Familiar things

8 February 2023

So much is so familiar here – I’ve heard the accents a thousand times before, seen the Starbucks and Krispy Kremes on their imperial advance into British culture, we have motorways and car culture back home too. And yet at the same time so much is alien – endless ads on the freeway: ‘WRECK?’ ‘Life is short. Get a divorce.’ ‘There IS evidence for God.’ Who’d have thoughts to call a supermarket ‘Harris Teeter or ‘Food Lion’.

On the drive to the Harris Teeter for lunch I spy a giant brick building, maybe 16 stories high, singularly towering over a flat horizon. I ask if anyone knows about it – Greg does. Apparently it is a giant empty hotel, the Heritage Grand Hotel, which was built as part of a failed theme park. Possibly part of the reason for its subsequent failure is that this particular theme park’s theme was God. A God-themed theme park!!! Yes sireee. A local hugely successful televangelist, Jim Bakker, made millions from his TV evangelism. As the story goes, God told him that his next project shoiuld be to build a Christian theme park, and so he did. It became the third largest theme park in the world, with five million visitors per year.

Eventually though the theme park collapsed around him in a cataclysm of disasters - he was mired in controversy for drugging and raping a secretary, which began to put punters off, and then tax fraud lawsuits and a hurricane (an act of god?) which ripped apart half of the buildings on the site conspired to put an end to ‘Heritage USA’. The great big towering Heritage Grand Hotel still stands, empty and looming over the flat wide terrain, a monument to the strange and yet hugely powerful marriage of boom and bust capitalism and religion which finds a home in this part of the world.

Jim Bakker ended up in jail, serving only five years of his 45 year sentence for fraud. He got back on the horse, and now prophesise the coming end of days, and does a successful line in promoting emergency survival products.