T.The Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas has many attractions on its property, including tours of a recreated Holy Land, a 67-foot hilltop Christ statue, and several museums. The main attraction, however, is their piece, which is based on the last days of Christ and features over a hundred performers, live animals, and pyrotechnics. The show culminates in a (mild spoiler alert) Jesus ascending into heaven with the help of a hidden wire belt.

When I attended a performance of the show last September, the crowd was sparse. My rough number of employees was around 250 people in the amphitheater with a capacity of 4,000 people. Kent Butler, the attraction’s director of operations (who also plays Jesus on the show), told me that attendance was down 33 percent from 2019 to 2020. “I think the lowest show we had was 150 people and the highest show was probably somewhere between 750 and 800,” he said, adding that in a typical year they get at least 600 people for each performance.

Ticket sales are also on the decline at BibleWalk, a Christian wax museum in Ohio that you may already know due to its viral turn a few years ago when some of their scenes were found to feature recycled celebrity wax figures, including a Tom Cruise Jesus and a Prince Charles Abel.

Julia Mott-Hardin, the director of the museum, told me that she had not yet added up the number of visitors from last year, but that there had been a significant decrease compared to the previous year. “The coach industry has really had a huge hit with the pandemic,” she said. “So we all lost our coaches. And that was a very wide range for us. “

However, Mott-Hardin was keen that she still viewed the past year as a success for her museum. “We have suffered a financial blow,” she said. “But finances are not our main goal. Our main goal is to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people. “Another Christian wax museum, the Christ in the Smokies Museum and Gardens, which has operated in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for over 50 years, has not been so lucky. It finally closed its doors in December after its lease was bought out by a neighboring secular attraction. (It’s unclear whether the shutdown was directly related to the loss of business due to the pandemic, and an email asking for a comment was not returned.)

Even before the pandemic, many of these attractions had problems.

Before COVID, the Great Passion Play was well below average when it was most popular. According to Butler, the attraction drew over a quarter of a million visitors in 1992. “When we got the most crowds, we sold over 4,000 tickets to the show,” he said. According to Butler, the show brings together between 45,000 and 50,000 people in a normal year. The night I was there, the man who introduced the performance told the crowd that the attraction was owed $ 2 million and asked us to consider donating to get it out of the hole.

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The experience of the Holy Land is probably what America comes closest to being a Christian Disney world. The 15-acre theme park in Orlando, about 20 minutes from Disney World proper, features replicas of Jerusalem landmarks, Bible-themed mini golf, and a variety of stage and live performances. At least until last January, when the attraction’s owners announced they were being fired most of their employeesand permanent cancellation of all live entertainment.

The announcement came at the end of a long period of financial struggle. According to the Orlando SentinelThe attraction’s deficit increased from $ 1.37 million to $ 10.1 million between 2012 and 2016, before falling to $ 5.2 million the following year. Between 2013 and 2018, ticket sales decreased from $ 9.4 million to $ 5.5 million.

The park is currently closed due to the pandemic and the owners are closed Reportedly considering Sale to developers who would transform the site into a mall and apartment complex.

If the Holy Land Experience is closed permanently, it will certainly not be the first major Christian attraction to have done so.

Heritage USA, a theme park in South Carolina with rides, an ice rink and what appeared to be what was then the largest wave pool in the world, which closed in 1989. Dinosaur Adventureland, a small creationist theme park in Pensacola, Florida, closed in 2006. So did Bible Land in Yucaipa, California in 1994 and the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Visitor Center in Costa Mesa, California in 2017. Christian theme parks announced in Tennessee, California, and South carolina did not come about at all.

“I have unfortunately seen Christian attractions fail due to lack of interest and my heart breaks over it,” said Mott-Hardin of BibleWalk. “Just a few years ago we were really one of the three big ones [Christian wax museums.] There was BibleWalk, Christ in the Smokies, and [the Life of Christ Museum] in Portugal. Now Portugal has closed, and [Christ in the Smokies] just had to close. So that leaves us. “

Dennis L. Speigel, a theme park consultant who was part of the team that oversaw the closure of the Heritage USA theme park, believes that many Christian attractions in this country are hard to sell because they just aren’t as exciting as they are not religious are ones. “Some of the greatest stories in the world are in the Bible,” he said. “And if you could use the stories from the technologies available today, compared to 30 or 40 years ago, you could really have a very, very interesting attraction. The rolling mass of stone, walking on water – I don’t think technology will ever match history. “

While many of these attractions are referred to as theme parks, they tend to lack the features that make regular theme parks so popular. None of the Christian attractions in this country offer rides other than the things you might find in some malls or casinos (ice rinks, zip lines, VR or 3D movies, etc.). There is no such thing as a roller coaster ride through heaven. No trip to hell. No Jonah and the whale block ride.

Speigel believes this was a particularly big problem for the Holy Land Experience due to its proximity to so many other attractions. “When people are [in Orlando] If you only have a limited amount of time, will you spend half a day of your schedule visiting an attraction of this type? Or will they go to Universal or Disney Homes? ” he said.

Hemant Mehta, a writer who runs the blog Kind atheistbelieves that this lack of thrill means that Christian attractions tend not to have the kind of counter-attractiveness that is required to be truly successful.

As an example, he cites Ark Encounter, a $ 100 million-themed Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky that is mostly picked up by exhibits on the theme of creationism. “There is no update to creationism,” said Mehta. “Even if you believe everything [that’s on display at the park,] There is no reason to go back because what are you going to come back for? […] It’s not that they’ll come up with new evidence next month. “

While Ark Encounter has certainly sold a lot of tickets in non-COVID years – 827,591 in 2018, 897,189 in 2019, according to tax reports that were reported from Mehta’s blog– Those numbers are pretty far below that 1.4-2.2 million Annual Visitors The Ark’s operators predicted they would stop by before it opened. (A representative from Ark Encounter told me that the numbers reported by Mehta are not representative of the total number of visitors as the tax numbers do not include annual pass holders and children under 10 who can visit the Ark without paying. They refused from reporting actual visitor numbers. They also found that they recently expanded with a new VR attraction.)

It should be noted that there are a few Christian attractions that appear to be working well. Although COVID has forced them to reduce their audience capacity, the owners of Sight & Sound, a Christian theater with locations in Pennsylvania and Missouri, say they were Every year 1.5 million visitors are attracted and sold out shows. The Museum of the BibleThe company, which opened in Washington, DC, has seen approximately one million visitors in each of the two non-pandemic years since it opened in 2017 (though, like Ark Encounter, this is significantly fewer than the 3 million visitors the museum had predicted they would get in their first year of operation).

One obstacle to Christian attractions in the future could also be that their potential customer base shrinks. In 2019 the Pew Research Center became reported that 65 percent of American adults identified themselves as Christians, 12 percentage points less than a decade earlier. Over the same period, the number of American adults who identify as either agnostic, atheist, or “nothing special” rose from 17 percent to 26 percent, a trend that is predicted to continue.

Still, Mott-Hardin of the Ohio Christian Wax Museum believes there will always be a market for attractions like hers. “The culture is changing,” she said. “But the power of the Word of God – it is unchangeable. And when people come in contact with this word, that force will shoot through them more than if you picked up an electric wire. “

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