JESUSLAND IN BAD DECLINE

Photos from America's derelict religious theme parks

In the small town where I grew up in there was an evangelical church that, at Christmas time, opened a quonset hut full of biblical scenes built out of surplus mannequins with glued-on beards and Party City wigs. For terminally ironic teenagers these thrift store-David LaChappelle scenes were a free entertainment godsend. One year, dressed in our punk and goth finest and stoned on weed, we posed with the figures, rearranging them in questionable tableaus when no one was looking. I think we even signed the guestbook with Manson girl names. Now that I’m far past my hokey teen transgressions I see that we were answering religious kitsch we found genuinely oppressive with our own brand of subcultural kitsch.  

In the end, it’s probably a danger to not take everyone’s kitsch seriously.

That hut is long gone but over the years I’ve kept looking for these places while on road trips and tours and taking photos when I can. The following photos are of derelict Christian parks in Connecticut and California. In their own ways, both places sprang from American anxieties: Holy Land USA wanted to bring a mini-golf-sized holy land to a dying industrial town while Desert Christ Park’s creator built reinforced concrete icons in the Mojave Desert meant to survive a nuclear war. (Though of course they couldn’t even survive bored teenagers.)

HOLY LAND USA (Waterbury, Connecticut)

Created by a Catholic businessman in 1955, Holy Land USA presented plaster and concrete versions of holy land sites and stories cut into a terraced hill. There was also a biblical animal petting zoo.  After the owner's death in the 1980s the park fell into severe disrepair, culminating in being the site of a horrific murder in 2010.

That crime mobilized a group of civic leaders to buy Holy Land. The area has been cleaned up but the exhibits are not restored—I still remember the odd feeling of looking down while getting into shooting position and realizing I was stepping on a piece of a Samaritan’s plaster face.

DESERT CHRIST PARK (Yucca Valley, California)

The statues of Desert Christ Park were created by aviation worker Antone Martin during the early days of the Cold War, from 1945 through the 1950s. Displaying idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical scenes Martin wanted his "nondenominational message of peace" to be able to survive a nuclear war so he sculpted the figures out of bunker material, including steel reinforced concrete.

It fell into disrepair in the ’80s and ’90s. Locals often stole the heads from the Jesus statues before it was reopened in 2004.