Holy Orlando!

And so it seems at the turnstile, where a costumed ticket-taker utters a hearty “Shalom.” Though none of us knows for certain exactly how Jerusalem looked between about 1450 B.C. and 66 A.D., it was surely a lot like the park’s recreated street market. Here, Middle Eastern soundtracks blast over an unseen PA system, while one meanders into the Methuselah’s Mosaics art gallery to pick out a $ 5,000 Abraham-sacrificing-Isaac painted in oils (not on velvet). Just off King David’s Alley, a guy named Mark (in period smock and flip-flops) loudly hawks the “ninth wonder of the world” — his milk-and-honey ice cream — which is moving much more briskly than the eighth wonder of the world, the lemon slush, known in antiquity as the “Thirsty Camel Cooler.”

The very words “Christian theme park” tend to elicit ridicule. It was 13 years ago that P. J. O’Rourke visited the last Christian theme park, Jim and Tammy Bakker’s now defunct Heritage USA, with the intention of scoffing. Instead, he wrote, he came away converted — “to Satanism.” Unlike Heritage, however, the Holy Land Experience, which bills itself as a “living Biblical museum,” doesn’t favor air-conditioned doghouses, 52-foot water slides, or slutty church secretaries. It is intended to create a “total immersion experience,” dramatically demonstrating that “the Bible is God’s word to man” and sharing the message of God’s grace to man through the “death, burial and resurrection of His Son.” But that hasn’t kept discount O’Rourkes at bay.

In fact, it seems to have attracted more of them, says a buoyant park spokesman, Ryan Julison, who has used the media controversy in a bit of public relations aikido. (The park has filled to its 800-person capacity by mid-morning every day since it opened on February 5, causing a run on tickets and a shortage of milk-and-honey ice cream.) “Check this out,” Julison says, handing me a copy of an article from PR Week honoring Gilbert & Manjura (the park’s outside PR firm, which employs Julison) for pulling off the “PR Play of the Week,” generating thousands of television and print stories. The magazine is “the PR bible,” he says proudly.

Well-tailored and good-humored, Julison is earnest enough to declare that he personally plays for Team Jesus, but earthy enough not to be religious about it. While the general tone of news coverage has been restrained bemusement, Julison says, “We’ve had every satirist in the country invent rides for this place — the Satan’s breath roller coaster, the John the Baptist flume — that kind of thing.” Since the park doesn’t actually have rides, I ask Julison to start our tour at the water-to-wine bar. “You’re the fourth guy to think of that,” he says. “C’mon. You’ve got to do better than the Apopka Chief weekly.”

At first blush, an outsider might expect the Holy Land Experience, which contains life-sized recreations of the Garden Tomb, the Herodian Temple, the Qumran Dead Sea Scroll caves, and the Israelites’ desert Tabernacle, to earn censure from Christians wary of sacrilege. One would be wrong. After all, the evangelical community in Orlando, as big and fervent as that of Colorado Springs, is largely an outgrowth of mega-church culture — where a congregation can be a self-contained universe providing every amenity from food courts to car-repair service.

While evangelicals don’t have the market cornered on commingling religion and commerce (the Source for All Things Jewish catalog features a Mickey Mouse menorah), they seem to do more of it than anybody else (Christian commerce nationwide is a $ 3 billion-per-year industry). Even at a buttoned-down operation like the Bible church I attend in suburban Virginia, where the scholarly pastor dedicates entire sermons to Greek and Hebrew etymologies, the well-stocked bookstore contains not only weighty volumes of apologetics, but stuffed Veggie Tales toys and biblical action figures (Job comes complete with festering lesions). A Christian theme park then isn’t so much peculiar as inevitable.

Nor should the Holy Land Experience cause civic leaders concern on tackiness grounds — even if it does look like the mother of all mini-golf courses, with its gold-filigreed towers rising up along Orlando’s humming Interstate 4. Orlando, after all, may be the only city that could fight Las Vegas to a tastelessness draw. It’s a place that celebrates restaurants like Medieval Times, where tourists eat whole roasted chickens without utensils while watching “knights” combat each other with battle-axes. Likewise, it nearly included Veda Land, the transcendental meditation theme park proposed by the late magician Doug Henning, who hoped to construct a levitating restaurant to help tourists attain higher consciousness. Even respectable theme park pillars, such as Universal’s Islands of Adventure (designed by ITEC, which also built the Holy Land Experience), contains the Triceratops Encounter, where visitors take a hike to watch a lifelike dinosaur perform its ablutions.

What has rankled the community — at least the Jewish community — is the park’s founder, Marv Rosenthal. A Philadelphia native whose parents were Jewish (his mother became a Christian when he was a teenager), Rosenthal now sits in the office of a Mediterranean-style building that adjoins the park and houses his 11-year-old ministry, Zion’s Hope, whose twofold purpose is to preach the gospel to Jews and to steep Christians in the Jewish aspects of their heritage (since without the Jewish prophets, a Jewish Jesus, and the early Jewish Christians, there wouldn’t be much Bible left except for the Amalekites and the Philistines). As I catch up with him early one morning, Rosenthal is loose-tied and baggy-eyed. He has a matinee villain’s slit of a mustache, and his hairline recedes into a Brylcreemed peninsula. Sitting behind a large desk in an office that mixes Jewish and Christian accents (stars of David, Billy Graham coffee table books, Christian Y2K survival guides), Rosenthal looks simultaneously elated and exhausted.

He’s elated because after 20 years of dreaming (and having finally secured a significant donation from a Christian investor), he’s been able to build a small theme park (15 acres) that would normally warrant a few paragraphs of local coverage in an already overstimulated Orlando. Instead, Rosenthal’s attraction has garnered “10 years’ worth” of free national publicity in just a few weeks. While Rosenthal has scrupulously vetted the park’s content, opting to forgo rides in the interest of preventing anything “that would be cheap or demeaning or honky-tonk or dishonoring to God,” the park’s publicity has come largely because of Rosenthal’s religion. Journalists grew exceedingly interested in the attraction when local rabbis cast it as an elaborate ruse to snooker Jewish tourists into switching teams. The militant Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin even flew in from Los Angeles on the park’s opening day to conduct a fizzled two-man protest, accusing Rosenthal of being a “soul-snatcher” (the Jewish Defense League’s website, under the heading “The Quiet Holocaust,” accuses evangelizing Christians, particularly Baptists, of trying to “LOVE US TO DEATH”).

The rabbis, taking a more sophisticated tack, abstained from the JDL’s protest, but universally denounced Rosenthal, who calls himself a “Hebrew Christian.” “A Hebrew Christian makes as much sense as kosher pork,” Rabbi Aaron Parry of Jews for Judaism told the Tampa Tribune. Nonsense, says Rosenthal, who asserts that if a Jew says he is an atheist, agnostic, or animist, “the rabbis still say he’s Jewish. . . . But somehow if he believes in Jesus, he’s no longer Jewish.”

It’s easy to understand why the rabbis are tense. As Mark Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, says, the local Jewish community, who’ve recently been the recipients of everything from mass-mailed Jesus videos to cold calls, “feel like they’re swimming in a sea of evangelical Christianity, and they’re looked at as tuna fish.” While the Southern Baptists (Rosenthal’s an Independent Baptist) have spent the better part of two centuries concentrating their missionary efforts on easier-to-convert adherents of monotheistic religions, in 1996 they launched a very public campaign to evangelize Jews in particular. The Jewish tradition, by contrast, generally discourages proselytizing, so that Jews’ only headline-generating conversion activity seems to be the occasional celebrity dalliance. (Madonna briefly flirted with pretending to be Jewish, before deciding she’d rather pretend to be British.)

Rosenthal insists that though he is an evangelist by trade and “makes no apologies” for sharing his faith, the intent of the park is not to pull a bait-and-switch by appropriating ancient Hebrew imagery in order to sock the gospel to Jewish visitors. Rather, he says, he wishes to “give color to the black and white” of scripture while encouraging people to “dust off their Bibles.” Sure enough, the park is shy of evangelical hard sells, containing no alter calls, no commitment cards, not even any counselors. If one were prompted to seek more details on the Christian plan of salvation — say, after seeing the Seed of Promise film depicting the crucifixion — one would be forced to ask Mark, the milk-and-honey ice cream dipper, who seems more preoccupied with pushing Thirsty Camel Coolers than netting new recruits for the kingdom.

What the park does have in spades is an endearing let’s-put-on-a-show spirit. With PR czar Ryan Julison as my guide, I head off down the Via Dolorosa to the Garden Tomb, where Julison apologizes for the air-conditioner’s being on the blink, jeopardizing the dank “tomblike atmosphere.” I tell him not to worry, and point to a casually thrown off shroud, as if to ask, “Could that be . . . ?” “That’s right,” he nods, “it’s J.C.’s,” indicating a sign that reads “He is risen.” While Julison makes every park employee available for interviews, I can’t meet the Jesus character, who only makes appearances for a few weeks on either side of Easter. Rosenthal doesn’t want his presence to become “corny” or “trite,” and besides, Julison adds, “We keep you guys away, ’cause what if Jesus has got a track record of driving under the influence or something? I mean — how do you find somebody without sin? You just can’t.”

Instead, Julison takes me back to the actors’ dressing room — an unthinkable security breach at a place like Disney — to meet Mary (as in Mary and Joseph). Gloria Beck, who plays the crowd favorite, is still holding a swaddled doll after completing a show. Beck has been in show business for a while, sort of. She was an opera-singing waitress at the Macaroni Grill, and for five years played Fred Flint-stone and a “number of other furry things” at the nearby Universal theme park. While those experiences were slightly humiliating, her current role, she says, is “humbling. You get the baby in your arms and it sort of hits you. I’m looking at a piece of plastic, but it represents the son of God.”

Some of the other presentations are not without glitches. At the Wilderness Tabernacle, costumed high priests painstakingly recreate the ancient Israelites’ rituals on the Day of Atonement. These include a visit to the Holy of Holies, where a twirling funnel of fog representing the presence of God descends over the Ark of The Covenant (think Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Bay City Rollers concert). The CO[2] and water/glycol effect is mighty impressive. But when the show concludes, the tabernacle dumps its crowd out into The Plaza of Nations, interrupting Mary’s period musical drama in the middle of the crucial dove release (20 or so doves are let out of a box, lurch toward Universal Studios before getting their bearings, then fly back to their trainer’s house in Kissimmee, where they will be collected and returned to the park for the next show at 4:30 P.M.).

At other times it’s unclear whether we are in the midst of a biblical theme park or a bad Elvis movie. Take the “Revival in the Land!” concert. Overcaffeinated players sing zippy contemporary Christian numbers with lots of box steps and over-the-head, making-a-sandwich hand clapping. Even as one favorably disposed toward the message, I find it hard to see a non-believer being in serious jeopardy of conversion here unless he has a weakness for stiff choreography and melting pancake make-up.

But just to make sure, I figure I should see the park through someone else’s eyes. So I invite Rabbi Sholom Dubov, Orlando’s only Orthodox rabbi, to be my guest. Other rabbis who’ve publicly castigated the Holy Land Experience without visiting it decline my invitation, citing every excuse from “a head cold” to its “not being good for the Jews.” But Dubov sees an imperative to visit: “The Talmud says the rabbis have to study all the idol-worshipping of the pagans. It’s important for us to know what’s going on on the other side.”

Dubov’s may not be the most ecumenical assertion. But he’s a good sport for coming. He shows up in a wide-brimmed rabbinical hat and a conservative gray suit and gazes amused at the Oasis Lagoon (a retention pond that Rosenthal would’ve liked to have made into a scale-model of the Sea of Galilee, if it hadn’t been hemmed in on all sides by office parks and 7-Elevens). The lagoon reminds Dubov of a joke. A priest, a rabbi, and “another guy” are in a boat, which starts sinking. The rabbi skitters across the water to safety on the far shore, as does the other guy. The priest, having just witnessed two miracles, stands baffled in the boat. “The rabbi,” says Dubov, “turns to his friend, looks at the priest, and says, ‘Should we tell him where the rocks are?'”

It’s one of the few moments of levity Dubov will experience all morning. For the park puzzles him. He is troubled in the Old Scroll Shop, where there are velveteen pouches for the souvenir mezuzahs (“Mezuzahs are supposed to go on the door,” he says). He is troubled at the Wilderness Tabernacle, where the sacrifice of a lamb is portrayed as a foreshadowing of Christ’s pending sacrifice on the cross. He is so downcast that he takes a pass on my offer to buy him a Hebrew National Hot Dog Pita Wrap at the Oasis Springs Cafe. “No thanks, maybe in D.C.,” he says. “Do they have kosher places there?”

As we sit down at a table near the cafe, with mostly elderly Christian visitors eavesdropping as they lunch on Famous Jaffa Falafels, we engage in light theological debate. I stick up for Rosenthal, saying that the park stands little chance of converting Jews or anybody else — it’s an affirmation of Christian faith in the form of biblical pageantry. Besides, even if Rosenthal is proselytizing — who cares? Any Christian who adheres to the Great Commission, the injunction in Matthew 28 to go forth and make disciples of all nations, knows that it requires us to make nuisances of ourselves by evangelizing, even if we do it through tacky theme parks.

Dubov shoots back that an affirmation of faith is fine, but not when it seduces non-practicing Jews by appropriating, then recasting, the trappings of their faith. “Why do [Christians] have to keep on taking from the Old Testament?” asks Dubov. “Why can’t they say, ‘The Old Testament’s old, we gotta new — out with the Old, in with the New’ — but they don’t say that.” We respectfully disagree, and I sense that the Bedouin-Beef-Wrap-eating tourists around us are confused as to whether the rabbi is a visitor or an attraction.

Dubov says the Holy Land Experience is “amateurish,” but he also pays it the highest compliment. “This should send a message to the Jewish community that we should have done it — or that we still should.” In fact, he adds, they kind of have. In Brooklyn, the Lubavitch community where Dubov hails from has nearly completed its Jewish Children’s Museum, which will feature everything from “pushka pinball” to an oversized Shabbat dinner table where children can crawl among giant matzah balls.

I inform Julison of this latest development. “That’s great,” he says, without a hint of competitiveness. “Go get ’em.” Upon further rumination, however, he seems conscious that both sides are playing for more than tourism dollars. “Hmmm,” he says with a new air of concern, “we don’t have giant matzah balls.”

Matt Labash is staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.