Matthew Paul Turner posted this advertisement for Christ in the Smokies, a wax museum and tourist trap in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

This should really be paired with Umberto Eco’s essay, Travels in Hyperreality. Sometime in the early 1970′s Eco traveled the United States, stopping by museums and tourist attractions. He toured a number of wax museums, including “Christ in the Smokies.” He witnessed many instances of what he called “hyperreality,” a simulation of reality that exceeds and distorts the actual reality.

It’s a dense piece, so pulling out a few pithy quotes isn’t going to work. So here’s a big chunk about his experience with wax museums:

The whole of the United States is spangled with wax museums, advertised in every hotel—in other words, attractions of considerable importance. The Los Angeles area includes the Movieland Wax Museum and the Palace of Living Arts; in New Orleans you find the Musee Conti; in Florida there is the Miami Wax Museum, Potter’s Wax Museum of St. Augustine, the Stars Hall of Fame in Orlando, the Tussaud Wax Museum in St. Petersburg. Others are located in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Atlantic City, New Jersey, Estes Park, Colorado, Chicago, and so on.

The contents of a European wax museum are well-known: “live” speaking images, from Julius Caesar to Pope John XXIII, in various settings. As a rule, the environment is squalid, always subdued, diffident. Their American counterparts are loud and aggressive, they assail you with big billboards on the freeway miles in advance, they announce themselves from the distance with glowing signs, shafts of light in the dark sky. The moment you enter you are alerted that you are about to have one of the most thrilling experiences of your life; they comment on the various scenes with long captions in sensational tones; they combine historical reconstruction with religious celebration, glorification of movie celebrities, and themes of famous fairytales and adventure stories; they dwell on the horrible, the bloody;
their concern with authenticity reaches the point of reconstructive neurosis. [...]

Between San Francisco and Los Angeles I was able to visit seven wax versions of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Some are crude and unwittingly caricatural; others are more accurate though no less unhappy in their violent colors, their chilling demolition of what had been Leonardo’s vibrance. Each is displayed next to a version of the original. And you would naturally—but naively—suppose that this reference image, given the development of color photo reproduction, would be a copy of the original. Wrong: because, if compared to the original, the three-dimensional creation might come off second-best. So, in one museum after the other, the waxwork scene is compared to a reduced reproduction carved in wood, a nineteenth-century engraving, a modern tapestry, or a bronze, as the commenting voice insistently urges us to note the resemblance of the waxwork, and against such insufficient models, the waxwork, of course, wins. The falsehood has a certain justification, since the criterion of likeness, amply described and analyzed, never applies to the formal execution, but rather to the subject: “Observe how Judas is in the same position, and how Saint Matthew . . .” etc., etc.

As a rule the Last Supper is displayed in the final room, with symphonic background music and a son et lumiere atmosphere. Not infrequently you are admitted to a room where the waxwork Supper is behind a curtain that slowly parts, as the taped voice, in deep and emotional tones, simultaneously informs you that you are having the most extraordinary spiritual experience of your life, and that you must tell your friends and acquaintances about it. Then comes some information about the redeeming mission of Christ and the exceptional character of the great event portrayed, summarized in evangelical phrases. Finally, information about Leonardo, all permeated with the intense emotion inspired by the mystery of art. At Santa Cruz the Last Supper is actually on its own, the sole attraction, in a kind of chapel erected by a committee of citizens, with the twofold aim of spiritual uplift and celebration of the glories of art. Here there are six reproductions with which to compare the waxworks (an engraving, a copperplate, a color copy, a reconstruction “in a single block of wood,” a tapestry, and a printed reproduction of a reproduction on glass). There is sacred music, an emotional voice, a prim little old lady with eyeglasses to collect the visitor’s offering, sales of printed reproductions of the reproduction in wax of the reproduction in wood, metal, glass. Then you step out into the sunshine of the Pacific beach, nature dazzles you, Coca-Cola invites you, the freeway awaits you with its five lanes, on the car radio Olivia Newton-John is singing Please, Mister, Please; but you have been touched by the thrill of artistic greatness, you have had the most stirring spiritual emotion of your life and seen the most artistic work of art in the world. It is far away, in Milan, which is a place, like Florence, all Renaissance; you may never get there, but the voice has warned you that the original fresco is by now ruined, almost invisible, unable to give you the emotion you have received from the three-dimensional wax, which is more real, and there is more of it.

While I’m reluctant to link to a blog that we are at war with, Camels with Hammers has an interesting series of guest posts from Eric Steinhart. Steinhart has been watching the growth of neo-paganism in America, and has some thoughts and analysis to share. He asks, “Atheists so far have been fighting Christianity. Should they fight Wicca (or neo-paganism) too? If so, it will be a different fight.”

FWIW, I don’t see myself as fighting Christianity. Christians can handle that on their own. I see myself as fighting what David Sehat calls the “moral establishment,” which is “the use of law to perpetuate Christian morals in society.” Briefly, in American history Protestant Christianity was so intertwined with society that people saw no problem with enforcing sectarian religious laws under then guise of perpetuating morality and social stability. This resulted in a feedback loop where sect and state supported one another without technically establishing a religion.

This is a legal problem, and groups like the ACLU fight it in the courts. But the fight will never end as long as the average American can look around themselves and see (or believe they see) nothing but other Protestant Christians. Humans being as they are, a group in the solid majority will see their views as the default, and everyone else’s views as the exception.

The obvious way to combat this is to increase America’s religious diversity. People like Fred Clark want pluralism for its own sake; because it is the opposite of coercion. I want diversity because it makes the mindset that leads to coercion more difficult. When your neighbor is Wiccan, your brother is an atheist, your in-laws are mystics and your children are dabbling in new religions at college, it is going to be hard for you to think of your local Baptist church as the only real religion and that everything else as superstition.

I read folks like Jason Pitzl-Waters, because those of us men with hyphenated last names need to stick together, even if I’m anonymous. And Star Foster, whose favorite atheist was Carl Sagan, because who the hell else could it be? Still, my understanding of the neo-pagan religions is more limited than I’d like. But I know enough to believe that an increasing presence of neo-pagans in the public eye would be a good thing for American society.

Over at Religion in American History, Charity Carney has just finished her series about working in Christian retail. Now Darren Grem is responding, starting off by looking at what we mean when we say that something is “Christian”:

I certainly have my own opinions about the “Christianness” of various companies. But asking if a company is actually a “Christian” business usually ends up obscuring more than it reveals. Let’s be honest – as with anything else, where you start your line of inquiry will shape the questions you will ask and the answers you will probably get. Asking about a company’s “Christianness” will also — more than likely — lead you back to yourself and your own definition of what “Christianness” entails.

Meanwhile, over at The Escapist, Britton Peele is looking at the idea of Christian video games, and Christian pop culture in general:

It seems so easy, right? Sprinkle a little God here, a little Jesus there and suddenly everything’s purified. Never mind the violence and language in The Book of Eli. Eli is on a journey to save the world’s last Bible! He’s a Christian! Can you say “Church movie night”?

Peele seems mainly interested in the way that members of the evangelical sub-culture defend the media that they enjoy against fellow members. But it does lead back to the tricky question of what makes something “Christian.”

As Grem points out, the question of whether something is Christian – be it company or cultural product – is a tricky one. Does having Christian markers – crosses, bibles, ichthys – make something a Christian work? The anime Neon Genesis Evangelion famously appropriated many Christian symbols and phrases without being a Christian work. Does using Christian themes or Christian morality make a work Christian? First we’d have to define what themes and morality are exclusively Christian. So how do you know when something is Christian?

Evangelical Christianity can never seem to make up its mind. Does it want to separate itself from popular culture, or does it want to embrace popular culture? Sometimes it seems to want to do both, rejecting pop culture for awhile, the scurrying to catch back up with it. This leads to comical results, such as the fact that Christian rock trends are usually 15 years behind the times.

So in that vein, meet Jimmy Valiant, an action hero without the gratuitous sex and alcohol.

Jimmy Valiant: Scions of Danger is an exciting, small-budget (by Hollywood standards) pilot for a proposed episodic series for network broadcast, internet streaming, and DVD. As a pilot, it is intended to serve as a concept for the series that, if approved by studios and networks for full-budget production, would expand. The pilot’s story itself would be re-shot and incorporated into the larger story of the entire 13-episode series.

The message of this series is simple: Heroism begins at the heart. For the last fifty years, men have watched movie heroes such as James Bond, Rambo, Jason Bourne, and the characters of the Mission Impossible series and received a counterfeit picture of manhood. While many appreciate the courage and can-do spirit of these characters, they’ve also been treated to a wash of self-indulgence: lust, rage, and rebellion. With admiration, young boys have grown into adult males emulating these wicked attributes. True manhood has been the casualty.

Our film Jimmy Valiant: Scions of Danger seeks to present Christian heroism — where men follow the example of their Savior Jesus Christ by giving themselves for the weaker. This begins at the heart. As the main character of our story has to discover, men have to acknowledge Christ’s Lordship over them in order to fight for justice over vengeance.

Here’s a teaser. If the acting in the pilot is this bad, this is all the Jimmy Valiant you’ll ever see.

Jimmy Valiant: Scions of Danger Full-Length Trailer 1 from NDFilmmaker on Vimeo.

BTW, if you search for “Jimmy Valiant,” you’re likely to get the 60′s professional wrestler:

I would prefer a show starring this guy.