https://www.christianpost.com/news/american-bible-society-to-close-down-60-million-museum.html

The American Bible Society will be closing down its Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, around three years after the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based museum, which cost around $60 million, had opened.
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Doesn't sound like it was a "dinosaurs and the Flintstones" type museum. More of a How God's Word Influenced America's Founders sort of thing, not a bad fit for downtown Philadelphia I suppose. In any case, it tanked.

What’s the word on the street regarding how America is doing?

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What’s the word on the street regarding how
> America is doing?

For sixty million dollars I'll do a survey and let you know. :P

Sixty million dollars to build.

Eleven million dollars to run from July 2021 to June 2022.

Yow.

My former next door neighbor is Lamar Vest. He was the president for a period of time of the American Bible Society. He was likely involved in the planning for that museum. He moved to an upscale neighborhood and married a woman 30 years younger than him. I would occasionally see him around town at restaurants, but not in the past 2 years or so.

A bit about ABS and Lamar. 2009
https://news.americanbible.org/article/new-president-for-bible-society

I would not have guessed - but the Philadelphia museum isn't/wasn't the only Bible museum in the US. There's something apparently unrelated in Washington, D.C.

https://www.museumofthebible.org/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/politics/epic-of-gilgamesh-hobby-lobby/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/10/hobby-lobbys-owner-returned-17000-ancient-artifacts-iraq-how-did-he-get-them-first-place/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

The Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal started in 2009 when representatives of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores received a large number of clay bullae and tablets originating in the ancient Near East. The artifacts were intended for the Museum of the Bible, funded by the Evangelical Christian Green family, which owns the Oklahoma-based chain.[1] Internal staff had warned superiors that the items had dubious provenance and were potentially looted from Iraq.

Several shipments of the artifacts were seized by US customs agents in 2011, triggering a struggle between Hobby Lobby and the federal government that culminated in a 2017 civil forfeiture case United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty Ancient Cuneiform Tablets and Approximately Three Thousand Ancient Clay Bullae. As a result of the case, Hobby Lobby agreed to return the artifacts and pay a fine of US$3,000,000. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned 3,800 items seized from Hobby Lobby to Iraq in May 2018.[2] In March 2020 the Hobby Lobby president agreed to return 11,500 items to Egypt and Iraq.[3][4]

From the article, I really get the impression that the museum was intended to attract Caucasians and sell white American Protestant Christianity. I suppose that one of the things that led me to this conclusion was the comments concerning Johnny Cash being in the museum's music section.

The thing is, like many other U.S. cities, especially on the middle and northern Atlantic coast and along the whole of the Pacific coast, Philadelphia's white population has been shrinking fast, and a majority of the city's citizens are of African, Asian, and/or Latin descent. And I really can't see how a museum designed to attract white American Christians would find much interest in this crowd. Perhaps if it had been located in Oklahoma City, Louisville, KY, or any number of other U.S. cities in the southeastern part of the country where white male populations still rule, it might have done better.