{"id":65,"date":"2008-11-14T09:42:20","date_gmt":"2008-11-14T09:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html"},"modified":"2008-11-14T09:42:20","modified_gmt":"2008-11-14T09:42:20","slug":"evangelism-or-entertainment-or","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html","title":{"rendered":"Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A curiosity I noted over my cereal flakes this morning: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.internetmonk.com\/archive\/riffs-the-creation-museum-in-kentucky-reviewed-in-the-new-yorker-june-2007\">Michael Spencer (the Internet Monk) linked<\/a> this week to a year-old <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/georgepacker\/2007\/06\/a-few-miles-sou.html\">article by the New Yorker&#8217;s George Packer<\/a> about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/Faiths\/Christianity\/2008\/09\/Creation-Museum.aspx\">Creation Museum<\/a>. In his summary of the article, Spencer says of the Creation Museum,\u00a0<span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: verdana;font-size: 12px;line-height: 19px\"><\/span><\/p>\n<div><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\"><p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: verdana;font-size: 12px;line-height: 19px\">Friends who have been there tell me it is less a presentation of science than a presentation of Genesis. The point is evangelism more than education.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\"><p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: verdana;font-size: 12px;line-height: 19px\"><br \/><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: verdana;font-size: 12px;line-height: 19px\">But this is exactly the opposite of the main claim Packer makes in his article:<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: verdana;font-size: 12px;line-height: 19px\"><br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\"><p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">It hardly matters that the Creation Museum is bound to appall secular visitors. They are not its audience. It exists to tell Christianist families that they are right and the future is theirs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\"><p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\"><br \/><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For Packer, the fundamentalist museum is &#8220;bound to appall&#8221; non-Christians. For Spencer, the museum is clearly meant to appeal to non-believers, and persuade them of the Truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>This is one of those embarrassing truisms of American evangelicalism: Many attempts at pop evangelism are really just evangelical commodities. See: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fireproofthemovie.com\/\">Fireproof<\/a>. See: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepowerteam.com\/\">The Power Team<\/a>. Spencer and Packer are correct in combination: the Creation Museum intends to convert people like Packer, but its main audience is the Christian consumer who is already persuaded of Biblicized science.\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A curiosity I noted over my cereal flakes this morning: Michael Spencer (the Internet Monk) linked this week to a year-old article by the New Yorker&#8217;s George Packer about the Creation Museum. In his summary of the article, Spencer says of the Creation Museum,\u00a0 Friends who have been there tell me it is less a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment) - Text Messages<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment) - Text Messages\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A curiosity I noted over my cereal flakes this morning: Michael Spencer (the Internet Monk) linked this week to a year-old article by the New Yorker&#8217;s George Packer about the Creation Museum. In his summary of the article, Spencer says of the Creation Museum,\u00a0 Friends who have been there tell me it is less a&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Text Messages\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-11-14T09:42:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Patton Dodd\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment) - Text Messages","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment) - Text Messages","og_description":"A curiosity I noted over my cereal flakes this morning: Michael Spencer (the Internet Monk) linked this week to a year-old article by the New Yorker&#8217;s George Packer about the Creation Museum. In his summary of the article, Spencer says of the Creation Museum,\u00a0 Friends who have been there tell me it is less a&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html","og_site_name":"Text Messages","article_published_time":"2008-11-14T09:42:20+00:00","author":"Patton Dodd","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html","name":"Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment) - Text Messages","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/#website"},"datePublished":"2008-11-14T09:42:20+00:00","dateModified":"2008-11-14T09:42:20+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/#\/schema\/person\/186e2b80f15c2a749e18f6781b9e4dbe"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/11\/evangelism-or-entertainment-or.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Evangelism or Entertainment? (Or, Evangelism IS Entertainment)"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/","name":"Text Messages","description":"Christianity and culture with Patton Dodd","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/#\/schema\/person\/186e2b80f15c2a749e18f6781b9e4dbe","name":"Patton Dodd","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/ea6\/ea67ccdc30915dc0263069ec4253344bx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/ea6\/ea67ccdc30915dc0263069ec4253344bx96.jpg","caption":"Patton Dodd"},"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/author\/pdodd"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}