Ken Ham blames secularists for financial failures of the Ark Park

This story about two weeks old, but has been revived and supplemented by recent articles at Alternet,  The Raw Story, and The Friendly Atheist. The Ark Park (or rather “The Ark Experience”) apparently, isn’t the great success it was touted to be by Ken Ham and his organization Answers in Genesis. On the Answers in Genesis website. the Hamster admitted, in a piece called “The secularist media war against the Ark continues” (June 13), that the expected boosting of the local economy didn’t occur:

Recently, a number of articles in the mainstream media, on blogs, and on well-known secularist group websites have attempted to spread propaganda to brainwash the public into thinking our Ark Encounter attraction is a dismal failure. Sadly, they are influencing business investors and others in such a negative way that they may prevent Grant County, Kentucky, from achieving the economic recovery that its officials and residents have been seeking.

To be fair, one article in a local newspaper did get some its facts wrong, reporting, for instance, that a local restaurant closed down for lack of business when, in fact, its sewer pipes were being replaced. But the fact remains, as Alternet notes, the injection of dollars into Grant County, Kentucky businesses has failed to materialize.

“The ‘fake news’ angle used by Ham doesn’t exactly hold water. As Patheos notes, while one recent article did err on two small points related to the Ark Encounter, local business owners haven’t challenged accounts that their profit margins haven’t been raised by Ham’s project,” Alternet reported. “Estimates for the park’s annual draw were between 1.4 and 2.2 million visitors annually. Now approaching the one-year anniversary of its grand opening, park co-founder Mike Zovath said visitor tallies will hit 1 million as of July. But that figure can’t be confirmed by outside sources.”

Despite Ham’s claims, local leaders are adamant that the taxpayer subsidies are not trickling down to the taxpayers.

“I think the Ark’s done well [laughter] and I’m glad for them on that,” Grant County Judge Executive Steve Wood told WKYT. “But it’s not done us good at all.”

See more about the financial woes of the area in a piece in the May 24th Washington Post.

There have been reports of the Ark Park’s giant parking lot being largely empty on weekends, and that’s not really a surprise to me. By all accounts the Ark, which is already showing physical wear (how did the original survive all that flooding?), isn’t that exciting: a walk-through of a replica interior filled with cheesy animals (including, of course, dinosaurs), accompanied by animal sounds from loudspeakers. How many people want to pay $40 for an adult ticket and $28 bucks for each kid to see that? At least the Creation Museum has a variety of diverse lies to hold the believer’s attention.

It’s worth noting three things. First, in what seems to me a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Park was financed largely by taxpayers. As The Daily Kos reported in 2014:

Besides the 510-foor replica of Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter project is unique in that it has received: “preliminary approval for $18 million in state tax incentives to offset the cost of the park’s construction; a 75 percent property tax break over 30 years from the City of Williamstown (a town of about 3,000 near where the park will be located); an $11-million road upgrade in a rural area that would almost exclusively facilitate traffic going to and from the park; a $200,000 gift from the Grant County Industrial Development Authority to make sure the project stays in that county; 100 acres of reduced-price land and, finally $62 million municipal bond issue from Williamstown that Ham claims has kept the project from sinking,” Simon Brown reported in the October issue of Church & State, a publication of the Washington, D.C. –based American United for the Separation of Church and State. [JAC: Ham claims that the city isn’t responsible for backing the bonds; Answers in Genesis is. Even if that’s the case, though, the other tax breaks still stand.]

According to Brown, “the bonds received junk status, which is the lowest possible rating for an investment. … [making] it highly unlikely that anyone who buys them will actually get money back.” Although the bonds “initially sold poorly,” Ham announced earlier this year that “the bond offering had succeeded.”

Hemant adds this:

Grant County (which Williamstown is in) gave Ham’s team 98 acres of land for $1. (That’s not a typo. Just a single dollar.)

Second, though Ham promised that the Park would create at least 900 jobs (3000 if you include the whole region), those jobs with the Ark Park itself—and I don’t know how many actually materialized—require that employees “confirm agreement with Ark Encounter’s Statement of Faith“. As Slate reported, the Statement of Faith is onerous:

AiG’s statement of faith is no mere loyalty oath: It’s a four-part theological declaration mandating that all signatories accept dozens of fundamentalist Christian principles. Employees at Ark Encounter don’t just have to believe in God; they have to believe in Christ, the Holy Spirit, Satan (as “the personal spiritual adversary of both God and mankind”), Adam and Eve, “the Great Flood of Genesis,” a 6,000-year-old Earth, and the eternal damnation of “those who do not believe in Christ.” All employees must follow “the duty of Christians” and attend “a local Bible believing church.” Just for good measure, employees must oppose abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, and trans rights.

Yes, those are the jobs created in part by taxpayers, and the employees have to swear that they oppose things that are legal in Kentucky. I suppose the oath itself is legal, but I doubt that government financing of the Ark Park is.

Finally, who’s to blame? I would have expected Ham to say “Satan,” but it’s the secularists—which I suppose is the same thing. As the Answers in Genesis website notes:

Why so many lies and misinformation? Simply because we are in a spiritual battle, and the intolerant secularists are so upset with such world-class attraction like the Ark (and Creation Museum) that publicly proclaim a Christian message. They will resort to whatever tactics they deem necessary to try to malign the attractions.

What we’re really intolerant of is that both the Creation Museum and the “Ark Experience” (the real name of the Ark Park) are purveying lies to people, miseducating children and bringing in the bucks while doing so. They can proclaim their Christian message (also largely lies) as much as they want, but when they start teaching kids a completely wrongheaded view of history, both human and evolutionary, then my knickers really get twisted. We don’t need financial information to malign the Ark Park. Even if it were a success, as I gather the Creation Museum is, I’d still find the whole exercise reprehensible—an exercise in harmful religious propaganda. Only Ham’s own delusions keep him from seeing how harmful he’s been to science education.

I’m curious, though, why, if God is omnipotent, he didn’t make The Ark Experience a big success.