\n\t\tCite this Article\n\t<\/h5>\n\t
Tucker Adkins, “Review: Ark Encounter,” Journal of Southern Religion<\/em> (22) (2020): jsreligion.org\/vol22\/adkins.<\/p>\n James S. Bielo. Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park.<\/i> New York: New York University Press, 2018. 240pp. 978-1-47984-279-7.<\/p>\n Publisher’s Website<\/a><\/p>\n\t \u201cThink Bigger.\u201d These two words welcome visitors to the Ark Encounter\u2019s website.[1]<\/a> Founder Ken Ham and the fundamentalist organization Answers in Genesis promote the massive structure as an entertaining, immersive, and historically-authentic introduction to the flood described in the book of Genesis. James Bielo\u2019s new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park<\/em> focuses on the spaces, people, ideas, and activities weaving together this unique experience.<\/p>\n A prolific scholar of religious anthropology at Miami University, Bielo offers an ethnographic examination of the much-discussed northern Kentucky theme park. His study is particularly concerned with how the Ark-park acts as a \u201cform of religious publicity [that] mobilizes the strategies and imperatives of modern entertainment to claim cultural legitimacy and authority.\u201d The multi-million-dollar attraction\u2014part biblical reenactment, part \u201cwild adventure\u201d\u2014exemplifies fundamentalists \u201cvying for cultural authority in American public life\u201d (3). Put another way, the Ark\u2019s life-like exhibits, family-friendly leisure, and sheer architectural magnitude constitute an evangelical endeavor to embolden creationists and challenge distrust of noncreationists (29). A strategic materialization of creationism, the Ark stands as the combination of specific biblical argument and family entertainment, palatably packaging scriptural literalism with zoos, ziplines, and buffet-style restaurants. Exploring the to-scale recreation of Noah\u2019s ark, family, animals, and cargo, visitors can experience historical affirmation of creationist exegesis while having fun. With the park\u2019s dual venture in mind, this monograph illustrates how Christian fundamentalism, and specifically its version of biblical interpretation, is \u201cre-created through material processes, such as the choreography of religious space and the testimony of the senses\u201d (6).<\/p>\n Ark Encounter<\/em> makes a stimulating and significant contribution. Not unlike historian John Wigger\u2019s recent study of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker\u2019s \u201cevangelical empire,\u201d Bielo engages readers with an expression of American fundamentalism at once staggeringly popular and often-lampooned.[2]<\/a> And, importantly, he attends to fundamentalism\u2019s theological distinctives through a creative analytical framework and fresh inquiries. Ark Encounter\u2019<\/em>s extended material inspection of this creationist theme park\u2014through its strategic advertising, astonishing reproduction of Noah\u2019s ark, conservative educational resources, and family-centric entertainment opportunities\u2014demonstrates fundamentalism\u2019s complicated engagement with contemporary culture. Through such an approach we gain crisp insight into fundamentalism\u2019s theological tactility and how the Ark\u2019s \u201cphysical, experiential, and choreographed\u201d productions offer visitors \u201caffective access to the biblical past and reproduces commitments to biblical authority through aesthetic strategies\u201d (38-9).<\/p>\n Alongside its efforts to explain the park\u2019s spatialization of fundamentalism, one of Ark Encounter<\/em>\u2019s principal attractions (if I may) is its ethnographic framework. Drawing on five years of \u201cbackstage access,\u201d Bielo\u2019s interviews, photographs, and field notes provide unique insight into the theme park\u2019s innerworkings. Though in the book\u2019s informative appendix he admits that some restrictions impacted his research, he gifts readers with wonderful descriptions of staff meetings integral to the construction of the Ark\u2019s public image and reinforcement of its theological underpinnings (13-4).<\/p>\n Readers may wonder if more historiographical engagement could have benefited Ark Encounter<\/em>. Given the monograph\u2019s inquiries into American fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and Christianity and business, it is odd that Kate Bowler, George Marsden, and Matthew Sutton go unmentioned.[3]<\/a> This book\u2019s story about contemporary fundamentalism\u2019s public materialization and commercialization, about the movement\u2019s innovative techniques for claiming and marking its victory (or expectations thereof), appears deeply relevant to these scholars (3, 138). For example, in 1986 Marsden\u2019s path-breaking Fundamentalism and American Culture<\/em> argued famously that fundamentalists are evangelicals marked by their strident anti-liberalism and biblical literalism.[4]<\/a> Over thirty years later, Ark Encounter<\/em> clearly shows how today\u2019s most recognizable fundamentalists have, in striking fashion, doubled down in their critique of modern American life and re-emphasized conservative theological principals. Most impressive, Bielo demonstrates his case through an analysis of space instead of politics\u2014an important achievement.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> See arkencounter.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> See John Wigger, PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker\u2019s Evangelical Empire<\/em> (Oxford, 2017).<\/p>\n\n\t\tOpen-access license\n\t<\/h5>\n\tThis work is licensed CC-BY<\/a>. You are encouraged to make free use of this publication<\/a>.
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