 181 n.29 anachronism 21–​2, 111–​12, 118, 120–​3, 125–​6, 130, 150–​1, 155 see also chronology in BibleWalk Museum see BibleWalk Museum and chronology 122 and discourses 147–​9 ideological anachronism 122 analytical traction, definition of 156 Anderson, Benedict 17, 147–​8 Anglo-​Saxons 33, 178 n.35 animal sacrifices 128, 132, 133, 134 Answers in Genesis (AiG) 43 Ark Encounter see Ark Encounter Creation Museum see Creation Museum (CM) critique of evolutionary science 43 cultural production of 43 Ham’s rainbow campaign 2–​4, 5, 6–​9, 17, 165 n.6 history of 46 “missing link” webpage 44 religious publicity of 46 anti-​Semitism 95, 98, 99, 100 Aoki, Eric 26, 31, 172 n.37, 173 n.55 aphorisms 68–​9 apologetics 29, 32, 36, 170 n.22 Arab-​Israeli conflict 86, 89 see also Israel; Israel tour Arafat, Yasser 99

architectural replica 1, 35, 47, 128, 129 Ark Encounter 2, 19, 20, 43, 45, 47, 176 n.13 see also Answers in Genesis (AiG) biblical play 54–​5 biblical relevance 52–​4 childhood artifacts 51–​2 collection of Noah’s ark themed books in 51–​2 and creationism 46, 48 creationist visitors 45–​6, 49, 50, 52–​3, 57 cultural producers 57 Deck One 47, 50, 54, 55, 56 Deck Three 48, 56 Deck Two 48, 50–​1, 51, 52–​3, 54 establishment of 46–​7 Fairy Tale Ark exhibit 50–​1, 51 and fundamentalism 52–​4 hermeneutic of suspicion 54, 56 kitsch 56, 57 materialized biblical replicas 47 Noah Interview, The 50 Noah’s ark exhibits 43–​4 orchestra pieces 56–​7 Phelps’ review 49–​50 Pre-​Flood world exhibit 52–​3, 53, 55, 55 secular conspiracy 50–​2 walking poetics of faith at 49–​55, 56 Arnal, William 81 artifacts 1, 52, 71, 79, 94, 148 atheism 52, 157, 159 Australopithecus 65 authenticity 3, 11, 80–​1, 85, 90–​3, 128, 129, 151, 153, 155, 182 n.44 authority 8, 10, 13, 15, 17–​19, 21, 33, 45, 46, 69, 83, 145–​6, 148, 161–​2, 177 n.3, 182 n.40 of discourses 157, 161–​3 divine 23, 28, 62, 68, 71–​4, 77, 128, 132

208

208

Index

Babylonian Talmud 102 Baden, Joel 168 n.3, 169 n.12, 172 n.37 Baker, Gilbert 3 LBGT rainbow flag 4–​6, 9 Balcombe, Dennis 107 Barak, Ehud 106 Barthes, Roland 80, 181 n.31 Barton, Bernadette 75 bathroom bills 4 Baumann, Gerd 122 Bayart, Jean-​Francois 90–​1 Be’ad Chayiim (For Life) 97 Beal, Timothy 129 Bell, Catherine 111, 121 Bennett, Tony 172 n.38, 173 n.57 Bethlehem 60, 98 Bible 8, 9, 18, 21, 56, 59, 65, 68, 70–​2, 74, 77, 128–​9, 136–​8, 141–​2, 155 see also God’s word accouterments in national origins 27 as a decisive agent for societal changes and values 29, 33 exceptionalism 18, 25–​9, 31, 32, 35–​7, 40, 41, 170 n.22 Hebrew Bible 101, 102, 103, 111, 120 inerrancy 29, 45, 71, 77, 79–​80, 81, 83, 87, 93–​4, 170 nn.21, 22 relevance 52–​4 BibleWalk Museum 111–​12, 113–​15, 125–​ 6, 155 Amazing Grace: The Journeys of Paul tour 113 and Diamond Hill Cathedral see Diamond Hill Cathedral dinner theater 124 Dinner Theater: Dinner with Grace 113–​14 gift shop 125 Heart of the Reformation tour 113 kitsch 114 Life of Christ tour 113, 120 Miracles of the Old Testament tour 113 see Miracles of the Old Testament tour Moses scenes appearing before Abraham scenes 121 mural of Noah 113 Museum of Christian Martyrs tour 113 Noah’s Ark appearing after David and Goliath 121

one-​way walk-​through tour 117, 125 parables exhibit 116 politics of nostalgia 125 supersessionism 120, 125 ticket prices 187 n.9 time and chronology, strategic uses of 120–​3 tours 113–​14, 116–​17 wax figures of Hollywood celebrities and British royalty 21, 113, 114 website 126 biblical archaeology 79, 93–​4, 129 Biblical Israel/​Christian Zionist tours 82 see also Israel tour biblical worldview 36, 40 Bikurim 102 bin Laden, Osama 146, 163 birth narratives 147 see also origin myths Bittner, Jobst 183 n.19 Black Lives Matter 14 blessing 7, 116 see also Genesis 12:3; rhetoric of blessing blessing Israel, rhetoric of 85–​6, 89–​90, 105–​6, 107 Book of Daniel 117–​18 Bourdieu, Pierre 32, 141 Brazil, ICEJ in 99 Britain 149–​50, 152–​3 Brown, John 38 Brubaker, Rogers 17, 138–​9 Bühler, Jürgen 99–​100, 106, 109, 186 n.72 Buksbazen, Victor 103 Bunyan, John 136 Bush, George W. 146, 163 Campbell, Joseph 12 Canada formation of see Canadian origin myth Seven Years’ War 152 war museum see Canadian War Museum Canadian-​ness 150, 154 Canadian origin myth 149–​53 aboriginal people 150 and British 153–​4 Canada 150, 149–​50 Canadian identity 153–​4 First Peoples 150, 151–​2, 153, 154 and French settlers 151, 152–​3 Hurons 151–​2

 209

Index militarization 152 nonreligious category 154 Ontario 151 Quebec 152 Canadian War Museum 22, 150, 163 “Early Wars in Canada” exhibit 150–​3 capitalism 27–​8, 29, 31, 37, 57, 121, 169 n.13, 173 n.51 Cartesian dualism 129 Cartesian subject 130 categorization 63, 65, 70–​1, 138–​9, 143 cathedral, definition of 187 n.11 Catholic Church 71, 72 Catholicism 72, 80, 81, 91, 92–​3, 155, 178 n.31, 182 n.44, 187 n.11 Center for Jewish-​Christian Understanding and Cooperation 106 “Chain Breaker” 115 Chalmers, David 131 Chanukkah menorah 98 charisma, charismatics 45, 95, 96, 99, 100–​ 1, 104–​5, 106–​7, 108, 186 n.66 Charleston massacre 14–​17 China, ICEJ in 99 Christian identity 1, 90–​3, 112 Christian origin narratives 147 Christians United for Israel (CUFI) 80, 82, 179 n.3 Christian Zionism/​Zionists 80, 93, 180–​1 n.21 see also Zionism authentically Christian identity 81, 85, 90–​3 definition of 82 ICEJ see International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ) on Israeli presence 89–​90 material mythmaking 83 solidarity with Israel and Jews 85 support to Israel 97 symbolic economy of Israel 81 view on two-​state solution 86 chronology 22, 33–​4, 111–​13, 116, 117, 120–​3, 124–​5, 139 see also anachronism and sequence, compared 186 n.2 Church of England 136 Church of the Holy Sepulchre 91–​2 civil rights movement 14, 28, 33, 34, 37, 40 Civil War 14, 16, 33, 39, 115

209

Clal Center 98 Clark, Andy 131 classification 18, 30, 80, 81, 89, 93, 129, 131, 138 cognitive landscape 25, 26–​9, 31, 32, 33, 34–​5, 37, 38, 40 see also experiential landscape cognitive prosthetics 130, 139 colonialism 33, 40, 94, 142, 150, 157 community 17, 145, 146, 147–​8, 153 Community (sitcom) 148–​9 complex adaptive networks 62, 63 concealment 1, 2, 6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 21–​3, 80, 90, 127, 141, 143 conceptual metaphor, theory of 130–​1 Confederacy 39–​40 Confederate ancestors 16 Confederate flag see Charleston massacre conservatism 4, 12, 25, 54, 74, 79, 99, 106, 109, 127 conspiracy 50–​2 covenantal theology 96, 99–​100, 112, 118, 133 creationism 19, 43, 44, 45, 52, 59, 72, 161, 176 n.13 see also evolutionary science antievolutionism 50 Ark Encounter see Ark Encounter Creation Museum see Creation Museum (CM) engagement of science and history 54 Creation Museum (CM) 19, 43, 44, 49, 59, 76–​7, 178–​9 n.35, 178 nn.26, 31 Biblical Authority room 61, 70, 71–​2, 71–​4, 73 campaign against evolutionary science 59, 61–​2, 64–​5, 66–​7, 72, 76 Cave of Sorrows room 74–​5, 75, 76 clarity, construction of 69–​70, 76 confusion, construction of 64–​9, 76 Culture in Crisis room 61, 64, 74–​5 Dig Site exhibit 178–​9 n.35 Dragon Hall bookstore 61, 64 floor map, first floor 60 floor map, second floor 61 Garden of Eden room 74 Graffiti Alley room 61, 64, 72–​4, 73, 75, 179 n.35 information theory and screening 62–​4 lighting effects 71, 72–​5

210

210

Index

Lucy fossils exhibit 65–​8 man’s word versus God’s word 65–​7 Martin Luther’s exhibit 72 Master Books (press) 64 mastodon skeleton 60–​1 Men in White (film) 68–​9 Noah’s Café 61 racialization of godliness at 178–​9 n.35 Scopes Trial portrayal 72, 73, 74 screening 59, 70–​6, 76–​7 sensory image of darkness 72 7 C’s of History 52 special effects theater 61 Starting Points room 64–​7, 66, 69, 70, 71 ticket prices 177 n.5 young earth creationism (YEC) 59, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74 Crouch, Jan 128, 189 n.13 see also Holy Land Experience (HLE) Crouch, Paul 128 see also Holy Land Experience (HLE) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 62 cultural appropriation 12, 107, 109 cultural production 1, 10, 18, 25, 29–​30, 43, 147–​8, 169 n.13, 188 n.1 Davis, Jefferson 39 Dawkins, Richard 159–​61, 162, 163 decline rhetoric 27, 169 n.10 democracies 33, 104, 161–​2 Demodocus 10 demonization 106, 146, 162, 163 demos 162 Derrida, Jacques 192 n.29 Diamond, Alwilda 113 Diamond Hill Cathedral 111–​16, 123–​5, 187 n.11, 188 n.32 Diamond, Richard 113, 126 Dickinson, Greg 26, 31, 172 n.37 dinosaurs and humans, coexistence of 46, 49 discourses 11, 13–​14, 15, 80–​1, 93, 112–​13, 145, 146, 154, 162–​4, 171 n.32, 173–​4 n.66 see also narratives functions of 163–​4 materialized mythic discourses 131–​8, 141, 143 religious and nonreligious 156–​62, 191 n.3

and society formation 147–​9 discursive constructions 111, 122, 124, 150 disinterest 18, 32 dispensationalism 96, 99–​100 dispositions 57, 80, 82, 87, 139, 141–​2 divine trickle-​down economics 90 donations 85, 105, 114 Don Verdean (film) 79, 93–​4 conservative evangelicalism 79 rhetorics 79–​80 subculture 79–​80 Douglass, Frederick 39 Dowland, Seth 169 nn.10, 13, 173 n.63 dualistic/​ism 61, 64, 70–​1, 76, 86, 129 Eade, John 101 Eagleton, Terry 32, 112–​13, 125 Earhart, Amelia 186 n.2 East Jerusalem 81, 86 Ebola virus 181 n.29 economies of signification 81 Eden 52, 62, 70, 74 Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) 14 see also Charleston massacre embodied mythic formation 22, 41, 127–​ 31, 138–​43 embodiment 127–​31, 190 n.24 Engelke, Matthew 46 Enlightenment 156–​7, 160 epistemology/​ies 19, 34, 59–​60, 64–​5, 70 eschaton 96, 147 ethnicity 17, 113, 122 fixedness vs. malleability of 122 Eusebius 165 n.1 evolutionary science 19, 59, 61–​2, 64, 69, 76 see also creationism authority of 46 critique of 43 exceptionalism 18 American exceptionalism 5, 25–​6, 28, 32, 33, 37, 40–​1, 169 n.13, 173 nn.51, 66 biblical exceptionalism 18, 25–​9, 31, 32, 35–​7, 40, 41, 170 n.22 exorcism 108, 186 n.70 experiential landscape 26, 29, 31, 32, 40 see also cognitive landscape extended mind, theory of 131

 211

Index Fabian, Johannes 112 Faith Bible Chapel 80, 82, 85, 179 n.3 Falwell, Jerry 45 family values 27, 28 Feast of Tabernacles see Sukkot Feast of Unleavened Bread 102 Fejes, Fred 169 n.13 Feldman, Jackie 81 Ferguson, Bruce 30 Feynman, Richard 77 First Baptist Church in Bethlehem 98, 186 n.70 First Nations 149 flags 4–​6, 9, 14–​16 force 13–​14 Foucault, Michel 133, 174 n.77 France 152 Francisco, Don 135 Freud, Sigmund 11 Friends of Zion Museum 97, 103 fundamentalism 43, 45, 46, 49, 52–​4, 57, 69, 72, 82, 99 walking poetics of faith 49–​55 Garden Tomb 91–​2, 96, 129 Garrison, William Lloyd 38–​9 Gaza Strip 107 Genesis 8, 48, 59, 60, 62, 67, 69, 74, 76 12:3 85–​6, 88, 105, 181 divergent accounts of creation 70 Gloege, Timothy 28 Goble, Philip 103 God of the Gaps strategy 161 God’s plan 79, 86, 100, 136–​8, 142, 155, 174 n.69 God’s will 88, 90, 104, 131, 132, 136, 137, 138, 142 God’s word 19, 62, 64, 65–​7, 69–​70, 71, 137 see also Bible good vs. evil 65, 71–​2, 75–​6, 97, 132, 135, 146 Grace Sola Foundation 128, 189 n.10 Green, Emma 98 Green, Jackie 168 n.5, 172 n.37 Green Line 89, 109, 155 etymology, and mythmaking 88 Green, Steve 25, 27–​8, 168 n.5, 169 n.12, 172 nn.37–​8, 173 n.63, 174 nn.66, 71, 75

211

Grimké, Angelina 34, 38 groupings 3, 5, 8, 18, 127, 136, 137, 140 groupness 5, 15, 17 Gush Etzion Heritage Center 98, 108 Gutenberg, Johannes 136 Hagee, John 181 n.29 Ham, Ken 50, 62, 69–​70, 77, 165 n.6 see also Answers in Genesis (AiG); Creation Museum (CM) rainbow campaign 2–​4, 5, 6–​9, 17, 165 n.6 Hands of Mercy 97 Harding, Susan Friend 44, 45, 57 Haynes, Stephen 174 n.69 Hebrew Bible 101, 102, 103, 111, 120 see also Bible Hedding, Malcolm 100 Hegel, G. W. F. 163 hegemony 13, 14, 18, 25, 27–​8, 31, 40, 147, 156, 172 n. 38 Herder, Johann Gottfried 11 heritage 15–​16, 18, 30, 104, 136, 152, 153, 171 n. 34 America’s biblical heritage 26, 27–​8, 29, 32–​5, 37 hermeneutic of suspicion 45, 49, 50, 54, 56, 175 n. 13 Hess, Jared and Jerusha 79–​80 Hitler, Adolf 160 Hoerl, Kristen 171 n.29 Holy Land Experience (HLE) 22, 57, 127, 155, 189 n.13 Christ’s tomb 128 Church of All Nations 128, 134 embodied mythic formation 127–​31, 138–​43 Herod’s temple replica 128 materialized mythic discourses at 131–​8 Oasis Palms Café 128 Old Scroll Shop 128 Passion of the Christ Live Drama 134–​6 physicality of 129–​30 Qumran caves 128 Scriptorium: Center for Biblical Antiquities exhibit 128, 129, 136–​8, 140–​2 self-​understanding concept 139, 141 socio-​cosmic location concept 139–​40, 141

212

212

Index

Via Dolorosa 128 Wilderness Tabernacle performance 132–​4 holy of holies 22, 118, 119, 120, 123, 133 Holy Spirit 53, 102, 103, 116 homologous distinctions 145 Howard, Kevin 102 humanity 1, 10, 11, 12, 40, 53, 64, 76, 89, 132, 134, 137 human nature 35, 53 human reason 11, 19, 59, 64, 65–​7, 76, 145, 158 human rights propagandists 162 humans and dinosaurs, coexistence of 46, 49 Hungarian Sabbatarians 103 Hurons 151–​2 Husserl, Edmund 192 n.29 identification 4, 9, 16, 17, 28, 29, 54, 90, 103, 109, 138–​9, 140, 141, 143, 150, 154 identity as analytical category 138 authentic 80–​1, 82, 90–​3, 153, 155 construction of 80–​1, 147–​9 and mythmaking 2–​9 ideological anachronism 111, 112, 121, 122, 125 ideology 45, 87–​90, 112–​13 kitsch as 56, 57, 114 of museums 32 supersessionist 96, 100, 113, 120, 125, 129, 187 n.18 immersion 1, 19, 32, 48, 49, 54, 55, 60, 113, 125, 128, 129, 131 information theory 59, 62, 177 n.10 communication theory 177 n.8 and complexity theory 62 and interconnectedness 62 and screening 63–​4 Institute for Creation Research (ICR) 46 intellectualist tradition 11 intellectual labor 10, 141 intelligibility 5, 22, 127, 139 interests 1, 2, 3, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19–​21, 22–​3, 25, 28, 31, 41, 80–​1, 82, 86, 89, 90, 93, 96, 103, 113, 115, 125, 127, 139, 141, 143, 153, 156, 168 n.68

International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ) 95, 97, 101, 103 and Bühler 99–​100 covenantal theology 100 and dispensationalism 99–​100 goals of 99 ICEJ-​News 99 ideological agenda support 104–​6 ideology 96 lobbying activity 99, 104 missionizing efforts 106–​7 opposition to 106–​7 and Parsons 100 political and material contributions 105–​6 pro-​Zionist stance 106 replacement theology or supersessionism 100 role in illegal Jewish settlements 107–​8 Shomer Society (Guardian Society) 105 Sukkot see Sukkot TV and radio broadcasts 99 unfamiliarity with Judaism 98 and United States 99 and van der Hoeven 99 irony 158, 161 Iroquoian communities 151, 152 irrationality 11, 156, 157 Islam 92, 146 Israel 20–​2, 38, 95, 98, 99–​101, 103–​8, 109, 125, 128, 146, 155 American Evangelical visitors to 81 Biblical Israel/​Christian Zionist tours 81 Christian support for 89–​90 crafting of ideology as natural reality 88–​9 and East Jerusalem 81, 86 Greater Israel agenda 99 and Green Line 88–​9, 109, 155 Gush Etzion 108 landscape 87–​8 Living Stones tours 82 modern Israel 88 Occupations 108 second intifada 82 Sukkot see Sukkot tiyyulim (field trips) 108 tourism 81 two-​state solution 86

 213

Index and United States 86 and West Bank 81, 85, 86, 96 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) 85 Israeli–​Palestinian conflict 96, 107 compared with Gog and Magog struggle 108 Israel Solidarity Rally 179 n.3 Israel tour 80, 155 Abu Ghosh 89–​90 authentic Christian identity, construction of 90–​3 avoiding contributions to Arab vendors 85–​6 Christian Zionism/​Zionists see Christian Zionism/​Zionists Church of the Holy Sepulchre 91–​2 description of the land 87–​9 Garden Tomb 91–​2 Green Line, pastor’s innovative explanation of 88 Islamic call to prayer 92 Israeli persimmons on itinerary cover page 83, 84 itinerary 82–​3, 85 Jericho 87 material blessing 85 mythical primers 82–​5 off-​site markers 83–​4, 86, 92 rhetoric of blessing Israel 85–​6, 88–​90 traditional Christian pilgrimage sites 90 Via Dolorosa 90–​1 Watchmen on the Wall booklet 83 Jenkins, David 189 n.9 jeremiad 79 Jerusalem 1, 21, 41, 81, 83, 89, 90, 91, 108, 112, 118, 120, 122, 128, 129, 134 Old City 86, 104 topography of 87–​8 Jerusalem Development Authority 184–​5 n.46 Jerusalem March 98, 100, 101, 101, 106 Jerusalem Summit 80, 82, 179 n.3 Jerusalem Temple Foundation 107, 186 n. 67 Jesus Christ 1, 3, 8–​9, 19, 21–​2, 92, 99, 101, 102, 111, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126, 128, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 155

213

Jewish-​affinity Christians 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 109 Jewish Agency 107 Jews 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 106, 132, 134, 135, 136, 147, 155 and Christians, history of 100 messianic 95, 100–​1, 103, 104–​5, 106, 107, 109 nationalism 105 Joan of Arc 186 n.2 Johnson, Davi 41, 174 n.77 Johnson Hodge, Caroline 111, 122 Johnson, Mark 130–​1 Johnson, Neil 62 Johnston, Jeremiah 36 Joseph Project 97 Judea and Samaria 88 Judeo-​Christian values 27 Jung, Carl 12 Kaell, Hillary 82 Katriel, Tamar 171 n.34 Kelly, Casey 171 n.30 Keren Hayesod-​United Israel Appeal 107 Kertzer, David 164 Khan, Genghis 160 Khoury, Naim 98 Kimchi, Israel 185 n.46 kingdom culture 123–​5 kingdom time 124–​5 King of Kings 106 Kircher, Athanasius 50, 176 n.16 kitsch (as ideology) 56, 57, 114 Kollek, Teddy 105 Ku Klux Klan 16 Lakoff, George 130–​1 Lambert, Lance 99 legends 17, 69, 77 LGBTQ identity, and Ham’s rainbow campaign 2–​4, 5, 6–​9, 17, 165 n.6 Likud Party 81 Lincoln, Bruce 13–​14, 17, 30, 59, 80, 83, 145–​6, 147, 154, 156–​7, 158, 162, 163, 172 n.38, 177 n.3, 182 n.40, 190 nn.1, 3, 16 literalism (biblical) 19, 45, 46, 48, 52, 54 Living Stones tours 82 Lollards 136, 140

214

214

Index

Louisbourg 152–​3 Luther, Martin 72, 136, 191 n.11 MacCannell, Dean 83 Macdonald, Sharon 30 Mack, Burton 15, 19–​20, 168 n.68 Magen David Adom 97 magic 161 Manifest Destiny 33 marginalization 57 Marxism 145 materiality see material mythmaking materialized mythic discourse 22, 127, 130, 131–​8, 139, 142 materialized pasts 19, 22, 127, 129 material mythmaking 55–​6 Ark Encounter see Ark Encounter Museum of the Bible see Museum of the Bible (MOTB) of museums 25–​6, 29–​32, 33, 36–​7, 40–​1 Mathews, Jana 128 Mayflower Compact 33, 38 McCutcheon, Russell T. 13, 30, 81, 89, 112, 125, 186 n.4 McDowell, Josh 170 n.22 Mencken, H. L. 57 Men in White (film) 68–​9, 178 nn.32, 35 messianic Jews/​Judaism 95, 100–​1, 103, 104–​5, 106, 107, 109 Milk, Harvey 5–​6, 9 millennial kingdom 82, 99, 101 miracles 11, 136, 161 Miracles of the Old Testament tour 113, 125 last scene of 118–​20, 119 scenes 116–​20, 118, 119 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego depiction 22, 117–​18, 118, 120, 121–​2 Mishnah 103 misrecognition 123, 141–​2 missionaries 35, 37, 38, 106, 107, 140, 141, 142 Moczygemba, Sarah 3, 4 Montgomery, Cameron 191 n.19 Monty Python, anachronism in Life of Brian 112 morality 27, 74, 161 progressive evolution of 160 and religion 160

Morris, Henry 46 Moss, Candida 168 n.3, 169 n.12, 172 n.37, 173 n.61 multiplicity, and mythmaking 19, 59, 66, 67, 68, 76 Museum of the Bible (MOTB) 18, 20, 25, 169 n. 12, 172 n. 37, 172 n. 38 Abolitionist Movement display 39 absence in 37–​41 American Civil War space 39 Banned and Burned exhibit 36 Battle Hymn of the Republic plaque 39 Bible and abolition of slavery exhibits 33, 34, 37, 38–​9, 40 Bible and Christianity, illustration of slippage between 36 Bible as a catalyzing force for progress 25–​6, 29, 31, 32–​5, 37–​41 Bible In America Now wall mount 33 biblical-​nationalist narrative 37–​41 Civil Rights and Beyond plaque 34 and cognitive landscape 25, 26–​9, 31, 32, 33, 34–​5, 37, 38, 40 Confederate States of America (CSA) space 39–​40 Encounter Between Natives and Settlers floor plaque 37 and Evangelical biblical exceptionalism 25–​9, 31, 32, 35–​7, 40, 170 n.22 experiential landscape 26, 29, 31, 32, 40 Identity Transformation and the Bible 35–​6 ideology of 32 Impact of the Bible in America 32–​3, 37 Impact of the Bible in the World 35, 36–​7 Impact on Native Americans floor plaque 31, 37–​8, 40 interactive exhibits 41 Joshua Machine Recording Booth 41 Justice exhibit 35–​6 Liberator, The 38, 39 Liberty Bell plaque 39 Liberty, Equality, and the Bible plaque 38 material mythmaking 25–​6, 30–​2, 33, 36–​7, 40–​1 naturalization in 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 37, 40 nonlinear exhibits 35 nonsectarian portrayal of 25, 32, 39

 215

Index Religious Freedom section of exhibits 34, 38 wall mounts 32–​5 Washington’s Religion exhibit 26–​9, 32, 35 Museum of Tolerance 97 museums 18, 20, 171 n.34, 172 n.38 see also BibleWalk Museum; Canadian War Museum; Creation Museum (CM); Museum of the Bible (MOTB) authorization 27–​8, 29, 30, 35, 37, 40 European museums 31 and exhibitions 30–​1 experiential landscape of 26 Friends of Zion Museum 97, 103 and identity formation 148 ideology of 32 material mythmaking of 25–​6, 29–​32, 33, 36–​7, 40–​1 and memories 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 37, 38, 41 and nationalism 31, 33, 34, 35, 37–​41 natural history museum 43, 44, 46, 60, 125 naturalization 148 ordering in 34 and origin myths 148 physical space, and visitors’ cognitive landscape 25, 26–​9, 31, 32, 33, 34–​5, 37, 38, 40 Plains Indian Museum 31 sex museums 31 myth authoritative discourse 13, 18 classifications of 13, 18, 22 concealment 21 definition of 9–​17, 80, 112 as depoliticized speech 80 and discourse see discourses as ideology in narrative form 45, 80, 87–​90, 127 innovative 122 and interests 19 and manipulation 20 materiality of 43–​57 psychological perspective of 11–​12 and religion 12–​13, 145–​64 as technique/​strategy 30 mythic discourse 22, 127, 130, 131–​8, 139, 140, 141, 143

215

mythic narratives 11, 21, 147, 154, 155 mythic worlds 15, 20, 21, 168 n. 68 mythmaking 1, 19–​20, 112, 145 and anachronism see anachronism bloodless battleground analogy 13–​17 characterization of 30 discursive practice of 1, 13–​14 and identity 2–​9 material mythmaking see material mythmaking and misrecognition 141 and multiplicity 19, 59, 66, 67, 68, 76 national 172 n.42 Pauline mythmaking 17 and social stability 13 mythos, definition of 10–​11 Napoleon Dynamite (film) 79 narrative logic 132, 139, 141, 143 narratives 1, 6–​8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17–​19, 21–​2 see also discourses biblical-​nationalist narrative 37–​41 birth narratives 147 Christian origin narratives 147 mythic narratives 11, 21, 147, 154, 155 nationalist narratives 37, 147–​8 religious narratives 155–​6 self-​authorizing narratives 22, 127, 131, 143 National Broadcasting Company (NBC) Community (sitcom) 148–​9 National Center for Science Education (NCSE) 49 nationalism 16, 17, 22, 105 and museums 31, 33, 34, 35, 37–​41 narratives 37, 147–​8 Native Americans 31, 37–​8, 40, 137, 142, 149, 174 n. 67 natural history museum 43, 44, 46, 60, 125 naturalization 25, 27, 30, 31, 37, 40, 80, 81, 83, 90, 93, 111–​12, 123, 148, 156 of Arab-​Israeli conflict 86 by museums 148 Navon, Yitzhaq 105–​6, 185 n.52 Netanyahu, Benjamin 106, 179 n.3 New Atheists 157 New Testament 38, 97, 101, 120, 124, 134

216

216

Index

Noah 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–​9, 19, 43, 44, 46, 47–​9, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 71, 113, 185 n.46 Noll, Mark 174 n.69 non-​empirical spirit 160–​1 North America 72, 137, 141, 142, 150, 152 Obama, Barack 181 n.29 objective truth 141, 157, 158, 192 n.27 Odawa tribe 150–​1 Odysseus 10 Odyssey 10 off-​site markers 83–​4, 86, 87, 92 Ontario 151 Orientalism 88 origin myths 147, 148 of Canada 149–​53 Ott, Brian 26, 31, 172 n.37, 173 n.49 Otto, Rudolf 161 Pais Arena 97, 97, 98, 103 Palestine 1, 82, 87, 88, 146, 155 Palestinians 21, 85, 86, 90, 93, 95, 96, 99, 106, 107, 108, 109 paradigmatic truth 18 paradoxical ignorance, of Sukkot/​ Tabernacles 21, 96, 107–​8 Parks, Rosa 34 Parsons, David 100, 106 Parton, Dolly 135 passing of time 121–​2 Passion of the Christ Live Drama 132, 134–​6 Passover Seder 103 Pauline mythmaking 17 Pentecost 102 Pesach 101, 102 Phaedrus 11 Phelps, Dan 49–​50, 52, 54, 56, 175–​6 n. 13 philosemitism 106 Pierce, John R. 177 n.8 pilgrimage 1, 21, 81 to Israel see Israel tour Sukkot see Sukkot Pinker, Steven 179 n.38 Plains Indian Museum 31 Plato 10–​11, 166 n. 32, 167 n.35 plausibility imperative 19, 48 play 54–​5 poetics of faith 45, 49, 50, 54, 56

political project 80, 85, 86, 90, 93 politicians 105, 146, 157, 162 politics of nostalgia 125 power 4, 5, 9, 10–​11, 13–​14, 16, 23, 30, 32, 81, 113, 115, 125 practice-​based inquiry 22, 127, 131, 139, 143 see also embodied mythic formation “primitive” and “advanced” 11, 157, 162, 163 prophecy 82, 84, 85, 87, 99, 114, 120, 155 Protestant Reformation 72 Protestants 21, 72, 91, 92–​3, 96, 136, 142, 182 n. 44 pseudoscience 50 Quebec 151, 152 Rabin, Yitzhak 181 n.29 rainbow flag see Baker’s LBGT rainbow flag Rashi 102 rationality 11, 31, 69, 156, 157 reason (logos) 11 religion 22–​3 and community 145 and discourse 145 and institution 145 Lincoln’s definition 145–​7 and morality 160 and practice 145 and science, compared 157–​8 religious authorization 23 religious discourses, discriminating from nonreligious discourses 156–​62 Religious Right movement 45, 54 replacement theology 100, 182 n. 44 replica 1, 35, 47, 65, 128, 129 revisionism, and mythmaking 13 revisionist history 150 rhetoric 8, 10–​11, 17, 20, 22–​3, 25, 27–​8, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 88, 90, 91–​2, 93, 112, 146, 147, 151, 157, 158, 161, 163, 168 n. 3 of blessing 85–​6, 88–​90, 105–​6, 107 rhetorical strategies 79–​80 Riskin, Shlomo 106 ritual 12, 13, 55, 87, 92, 97, 98, 103, 107, 108, 121, 128, 130, 133, 156 ritualization 121

 217

Index “Roll Call of Nations” 103, 104 Romanticism 11, 12 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 33 Rosenhouse, Jason 179 n.39 Rosenthal, Marvin J. 102, 127–​8 see also Holy Land Experience (HLE) sacred 22, 81, 87, 91, 93, 101, 112, 133, 146 sacrifice 7, 39, 83, 98, 102, 128, 132, 133–​4, 135, 136, 140 Sallnow, Michael 101 same-​sex marriage 2–​3, 4 Sar-​El (travel agency) 98 Satan 19, 51, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 74, 86, 89, 99, 134, 135–​6, 139, 155 Schilbrack, Kevin 130, 131 Schuller, Robert H. 187 n.11 science 19, 40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 59–​60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68–​9, 70, 72, 77, 159, 178 n. 26 and confusion 76 displays 30 idealizations of 161 and religion, compared 157–​8 uniqueness 162–​3 scientists 59, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163 Scopes, John T. 72 Scopes Trial 72, 73, 74 editorials in Inherit the Wind 57 Scott, D. Travers 16–​17 screening 59–​60, 70, 77 conceptual level 63 definition of 63–​4 and information theory 63–​4 intentional/​conscious screening 63 sensory level 63 unintentional/​unconscious screening 63 Second Coming 19, 82, 86, 95, 99, 102, 105, 126 self-​authorizing narratives 22, 127, 131, 143 self-​identification 28, 29, 54, 90, 93 self-​interest 141, 143 self-​understanding 115, 130, 138–​9, 140, 141, 143 senses 63, 125, 158 September 11 attacks 146 sex museums 31

217

Shakespeare, William, anachronism in Julius Caesar 112 Shannon, Claude 62, 177 n.10 Shapiro, Faydra 180–​1 n.21 Shavuot 101, 102 Shoah 21, 100 Shomer Society (Guardian Society) 105 sins 9, 34, 83, 132, 133, 134, 146 Sizer, Stephen 82 Smith, Jonathan Z. 12, 13, 87 social formation 8, 17, 28, 30, 146, 147, 164, 171 n.25 socialidentities 2, 81, 112 social interest see interests social location 9, 138–​9, 143, 155 social practice 2, 15, 141 socio-​cosmic landscape 22, 127, 131, 139–​ 40, 141, 142 solidarity 3, 82, 85, 95, 105, 147–​8 spatial logic 130, 139 spirit 122, 137, 141, 142, 160, 161, 163 Spurgeon, Charles 136 Stephens, Alexander 39 Stern, Aryeh 106 Stevenson, Jill 69, 129–​30, 190 n.22 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 38 Stowers, Stanley K. 17 subjectivity 130, 138 Sukkot 21, 95, 184 n.36 Arabs in 98 attendees 108–​9 and birth of Jesus 103 blessing Israel 105–​6, 107 celebration in several communities 103 charismatics and messianic Jews 100–​1 communion service at the Garden Tomb 96 delegates identity of attendees 95, 103–​4 “Ein Gedi Desert Celebration” 96 as the first universally celebrated eschatological feast 102 Israeli Guest Night 98 Jerusalem March 98, 100, 101, 101, 106 as a Jesus-​holiday 95, 96, 100–​4 Jewish dietary laws 98 lulav purchase 107 messianic charities 97 monetary donations 105 paradoxical ignorance of 107–​8

218

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Index

pilgrims identity of attendees 95, 101, 103 political and material contributions 105–​6 prayers, Bible studies, and lecture series 96–​7 Saudi Arabian attendees 98 sukkah 98, 107 support of the ICEJ’s ideological agenda 104–​6 supersessionism 96, 100, 113, 120, 125, 129, 187 n.18 Swain, Stacie 191 n.19 symbol 2, 3, 8, 9, 15, 28–​9, 57, 150 power of 4–​5 Székely Sabbatarians 103 Tabernacles/​Sukkot see Sukkot Taylor, Mark C. 62 telos 21, 147 “Temple of Liberty, The” 162 terrestrial 145–​6 territories 13, 20, 81, 89, 93, 99, 141, 155 theme parks 2, 19, 22, 43, 45, 50, 54, 55–​6, 57 Ark Encounter see Ark Encounter Holy Land Experience see Holy Land Experience (HLE) time, flexibility of 121–​2 time reckoning 121 tiyyulim (field trips) 108 Todorov, Tzvetan 96, 107 topography 87, 88, 89 tourism, religious 43, 180–​1 n.21, 184–​5 n.46 see also Israel tour Tower of Babel 47, 48 traditionism 90–​3, 100, 120–​1, 145–​6 transcendence 6, 11, 13, 22, 81, 123, 145–​6, 154, 156, 158, 161–​3, 191 n.1 Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) 22, 128 see also Holy Land Experience (HLE) Trollinger, Susan 68–​9 Trollinger, William 68–​9 truth claims 17, 21, 79, 80, 81, 82, 88, 90, 93, 94, 112, 123 Tubman, Harriet 186 n.2 Tyburczy, Jennifer 31 Tyndale, William 136

Tyson, Neil deGrasse 157–​9, 161, 162, 163, 192 n.29 United Nations Plaza, LBGT rainbow flag in 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade 4–​5 United States 1, 4, 14, 16, 18, 38, 39, 43, 64, 72, 85, 99, 104, 121, 132, 146, 153, 169 n. 12 biblical heritage, portrayal of 26, 27–​8, 29, 32–​5, 37 exceptionalism 5, 25–​6, 28, 32, 33, 37, 40–​1, 169 n.13, 173 nn.51, 66 origins myth 26, 27–​8, 29, 33, 34–​5 see also Museum of the Bible (MOTB) and Sukkot 103 untamed 137, 141, 142 ur-​culture 124 Ussher, James 70, 178 n. 28 van der Hoeven, Willem 99 see also International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ) Van Kampen Collection 128 Van Kampen, Robert 128 Via Dolorosa 90–​1, 128 Vikings 151, 153, 154 virtual pilgrimage 1 visual mythmaking 121 BibleWalk Museum see BibleWalk Museum Wach, Joachim 161 Wampanoag Indians 37 Washington, George 26 wax museums, Mansfield 21, 113, 114 Weber, Max 45 West Bank 81, 85, 86, 89, 96, 107, 108 holy sites 98 Wilderness Tabernacle 132–​4 Wise, Kurt 159 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 126 World Jewish Congress 104 Wycliffe, John 136 Xenophanes 10 Yahav, Daniel 105 Yaniv, Omer 185 n.46 Yom Kippur 120

 219

Index young earth creationism (YEC) 19, 59, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 176 n. 2 Zechariah 102–​3 Zeitgeist 160–​1

219

Zionism 20–​1, 90, 93, 99, 105, 106, 184 n.43 see also Christian Zionism/​ Zionists Zion’s Hope, Inc. 127–​8 see also Holy Land Experience (HLE)

220