Six Flags Over Jesus

Why Flying Angels, Live Camels, and Broadway-Style Spectacles Are Rewriting Christmas as a Theme Park Experience

It started with a TikTok and now the whole internet is scratching its head. A Texas megachurch’s Christmas pageant went viral because it looked less like a simple Nativity and more like Cirque du Soleil meets Las Vegas residency with a touch of Frosty the Snowman. That clip you saw? It wasn’t a fever dream — people flying on harnesses, live camels strolling down the aisles, and LED spectacle on church turf are very real.

Let’s put some meat on this bizarre holiday ham.

The Extravaganza

Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas — one of the largest megachurches in the country — puts on an annual Christmas production called The Gift of Christmas. This isn’t your grandma’s pageant with kids in bathrobes and paper crowns. We’re talking about 1,200 performers, a 50-piece live orchestra, 21 animals onstage (camels, donkeys, peacocks, zebras, alpacas), angels and drummer boys flying on harnesses, elaborate LED scenery, costumes numbering in the tens of thousands, and scenes that feel more corporate holiday special than humble Bethlehem.

This massive, two-hour spectacle has become a multi-day event with sold-out shows and social media views in the millions.

Viral Backlash

The internet reaction has been, shall we say, mixed. A clip of drummers suspended in midair went viral with millions of views and thousands of comments, many dragging it for being over-the-top and questioning whether this is actually worship or just faith marketed as a show.

One Reddit thread literally refers to these kinds of productions as “Six Flags Over Jesus churches,” because once you add enough harnesses, fog machines, and camels, who’s to say you’re not just at a theme park with choir robes?

What the Church Says

Prestonwood defends the spectacle, calling it a long tradition and saying they want to offer Jesus “our absolute best.” Ticket prices range from around $20 to $60, and the church insists the show is self-funded through ticket sales, not general church funds. The Barbed Wire+1

But critics online didn’t stop there. They’ve raised eyebrows at the grandeur, the production values, and why a Christmas story needs all this flash to make an impression.

And Yes — Things Got Even More Wild

Speaking of live animals, there’s a fresh story from Champion Forest Baptist Church in Houston where a live camel kicked a guest in the face during their Christmas spectacular. The incident went viral, emergency services were called, and the church said it regretted the situation. Whether you see that as divine irony or just poor risk management, it’s another data point in the “are we doing Christmas or running a petting zoo” debate.

So What’s Really Going On?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody in the production meeting wants to say out loud. Once a church starts treating worship like entertainment, it inherits the rules of the experience economy. Attention must be captured. Dopamine must be sustained. Silence becomes a liability. Stillness becomes dead air.

If you don’t have harnesses, fog machines, LED walls, synchronized lighting cues, and at least one exotic mammal wandering past the offering plates, someone will mentally swipe left. So you escalate. Louder music. Bigger sets. Flying bodies. Live animals. Familiar fantasy tropes borrowed from Broadway, Disney, and whatever tested well with focus groups last year.

And eventually, inevitably, someone posts it to TikTok.
And the whole thing becomes a punchline.

But here’s the deeper cost.
You don’t just lose credibility. You lose the nerve to trust God without props. And once you need props, it was never really about God to begin with.

The original Christmas wasn’t impressive. That was the point. It was quiet enough to be missed. Ordinary enough to be dismissed. Vulnerable enough to offend religious expectations. No spectacle. No applause cues. No merch table. Just a birth so small it required attention rather than stimulation.

A baby in a trough.
A mother pondering.
A sky doing the only special effect it ever needed.

Now we’ve got flying drummer boys swooping like halftime performers, LED Bethlehems flickering like a Marvel portal, and the occasional live animal incident that reminds everyone this is still, technically, a church and not a petting zoo with a sermon.

And social media? Social media has no reverence for religious coping mechanisms. It’s calling it exactly what it looks like.

Broadway with a baptismal.
A zoo with a praise band.
Six Flags Over Jesus.

And the tragedy isn’t that people are laughing.
The tragedy is that somewhere along the way, churches stopped believing a silent God entering history was enough to hold a room.

So they made Him fly.

From “Empty Ritual” to Plastic Ritual

What makes this spectacle even harder to stomach is who’s doing it.

For decades, Baptists and evangelicals warned about “empty ritual.” Candles. Vestments. Incense. Processions. Set prayers. Catholic and Orthodox worship was framed as hollow repetition, dead religion, motion without meaning. Too embodied. Too scripted. Too theatrical.

But ritual never disappeared. It just got replaced.

What was actually rejected wasn’t ritual itself, but ritual that wasn’t under their control. Ritual rooted in memory, lineage, and restraint. Ritual that forms people slowly and refuses to adapt to market logic or emotional demand.

So a new ritual emerged. Carefully engineered worship environments. Choreographed movement. Repetitive musical bridges designed to extract emotion on cue. Highs delivered at predictable moments, reinforced by lighting, sound, and spectacle.

That isn’t the absence of ritual. It’s ritual optimized for stimulation.

The old critique of Catholic “emptiness” was always misdirected. Historic liturgy never promised constant emotional payoff. It assumed dryness, distraction, and silence were part of the work. You showed up anyway. You submitted to a form that outlasted your mood.

The new model has no tolerance for that. It must land every time. It must move people. It must justify the production budget. Which means escalation becomes inevitable.

In the end, the charge of “empty ritual” turns out to be projection.

Ancient ritual was designed to empty the participant. Ego. Control. Demand.

The plastic version exists to do the opposite. To keep attention hooked, emotions elevated, and consumers returning.

One tradition trusted God to work without stimulation.
The other panicked at the thought and built a stage.

And that difference explains everything.

Virgin Monk Boy Take

Christmas doesn’t need rescuing by production crews or aerial rigs. It doesn’t need camels in the aisles or angels on wires to stay relevant. What it needs is courage. The courage to believe that God entering history in obscurity, vulnerability, and silence is still enough to undo us. The courage to stop entertaining ourselves long enough to be formed. The Incarnation was never meant to compete for attention. It waits. And it’s still waiting now, just beyond the lights, after the fog clears, asking whether anyone is willing to meet it without applause.

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