Bible Theme Parks!?

Life often imitates art. Maybe you remember the episode of the Simpsons where Ned Flanders--the annoyingly wierd, overly zealous, legalistic supposedly Christian neighbor--opened up a Christian amusement park called "Praiseland." Well stand back, now there's "The Holy Land Experience" in Orlando, Florida (along with a host of other similar endeavors).

For $30 you can experience such exciting amusements as:

• A musical reenactment of Christ's death and resurrection, delivered daily by one of the park's three Jesus impersonators!
• A six-story replica of Herod's temple!
• A gift shop that sells Holy Land T-shirts, plastic swords and shields, and biblical cookbooks!
• And much more!

Some people have complained: "What you have is this radical, paradoxical combination of the sacred and the profane, or maybe the sacred and the trivial."

If you tend to agree, perhaps one of the Jesus impersonators could dissuade you: "There are a lot of things we could do here to bring in money, like serve alcohol, but we don't."

But one commentator observed: "places like Holy Land Experience and Dinosaur Adventure Land belong to a long-standing American religious tradition of evangelism as entertainment."

I guess it's not so different than your average Sunday morning worship service these days. And, hey, at least they don't serve alcohol. Because that would make it profane.