In the summer of 2002, Timothy Beal and his family rented a motor home and traveled across the nation to visit strange and unusual roadside religious attractions. He was curious to discover why people would create such oddities as the World’s Largest Ten Commandments of a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark. He shares his journey in Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith.

Beal could have spent the bulk of his book belittling the religious attractions he visited. This would not have been difficult. Instead, he approaches his strange pilgrimage as a serious religious study. “I take care to avoid the temptation to make fun or condescend. I want to take these places seriously as unique expressions of religious imagination and unique testimonials to the varieties of religious experience in America” (6). Because of this, Beal’s book is not mean or cynical. He does not use his voice as an opportunity to cast stones at strange memorials and even stranger people. He truly attempts to understand the people who create such oddities. “In the eyes of the world, these are indeed words of faith whose only virtue is absurdity. But by the same token I find them utterly, disarmingly sincere, without the slightest hint of irony” (20).

The theme that ties all the roadside religious attractions together is their attempt to create sacred space. In their own peculiar manner, “each works to create a space that is set apart in a way that orients it toward and opens it to divine transcendence” (8). As such, each attraction fits Beal’s definition of the heart of religion: “I tell my students that the study of religion is fundamentally about making the strange familiar and the familiar strange” (12).

In the book, Beal describes his visits to the following sites (when available, I have included links to their respective websites):

Holy Land USA in Bedford County, Virginia. Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Holy Land USA is a 1:100 scale replication of the land of the Bible during the time of Jesus. The one trail through the park – Journey Trail – follows the life of Jesus from birth to death and beyond. In spite of the low-budget quality of Holy Land USA, Beal found that the Trail left people in a mood of solemn reflection. He concludes that this is because of the power of narrative. As participants become part of the Jesus story, it becomes profoundly real to them.

The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida purports to be a $16 million, fifteen acre “living biblical history museum.” Beal calls it “a fundamentalist Magic Kingdom” (53). In contrast to Holy Land USA he finds it unimpressive. In spite of its small budget and historical inaccuracies (it is hard to replicate the Holy Land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains!), Holy Land USA seeks to convey an experience of Christ through sharing in the biblical narrative. The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, on the other hand, seeks to indoctrinate visitors in Marvin Rosenthal’s unusual end-times ideology.

Beal visits two biblically-themed miniature golf courses. Golgotha Fun Park in Cave City, Kentucky brings together two words – “Golgatha” and “fun” – that should never be within the same sentence much less the same phrase! Beal also visits Biblical Mini-Golf in Lexington, Kentucky. Beal writes, “With biblical minigolf, then, sacred narrative, The Greatest Story Ever Told, meets one of the most trivial of all American amusements” (84).

Cross Garden in Prattville, Alabama, is eleven acres of junk appliances and crosses donned with such inspiring messages as: “You will die,” “Hell is hot hot hot” and “No ice water in hell!” According to creator Bill Rice, God told him to create this strange monument as a warning to humankind. Bill considers himself a modern-day Noah who has been given a divine mission to alert the world of its impending doom.

Richard Greene, the founder of God’s Ark of Safety in Frostburg, Maryland is another self-proclaimed modern-day Noah who has taken his title a little too literally. God’s Ark of Safety is a full-scale unfinished replica of Noah’s Ark. Why does God want Green to build the ark? The same reason God wanted Bill Rice to create Cross Gardens. Apparently, God wants to use strange creations such as the Cross Garden and God’s Ark of Safety to stir humankind to repentance before all hell breaks loose.

Fields of the Wood in Murphy, North Carolina, houses the World’s Largest Ten Commandments, the World’s Largest Altar (80-feet wide), and the World’s Largest New Testament. Apparently, “size matters at Fields of the Wood” (107). Though people come to see all the attractions, the star attraction is the World’s Largest Ten Commandments. The letters are five feet tall and purportedly visible from outer space. Beal comments that Fields of the Wood “has turned the Ten Commandments, with their prohibition against graven images, into a graven image – ‘the World’s Largest,’ in fact” (114).

Beal also visits the Dan Brown Rosary Collection in Skamania County, Washington, Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama, and Paradise Gardens in Summerville, Georgia. His comments concerning these attractions are mostly descriptive and positive.

Surprisingly, Beal is impacted most by Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Carthage, Missouri. The creation of Sam Butcher, the Park consists of a visitor’s center, the Fountain of Angels where two elaborate musicals show each day, and the Precious Moments Chapel, Sam Butcher’s own tribute to the Sistine Chapel. Annexed to the main chapel is a smaller chapel called Philip’s Prayer Room, created by Sam in remembrance of his son who died in a car accident. Though he died as an adult, he is pictured as a child in heaven. Among numerous photos of other deceased children, there are seven large Books of Remembrance in which visitors can “write whatever they want in remembrance of loved ones who have died” (155). The books are filled with prayers to and memories of dearly departed loved ones.

While in Philip’s Prayer Room, Beal experienced the simple power of Butcher’s vision. He writes, “For those of us who are not big Precious Moments fans, it’s hard to see how Precious Moments figures could speak to pain without glossing it over, sugarcoating it in sweetness, making it ‘just precious’” (140). However, that was not his experience. “From a distance, it all seemed like a strange mix of creepiness and sappiness… I was wrong. The place completely disarmed me with its simple, honest, precious expression of childlike suffering, loss, and hope for healing” (157).

This experience caused Beal to reflect upon his own perspective of grief, suffering, and loss. “Why do I equate complexity of expression with complexity of life experience and religious response? Why do I think that a simple expression expresses a simple experience?” (158) His conclusion: “I came to believe that the appearance of simplicity here is superficial, a precious sugar coating over an abyss of feeling so deep and complex that it cannot be adequately expressed” (158).

From the strange to the surreal, from the sappy to the serious, Beal has exposed two interesting and sometimes conflicting truths about contemporary religion: (1) we need sacred space, but (2) we have a hard time defining its boundaries and agreeing on what should fill it.

First, whether we realize it or not, we need sacred space. “This is the paradox. There is no experience of the sacred outside the profane” (82). As physical beings, we encounter the divine through physical reality. Though the greatest mystics are able to encounter the transcendent in all of reality – including the sentimental, strange, absurd, and serious – few of us are great mystics. Therefore, we need physical aids to remind us of the inherent sanctity of life and the pervasive presence of God. Sacred space provides us with clearly-marked boundaries and set-apart vehicles to define and guide our experience of the transcendent.

This truth leads us to a conflict. Though we need sacred space, we have a hard time drawing boundaries as to what space truly inspires a sense of the sacred, and what space simple trivializes and cheapens the sacred. Is everything equally suited to creating sacred space? Is there any difference between the experiences of the sacred one might have at a ornate grotto as compared to a mini-golf course? At a collection of 4,000 rosaries as compared to eleven-acres of rusted crosses plastered with damning messages? Beal wrestles with this in one his most poignant observations:

Although we tend to think of American evangelical Christianity as a conservative movement (focusing on its positions concerning sexuality, reproductive rights, drugs and alcohol, and matters of biblical authority), in fact it tends to be the most liberal of Christianities when it comes to its appropriating and adapting tradition to the popular interests and consumer demands of the secular mainstream… What keeps it from becoming a complete carnivalization of tradition? Does it ultimately sacrifice the sacred, so to speak, in the name of spreading its Gospel? (87)

Our conflict with the need to create and experience sacred space and the appropriate boundaries of what comprises sacred space will continue. The challenge will not go away until all things are brought under submission to Christ’s lordship and God is “all in all.” Until then, we wrestle with defining what constitutes sacred space and what should prompt transcendent experience. Though sacred tradition provides us with guidelines, the truth of the mystics – that all life is sacred and pervaded by God’s presence – assures us that we will always wrestle with drawing boundary lines. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005