In the days of the ark

Today marks the grand opening of an ark: a San Antonio megachurch's 24,800-square-feet replica of the apocalypse-surviving boat of Genesis 6, 7 and 8. The structure is two-stories, has 13 classrooms and is designed to hold 850 children. It also houses a number of animatronic animals including a talking macaw and a giraffe that raises and lowers its head.

The animals have names like "John Bunyan" and "Dietrich Bonhoeffer."

A facebook page dedicated to The Ark calls it a "place of fun, learning and worship" for toddlers and Kindergarten-age children.

My San Antonio reports:

Called The Ark, it cost almost $5 million and will open to the public Saturday and for church programs the next day. It aims to spur wonderment but also to underscore the Bible's authenticity, said Matthew Hagee, executive pastor. 

"I want them to say it happened," he said. "The Ark was real. Salvation is real. What God desires for Noah, God desires for me. For Noah, it was a boat. And for me, it was Jesus Christ." 

In recent years, churches nationwide have ramped up resources for innovative children's buildings, mindful of their appeal to young families, and Noah's Ark has enjoyed longstanding popularity for such spaces. A Christian theme park in Kentucky is building a full-scale replica.  

But the scale and sophistication of Cornerstone's new facility -- and particularly its collection of electronically controlled animal replicas -- might be unmatched nationally, say experts in Christian children's ministry.

A children's minister at the church told the media the ark is meant to compete with the "whiz-bang Disney stuff," and to send a message to parents: "We don't just want your kids to come here and learn. We want them to experience God."

The imitation boat manages to symbolize a lot of the distinctive messages of the megachurch, including its emphasis on the historicity of such Bible stories as Noah and the ark, and also its emphasis on apocalypticism.

Cornerstone was founded in the 1970s by controversial Pentecostal pastor John Hagee, who is still the senior minister of the 20,000-member church. The biblical character Noah has figured into the teachings of both the older and the younger Hagee. Mathew Hagee preached a sermon series called "Build an Ark" about "the divine warnings the Word of God gives us about the day an age in which we live." Noah's ark, he said,

tells us that the wise pay attention, they make a plan … they are prepared. When something changes in their life, they are not affected.  

I pray that you will become aware of the situations surrounding you and that you will begin to build yourself an ark. I want you to build yourself a spiritual ark for your family to take refuge in, a financial ark to provide for your children and your grandchildren, an ark for your marriage, and an ark for your ministry. Ultimately, in every area of your life, I want you to consider how you can be better prepared for the things that are coming your way so when they do come, and trust me they will come, it is not a matter of if you will be victorious, but for certain that you will live in total triumph.

The elder Hagee also mentions Noah and the ark in a recent book where he suggested the apocalypse could begin on December 12, 2012. John Hagee opens the book, Can America Survive?, by comparing the nation to another gigantic boat, the Titanic. He writes:

Why do I belabor this point?

Because America, believed to be the most powerful and 'unsinkable' nation on the face of the earth, is now racing across the stage of history in a similar perfect storm -- this one driven by the winds of political correctness, economic meltdowns leading to the death of the dollar, the rejection of Israel, the maniacal nuclear ambitions of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, the ten prophetic signs that we are the terminal generation now being fulfilled in Biblical prophecy for the first time in world history, and the very real fact that in the near future planet Earth is going to experience, on a specific day, global ecological disaster in which a third of humanity will die.

The tenth "sign," according to Hagee, is the similarity between the world today and the world "in the days of Noah."

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Rob Bell's internal contradiction

Rob Bell's been gone from the Michigan megachurch he founded for more than a year now. When he remembers the church, he often in a sense misremembers it, according to Kelefa Sunnah's piece in the New Yorker.

Not misremembers, exactly, but rather remembers the beginning and not the end, what was overcome instead of what was created. He talks about the energy of the potential, not the extent to which an institution is an institution is an institution. The difference between what's emphasized and what's not is the contradiction inherently internal to the megachurch project, and also to Bell himself.

Sennah writes:

"Because [Bell] vividly remembers the early days, he still sometimes talks about Mars Hill as a gritty, scrappy place: a church with no sign, no steeple, no cross, and hardly any decoration. This is all true, but Mars Hill is also a comfortable, well-run facility, with plenty of parking and age-specific child care. It was just after eight o’clock on a seasonably cold morning, and worshippers were trickling in and stamping the snow off their boots."

Both of these aspects were critical to Mars Hill's success, and also to the problems that eventually became serious. Sennah locates the tension in the two very different things a church like Mars Hill needs: a sense of creativity and ongoing discovery, but also structure, order and stability.

Another way to say this would be: the things that Bell did tended to have two opposite and yet simultaneous results. His sermon style, to take one example, brought people together who wouldn't have otherwise been brought together, and it also created new polarities, and pushed people apart.

The same is also probably true for other major evangelical leaders and their megachurches.

The question is always, it seems, of how the internal opposite forces are balanced.

Bell, on the one hand, couldn't not push. But also -- and this is missed by most of his critics and more than a few of his fans -- he couldn't allow himself or be happy with himself as a bomb-thrower and controversialist.

The contradiction, at some point, became unsustainable for Mars Hills. Or, arguably, not for Mars Hill but for Bell, who himself was internally conflicted in exactly this same way the church he created was conflicted, on the one hand wanting to be a radical and on the other unwilling to take strong stands, wanting to be a mediator and someone who builds consensus.

In Sennah's telling, the inherent contradiction within Rob Bell was expressed as a kind of crafted ambiguity ("a careful ambiguity, allowing worshipers to think that he was however evangelical" -- or however liberal -- "they wanted him to be. He wanted to make a wide range of worshipers feel comfortable.") that ultimately broke down. Either Bell himself couldn't bear the cost of keeping it up, or the balancing act of that ambiguity just became impossible, and any move would have meant a tumble.

In this postmortem, at least, the controversy over hell that marked the end, at least for now, of Bell's pastoral ministry was rather incidental to there being an end. It if wasn't that, it would have been something else. What he had, what Bell was, was unsustainable.

The internal contradiction that couldn't be kept up indefinitely.

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The odd non-relation of the economy & religious construction

Despite signs of an economic recovery in other sectors of construction, religious construction has not picked up again. 

The stats from the US Department of Commerce show that the economic recovery -- sluggish though it may be -- isn't notable at all in spending on construction of houses of worship. The rate of decline with this construction spending isn't steep as it has been at some points since the economic crisis, but things are still moving in the downward direction. 

In the Spring, there was no hint of a reversal to the downward trend. Now, with two more month's worth of data, there's still no sign that spending on religious construction in America will do anything other than continue to decrease. The Summer just hasn't seen a significant uptick in construction spending by religious organizations. 

Given that construction typically increases in Summer months, and that religious construction has not increased this Summer, it doesn't seem likely that there religious construction will increase anytime soon. 

In January 2012, religious organizations spent a bit over $4 billion on construction. That dipped to $3.8 billion in April, $3.9 in May, and came in at $3.8 in June and $3.9 in July, according to the Department of Commerce numbers.

This means the market for religious construction is not responding to the economy in the same way the markets for residential and non-residential construction are responding. One can see the recovery in the statistics for private, non-government spending on other sorts of construction. But not with religious construction. 

Perhaps the era of construction of houses of worship is over in America. Certainly it now seems it was an era, rather than just being normalcy. 

It's difficult to imagine the near future will witness construction spending of the volume seen even during the recession. It's seems less likely still to see how these numbers might again reach the heights they did a decade ago, when nearly $9 billion per month was spent on religious construction in the United States.

The most recent numbers continue to support the point I made in July that there doesn't seem to be any clear relationship between economic conditions and religious construction. The decline in religious construction spending doesn't neatly correlate to the economic crisis, and the economic recovery doesn't   appear to have any bearing on religious construction either. 

It's just not clear what material conditions are conducive to religious construction. There's a kind of strange disconnect between the economy and this sector of the construction market. 

Comparisons to other sectors of construction make this clear. The signs of a recovery are apparent when one looks at the data for private spending on residential construction and non-residential construction. With residential construction, there's a bottom to the collapse of the market, and things turn around in mid 2011:

With non-residential construction -- only taking into account that construction funded by private sources, so as not to muddle things with government spending -- the same patter is visible. Spending drops from nearly $420 billion in 2008 to about $220 billion in January 2011. From that point on, spending as trended upwards:

Comparing all three data sets, the relationship between residential and non-residential construction spending is apparent. These look like they're responding to the same economic reality, the same economic conditions. Religious spending, by comparison, seems totally detached from the reality affecting the other sectors of construction:

It's still not at all clear to me why this is so. The economics of religious construction are ambiguous.

There's a temptation, I think, to see the change in idealist rather than materialist terms, but that doesn't particularly work either. One could argue and might want to argue that what's happened to spending on houses of worship in America isn't most basically economic, but theological. One could argue, for example that sometime around 2002, when the decline in spending seems to start, something shifted in the terms religious leaders and people used to conceive of and conceptualize spending, so that perhaps, for example, there was a shift from language about "sowing" and "expectations" and "enlarg[ing] the place of your tent," to language about "stewardship."

There's some evidence to support the idea that this has happened among evangelicals. The tide may have turned against megachurches, or at least the under girding theory of megachurches. 

Famously, for example, Willow Creek, the very influential megachurch that had served as a model for many, announced that their model was flawed and wasn't working as they'd predicted it would. Pastor Bill Hybels announced, pretty bluntly, "We made a mistake."

That's only evangelicals, though. Evangelicals count for roughly a third of Americans, so theological changes in that tradition that directly relate to church's construction spending are not irrelevant, but there's still the other two-thirds to consider. Surely it's not the case that most religious construction is done by just one-third of religious people? The Department of Commerce doesn't break down the religious construction number, but the statistics include Catholic construction, other Protestant construction, and non-Christian construction, too. 

If one posits a theological change as the condition for the change in religious construction spending, one either has to argue that 1) the change in one theological tradition was significant enough to cause the bulk of the affect of decline in religious spending; 2) that the theological change happened across traditions and across religions; or 3) that there were multiple, basically simultaneous theological changes in a variety of religious groups.

Those are difficult arguments to make. None of them seem, on the face of things, plausible. Perhaps with more data, an idealist argument for the root cause of the collapse of religious construction spending would have some support. 

I'm personally still inclined to look for a materialist answer, though I don't know of a decent one right now. It seems to me that it must be the case that, however decisions are made on a micro, case-by-case, congregation-by-congregation level, there must be some marco explanation that shows that certain social conditions relate to and result in increased spending on the construction of houses of worship, and that other social conditions are strongly connected to the decrease of spending seen over the last decade. 

What are those conditions, though? At least for now, there does not seem to be an answer. 

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